Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine (review)

Book Reviews 155 writing, and the study ofJewish culture. Indeed, Alcalay's essay plays a critical role in a volume which is actively pushing the boundaries ofJewish studies and asking readers to think in new and different ways. Boyarin and Boyarin suggest that cultural studies could provide a function as a useful tool for the study of Jews and Jewishness. They frame their volume as an invitation to use the multi-valanced notion of difference as a critical approach to reinvigorate Jewish academic work, and they want to put Jewish studies scholars in conversation with others whose work deals with differences of many kinds. But their argument would have been even more powerful had they defined cultural studies in greater detail. The introduction contained too many unexamined assumptions regarding the relationship between cultural studies and difference; their claims would have been stronger had these assumptions been more carefully unpacked. Still, the book succeeds in drawing attention to the insights academically rigorous studies of difference can provide. The individual essays are provocative and well written; taken together, they provide a compelling example of the riches "the new Jewish cultural studies" has to offer. Deborah Glanzberg-Krainin Temple University Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine, by Tal Ilan. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996. 270 pp. $19.95. Seeking to document the social, political, and religious status of Jewish women in Palestine from Alexander the Great to ca. 200 C.E., Ilan has produced an engaging compendium of materials ranging from Ben Sirach and Jubilees to Talmud and Midrash. Equally helpful is her critical survey of previous works on the topic, from those apologetically or polemically viewing Rabbinic sources as normative for the period to those reductively contrasting a liberating Jesus and Christian movement with a misogynist Judaism. Somewhat problematic, however, are her methods and conclusions. The study originated as a Ph.D. dissertation in the late 1980s under Menahem Stem and was completed, following Stem's death, under Isaiah Gafni. Ilan recounts that during her post-doctoral year at Harvard's "Women's Studies in Religion" program she came to realize that she had been writing "feminist criticism" (p. xi) all along. Yet there is little that makes the study "feminist" per se. It does not define or employ "feminist" method, it does not explore gender as a category of analysis, and it even utilizes androcentric language ("the historian ... he"). Ilan frequently notes other authors' political or ideological alliance, as ifan explicit agenda were incompatible with rigorous historical 156 SHOFAR Winter 2000 Vol. 18, No.2 investigation. "Feminism" thus appears to mean looking, with objectivity, at sources regarding women. Ban's suggestion that"extreme" groups influenced other movementsto tighten their control over women's activities and to emphasize women's chastity is plausible, but it is not as well supported by the documents as the volume suggests. Moreover, increasing segregation of the sexes and attendant restrictions on women's activities may also be occasioned by economic, political, and even ecological changes; they may result not only from internal sectarian pressure, but also from external cultural shifts. These matters are not fully addressed. Her assertion that women's lives were much more varied than literary representations and legal codes suggest is surely correct, albeit hardly original and, again, less well argued than it could have been. By presenting materials thematically (e.g., daughters, marriage, biology, chastity, divorce, the legal system, women in public, employment [maids, prostitutes, witches]) rather than according to period or class, Ban leaves the impression that women's lives from the preMaccabean period until the post-Bar-Kochba world, from the upper Galilee to the Negev, from urban to rural environments, from patron to peasant, were relatively static. Contributing to this impression is her concentrated dependence on Rabbinic sources: Mishnah and Tosefta, as well as both Talmuds and various Midrashim, are cited with only meager discussion of dating. Although her skepticism concerning the Beruriah traditions is proper, as is her wariness of Rabbinic generalities regarding women's public presence, her reliance on these later sources is more positivistic than is warranted. Had Ban made greater use of the Qumran scrolls and the other fmdings from the Judean Desert (she has...