Notes: Bella Perlhefter's (d. 14 Elul, ע"ת = Sept. 9, 1709) literary effects of Johann Christoph Wagenseil, a Hebraist scholar at the University of Altdorf.[1] The Jewish letters appear among other collections of ephemeral texts (such as Hebrew tombstone inscriptions) apparently to serve pedagogical and scholarly purposes.[2] Wagenseil had previously devoted one immense tome to contemporary Jews.

The literary legacy of Bella bat Jacob Perlhefter (born c. 1650) provides a rare glimpse into the life of a seventeenth-century Jewish woman (other than Glikl). An accomplished writer, instructor of music and rhythm, and entrepreneurial seventeenth-century businesswoman, Bella was born to a prominent Viennese Jewish family and appears to have received an excellent education. After the expulsion of Jews from Vienna in 1670, the family resettled in Prague. Bella's husband, Ber Eibescheutz, took her family name after their marriage.

The central source of anguish in Bella's life was the death of her seven young children. She commemorated them in an innovative way that ultimately serves as an eloquent memorial to her own life. She urged Ber to compose in Yiddish a work of moralistic literature to which she penned the introduction. Be'er Sheva (Seven Wells) contains a chapter named for each of their deceased children. It has never been published, but was copied many times as a source of consolation to parents similarly afflicted.

Bella's surviving letters are preserved in the Wagenseil collection (Ms. 80 in Universistätsbibliothek Leipzig). They date from the winter of 1674-75. From these letters we learn that Bella lived in the small south German Jewish community of Schnaittach while her husband travelled as a Sabbatian maggid or worked in the atelier of Johann Christoph Wagenseil, eminent scholar and Hebraist, in Altdorf. Bella corresponded with Wagenseil directly. Her ornate Hebrew writing exhibits a high level of Jewish learning. In addition to her own letters, she served as composer and writer of Hebrew letters for other Jewish women. Her own letters and her role as a letter writer for others allow us to raise the question of epistolary as a somewhat neglected primary source for the early modern period.

Astonishingly, despite decades of scholarly interest in social history, the history of daily life, and the interest in Jewish women's history, various troves of correspondence that have been located, identified, and even published, have generally been used for other purposes such as philology, rather than for the window into these aspects of the past that they open. Correspondence is a complex genre with many limitations. Without the survival of complete two sided exchanges over significant stretches of time it is difficult to construct a narrative. Letters tell us nothing about the development over time of the self that writes, distinguishing them from even the most primitive and cursory autobiographies. Formulaic model letter collections, brivshteller, which Bella likely employed, allow letter writers to appropriate entire segments, from salutations to closings, obscuring the individual voice.

Yet, letters have strengths as historical sources that even autobiographies cannot match. By their nature, letters address concerns of the moment of writing. While writers surely adopt poses to impress the recipient, granting or withholding information depending on their relationship, their letters were certainly never intended for publication and often for no other eyes than a single reader. We cannot overemphasize how vital a means of communication they were, how central to the maintenance of family, of community, of commercial ties in an age when distance and travel shaped Jewish life to a great extent. Letters generally touched upon matters of immediate concern, events not yet altered to suit the concern with posterity. Social and cultural historians of early modern Europe have been using correspondence for decades to enrich their studies of family history and the history of private life.^[1] A geniza's worth of private correspondence from the early modern period remains scattered in collections, unjustly neglected by many historians of early modern Jews.

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