18Forty Podcast
18Forty Podcast

Elisheva Carlebach & Debra Kaplan: The Unknown History of Women in Jewish Life [American Yeshiva World 1/3]

February 10, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In the 17th century, a Jewish woman named Bella Perlhefter prepared a massive work of Jewish thought for print, edited it, and wrote an introduction—yet the book was never published. A few decades earlier, around 1607, a woman named Rivka Tiktiner became the first Jewish woman known to have a full work of her own printed. These are not anomalies from a progressive fringe of Jewish history. They are part of a much larger pattern that historians Elisheva Carlebach and Debra Kaplan spent over a decade uncovering: a period in which Jewish women in early modern Europe were deeply literate, economically active, and formally embedded in the governance of their communities. Their new book, A Woman is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press), draws on hundreds of handwritten communal logbooks, tax records, wills, and visual sources to reconstruct a world that looks very different from common assumptions about women’s place in pre-modern Jewish life.

Why This History Was Overlooked

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What you'll learn

  • 1 (04:19) **Introduction & Framing the Episode** - Host David Bashevkin introduces the topic of women's roles in Jewish life and the interview with historians Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach.
  • 2 (13:18) **The Need for This Book: "We Were Told There Were No Sources"** - The authors explain why a major study of Jewish women in this period was long overdue.
  • 3 (15:30) **Why Co-Author? Complementary Strengths and Shared Discovery** - The professors explain their decision to write the book together rather than individually.
  • 4 (17:31) **Why Was This History Ignored for So Long?** - The scholars diagnose the academic neglect of Jewish women's history.
  • 5 (22:11) **What Were the Pinkasim? The "WhatsApp Groups" of Early Modern Jewish Life** - A vivid explanation of the primary source material.
  • 6 (26:50) **Why Early Modern? The Unique Window of 1500-1800** - The authors explain why this specific period is so important for understanding Jewish women.
  • 7 (33:12) **Moments of Discovery: "Why Hasn't Anyone Written About This Woman?"** - Personal stories of finding forgotten women in the archives.

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Show Notes

This month of learning is sponsored by our dear friends Matt and Mollie Landes of Riverdale for the neshama of Dovid Yehonatan ben Yitzchak Yehuda.

In this episode of the 18Forty Podcast, we speak with Professors Elisheva Carlebach and Debra Kaplan, scholars of early modern Jewish history, about women’s religious, social, and communal roles in early modern Jewish life.

In this episode we discuss:
  • How have women’s prayer and shul-going habits changed over time? 
  • When did the women’s chevra kadisha become a Jewish institution? 
  • How did Jewish emancipation alter the structure of Jewish life and its implications for women? 
Tune in for a conversation about how women shaped—and were shaped by—the structures of the early modern kehillah.

Interview begins at 9:13.

Elisheva Carlebach is the Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture, and Society at Columbia University and Director of its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. A specialist in Early Modern European Jewish history, her work explores Jewish–Christian relations, religious dissent, conversion, messianism, and communal life. She is the award-winning author of The Pursuit of Heresy, Divided Souls, and Palaces of Time, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and honors including Columbia’s Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award.

Debra Kaplan teaches early modern Jewish history at Bar-Ilan University. A social historian, she is the author of Beyond Expulsion (2011) and The Patrons and their Poor (University of Pennsylvania 2020; winner of the Rosl und Paul Arnsberg-Preis).

References:

“Notes Toward Finding the Right Question” by Cynthia Ozick

A Woman Is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe by Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach

Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi, 1666 - 1816 by Ada Rapoport-Albert

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