Pioneering Female Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Naomi Feinbrun-Dothan and Elisabeth Goldschmidt were two prominent female scientists who were among a small minority of women who pursued scientific study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before 1948. The fields to which both scientists gravitated reflects the well-known phenomenon of women’s affinity for biology

Botanist Naomi Feinbrun-Dothan studied the flora of Israel since the 1920s, and published dozens of articles and a handful of analytical flora books. In 1991 she became an Israel Prize laureate. Elisabeth Goldschmidt wrote her PhD dissertation at the Zoology department during the years 1936-1942, became a lecturer and researcher there, and later founded the Department of Genetics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

I will present the obstacles these pioneering women faced in comparison to those encountered by their male colleagues. I shall analyze their different career patterns and the particular ways in which each of them coped and compensated in a competitive and demanding environment with a definitively masculine ethos. Feinbrun-Dothan and Goldschmidt may seem as representative of the several other female scientists who were active in Jerusalem during the British Mandate period and their biographies sheds light on the challenges female scientists faced.