Rebuilding the House of Israel: Architectures of Gender in Jewish Antiquity (review)

This beautifully written and sharply insightful volume offers a reconsideration of the dynamics of households, domesticity, and communal space in late ancient Judaism. In four interwoven chapters, Baker utilizes early Palestinian rabbinic texts and relevant material culture to address not only the social and material location of women in ancient Jewish society but, more pervasively, the discursive power of rabbinic gender images to construct norms with regard to authority, sexuality, and social control.

Baker begins with a discussion of "Space, Material Discourses, and the Art of Cultural Production," in which she observes that early Palestinian rabbinic texts lack the bias toward keeping women in isolation that is found in some other texts and cultures; archaeological evidence similarly fails to support theories of separate, secluded "women's space" in this period. In lieu of arguing for a public/private dichotomy or distinctive women's and men's spaces, for which, in this context, "there is no substantive evidence whatsoever" (p. 18), Baker reminds readers that "the built environment is not simply a context for social practices, but is itself a nexus of social practices; . . . it does not plainly reflect a preexistent gender ideology or culture, but is constantly involved in the ongoing negotiation of these" (p. 32).

Chapter Two, "The Well-Ordered Bayit: Bodies, Houses, and Rabbis in Ancient Galilee," begins with the observation that the rabbis might, to paraphrase Oliver Sacks, be better understood as "the men who mistook their wives for a house" (p. 34). The rabbinic metaphor of wives (and wives' sexual organs) as "houses" runs through this chapter (as does the image of women's "hats," or head coverings). Beginning with the material evidence for Galilean domestic architecture and riffing on Foucault (and Bentham before him), Baker introduces the concept of the "anopticon," a structure that deflects or interrupts sight, creating invisibility even in open space. Galilean houses, she argues, were busy, shared domestic spaces where lines of sight were often cut off, creating spaces at once public and private. The Jewish wifely body, similarly, could be present in public spaces (the market, the street), but only under the power of such anopticizing social disciplines as proper headcovering, bodily control, and constrained behavior. Ultimately, "it is not built walls that render women silent, absent, and invisible; rather, it is the trained eye, the habituated hand, the bound head, the countless small gestures by which a woman's body is rendered an edifice whose walls, although seen, may be perceived merely as barriers referring always to something else, something other, something more 'glorious within'" (p. 75).

The problematics of gendered public spaces are explored more fully in Chapter Three, "Men, Women, and the Shuk: Cultural Currencies on the Open Market," which focuses in particular on the ancient Palestinian market or marketstreet (shuk). Unlike the open-air market square (agora), the shuk was "most often fully integrated into the residential built environment" (p. 78). Reflecting an anxiety about this integration, rabbinic literature offers a number of rhetorical responses: the creation of distinctions between "real" workers and women who work (m. Hallah 2.7 speaks of "bakers" and women who bake bread to sell in the market) (pp. 80–82); indecision over whether and when women have authority to sell their (husbands') property; and expressions of concern over women's public decorum (especially the image of women spinning in the shuk). Anxiety about power is regularly framed in sexual terms, reflecting "a desire on the part of the rabbinic authors to police women and female sexualities (and thereby, concurrently, male sexualities)" (p. 105). At the same time, Baker argues, these rabbinic texts may be responses to social and economic changes, including increases in export-based marketing and exposure to Roman imperial culture. From this perspective, the interest in constraining women's public presence and sexuality may reflect an anxious desire for "protection against the penetration and dissemination of others' culture into the carefully delineated Jewish society envisioned by...