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Female, Jewish, Educated, and Writing Polish Jewish History

I  Female, Jewish and Educated, a riveting collective biography of women who attended German-speaking universities in the early decades of the twentieth century, Harriet Pass Freidenreich examined the lives of ‘gifted and resourceful women [who] have remarkable stories to tell’.1 More specifically, Freidenreich investigated the ways in which gender, class, and ethnicity shaped these women’s educational choices and careers. This chapter focuses on a similar, but smaller, group of pioneers—Jewish women who enrolled at Polish universities in the s and s in order to study and write the history of their own community: Polish Jewry. It traces the social and cultural backgrounds of the young cohort of female Jewish historians in the Second Polish Republic and examines their scholarly contribution from a gender perspective. Facing formidable difficulties on two counts —being both female and Jewish—these women entered Polish universities, took classes in Polish and European history, and completed their degrees in the humanities. Unlike the women studied by Freidenreich, the majority of universityeducated female Jewish historians in the Second Polish Republic did not come from the upper middle class and only a few came from middle-class families. In addition, these Jewish women were more at home in traditional Jewish culture and perceived themselves less unambiguously as members of the Jewish minority in Poland. Most perished in the Holocaust, without leaving behind many traces of their professional paths and research agendas. Their sparse scholarly and popular publications, their student files and research theses (which are deposited in the university archives,