Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (review)

142 SHOFAR Fall 1992 Vol. 11, No. 1 "Judaism" is a recurrent feature of these essays. We are told, for example, that what is important is not what scripture meant, but what "Judaism" has taken it to mean; that midrash has at times forced "astonishingly alien notions" on the Hebrew Bible (p. 2); that Philo had little impact on "mainline Judaism" (p. 21), and the like. These reservations aSide, however, I find that overall the book offers a gold mine of information about the history of Jewish thought and literature and provides a generally useful selection of texts for giving the students the opportunity to confront actual primary sources. As part of a formal class, this book would be a wonderful resource. Peter J. Haas Department of Religious Studies Vanderbilt University Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, edited by Judith R. Baskin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. 300 pp. $39.95. It is now almost twenty years since scholarship on Jewish women began to separate what is particularly women's history from what is men's history. In the introductory remarks to this ambitious set of historical essays about Jewish women, the first of its kind, the editor, Judith Baskin, underscores the significance of gender when she writes: "The perception that women's lives and experiences in any particular historical epoch may differ from men's has profoundly affected how many scholars approach and interpret their subjects of study." Each author as well as the t;ditor points out the important awareness that her story is not his story; from this point of view, the scholarship assembled here is impressive. This book is a compilation of twelve original essays that present an historical overview of women throughout Jewish history. Essays cover the Biblical period, Ashkenazic and Sephardic women in late antiquity through the Middle Ages, Italian women, salon women in old Berlin, and women in Imperial Germany, the immigrant woman's experience in the United States, women in the Holocaust, and women's religious lives in twentiethcentury North America. Although so many different aspects of Jewish women's experience over centuries are explored in this kaleidoscopic attempt to retrieve the female past, there is a unity in the collection. The authors share a feminist scholar's faith that 1) the Jewish female past is reconstructable despite centuries of neglect and even willful destruction of evidence; 2) by using unexplored and untraditional sources, ignored, Book Reviews 143 overlooked, or buried bygenerations ofmale historians, androcentrism can be challenged and original insights harvested; 3) by asking new questions of the material, far richer and diverse patterns ofJewish history emerge. At the same time, the authors are quick to point out how little is available about women's lives; how little writing by women themselves has been preserved; and how much ofwhat we have is by and about extraordinary women. They caution us about making too easy generalizations from the available data. It is well to remember this caution. While these essays give us a lot of information, it is ultimately about very few people. While we know a great deal more after reading this book than before, we still do not learn much about most Jewish women through time-the poor, the inarticulate, and those who left no records. Also, there is no one essay which gives us any transhistorical analysis, and therefore the reader is left alone to note which aspects of women's lives have differed greatly in different historical settings, and which have shown remarkable similarity. Some essays present fine overviews of scholarly work done by others in the field, while other essays contain original research which discloses new cultural and societal patterns. For instance, by analyzing the text of a second-century C.E. Greek tomb inscription which says, "Rufina, aJewess, head of the synagogue, built this tomb for her freed slaves and the slaves raised in her household ..." Ross S. Kraemer offers us a vastly more independent portrait of Jewish women in the Greco-Roman world than could ever be obtained by consulting only the early rabbinic sources. However, the essays in this collection are rarely informed by feminist analysis and do not explore the meaning of their...