Unsung Women | Miriam Spiria-Luria
Miria Spiria-Luria Image by Yehuda Blum
By Irene Katz Connelly March 26, 2020
Who she was: Miriam Spira-Luria
Where and when: 15th-century Padua
What we know: If Miriam Spira-Luria were alive today, she’d be a public intellectual and a prominent voice on Jewish Twitter. But in a cloistered religious community controlled by men, she could never even get a seat at the table. Spira-Luria was born in Germany and married Aharon Luria, a scholar who lived in Italy. According to one of her descendants, Yochanan Luria, she leveraged her husband’s position as an academic leader to gain entrance to the yeshiva, eventually giving public lectures on halakha, or Jewish law and teaching Talmud to young men — all the while separated from her students by a curtain to preserve her modesty.
What she thought: We have no idea what conclusions Spira-Luria reached about the Talmud or how she instructed her students. Unlike those of her male counterparts, her teachings were not preserved. Despite her accomplishments, which she must have pursued with tenacity and and determination, her relative anonymity illustrates her era’s lack of respect for female scholarship.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
