Aguilar, Grace. The Women of Israel.

The First Comprehensive Study of Jewish Women by a Jew. This work, by Grace Aguilar (1816-47), contains a history of Jewish women from the Biblical period through the contemporary age. She published it for her own co-religionists and lamented in the preface that the authors of previous works on the subject “are Christians themselves, and write for the Christian world … the characters of the Old Testament are so briefly and imperfectly sketched, compared to those of the New.” Aguilar’s secondary motive in publishing this work was to counter the charge “that the law of Moses sank the Hebrew female to the lowest state of degradation, placed her on a level with slaves or heathens, and denied her all mental and spiritual enjoyment. The word of God at once proves its falsity.” Aguilar believed that the spiritual state of a Jewish community was dependent on the nation in which it existed, and in her survey of the contemporary period she distinguished between the communities of southern and eastern Europe from those in the Protestant north. Only in the latter were the Jews free of persecution and able to reach spiritual heights. The freest community, she observed, was the one in America—“The Hebrew advantages in that land, more numerous even than in England, consist in perfect freedom”—and American Jews had the greatest opportunities to cultivate the Jewish spirit.