“May the Writer Be Strong”: Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts Copied by and for Women

Jewish books, to learn from and to pray from, were in demand long before the invention of printing, and the only way of fulfilling that demand was to produce them by hand. From the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, we know of named Jewish women who were involved in the manual production of Hebrew books, both as producers and as consumers. Most of our information on this topic is derived from scribal colophons—short texts appended to the end of a manuscript by the copyist. These could include the name of the scribe, the date of the book’s completion, the place where it was copied, and similar pieces of information. Sometimes manuscript colophons also identify the person who commissioned the copying of a book or for whom it was copied. In this essay, we discuss Jewish female copyists who are known from their colophons, as well as women who are mentioned in colophons as commissioners or recipients of manuscript books.

Jewish books, to learn from and to pray from, were in demand long before the invention of printing, and the only way of fulfilling that demand was to produce them by hand. From the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, we know of named Jewish women who were involved in the manual production of Hebrew books, both as producers and as consumers. Most of our information on this topic is derived from scribal colophons—short texts appended to the end of a manuscript by the copyist. These could include the name of the scribe, the date of the book’s completion, the place where it was copied, and similar pieces of information. Sometimes manuscript colophons also identify the person who commissioned the copying of a book or for whom it was copied. In this essay, we discuss Jewish female copyists who are known from their colophons, as well as women who are mentioned in colophons as commissioners or recipients of manuscript books.

Women Scribes

Until the invention of printing in Europe in the mid-fifteenth century, book production was a demanding and arduous labor; a copyist might spend many months or even years reproducing a single book.¹ Some copyists worked within an institutional framework, such as the scriptorium of a monastery, while others worked in their own homes, as was most typical for Jewish copyists. Some were professional scribes; others were occasional copyists, individuals skilled at writing who chose to copy books by themselves, thus enriching their personal libraries while saving the scribe’s fee. The numbers of copyists differed from one region to another, based on the level of education and the demand for manuscripts in the specific society.² In the late Middle Ages, some Hebrew manuscripts, especially in Ashkenaz (the Franco-German lands) and Italy, were copied by women.

Given the highly gendered nature of education in medieval Jewish society, the existence of professional women scribes may seem surprising.³ While Jewish boys were taught to read sufficient Hebrew to enable them to participate in worship (though not necessarily to understand the prayers) and perhaps also to study Jewish texts, at least on an elementary level,⁴ girls and women were infrequently encouraged to pursue Hebrew studies and the complexities of traditional Jewish learning. For the majority of Jewish girls, their education consisted of being taught the domestic, ritual, and economic skills essential for their lives. However, this does not mean that they were illiterate; many women engaged in business activities, mainly money-lending, that required maintaining records, and so they often acquired some facility in writing, as well as significant calculation skills.⁵ For economic purposes, then, medieval Jewish women in Europe were taught to use Hebrew letters to write in the vernacular languages of their regions, most often some form of French, Italian, German or Yiddish. As we shall see below, many women also could read Hebrew characters well enough to use a prayer book, in Hebrew or in the vernacular.

However, the existence of several surviving Hebrew manuscripts with colophons indicating that they were copied by women shows that...