Women in Judaism: Reexamining an Historical Paradigm

VoLume 10, No.2 Winter 1992 WOMEN IN JUDAISM: REEXAMINING AN mSTORICAL PARADIGM by Peter J. Haas Peter Haas is Associate Professor of Jewish Thought and Literature at Vanderbilt University. He received his Ph.D. in History of Religions: Judaism from Brown University in 1980. He has published several works on Jewish law and ethics. His most recent book, Morality After Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic (1988) deals with the impact of the Holocaust on contemporary moral philosophy. 35 Reading contemporary accounts of the role of women in pre-modern times yields the impression that women occupied a subordinate role in the traditional Jewish community. Women are almost never mentioned as political or scholarly leaders in the rabbinic literature. There seems to be little reason for assuming that women in pre-modern Jewish communities held much authority, power, or influence. In the following, I will argue that this impression is wrong. Further, I want to suggest tha~ the role of women in pre-modern Jewish communities has been ignored not because women are invisible or mute in the sources but because of the way modern scholarly conventions have governed the reading of the sources. I will try to show that women played a much more influential role in pre-modern Jewish communities, and are much more prevalent in the sources, than modern scholarship has been prepared to admit. The primary reason that scholars have ignored the evidence of women's power, I suggest, is the influence of Orthodoxy and Wissenschaft ideologies on the development of Jewish Studies. This influence is based on two convictions that have deprived women of their proper audience in the reconstruction of Jewish history. One of these convictions is that modern traditional communities carry forward more or less intact the timeless life-style ofJewish communities of the past. Thus, since women play little public role in modern Orthodox or Hasidic communities, it is taken for granted that they did not 36 SHOFAR play such roles in prior communities. The second conviction, related to the first, is that the proper study of authentic Jewish history and thought must be based on the rabbinic literature. Since this literature is male-oriented, reliance on it has turned scholars away from other historical evidence that does indicate a greater role for women. There has thus emerged a sort of modern scholarly orthodoxy that holds that women were excluded from meaningful power or authority in classical Jewish culture. But, in fact, the notion that women were excluded from learning, worship, and other activities is an anachronism, projecting current structures back into the past and serving as a justification for continuing to restrict women's access to these roles. As I will show below, when these two assumptions are suspended, a whole new world stands revealed in the sources. My aim is to explore some of the research possibilities such a move opens up. Before proceeding, two important distinctions must be made. The first has to do with the type of evidence we have available. On the one hand, it is undeniably the case .that women were not accorded a place of authority within the rabbinic estate; that is, rabbinic activities were restricted to males. Thus, insofar as we assume that classical Judaism was entirely rabbinic, that only what the rabbis did was what counted, and that rabbinic literature is the only evidence that tells us what authentic Judaism was like, we will in fact find women to be relatively powerless. But ifwe are ready to acknowledge spheres of authentic Jewish life and community outside of the activities of rabbis, we find that women in these other spheres were far from excluded, and at times even were dominant. The scholarly study of non-Rabbinic Judaisms is still in its infancy, but"the work of people like Erwin Goodenough and Gershom Scholem indicates the richness of the extra-rabbinic materials. Related to this distinction is another one, namely, the distinction between authority expressed through the control of public or dominant institutions , on the one hand, and the power to shape the communal discourse within which the institutions must operate, on the other. As the official structures of the post-Destruction...