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On the “Advantages of Marginality” in Swift Hall

By Sheila E. Jelen, Director of MA/AMRS Studies, Professor of Religion, Literature and Visual Culture and History of Judaism | June 2, 2026

Sheila Jelen on Dvora Baron, the Jewish Enlightenment, and Finding a Home in Swift Hall.

In Reading Jewish Women, Iris Parush claims that the marginalization of Jewish women from the educational hierarchies in traditional East European Jewish society actually enabled women during the Jewish Enlightenment to become advocates for the modernization of the Hebrew language and its secularization. Because they were not afforded traditional Jewish educations, Jewish girls and women were not exposed to the dogmas that kept men from engaging with the Hebrew language outside of a sacred context. Indeed, the teaching of Hebrew grammar was, in most settings, expressly forbidden, as the rabbinic authorities sought to keep the Hebrew language from being used in “mundane” settings or exploited (as they saw it) for entertainment purposes. As a result, Jewish women, who had not been educated in traditional Jewish texts, who were marginal to the reigning center of Jewish authority and social mobility in the form of the sacred word, were at the forefront of revolutionizing the Hebrew language. Maskilim, or advocates of Jewish Enlightenment, gestured toward women who were reading and writing and teaching in modern Hebrew as a means of galvanizing men to do the same. Admittedly, women were not exactly flocking to Hebrew after having been prohibited access to it for so long. Rather, the few who joined the ranks of the Enlightenment found it easier to adapt to the cause of modernization than did the many men who were already acquainted with the language and the sacred dogma surrounding it. The women became symbols of the possibility of progress.

Women as Hebrew readers and writers during the period of the Jewish Enlightenment exemplify the advantages of marginality. My book, Intimations of Difference: Dvora Baron in the Modern Hebrew Renaissance (Syracuse University Press, 2007), pursues this idea by examining the Modern Hebrew Renaissance through the lens of its only canonical woman writer.

How, I ask in Intimations of Difference, did Dvora Baron (1887–1956) illuminate the unique challenges faced by male Hebrew writers emerging from the ultra-orthodox house of study and seeking admission to European universities? Where did a woman who had never formally studied the Torah or the Talmud learn Hebrew well enough to write in it? I claim, in Intimations of Difference, that Baron’s marginal position in her generation clarified its assumptions and its orthodoxies, its continuity with Jewish tradition, and its discomfort with the possibilities it afforded women.

Intimations of Difference was my first book, published in 2007. In conceptualizing this brief reflection on my relationship with Swift Hall and the Divinity School, I was surprised to find myself drawn to discussing it here. Why would I feel compelled to go back to the earliest stages of my career in order to reflect on my very recent arrival at Swift Hall, during the summer of 2024? A poetics of marginality has accompanied me throughout my career, both in my areas of interest and in how I have been situated within various institutions. My training was in comparative literature, with an emphasis on Hebrew, English, and Yiddish literature written at the turn of the twentieth century during the mass Jewish migrations from Eastern Europe to the United States and Palestine. My first job was in an English department with a canon-based, historically oriented curriculum where Yiddish, Hebrew, and Jewish literature were, at best, puzzling and, at worst, irrelevant to my colleagues. My next job was in a department of modern and classical languages, literatures, and cultures in a southern school where I was, again, rather an oddity because my focus on Hebrew and Yiddish literatures was not as an object of study from a Christian perspective, but from a Jewish one. Finally, in June 2024, I landed here at the Divinity School, which, on the one hand, was founded by a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, but where, on the other hand, Jewish studies only really became an area of focus in 1989 with the appointment of Michael (Buzzy) Fishbane to the faculty.

As I asked in a recent essay for AJS Perspectives, a journal published by the Association for Jewish Studies:

How might an institution widely associated with the training of Christian professionals be appropriate for the academic study of Judaism? Furthermore, how must Jewish Studies, which does not conform neatly to the study of Religion as long understood in Western culture, reconceive itself to better fit into the theological discourses long characterizing Divinity Schools? Finally, as the fields of study comprising the University of Chicago Divinity School have, in recent years, diversified into studies of Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism, how have regional geopolitics affected the culture of the school and impacted the shape of Jewish Studies therein?

Since arriving here in Swift Hall, I have often found myself reflecting on how my perennially marginal status has stayed the same and changed. At my job interview, a colleague asked me how my work fits into a Divinity School. My answer to her was that I wasn’t sure because I had never been in a Divinity School before. As a scholar of Jewish literature, I have been reassured by our dean that I belong in a school whose focus is the study of religion. I, however, find myself clinging to my own marginality here, as a newcomer, as a scholar trained in literary methodologies and not necessarily philosophical or historical ones. Perhaps, as always, I am the better for my status as an outsider. Marginality has its significant advantages, and I am certain those advantages will reveal themselves in due time.

Read additional faculty reflections upon Swift Hall's centennial: