Unveiling Eve

Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature

Tova Rosen

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812237108, 9780812237108
• eBook ISBN: 9780812203592
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria ebraica

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Unveiling Eve is the first feminist inquiry into the Hebrew poetry and prose forms cultivated in Muslim and Christian Spain, Italy, and Provence in the eleventh through fourteenth centuries. In the Jewish Middle Ages, writing was an exclusively male competence, and textual institutions such as the study of scripture, mysticism, philosophy, and liturgy were men's sanctuaries from which women were banished. These domains of male expertise—alongside belles lettres, on which Rosen's book focuses—served as virtual laboratories for experimenting with concepts of femininity and masculinity, hetero- and homosexuality, feminization and virilization, transvestism and transsexuality. Reviewing texts as varied as love lyric, love stories, marriage debates, rhetorical contests, and liturgical and moralistic pieces, Tova Rosen considers the positions and positioning of female figures and female voices within Jewish male discourse.The idolization and demonization of women present in these texts is read here against the background of scripture and rabbinic literature as well as the traditions of chivalry and misogyny in the hosting Islamic and Christian cultures. Unveiling Eve unravels the literary evidence of a patriarchal tradition in which women are routinely rendered nonentities, often positioned as abstractions without bodies or reified as bodies without subjectivities. Without rigidly following any one school of feminist thinking, Rosen creatively employs a variety of methodologies to describe and assess the texts' presentation of male sexual politics and delineate how women and concepts of gender were manipulated, fictionalized, fantasized, and poeticized. Inaugurating a new era of critical thinking in Hebrew literature, Unveiling Eve penetrates a field of medieval literary scholarship that has, until now, proven impervious to feminist criticism.

1

No-Woman’s-Land: Medieval Hebrew Literature and Feminist Criticism

Lonely Female Voices in the Silence

A SINGLE POEM ATTRIBUTED TO a woman has reached us from the wide literary corpus of medieval Hebrew literature.¹ This lonely female voice, from the latter part of the tenth century, is a wife’s intimate recollection of her husband’s departure from Spain. Evoking the sad scene of parting with the exchange of farewell gifts, she conceals a subtle complaint for being deserted with a child:

Will her love remember his graceful doe,

her only son in her arms as he parted?

On her left hand he placed a ring from his right,

on his wrist she placed her bracelet.

As a keepsake she took his mantle from him,

and he in turn took hers from her.

He won’t settle in the Land of Spain,

though its prince give him half his kingdom.²

This poem of the wife (whose name remains unknown) was saved from oblivion only thanks to the reputation of her husband, Dunash ben Labrat, the initiator of what will later be known as the poetic school of the Jewish Golden Age in Muslim Spain.³ The wife manifests a complete mastery of both the Arabic form and the biblical language—these two distinctive marks of the nascent poetic school which her husband pioneered. Nevertheless, this poem reveals lyrical qualities that are hardly to be found in the whole oeuvre of her more famous husband or in those of other poets of his generation.

What is even more astounding about Dunash’s wife is her utter solitude in the vast terrain of Hebrew poetry. Not only is she the first identifiable woman poet in the Hebrew language since the biblical poetesses Miriam and Deborah, she is also the only one for centuries to come. For the next name, Merecina of Gerona (Catalonia), from whom we have another single poem and about whom too nothing is known, we will have to wait another four and a half centuries.⁴

The singleness of Dunash’s wife as a medieval Jewish woman writer is manifest compared to the relatively significant number of medieval non-Jewish women writers. In medieval Europe, “however much outnumbered by men and however much excluded from the literary canon, women did write perceptions of reality.”⁵ Especially nuns and women of aristocracy were readers of literature and occasionally acted also as patrons. The writings of the fourteen women troubadours of Provence, Marie de France, Héloïse, Hildegard of Bingen, and Christine de Pisan are just a few famous examples from Christian Europe. Other, less famous names have been rediscovered, reread, and reintegrated into the Western canon, thus somewhat correcting the historical imbalance.

Even more pertinent to our context are the Arabic women poets. Muslim sources have preserved the names, and sometimes also the texts, of several women poets from the East and about forty women poets from al-Andalus. Slave girls (mostly of Christian origin) were known to be musicians and singers—and to also invent their own lyrics—in the vibrant Andalusian courts. Others were princesses or courtesans. Known by name are, among others, the Cordoban princess Wallāda, Hafsa of Granada, Hamda bint Ziyād, and the Granadan courtesan Nazhūn.⁶ All of them were well-versed in the learned classical poetry of their time, and their own poetry was evaluated by Arabic contemporary critics by the same standards as male poetry. Their poetry, far from being prudish, is dedicated mostly but not solely to themes of love and flirtation and “show[s] surprising freedom in the expression and fulfillment of their feelings of love.”⁷

Among the names of Andalusian poetesses listed by Arabic literary historians we find also a Jewish poetess by the name of Qasmūna. It was her father, Ismaā‘ī l the Jew, himself a poet, who taught her the art of poetry. It is told that the father would challenge Qasmūna with some Arabic verses, and she would respond then by completing them into a whole composition. It had been suggested that the father, Ismaā‘īl ibn Baghdāla (as is the manuscripts’ version), was none other than Samuel

Ibn Naghrela, better known as Samuel ha-Nagid, the eleventh-century major Hebrew poet and scholar, the vizier of Granada and apparently also the chief of its army.⁸ It is known that this dedicated father also instructed his sons in the writing of Hebrew poetry. If indeed Qasmūna was the daughter of this famous father, it is doubly intriguing why Jewish sources keep silent about her existence. Was it because she composed in Arabic, not Hebrew, or because she was a woman?

The scarcity of medieval Jewish women writers is thus striking. The three single extant names over a span of five centuries (and not many more in the vast expanse of time between the Bible and the revival of modern Hebrew poetry)⁹ only highlight the fact that Jewish women were excluded from the literary marketplace. The prospects of recovering more women-authored literary materials in this no-woman’s-land of Hebrew literature are scant. This makes the feminist project termed by Elaine Showalter as “gynocritics” impracticable.¹⁰ The path left for the Hebrew medievalist feminist is thus approaching the issues of women and gender via male-authored texts.

Seeking the Absent Historical Woman

Despite the irrevocable silence induced by their illiteracy,¹¹ we know that medieval Jewish “women were real in ways absent from the texts. . . . We know that [they] lived . . . endured, triumphed, suffered, and died in the silence we now hear when we listen for them. . . . The historical self of women is a compelling and yet elusive subject of study.”¹²

Considerable progress has been made in recent years by historians, feminist and nonfeminist, working in the field of medieval Jewish studies, to reconstruct women’s lives from what men wrote about them. Avraham Grossman’s recent book Pious and Rebellious is a comprehensive study of the history of Jewish women in Europe (Ashkenaz as well as Spain) in the Middle Ages, based on halakhic sources, responsa, commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud, and on moralistic compositions. Juxtaposing these male-authored sources, claims Grossman, “may provide a picture, though partial, of the status of women. . . . It is harder to restore the voices of the silent women.”¹³

Shelomo Dov Goitein’s pioneering and monumental work on the documents of the Cairo Geniza is remarkable in its restoration, to minuscule details, of the lives of medieval Mediterranean Jews, men as well as women.¹⁴ Goitein’s work on the presence of women in the Geniza is outstanding in its methodology. Rather than residing on the ideological views of rabbis, philosophers and poets—who, by and large, forged abstract ideals about, and rules for, women—he listens to the utterances of the simple men who inadvertently voiced their mentalities in these documents. Aware of the androcentricity of his material, he enters the gap between the prescribed ideals for women, on the one hand, and the actual life stories of individual women (as inferred from male-authored “trivial” documents), on the other hand, to penetrate “a world within a world,” “The World of Women” (as his chapter on women is titled). Even then Goitein is still aware of the scholar’s difficulty in accessing women’s subjectivities. The only indication, tangential as it is, to women’s creative imagination and verbal artistry is, in Goitein’s view, the names they gave to their daughters, some of which express women’s strife and aspirations.

In the Geniza documents Jewish women are shown to be much freer than one might have thought. While they are normatively said to be confined to the house, many of them were involved in small-scale industry and commerce, selling and buying products and houses, bargaining, appearing in courts (even in gentile courts), traveling, going on pilgrimages, teaching children, contributing to synagogues, and even having illicit love affairs.

An even more penetrating glance into Jewish women’s lives is availed by a corpus of nearly two hundred letters found in the Geniza written by women between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, a period parallel to the literary works discussed in this book. The letters, sent by women from and to Egypt and other Mediterranean (including Spanish and Italian) communities, were collected and commented upon by Joel Kraemer who pursued Goitein’s project.¹⁵ The women’s letters, though probably mostly written by professional scribes or dictated by women to husbands, brothers, or sons, succeed in retaining the Arabic vernacular and are thus more direct, authentic, and emotional than the male documents. They are addressed by women to their parents, husbands, and grown-up children, or to rabbinical (and at times also gentile) courts. They include complaints about deserting husbands, accusations of beating and abuse, grudges about the unkindness of mothers-in-law and the cruelty of the husband’s family, complaints about heavy house chores, expressions of love for spouses, longing to distant siblings and children, laments of young, especially orphaned women married to old and sick husbands, invitations for holiday stays, shopping lists sent by women to traveling husbands, and even a protest of a mother whose son sent her as a gift a ridiculous dress which made her the town’s laughingstock.

This vibrant existence of women, this materiality and facticity of women’s lives, which emerges from the nonliterary documents is to a large extent missing from the fictional literature. Paradoxically, the “dry” documents mirror women’s lives in ways richer, more diverse, and unexpected than the more imaginative belletristic literature, which tended on the whole to be stylized and stereotyped.

Poets, Courtiers, Rabbis: Historical Background to Medieval Hebrew Literature

In medieval Hebrew literature it was only men who voiced their opinions and feelings through their texts. The textual institutions were men’s sanctuaries from which women were banished. The study of Scriptures and rabbinical literature, mysticism, and philosophy and even the practicing of liturgy had all been the exclusive domains of male creativity. In medieval Judaism, even more than in its hosting cultures, writing was considered an exclusively male—and essentially virile—competence. “The poet’s pen is in some sense (even more than figuratively) a penis.”¹⁶ The pen (and pen-man-ship)—metonymie of writing, and of the writer himself—often stands for men’s productivity and prowess, authorship and authority.

From its very outset, in mid-tenth-century Cordoba, the Andalusian-Hebrew poetry of the Golden Age was distinguished by its dual—courdy and clerical—face. The poets came from the circles of the intellectual leadership of rabbis, community leaders, talmudic scholars, Bible exegetes, moralists, and philosophers. From these echelons came also the Jewish courtiers who served as financiers, physicians, and diplomats to the Andalusian rulers. Some poets were courtiers, others were patronized by them or were close to their circles. This unprecedented brand of courtier-rabbis managed to live in two worlds—that of Jewish tradition and learning, and that of Arabic culture. The Arabicization of the Jewish intelligentsia was manifest not only in their adoption of Arabic as both the vernacular and the language of writing (everything but poetry was written in Arabic), but also in embracing Arabic learning, customs, and ways of life. Notwithstanding their devotion to Jewish tradition, their admiration for Arabic letters and culture resulted in an eventual modification of Jewish culture—even in its religious aspects—according to Arabic models. Jewish philosophers adopted doctrines of Arabic-Greek thinking, grammarians explored the Hebrew according to Arabic linguistics, Jewish doctors practiced Arabic medicine, and poets modeled their poetry, secular as well as religious, on Arabic ideas, themes, and forms. While adhering to pure biblical idiom as the marker of their Hebrew/Jewish identity, the poets appropriated Arabic prosody, poetic genres, and thematic.¹⁷ Conceived in the Andalusian courts, the new brand of secular Hebrew poetry, intended for the milieu of the serving elite, introduced typical Arabic courtly themes (such as the depiction of palaces and gardens, wine banquets, and romantic love) as well as the concepts of courtly aestheticism.¹⁸ The acculturation of the Jewish poets and thinkers resulted also in their adopting a variety of attitudes toward women and sexuality prevailing in their non-Jewish circles.

Far-reaching historical events around and after 1150 (the Berber-Almohad invasion of al-Andalus and the Christian Reconquista) resulted in the shifting of most Jewish-Spanish communities to Christian domains. The Jewish elite, which emerged around the Christian courts, readily adapted to the new ambience. And though Arabic learning and Andalusian poetry remained the declared cultural ideals, the changing historical circumstances (and to some extent also the encounter with the dominant Romance culture) resulted in a “jumble of continuities and transformations of the Andalusian traditions.”¹⁹ The hybridity of old and new literary paradigms characterizes the writing of Jewish intellectuals in Castile and Catalonia, Provence, and Italy. To these we must add two major inner developments which took place in Jewish spirituality from the thirteenth century on. One was the efflorescence of philosophy and sciences, the other the advent of the mythical-mystical Kabbala. The heated controversies which arose between the “Averroistic” and pietist circles (centered mainly around the writings of Maimonides) exerted, in their turn, considerable intellectual and soci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 No-Woman’s-Land: Medieval Hebrew Literature and Feminist Criticism
• 2 Gazing at the Gazelle: Woman in Male Love Lyric
• 3 Veils and Wiles: Poetry as Woman
• 4 Poor Soul, Pure Soul: The Soul as Woman
• 5 Domesticating the Enemy: Misogamy in a Jewish Marriage Debate
• 6 Among Men: Homotextuality in the Maqāma
• 7 Clothes Reading: Cross-Dressing in the Maqāma
• 8 Circumcised Cinderella: Jewish Gender Trouble
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments