ABSTRACT
The conclusion establishes that Jewish women's agency is neither a recent nor a novel phenomenon. It argues that the purpose of exploring gender norms and hierarchies in diverse contexts and from multiple angles aims to challenge the common understanding of female agency in the context of a male-dominated social structure exclusively in relation to power. The portraits of Jewish women in different spatial and temporal contexts try to resist the temptation of studying Jewish women through an exclusively androcentric textual lens, giving instead priority to images, still and moving, artifacts, architectures, and sites. This section explicates how the present study has brought forth a continued and persistent narrative in which patriarchy and women's agency interact with each other. It shows how the performance of agency and piety, or of agency and compliance—at least through the lens of visually and materially identifiable constructs and depictions of Jewish women—is mostly complementary rather than exclusionary or adversarial.
