There are few autobiographies of Jewish men or women in medieval and early modern history. The memoir of Gluckel of Hameln is unique for opening up the life and world of a woman who was born in Hamburg around 1645, was betrothed at the age of 12 and married at 14; worked with her husband in their pearl trading business, and continued to run the business after his death. Twelve of her fourteen children survived into adulthood, and she worked assiduously to arrange suitable matches for them in different communities. Proud of her traditions, she wanted to pass them on to her children and so wrote a manuscript in Yiddish in seven sections. Basically a book of musar for her children, it also is a story of her life, its joys, and its sorrows.
First published in 1896 in Yiddish with a German introduction by the famous scholar, David Kaufmann, Gluckel’s memoir has become a classic and has been translated into German, Hebrew, and English. This 1962 translation by Beth Zion Abrahams, the only English translation from the original Yiddish text, has been out of print for a long time, and the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) has done a valuable service by reprinting it together with the translator’s introduction. Readers of Hebrew would do well to read it together with the Hebrew critical edition (Yiddish and Hebrew text on facing pages), with an extensive introduction and notes by Yiddish scholar Chava Turniansky, which was published in 2006. In addition, there has been much Gluckel scholarship in recent years such as the work by the eminent historian, Natalie Zemon Davis, in Women at the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives (Harvard, 1995).
For those who do not already have Gluckel’s memoir on their shelves, this JPS volume is a great introduction to the most famous female Jewish writer of all time.