Shulamith Shahar

Shulamith Shahar was born in 1928 in Riga

Shulamith Shahar was born Shulamith Weinstock in Riga, Latvia, on 2 November 1928. She was the youngest of three daughters of industrialist Moshe Weinstock and his wife Deborah. In 1933 the family moved to Haifa in Mandate Palestine, and her sister Dina was murdered near Riga in 1941.

She studied at the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa and served in the Haganah. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She later wrote her doctorate at the Sorbonne in Paris on 14th century French political theory and received it in 1965.

Back in Israel she taught medieval history at Tel Aviv University and became a full professor in 1990. Her study Fourth Estate, published in 1981, was the first to focus on women in the medieval period. She also wrote books on childhood and old age in the Middle Ages and translated three books from Latin to Hebrew.

She married writer David Shahar, who died in 1997. Her son Evyatar from her first marriage was killed in 1968. From 1993 she volunteered with an association running a home for battered women in Jerusalem and chaired it. She died on 9 January 2025.