In the seventeenth century, Kurdistan’s most illustrious rabbi, Samuel Barzani, a charismatic reformer and yeshiva builder, produces no sons and finds himself unable to continue his line in the usual way. So he drills his beautiful daughter, Asenath Barzani, in Hebrew, Torah, and the Kabbalah. He marries her to his nephew and favorite disciple, Rabbi Jacob, and makes the man swear he’ll never make her do housework. When her father and then Rabbi Jacob die, Asenath is the only one in the family with the training to take over the yeshiva the two men had run in Mosul. She becomes what is thought
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