My Dear Daughter: Rabbi Benjamin Slonik and the Education of Jewish Women in Sixteenth-Century Poland »

Acknowledgments     ix
Abbreviations and Rules of Transliteration     xi
Introduction     xii
Context
The Bibliographic Context     3
Handbooks of the Law     3
Practical Obstacles to Reading in the Age of Manuscripts     8
A Proposed Handbook for the Fifteenth Centiny     12
Literacy and Printing in the Vernacular     15
The Shifting Center of Ashkenazic Jewry     22
German Jewry on the Move     23
Keeping in Touch     26
Italian Jewry in Crisis and the Rise of Polish Jewry     30
Cultural Exchanges     32
Glimpses into the Lives of the Main Audience     37
Men's Views of Women     37
Separate and Unequal     45
Life at Home     48
Religious Responsibilities     60
Women at Prayer     63
Piety and Super-Piety     70
In the Community     78
Content
Popularizing the Law     87
Creating a Book People Wanted to Read     87
Motivating Observance     93
Historical Role Models     98
The Seder mizvot ha-nashim and Earlier Handbooks     101
Slonik, His Teachers, and theShulhan 'aruk     105
Aftermath     129
Tables 1 and 2: Comparison of Passages from Seder mizvot ha-nashim and Shulhan 'aruk     136
Textual Traditions of "Women's Commandment" Books and Slonik's Seder mizvot ha-nashim     139
Introduction to the Yiddish Text and Translation     151
Yiddish Text and Translation     154
Bibliography     309
Index     331