The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Learn more about the Encyclopedia

Shmuel Feiner

Shmuel Feiner is a professor of Modern Jewish History at Bar Ilan University and heads the Samuel Braun Chair for the History of the Jews in Prussia. He is the author of Haskalah and History, The Emergence of a Modern Jewish Historical Consciousness (2002), The Jewish Enlightenment (2004, winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award) and Moses Mendelssohn (Hebrew, 2005), as well as of various articles on the Haskalah in Germany and Eastern Europe and on Secularization.

Articles by this author

A portrait of Miriam Markel Mosessohn, wearing a dress with a frilled collar

Haskalah Attitudes Toward Women

Just as the many well-known thinkers of the Enlightenment debated the proper role of women in society, so did the maskilim, the men of intellect who burst upon Ashkenazi Jewish society in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revolution known as Haskalah. Dominated by men, the movement critiqued Jewish tradition and encouraged modernity among Jews, but simultaneously met Jewish women’s pursuit of modernity with ambivalence.