Gender, Penmanship and the Primacy of Speech over Writing in the Jewish Society of Galicia and Eastern Europe in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

One of the codes exposed by the maskilic challenge to rabbinic authority is that of the primacy of orality over writing. In the first part of this article, I will discuss the meanings of this code in light of its treatment by Plato on the one hand, and by Derrida on the other. Thereafter, I will touch upon several methodological issues and theoretical models used by scholars of literacy to analyze literacy policy and its effects. Finally, I will look at several of the cultural meanings and gender implications of the primacy of speech over writing in traditional Jewish society’s encounter with modernity. Within this framework, I will probe the cogency and, mainly, the limitations of women’s “benefit of marginality” in east European Jewish society. In other words, I will endeavor to show how the marginal role assigned to women in the realms of religion, culture and intellectual life actually provided them with islands of unregulated space, in which they had a significant degree of freedom to gain literacy skills of value from the perspective of modern society.