Letter in al-Hilal: Arguing for Women’s Equality in the Arab World

Born in Beirut, Esther Azhari Moyal was a prolific Arabic author, translator, and journalist, and feminist activist. She was also, at different moments, a teacher, community leader, and school director. Educated in Arabic by a prominent Beirut poet, Moyal did not deny her Jewish identity but did identify primarily with the supraethnic Arab Awakening (or Arab Renaissance) movement that sought to modernize the civic and cultural life of the Arab world and shake off European imperial domination while incorporating the useful elements of European modernity. Within this framework, Moyal repeatedly addressed the question of women’s rights, and intermittently engaged with the Jewish Question. 

In 1891, she joined an association of Syrian women entitled Bakūrāt Sūrīyā (The Dawn of Syria); by 1896, she had cofounded a new organization, Nahḍat al-Nisā’ (The Women’s Awakening). She moved to Cairo in 1899 with her husband, Simon Moyal; there she founded al-‘Aʿila (1899–1902, 1904), an Arabic-language journal for women. Publishing extensively in the Arabic press, she also wrote an Arabic biography of Émile Zola and translated more than a dozen works—largely French novels—into Arabic. After moving to Jaffa in 1908, she and her husband helped found the short-lived newspaper Ṣawt al-ʿUthmāniyya (The Voice of Ottomanism, 1913) and became active in local initiatives in support of the prospect of a shared homeland for Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

While in Jaffa, she also directed a Muslim girls’ school and other women’s programs. After her husband died in World War I, she left with her son for Marseilles. Little is known about her life after this point, beyond the fact that she returned during the 1940s to Jaffa, where she died in poverty with little public recognition of her former prominence.