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Glikl bas Judah, of Hameln was born in 1646 or 1647 in Hamburg Germany. At a time when many women never left the towns in which they were born, Glikl's travels for both business and personal purposes led her throughout Germany, France, Holland and Denmark. Glikl took over her husband Haim's business after his death in 1689, although it is clear that she was already very involved in its workings. Haim named no executors or guardians. On his deathbed, Glikl's memoir recounts, her husband declared "My wife knows about everything." Glikl set up a shop in Hamburg for manufacturing stockings and sold them near and far; she bought pearls from every Jew in town, sorted them, and sold them by size to appropriate buyers; she imported wares from Holland and traded them in her store along with local goods; she attended the fairs of Braunschweig, Leipzig, and other towns; she lent money and honored bills of exchange across Europe. She never let a moment for trade be lost. The many trips she took to negotiate marriages or weddings for her children also brought profits: precious stones sold at Amsterdam after Esther's wedding, a fair at Naumburg fitted in after a betrothal agreement in Bayreuth, children's dowry money was lent out at interest until it had to be paid. Among German Jews, traveling to fairs did not detract from a woman's reputation, especially when she made as much money as Glikl did. If anything, it brought additional marriage proposals. Much of Glikl's extensive travel, both before and after her husband's death, was devoted to good matches for her children. As a widow with eight children still at home to raise, dower and marry, she carefully arranged marriages for some of her children close to home and some in distant cities. Before Haim's death, two sons had been married in Hamburg, a daughter in Hannover, and the oldest daughter, Zipporah, in Amsterdam. Glikl's matchmaking placed Esther in Metz, and other children in Berlin, Copenhagen, Bamberg, and Baiersdorf, with only daughter Freudchen settling for a time in Hamburg. We remember Glikl bas Judah today because she recorded the stories of her family, business, and travels in a memoir that she wrote to alleviate her grief over her husband's death and to convey their family's stories to her children. The familiarity with different European settings and the varied experiences gleaned from her extensive travels gave Glikl a broad perspective that distinguished her from most of her contemporaries. As a result, her memoir, written in an era when women's lives were not considered important enough to record, and most lacked even a basic Jewish education, offers a unique window on the lives of European Jews in the seventeenth century. Sources and excerpts for this page were drawn from Women on the Margins; Three Seventeenth Century Lives by Natalie Zemon Davis (Harvard University Press, 1995) and the Jewish Women's Archive's Women of Valor poster series, 1997.
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