On Hearing She Had Been Praised in the Journals

Rachel Morpurgo (b. Luzzatto) was born to a rabbinic and literary family in Trieste, Italy. Highly educated in Jewish and secular subjects, Morpurgo began writing poetry at age eighteen. She was one of the first women to write modern Hebrew poetry. Despite her parents’ disapproval, she married Italian Jewish merchant Jacob Morpurgo. Rachel Morpurgo’s work first appeared in print in 1847 in the literary journal Kokheve Yitsḥak, where she ultimately published some fifty poems to wide acclaim, thanks to the advocacy of her well-known cousin Samuel Luzzatto.