> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://beirutwire.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Jewish Beiruti Feminist the Nahda Forgot - URL: https://beirutwire.com/the-jewish-beiruti-feminist-the-nahda-forgot/ - Published: 2026-10-09T11:34:39.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-09T11:34:39.000Z - Description: Long before some of the best remembered women of the Arab Nahda rose to prominence, Esther Azhari Moyal, a Jewish woman born in Beirut in 1873, was writing in Arabic, organizing women, translating European literature and publicly challenging arguments about women’s intellectual abilities. - Author: Beirut Wire - Tags: Culture When the women of the Arab Nahda are remembered today, a small group of names tends to dominate the story. May Ziadeh is celebrated for her Cairo salon and literary writing. Zaynab Fawwaz is remembered as a pioneering feminist intellectual. Labiba Hashim and others have gradually returned to histories of the Arab press. Far less often does the name Esther Azhari Moyal appear. Yet before many of the women now associated with Arab feminism reached prominence, a Jewish woman born in Beirut was writing in Arabic, translating European literature, organizing women, challenging arguments about female intellectual inferiority and eventually publishing her own Arabic women’s journal. Esther Azhari Moyal was born in Beirut in 1873 into a Sephardic Jewish family. She grew up during one of the most extraordinary periods in the city’s intellectual history, when Beirut was becoming a major center of the Nahda, the cultural and intellectual renaissance transforming Arabic literature, journalism, education and political thought. Her background complicates the way that period is often remembered. Moyal was Jewish and deeply embedded in Arabic intellectual life. Arabic was the language through which she wrote, translated, debated and participated in the Nahda. The Posen Library describes her as an Arabic author, translator, journalist and feminist activist who identified strongly with the broader Arab Awakening. Princeton scholar Lital Levy’s research places her within both Arab and Jewish intellectual history, describing her unusual position as an Arab-Jewish intellectual whose life crossed categories that later histories tended to separate. She was not standing outside the Nahda observing it. She was participating in it. Moyal received a multilingual education in Beirut. She became proficient in Arabic and French, learned English and studied Arabic under the writer Muhammad al-Bakr. Sources differ over the precise institution from which she graduated, but her education was exceptional enough to lead to work as a teacher in Christian and Jewish schools. By the early 1890s, while still remarkably young, she had entered Beirut’s emerging world of women’s intellectual associations. In 1891, Moyal joined Bakurat Suriya, or “The Dawn of Syria,” an association of Syrian women. By 1896, she had helped establish another organization, Nahdat al-Nisa, or “The Women’s Awakening.” These organizations emerged as the Nahda was producing newspapers, schools, literary societies and arguments about education and social reform. Moyal insisted that women belonged inside that transformation. Her feminism was unusually explicit. One of the clearest examples appeared in 1894, when Moyal responded in the influential Cairo journal *al-Hilal* to an argument questioning women’s intellectual abilities. Her response defended women’s capacity for reading, writing and intellectual life while rejecting the idea that an educated woman would therefore neglect her household. The intervention was remarkable for another reason: the Posen Library identifies it as the first signed contribution by a woman to *al-Hilal*, one of the leading intellectual journals of the Arabic-speaking world. Her ambitions extended beyond Beirut. Biographical accounts record that in 1893 she represented Syria at a women’s congress connected to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She would have been around twenty years old. In 1894, Esther married Simon Moyal, a Jewish physician, journalist and activist from Palestine. The couple eventually settled in Cairo, where the rapidly expanding Arabic press provided another arena for her work. There, in 1899, Moyal founded *Al-ʿAʾila*, “The Family,” an Arabic-language women’s periodical. Its subjects ranged far beyond the home. It addressed women’s education, health, parenting and household life, but also literature and international affairs. Moyal was simultaneously publishing in the broader Arabic press and translating European literature into Arabic. She translated more than a dozen works, largely from French, participating in one of the central projects of the Nahda: bringing foreign literature into an expanding Arabic reading culture. One European writer became particularly important to her: Émile Zola. The Dreyfus Affair, in which Jewish French army officer Alfred Dreyfus was falsely convicted of treason, had become an international political controversy. Zola famously intervened in Dreyfus’s defense. Moyal followed the affair closely and in 1903 published an Arabic biography of Zola. Her interest brought together several parts of her intellectual world: Arabic journalism, European literature, questions of justice and prejudice, and her own Jewish identity. Her later life became even harder to fit into the national categories through which the region’s history would eventually be written. The Moyals moved to Jaffa in 1908\. Esther continued educational and women’s work there and directed a Muslim girls’ school. In 1913, she and Simon became involved with the Arabic newspaper *Sawt al-Uthmaniyya*, or “The Voice of Ottomanism.” Its politics were complicated. The paper defended Zionism against criticism appearing in the Arabic press while expressing loyalty to the Ottoman Empire and participating in efforts to improve communication between Arabs and Jews. The Moyals belonged to an intellectual world in which Ottomanism, Jewish identity, Arabic culture and forms of Zionism could still overlap in ways that later political divisions would make increasingly difficult. That world did not survive. The Ottoman Empire collapsed. Arab nationalism and Zionism developed along increasingly separate trajectories. Palestine entered decades of escalating conflict, and identities that had once overlapped became harder to reconcile. Simon Moyal died in 1915\. Esther subsequently left for Marseille before eventually returning to Palestine in the 1940s. By the final years of her life, the woman who had once edited journals, translated European literature and debated intellectuals in the Arabic press was living in poverty and relative obscurity. She died in 1948. Lital Levy’s research describes the problem through the idea of “partitioned pasts.” Moyal belonged simultaneously to histories that later came to be written separately: the Nahda, Arab feminism, Sephardic Jewish history, Arabic journalism and the intellectual history of Palestine. That may help explain why she became so easy to forget. Remembering Esther Azhari Moyal therefore does more than restore another woman to the history of the Nahda. It restores something about Beirut itself. The Beirut into which she was born was a city where a Jewish girl could receive an Arabic literary education, participate in Syrian women’s organizations and emerge as an Arabic journalist, translator and feminist intellectual. Her life belongs to the history of Beirut’s Jewish community. But it also belongs to the history of Arabic literature and Arab women’s intellectual life. Today, May Ziadeh’s place in the story of the Nahda is secure. Esther Azhari Moyal’s is not. Yet more than a century ago, a Jewish woman from Beirut was already confronting questions that would occupy generations of Arab feminists after her: Who gets to participate in intellectual life? What does education allow a woman to become? And why should writing, publishing and public debate remain overwhelmingly the preserve of men? Her name largely vanished. Her place in Beirut’s history should not.