While celebrating the work of Orthodox poets, novelists and essayists of the present, it is important to remember their predecessors throughout Jewish history. Some of their writings have miraculously survived. Among poets, there exists a Hebrew poem, found in the Cairo Geniza by the wife of the famous Spanish poet Dunash Ben Labrat in the tenth century. We do not know her first name, but her lyrical poem expresses her distress when her husband was forced to leave Spain, as well as her love for him. There are also poems in Arabic by Qasmuna of Granada in the eleventh or twelfth century, thought to be the daughter of Shmuel Hanagid, and a poetic prayer in Hebrew by a woman called Merecina from Gerona probably in the fifteenth century which is prefaced by the line, “This song was made by a woman of virtue, the lady Merecina, the Rabbiness from Gerona”, and draws on biblical and rabbinic sources with an acrostic forming her name from the first letters of each line.
Among many educated women in Renaissance Italy, two stand out. Deborah Ascarelli, who lived in Rome in the sixteenth century, translated many Hebrew liturgical and rabbinic works into Italian, and wrote her own poems in Italian including one relating the story of the apocryphal heroine, Susannah. Sara Sullam was a scholar and poet in seventeenth century Venice who knew Hebrew. Latin, Greek, Spanish and Italian by the time she was fifteen. After she married, she held a literary salon in her home, and was involved in scholarly polemical debates. Her Italian poetry included many sonnets.
Perhaps the most renowned female Jewish poet was Rachel Morpurgo, who lived in Trieste in the nineteenth century. She came from the famous Luzzatto family, and wrote poems in Hebrew on both religious and secular themes, many in sonnet form. Married with four children, she was said to have only been able to find time to write her poetry at night or on Rosh Hodesh which was considered a semiholiday for women. She was highly acclaimed in Jewish scholarly circles as a Hebrew poet. Her last poem was written before her death aged 81, and was left unfinished.
In Central Europe, many women wrote poetic prayers and prayerful poems (such as Hannah Katz in Amsterdam, Toibe Pan in Prague, Roizel Fishels in Krakow). One famous 17th century scholar in Prague, Rivka Tiktiner, besides writing Menkat Rivkah a book of ethics in Yiddish, also wrote a special and sophisticated song for Simhat Torah.
Although on the whole, literacy rates were lower in non-European communities than in the West, there are also a few surviving poems written by women in Kurdistan, Yemen and Morocco and Tunisia. In the sixteenth century, Asenath, the daughter of a rabbi in Kurdistan, wrote a long poem of petition and lament, in the form of a rhymed letter. Another woman, Freha Bat Avraham, was born in Morocco at the beginning of the eighteenth century and moved with her family to Tunis where she wrote poems in Hebrew. Especially among the women of the Ladino communities, there was also a strong tradition of oral poems and songs through the centuries.
How many of our foremothers had the time to keep a diary or journal or write an autobiography? The most famous one to have survived is that of Gluckl of Hameln, a woman of the seventeenth century. Born in Hamburg in 1646, she wrote in Yiddish about her life, her marriage at age fourteen, the death of her husband, how she carried on in business by herself, her efforts and successes in marrying off her children, and her far less successful second marriage and widowhood. In the book that she started after her first husband died, there are wonderful details about Shabbetai Zvi and many others that give an intimate and vivid portrayal of this deeply pious, yet adventurous, woman and her times.
Famous as a novelist, essayist and translator in her native England as well as in America, was the nineteenth century writer Grace Aguilar. Before she died at the age of 31, she had devoted her life to educating young women in religious matters and the Jewish faith and tradition, both by helping her mother to run a school for girls and by her voluminous writings.