Virtual talk: “Jewish Women in the Medieval World, 500-1500 CE,” with Sarah Ifft Decker.

People often assume that the history of medieval women is a story of oppression and subjugation. However, a wide array of texts and images reveal the agency and determination of Jewish women as they negotiated family, love, sex, work, faith, and crisis in the medieval past. In this talk, Sarah Ifft Decker will offer an introduction to the lived experiences of Jewish women in the medieval world, from the Iberian Peninsula to Northern Europe to the Middle East. Through both the stories of individual women and an overview of broader trends, Ifft Decker will demonstrate that studying Jewish women is crucial to a richer understanding of Jewish history.

December 18, 2022 at 2 PM Pacific Daylight Time.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Maya Soifer Irish (December 9, 2022). Virtual talk: “Jewish Women in the Medieval World, 500-1500 CE,” with Sarah Ifft Decker. medievalJewishStudiesNow! Retrieved April 18, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/rhvz


About Maya Soifer Irish

Dr. Maya Soifer Irish an Associate Professor of History at Rice University, whose research focuses on religious violence and toleration, and explores the legal, social, and economic situation of religious minorities in Iberian Christian societies. She is the author of many articles, including “Beyond convivencia: Critical Reflections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain.” Her first book, Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile: Tradition, Coexistence, and Change, explores the changes in Jewish-Christian relations in the kingdom of Castile between the 11th and 14th centuries. She is currently working on a new book, The Politics of Persecution in Medieval Spain: Toward the Anti-Jewish Riots of 1391. Between 2018 and 2021 she served as President of the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain (AARHMS).