Patriarchy and the Status of Women in Rabbinic Judaism

292REVIEWS Patriarchy and the Status of Women in Rabbinic Judaism Judith Hauptman. Rereading the Rabbis: A Women's Voice. Boulder: Westview Press, 1997, 285 pp. Judith Hauptman's goal in her most recent book, Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman's Voice, is to describe rabbinic attitudes toward women as found in the legal portions of the rabbinic corpus in order to provide us with a history of Jewish law regarding women. In contrast to scholars like Tal lian, who believe that historical information about women can be unearthed from rabbinic literature,1 Hauptman approaches rabbinic legal material armed with the assumption that legal sources are not historically descriptive.2 Based upon our readings of rabbinic law, we cannot conclude anything about the impact rabbinic legal decisions had upon the lives of women. We can only formulate a picture of how one group of Jewish men in antiquity viewed them and wished to see them conduct their lives. The parameters are clear; this is an analysis ofrabbinic texts alone. Hauptman has chosen to read rabbinic halakhic sources written about women from within the context ofrabbinic literature. Although at times, Hauptman will point out that the Greco-Roman and Persian contexts influenced rabbinic legal developments, she does not focus on these historical and legal contexts. In this regard, her work is not comparative. Rather, she chooses to read rabbinic texts, including the Mishnah and the Tosefta,3 as well as the Babylonian and the Palestinian Talmudim, in relation to one another. Hauptman's application of the techniques of source criticism, in which she divides the material into historical layers, leads her to uncover one unifying trend in the development ofJewish law concerning women and, as such, to present an overall rabbinic attitude toward women.4 Her account of the development of the status of women, in which she treats the topics of sotah, relations between the sexes, marriage, rape and seduction, divorce, procreation, niddah, inheritance, testimony, and ritual, is carefully synthesized and clearly written. Her new scholarly interpretations of the rabbinic material, combined with her concern for reaching a wider readership, make this "rereading" of rabbinic texts a significant one for scholars in the field as well as those outside the field of rabbinics. Hauptman reads rabbinic literature acknowledging that patriarchy is a cultural given and that therefore women occupy a cultural space in rabbinic literature distinct from that of men.5 Whereas such assumptions have led other scholars to view the rabbinic legal treatment ofwomen as negative6—because any classification of women as "different from" automatically implies that they are "less than"7—Hauptman demands that we examine this classification with greater caution. She asks us to consider the degree to which women are "less than" men in rabbinic society. By tracing the beginnings ofJewish law in the texts of the Bible and comparing these sources with the tannaitic, amoraic, and stammaitic sources of rabbinic literature, Hauptman is able to document positive changes in the development of Jewish law concerning women. While never claiming that women, despite rabbinic improvements in the law, attained a status Prooftexts293 better than second class, she detects a gradual transformation—women were viewed less as chattel and more as second-class persons. What distinguishes Hauptman's research from that of other scholars who have approached rabbinic texts from within the patriarchal paradigm is her ability to present rabbinic texts that show that patriarchy is not necessarily synonymous with misogyny.8 In many cases, we find that the Rabbis sympathized with women and attempted to protect them from abuse. Although the Rabbis never shed their patriarchal mode ofsocial organization, Hauptman shows that in almost every legal category of concern to women, including marriage, divorce, inheritance, the offering of testimony, rape, and ritual law, they improved the status of women during the rabbinic period. While she does not deny the appearance of statements that describe women negatively, she forces us to confront other statements that reflect positively upon women. For example, in her study of the laws of Gittin, Hauptman reminds us to judge the Rabbis and their attitude toward women by looking beyond the aspects of these laws that are still disabling for women—for example, the...