Blood, Identity, and Counter-Discourse: Rabbinic Writings on Menstruation

The project undertaken by Charlotte Fonrobert in this book¹ is clearly innovative, breaking fresh ground in the research of rabbinic culture. Her scholarly novelty lies in the specific material that she investigates as well as in the methodological approach to it. The last decade saw the emergence of abundant writing on questions of gender and sexuality in rabbinic literature. Exploiting the contemporary methods employed in the fields of cultural research, women studies, and feminist criticism and assisted by Michel Foucault's writing on sexuality, the works of David Biale,² Daniel Boyarin,³ Michael Satlow,⁴ Miriam Peskowitz,⁵ and others have presented a broad view of the relations between the sexes and the picture of gender that emerge from rabbinic literature. Within this framework, particular attention has been given to marriage and sexual relations, the place of women in the house of study and in the market, adultery and seduction, and so forth.

The talmudic concern with the female body, however, has not yet been subject to such a comprehensive examination. Though most of the above-mentioned writers recognize the centrality of the human body in rabbinic literature,⁶ there has been no detailed study devoted solely to this subject. The opposite holds true of parallel research of Greek and Hellenistic literature, which long ago recognized that medical writings about female anatomy and physiology are a potential source of a cultural history of gender. The works of Aline Rousselle,⁷ Lesley Dean-Jones,⁸ Ann Ellis Hanson,⁹ and others have proved that this research direction is promising and fertile. These investigators introduced Greek and Hellenistic medical writing into the historical discussion of gender. They managed to prove that the Hippocratic corpus, Aristotle's biological works, Galen's and Soranus's writings, and similar texts that deal with the structure and function of the female and male body are no less instructive about perceptions of sex and sexuality in the Hellenistic world than the analysis of Ovid's works or the nude paintings in Pompeii.¹⁰ Following in the footsteps of these investigators, Fonrobert seeks to examine the gynecological and physiological knowledge embodied in the laws of Niddah as a gateway to the talmudic universe of gender. In this endeavor, she complements Tirzah Meacham's critical study of the mishnaic tractate of Niddah,¹¹ which focuses on the philology and realia of the text without analyzing its gendered context and cultural implications.

Fonrobert's second novelty lies in her methodology. The works of Judith Hauptman,¹² Michael Satlow, Judith Romney Wegner,¹³ and Tal Ilan¹⁴ are thematic, tracing an issue through various sources and strata. As a result, they engage the sources in a selective and necessarily partial manner. Fonrobert, in contrast, focuses on a relatively limited number of texts, but quotes them extensively and analyzes them rigorously and at length. This method proves to be profitable. Her detailed and extensive treatment of the material produces new insights even into texts that have drawn considerable scholarly attention (such as the story of R. Akiva and the menstruating woman in M Niddah 8:3).¹⁵ By adopting a textual orientation, Fonrobert goes beyond the analysis of contents to examine the text's language, argumentation, analogies, metaphors, and tone in order to extract their implicit picture of gender. This approach accounts for the accomplishments of this book and the insightful perceptions it offers.

The Structure

The book has a clear-cut structure, which is instructive of Fonrobert's methodological approach. Besides the introductory and concluding chapters, the main argument—engaging the laws of Niddah in rabbinic literature—is presented in four thematic chapters. These chapters are divided into two groups: the first part (chapters 2 and 3) concerns the object of knowledge—the female body, while the second (chapters 4 and 5) deals with the subjects holding this knowledge. Each of the two parts is structured in a similar fashion, with the opening chapter describing the masculine hegemony and the succeeding...