Irony as Feminist Protest in the Hebrew Writings of Early Jewish Women Scholars

This article focuses on two texts written by early Jewish women scholars: a Hebrew poem entitled “These are the Words of Rachel”, dated 1847 and composed in Trieste by the Italian-Jewish poetess Rachel Morpurgo (1790–1871); and an English-language speech, interspersed with Hebrew, delivered in London in 1924 by Flora Sassoon (1859–1936), a prominent Jewish businesswoman, philanthropist and scholar. Although separated by their dates, places of composition, literary genres and subject-matter, these two texts share one prominent characteristic. They impart a similar tone of irony, created by the admixture of feminist protest, broad knowledge of Jewish canonical texts and the writer’s awareness of the gulf separating herself from the male audience. As a rule, irony–a recognized characteristic of early European female writers–is absent from Hebrew texts written by women during the nineteenth century, including when they voiced protest against their marginalization in the world of Hebrew-Jewish learning. The ironic tone of the texts written by Flora Sasson and Rachel Morporgu is therefore an exception which might attributed, I will suggest, to their comprehension of the gulf between their scholastic self-identity and the generally derogatory (albeit sometimes concealed) male attitude towards their intellectual abilities, characteristic of contemporary Jewish society.