Chava Turniansky is a leading scholar of Old Yiddish. Born in Mexico, Turniansky attended the Yidishe Shul, took private Hebrew lessons, and joined the Socialist Zionist Youth Movement. In 1957 she emigrated to Israel, where she first studied education and went on to study Yiddish with some of the most prominent scholars of the time. Her publications shed light on the manifold aspects of Ashkenazi life, literature, and culture, including its internal bilingualism, the way literacy and knowledge are transmitted, how men and women are educated, book production and reception, and women readers and writers. Turniansky views not just as the vernacular of fourteenth to eighteenth century Jewish society but as a vehicle for understanding the literary, philological, historical and sociological mores of the period. (via her entry in the Jewish Women's Archive)