New Archival Sources on the Maiden of Ludmir

Abstract

he Maiden of Ludmir is popularly known as the only woman rebbe in the history of the Hasidic movement. Beginning with S. A. Horodetsky, various authors have sought to describe her exploits: leading Sabbath third meal gatherings in her own study house, healing the ill, wearing tallit and tefillin, and refusing to marry.1 At some point in the nineteenth century, according to these writers, the Maiden of Ludmir left the shtetl of her birth and immigrated to Palestine, where she settled in Jerusalem. In a forthcoming book, I will explore these and other aspects of the Maiden of Ludmir's life, including what I consider to be the highly problematic image of her as a rebbe.2 The subject of the present article is more specific. Despite her fame, the most basic details about the Maiden of Ludmir, even her name and year of birth, have remained shrouded in legend. In the following pages, however, I would like to analyze several newly discovered archival sources that appear to provide official documentation of the Maiden's life, both in Ludmir and in Palestine. In her work on premodern women, the feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott has noted that historians searching the past for evidence about women have confronted again and again the phenomenon of women's Recent research has shown that women were not inactive or absent from events that made history, but that they have been systematically left out of the official record.3 For nearly a century, ever since Horodetsky published his first account of her life in 1909, the Maiden of Ludmir appeared to suffer from what Wallach Scott has called the problem of invisibility. Although many of her biographers claimed to draw on oral traditions originating in Ludmir or even testimony from eye witnesses who knew the Maiden in