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Reviewed by:
  • Women Out—Women In: The Place of Women in Midrash
  • Yehuda Gellman (bio)
Chana Safrai and Avital Campbell Hochstein. Women Out—Women In: The Place of Women in Midrash. Hebrew; Tel Aviv: Miskal–Yedioth Ahronoth and Chemed Books, 2008. 188 pp. NIS 88

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Several years ago, I participated in a seminar at the Shalom Hartman Institute, led by the late Dr. Chana Safrai, on how women are treated in the midreshei halakhah—midrashic texts that expound the commandments by exploring their scriptural derivations. Safrai focused on a type of legal derivation that, roughly, takes the form, “We know that men are included in the law, but how do we know that women are also included?” The purpose was to investigate the dynamics of exclusion and inclusion of women in the application of Jewish law. Safrai was unwavering in her willingness to critique the texts she presented to us, and at the same time she was uncompromising in her loyalty to Orthodox Judaism.

Subsequently, Safrai began a study partnership with Avital Campbell-Hochstein, who had also participated in the seminar and had become convinced of the importance of the subject for women’s place in Jewish law. I would often pass by Safrai’s open door at the Institute and see the two study partners not only examining intensely the texts before them, but also scrutinizing their own hearts for their reactions to those texts.

Chana passed away before her time, and I miss her critical mind and the conversations we used to have about the direction of Orthodoxy and women’s issues. Now, in this Hebrew volume, we receive the fruits of the seminar and study partnership between her and Campbell-Hochstein. And a most important volume it is. [End Page 198]

I am familiar with a host of feminist critiques concerning the exclusion of women from the application of Jewish laws, and other androcentric forces in Jewish law. I recall, for example, Paula Hyman’s early study about the exclusion of the “other half” from Jewish law;1 a scathing article by Judith Romney Wegner on women’s rights in the Mishnah, later expanded into a book;2 and Rachel Adler’s agenda for a new Jewish law.3 These and most others deal with Jewish law only as already derived, not with the detailed manner in which laws were derived. As a result, concern over androcentrism in Jewish law is mostly restricted to women’s exclusion from a law’s application or their otherwise being treated differently from men. This volume goes further by focusing entirely on androcentric forces at work in the very innards of the halakhic process, even when women are ultimately included in a legal application. The authors advance the thesis that even then, women are still on the outside in relation to men: “Even after their inclusion, women remain a foreign appendage whose inclusion is to be dealt with again and again for each case separately” (p. 152, my translation). It is men who weigh whether women should be included, have reasons for excluding them, and in the end may consent to allow them in. The thesis: Even when women are in, women are out.

The volume analyzes 77 rabbinic texts, mostly tannaitic, 67 of which include women in a legal application and 10 of which include them as participants in sacred historical events. Safrai and Campbell-Hochstein systematically analyze each text to discern the hava amina, the initial presumption, for excluding women; what the rabbis saw in the scriptural passages they cited to make them conclude that women are in; and the implications of women’s inclusion in the particular law.

Here is an example of how the authors analyze a text pertaining to historical events, in the chapter “The Historical Story as the Story of Men.” It pertains to the days immediately prior to the revelation of the Ten Commandments, when everyone, “beast or man,” was forbidden to approach Mt. Sinai (Ex. 19:13):

[It says] “or man.” So I have it that a man [is included in the prohibition]. How do I know a woman [is included]? For it says, “or man.”

(p. 140)

Our authors speculate that...

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