Reflections on Jewish Women in Eulogies and Sermons of Ottoman Sages in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article is based on sermons and eulogies delivered by preachers in various Jewish communities throughout the Ottoman Empire in the first 200-250 years following the expulsion from Spain, and the integration of the exiles from the Iberian Peninsula in the Ottoman region. Almost all the sages who were the heads of congregations and served as leaders in prayer, teachers and preachers in synagogues, were of Spanish descent, and their statements reflect the Sephardic influence on the Jews of the empire. Sermons and ethical (musar) literature, intended to guide and instruct the public about proper religious, social, and familial behavior, show the ambivalent attitude towards women in general, and the disparity between the rabbinic ideal and rabbinic practice. These sources must be viewed as mostly educational; their authors never challenge the traditional roles of women in society. However, they also encourage their community members to respect exemplary women in their families and social circles. The almost impossible image of the Woman of Valor is the focus. Nevertheless, the commentators also point out the merits of women in general, noting that women played an instrumental role in the Exodus from Egypt and other biblical events, and emphasize that women support Torah study, contribute to synagogues and charities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".