Can a Woman Be a Rabbi? (Kann die Frau das rabbinische Amt bekleiden?)

Can a Woman Be a Rabbi is Regina Jonas's own 1930 rabbinical thesis, in which she made the halachic case for women's ordination, years before she herself was privately ordained and became the first woman to serve as a rabbi. The thesis and her other papers were lost for decades and rediscovered in a former East German archive in the 1990s, after which her story became widely documented. As her own primary argument in her own words, it is the correct and authoritative source for the actual halachic reasoning she advanced, not a secondary account of it. Its limit is the ordinary one for any primary text, it presents Jonas's own argument rather than an independent legal or historical assessment of that argument's reception or its place within the wider history of women's ordination debates, which needs a secondary scholarly source alongside it.