Women and Judaism

New Insights and Scholarship

Frederick E. Greenspahn

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780814732199
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814732298
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Although women constitute half of the Jewish population and have always played essential roles in ensuring Jewish continuity and the preservation of Jewish beliefs and values, only recently have their contributions and achievements received sustained scholarly attention. Scholars have begun to investigate Jewish women’s domestic, economic, intellectual, spiritual, and creative roles in Jewish life from biblical times to the present. Yet little of this important work has filtered down beyond specialists in their respective academic fields. Women and Judaism brings the broad new insights they have uncovered to the world.
Women and Judaism communicates this research to a wider public of students and educated readers outside of the academy by presenting accessible and engaging chapters written by key senior scholars that introduce the reader to different aspects of women and Judaism. The contributors discuss feminist approaches to Jewish law and Torah study, the spirituality of Eastern European Jewish women, Jewish women in American literature, and many other issues.
Contributors: Nehama Aschkenasy, Judith R. Baskin, Sylvia Barack Fishman, Harriet Pass Freidenreich, Esther Fuchs, Judith Hauptman, Sara R. Horowitz, Renée Levine, Pamela S. Nadell, and Dvora Weisberg.

Part I
Classical Tradition

1
Jewish Feminist Approaches to the Bible

Esther Fuchs

Jewish feminists have been studying the Bible since the late 1970s. Most of this study has been from a theological perspective because of the Bible’s role as the bedrock of Jewish norms and attitudes. It continues to be a focus of theological debate to this day, as feminist thinkers from various denominations attempt to establish its meaning for Jewish women.

Unlike feminist theology, feminist biblical scholarship is interested not in an ethical, normative, prescriptive, or denominational agenda but rather in the literary, historical, ideological, and philosophical configurations of gender. In this regard, it is part of the ongoing project of both feminist biblical studies and Jewish feminist scholarship. Having previously outlined a theoretical approach to the field as a whole,¹ in this chapter I provide an overview of specifically Jewish feminist approaches to the Bible, including work that has already been done, as well as a map of trajectories for future research.

In an essay on Jewish feminist scholarship, I suggested that two theoretical trends structure the field of Jewish women’s studies: critique and reconstruction.² Critique is the classic approach that was pioneered in the 1970s by theologians like Rachel Adler and Judith Plaskow, while reconstruction has dominated the field since its emergence in the late 1980s, to some extent as a response to the previous stage.³

As its label suggests, critique is concerned with feminist critical perspectives on Jewish texts, traditions, and practices. What it criticizes are usually the omissions, erasures, and misrepresentations of Jewish women’s historical experiences and literary expressions. While the disciplines most relevant to such critiques are history and literature, other related disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, from sociology tophilosophy and from anthropology to film studies, became contexts for critical reflection. Reconstruction involves elaborating the minimal references to women in classical texts by shifting the focus to female lives and voices so as to expand the traces of memory in authoritative histories that took place in the late 1980s, as attention shifted to women as subjects, cultural producers, and agents of social change.

The earliest critiques in Biblical Studies were published throughout the 1980s. They were mostly written in response to Christian feminist interpretations of biblical literature that tried to “depatriarchalize” the Hebrew Bible by reconstructing it as an egalitarian text.⁴ They did this by highlighting the contributions of women to the biblical tradition and their crucial roles in the lives of male leaders and heroes and in Israel’s history as a people. Texts that described the oppression of women by men in both domestic and public spheres were framed as deviations from biblical social norms, indeed as “texts of terror” meant to evoke empathy and identification in the modern woman reader for the woman victim.⁵ Contemporary readers were encouraged to condemn oppressive behaviors and to reconstruct their stories of female victims for collective ritual purposes.

Method

In the early 1980s I began to challenge both the method and the conclusions of this early phase of Christian theological interpretation. My earliest article challenged the rhetorical and archetypal criticism in feminist biblical interpretations, suggesting instead a critical reading.⁶ Shifting that frame of reference reconfigured female biblical characters that had previously been taken for granted as representative of either female authenticity or historical reality as problems or subjects for feminist critical inquiry. Everything about them became problematic: their actions, their speech acts and motivations, their geographic and chronological placement, their names or namelessness, their appearance, to the extent that any details were offered, their relationships with others, their biographical trajectories, their relations with their families, communities, and nation. This approach made it possible to question the terms and conditions of the literary representation of the ways in which both heroic and villainous women were presented. Focusing on “heroines” like Esther and Ruth, I raised the question “who benefits?” (cui bono) from attributing to them the survival of the group, be it familial or national. I questioned thestrategies attributed to these heroines, such as politeness and obedience, and characteristics such as youth and sexual attractiveness.

A second article sought to focus on villainous women, many of whom were characterized as deceptive.⁷ Though I conceded that male characters also stood in some problematic relationship to language, their deceptions are both “motivated” and resolved; as a result, their deceptions are seen as temporary and accidental, rather than inherent in their gender.⁸

In my article “The Literary Characterization of Mothers and Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible,” I suggested that we examine the positive and negative categories that characterized Christian treatments of this subject since the publication of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible in 1895.⁹ Cady Stanton and her committee of interpreters distinguished between “positive” texts that had the potential to empower women and “negative” texts that presented them as unworthy of trust or public office. I noted that we should question what the biblical narrative presents as “positive,” rather than accept it willy-nilly. In other words, I argued that biblical women reflect a patriarchal ideology that promotes the self-interest of the elite, including the scribes and editors who were responsible for the final literary product. A case in point is the characterization of mothers as producers and protectors of sons; they are secondary characters who disappear from the text as soon as their function is completed. I defined these literary dynamics as “sexual politics,” suggesting that we read the Bible not merely as a reflection of an ultimate truth or historical reality but as a political text with gendered interests.¹⁰

As I was exploring the potential of a deconstructive approach to the Bible, other scholars, notably Carol Meyers, promoted a reconstructive approach. Though Meyers agreed that the Bible is the product of a small select group of male scribes, she saw its text not as political but rather as a (partial) reflection of historical reality. In order to fully appreciate the roles women played in ancient Israel, we needed a historical reconstruction of their daily lives, including their economic activities and their contributions to the subsistence and survival of the basic social unit, the extended family (bet av). Meyers’s reconstruction of ancient Israelite women’s lives went beyond the available reconstructions that were based for the most part on biblical evidence. Her basic argument was that, as an agrarian society, Israel depended on both the labor and the fecundity of women. Their productive and reproductive activities were therefore crucial to the survival of the economy of ancient Israel, where there was no absolute separation of private and public spheres.

Meyers reads the Genesis creation story in light of the economic prescription for women to increase their productivity and procreativity. In addition to her economic roles, “Eve” (the ancient Israelite woman) was also charged with producing the future labor force. Besides caring for and raising infants, women had distinct religious duties and privileges. Most significant, Meyers argues that, in premonarchic times, as described for the most part in the book of Judges, women had leadership roles in the political and religious life of the nation. She summarizes her analysis as follows: “The Eve of the premonarchic era has become visible: the peasant woman now seen is hardly the exploited, subservient creature imagined by those who have been influenced by the androcentricity of the biblical canon and by the misogyny of much of the postbiblical tradition.”¹¹ Meyers sees the ascent of male authority and dominance as a historical accident that is the result of the urbanization of Israelite society and the centralization of religious life. In the prophetic period, the monarchy was the focus of criticism, and the vision of social justice and equality that emerged during this time harks back to Israel’s origins when women were autonomous, powerful, and equal to men.

Though few scholars elaborated or extended Meyers’s method, the reconstructive approach emerged as the dominant interpretive theory in the 1990s. Using a feminist literary critical method known as gynocriticism that had been applied mostly for reading modern female-authored texts, Ilana Pardes sought to reconstruct the authentic voices and experiences of biblical women from speeches and discourses attributed to them in the text. Pardes’s reconstruction suggested that biblical women’s speeches reveal a protofeminist countertradition, one that asserts women’s power over their male counterparts.¹² Women’s voices are interpreted as isolated instanciations of a prebiblical, antipatriarchal tradition that can somehow be reconstructed through an astute application of the right interpretive methodology. Thus, for example, Pardes focuses on Eve’s naming speeches as expressions of maternal power and authority. Pardes associates female naming speeches with earlier mythological phases in which mother goddesses were described as the creators of life on earth. She interprets Eve’s naming speech as transgressive and insurrectionary, nothing less than a critique of monotheism’s underlying patriarchal presuppositions. Pardes reconstructs the passages that scholars attribute to the J source as an antipatriarchal countertradition, much as Harold Bloom conceived J as authored by a woman.¹³ Pardes then applies her gynocritic method to the story of Rachel’s rebellion against her father, Laban, and reconstructsa story analogous to Jacob’s dream, with Rachel dreaming of liberation from hierarchy. In a similar light, Pardes reads Zipporah, Moses’ wife, as exemplifying a female struggle for deliverance through association with the mythological figure of the goddess Isis.

The reconstructive approach was adopted as well by Tikva FrymerKensky, who is best known for her important book on ancient Near Eastern goddesses.¹⁴ In much of her work Frymer-Kensky follows the “depatriarchalizing” methodology articulated by Phyllis Trible in the late 1970s. Her reading of biblical women ignores the patriarchal frame and context, while focusing on female characters’ motivation, resourcefulness, autonomy, wisdom, and devotion to God.¹⁵ Frymer-Kensky reconstructs what she calls “women-stories” as egalitarian and diverse: some women are presented as heroes and some as victims. Her theological reading pushes beyond Trible’s more individualistic reading, focusing on women’s contributions to Israel’s national life. She divides the “women-stories” into four categories: women as victors, victims, virgins, and voices. Among the victors, Frymer-Kensky names Rebekah and the saviors of Exodus, as well as “evil” women like Delilah and Athaliah. She reconstructs the stories of Jephthah’s daughter, the concubine of Gibeah (Judges 19), Bathsheba, and David’s daughter Tamar as victim stories, while Dinah, Jacob’s daughter, Queen Jezebel, Hagar, and Ruth are reconstructed as virgin stories. These categories reflect various phases and aspects of Israel’s collective life, its general ascent and strength or its chaos and political disintegration. Women-stories are reconstructed as symbolizing the collective national life, signifying the historical evolution of the people’s relationship with its deity. While Pardes sees women’s speeches as countertraditional and counterpatriarchal, Frymer-Kensky reconstructs them as expressing the identification of Israel’s nation...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Four Approaches to Women and the Jewish Experience
• Part I Classical Tradition
• Part II History
• Part III Contemporary Life
• Part IV Literature
• Epilogue: Women and Judaism: From Invisibility to Integration
• Contributors
• Index