In Search of Ottoman Jewish Women’s Lives

Although our knowledge about Ottoman Jewish women’s history has expanded significantly in recent decades, there is still much we don’t know about the lives they led as the modern era dawned. Among the questions that remain are those surrounding the extent of Ottoman Jewish women’s autonomy—whether, when, and in which contexts they had the space to forge their own paths in life, to marry for love, pursue their own professional interests, or achieve financial independence.

Unlike those who have productively mined Jewish women’s oral traditions and autobiographical writings for later, post-Ottoman periods, those working on earlier eras find first-person accounts left behind by Ottoman Jewish women only rarely, and with great difficulty. Yet this need not deter us from asking these questions. Even those who did not leave behind memoirs or personal correspondence have left us other bread crumbs—in the advertisements they placed in the press, in the businesses they registered, the lesson plans they created, the photographs they posed for and kept, the portraits they had commissioned, the songs they recorded, and the pieces of clothing they designed, cut, and sewed, leaving us with a wealth of textual and material traces.

This talk will pursue a few such cases, offering selected portraits of little-known Jewish women who lived during the final half-century of the Ottoman Empire.