A Late Nineteenth-Century Rabbinic Critique of the Status of Women in Judaism

This article aims to show that long before the famous debate over women’s suffrage (1918–25), women’s alienation from significant parts of Judaism was a fact that was obvious to those in the Orthodox community who were ready to admit it. To prove this, I discuss the late nineteenth-century essay Netiv Moshe: Maamar Mehkari ’al Mishpat haNashim baEmunah (A Scholarly Enquiry into the Case of Women in Religious Faith). This essay, written in Hungary by Mózes Salamon, the rabbi of a small provincial community, analyzes the gender problem in Judaism and reveals that the basic arguments of Jewish religious feminism had been expressed even before feminism as a movement came to terms with its objectives. This is the first scholarly analysis of this little known essay.