Rachel Morpurgo

• Name — Rachel Luzzatto Morpurgo • Birth Name — Rachel Luzzatto • Born — 8 April 1790 • Birthplace — Imperial Free City of Trieste • Died — 1871 • Language — Hebrew

Morpurgo was born in Trieste, Holy Roman Empire into the prosperous Luzzatto family that produced many Jewish scholars and intellectuals, including her cousin Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865), whose support and encouragement were important to the recognition she received in her lifetime. In 1819, she married Jacob Morpurgo, also a member of a prominent Jewish Italian family. Morpurgo is Italianised "Marburger", from where the family originated. She moved to Gorizia and had four children, three boys and a girl. Her parents provided a rich education with private tutors and a large private library. She worked in the family business at a potter's wheel and had little leisure to write. After she married, her time was almost entirely consumed with domestic duties. Nevertheless, she wrote throughout her whole life and published some fifty poems in the journal Kochbe Yitzhak (כוכבי יצחק, 'The Stars of Isaac'). She was writing a poem a few days before her death at the age of eighty-one.

Morpurgo scholar Tova Cohen of Bar-Ilan University writes: Today Morpurgo has attracted attention as an early feminist poet. Some of her poems reflect her frustration at being ignored as a woman or being dismissed as a poet because she was a woman. For instance, in "On Hearing She Had Been Praised in the Journals" (1847): She signed the poem "Wife of Jacob Morpurgo, stillborn." She also signed some poems Rachel Morpurgo Ha-Ketana ('Rachel Morpurgo, the Little One'). She would abbreviate this signature as RMH, the Hebrew word for worm. Some critics have argued that she was not merely expressing humility but making an ironic comment on the contempt some male critics had for her.