Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (review)

The impact of modern feminism on academic Jewish studies and the widespread recognition of the importance of gender as a category of historical and literary analysis have prompted a growing number of contemporary scholars to look seriously and in diverse ways at the representations of women in rabbinic texts. While most contem porary investigators affirm the androcentric nature of rabbinic Judaism, a growing number of sophisticated readers also endeavor to distinguish within its immense and multivocal literature marginalized voices supportive of expanded human and legal possibilities for women. Some scholars, reading against the grain, hope to tease from selected passages evidence of female strategies of resistance against the male hegem ony characteristic of rabbinic social policy. There are those readers, as well, who look for inspiration from Jewish women of the past that will contribute to contemporary efforts to refashion Judaism to include and value female spiritual aspirations and contributions.

In Menstrual Purity, Charlotte Fonrobert brings all of these redemptive goals to her explorations of the meanings rabbinic Judaism accords to menstruation and to women’s bodies. She also suggests an innovative sociological explanation for the persistence of marital separation during menstruation following the destruction of the Temple. Fonrobert’s volume focuses on Tractate Niddah in the Babylonian Talmud, an exhaus tive consideration of all aspects of female menstruation and related topics. However, her book makes no claims to be a rigorous or thorough analysis of that tractate or any of its parts. Rather, Menstrual Purity is a compilation of six interrelated essays, five of which utilize various aspects of halakhic debate on menstruation to comment on the complex rabbinic taxonomy of women and their place in the rabbis’ religious landscape. The sixth chapter turns to early Christian documents about the female body, both as complement and as contrast to rabbinic discourse.

When she began her investigations of rabbinic thinking about gender, Fonrobert writes, she hoped that distinct female voices would emerge from her reading of Tractate Niddah. However, she came to see that this tractate is no different from others in privileging the hermeneutic and analytic agendas of men. While she discovered an occasional moment of textual rupture, preserving vestiges of counter-discourses in which women figured as subjects rather than objects, such instances were rare and contested. Far more frequently, women appeared as ciphers in legal discussions of their bodily discharges or as speakers in narratives fashioned by men. Fonrobert responded to this dilemma of absence by focusing on the power relationships that affected women’s lives. To study Tractate Niddah, she argues, is to witness men insisting upon their authority to interpret women’s bodies.

Fonrobert’s first chapter, “Framing Niddah,” argues against the normative view that rabbinic literature follows the Hebrew Bible in constructing the menstruating woman as a source of general impurity or of danger to the community at large. She insists that with the destruction of the Temple it was only the second levitical prohibition con cerning the niddah, forbidden marital contact, that continued in force as an ethnic marker to distinguish Jews from their neighbors. Thus, Fonrobert argues that discussions in Tractate Niddah about ways in which a menstruating woman transfers states of impurity to objects and other persons had no practical relevance. While Fonrobert acknowledges that references to the harmful propensities of menstruating women remain in rabbinic literature, I am not convinced by her dismissal of such statements as folklore rather than as actual expressions of anxiety about the niddah as a source of danger.

The desire to retrieve the female body as a site of resistance to the prevailing patriarchy of rabbinic gender politics is invoked in Fonrobert’s discussion of B. Me’ilah 17a, which recounts that the Romans forbade Sabbath observance and circumcision and ordered that Jewish men sleep with their menstruating wives. According to Fonrobert, this text demonstrates that Jewish women constituted their ethnic identities through punctilious observance of niddah regulations and suggests that this approach can help...