Path of Moses: Scholarly Essay on the Case of Women in Religious Faith

Writing in the late 19th century, Mózes Salamon, rabbi of a small Hungarian community, hoped to convince his fellow rabbis to recognize women as equally privileged members of the People Israel. The result was his The Path of Moses: A Scholarly Essay on the Case of Women in Religious Faith, a ground-breaking enquiry into the causes of women’s exclusion from most of Judaism’s religious practices. Predating contemporary feminism, it gave early expression to ideas found in today’s religious feminist critique of women’s role in Judaism, thus undermining attempts to dismiss those ideas as shallowly mimicking fashionable secular opinion. The Path of Moses is here published for the first time in English, accompanied by the Hebrew original, an introduction, and commentary.