“To the Modern Girl”: A Rebuke of Modernity

Reina ha-Kohen

1898

It is you, modern girls, whom I address. The modern spirit has completely changed your natures. If the sages of old, who spoke so much about the wonderful strength of woman as opposed to man, found themselves in this epoch and saw your spinelessness, the way you let yourselves be seduced by men and fall into their traps, they would say: Is this…

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Reina ha-Kohen’s fiery essay “To the Modern Girl,” published in nineteenth-century Salonika, warns Jewish women that the “modern spirit” has upended the traditional gender and moral order. Addressing “modern girls,” she laments that women once possessed immense moral and emotional power but have become weak and vain, seduced by fashion, wealth, and men’s deceit. Ha-Kohen argues that in earlier times, women’s strength inspired passion and reverence, but modernity has reversed this balance—men now dominate through the very arts of manipulation once associated with women. She calls on Jewish women to reject materialism and superficial beauty, reclaim virtue and piety, and resist the corrupting influence of Western modernity that, in her view, has undermined both faith and femininity.

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Creator Bio

Reina ha-Kohen

19th Century–Early 20th Century

Little is known about the upbringing or family life of the Salonikan author Reina bat Menaḥem ha-Kohen (Reyna Hakohén) beyond the few clues she gives in her autobiographical writings. From these texts we learn that she had seven siblings and that her father sent her to a Protestant missionary school for financial reasons. In other works, she implored fellow Ottoman Jews not to be too zealous in their attempts to “modernize,” a process she believed too often drove people toward materialism and a lapse in morals and religious observance; her 1898 article “Las muchachas modernas” (The Modern Girls) was challenged in the Ladino press for dissenting from modernizing calls for the full incorporation of Sephardic women into Jewish public life. In 1901, she published a commentary on the Book of Daniel (Comentario a Daniel, Salónica: Ets Hayim, 1901).

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