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Bonna Devora Haberman

The Suspected Adulteress: A Study of Textual Embodiment

Potencies of the sacred realm and textuality converge in the bodily territory of the sotah, the suspected adulteress. The sotah is defined by her act of turning aside from her spouse, toward another man (Num. 5:11-31). Her turning sets in motion social, legal, and religious ritual. She is taken to the priest at the core of the Israelite encampment, positioned at a seam between sexual, ceremonial, and political order and disorder; between holiness and defilement; between access to and the unattainability of truth. This analysis of biblical and rabbinic sotah sources explores the perturbing intersection of gender with Jewish ritual and textual culture.

Adele Reinhartz

Margins, Methods, and Metaphors: Reflections on A Feminist Companion to the Hebrew Bible

One of the most ambitious contributions to the field of feminist biblical exegesis to date is the eleven-volume Sheffield series, A Feminist Companion to the Hebrew Bible. The series, which includes over two hundred articles, is not intended to cover the field in its entirety. It does provide, however, a useful and stimulating guide to some of the highways, avenues, side streets, and even dead ends of feminist biblical criticism. This review article attempts to describe this road map, with special attention to the assumptions, methods, and results of current feminist biblical interpretation as represented in this series. [End Page 224]

Natan Margalit

Not by Her Mouth Do We Live: A Literary/Anthropological Reading of Gender in Mishnah Ketubbot, Chapter 1

This paper uses a literary/anthropological approach to reading gender in the Mishnah. It is argued that by paying attention to literary devices such as chiasmus we may gain a more nuanced idea of the rabbinic constructions of gender found in the Mishnah. The first chapter of M. Ketubbot is examined, and it is suggested that the structure of this chapter is built on a progression from the social unit of the family to that of the nation. This structure also revolves around a parallelism between married women and priests-the former representing the unity of the family and the later, the unity of the nation. An important dynamic in this chapter is the relationship between speech, especially the authoritative speech found in the courtroom, and women's bodies.

Tova Rosen

Circumcised Cinderella: The Fantasies of a Fourteenth-Century Jewish Author

An outstanding passage in Qalonymos ben Qalonymos's Even boḥan (1322) is a male's prayer to God to turn him into a female. Understanding that his transsexual wish is unrealistic, the speaker reluctantly complies with his bitter and irreparable fate as male, uttering the formula of the morning prayer: Blessed art Thou who did not make me a woman."

Labeling the passage as "parody" or "satire," critics hitherto ignored the historical context in which the piece was written. Similarly, they did not attend to the cultural implications of its unusual treatment of gender. As I will suggest, Qalonymos's piece is an early (probably the earliest) written response to the women's prayer: "Blessed art Thou . . . who hast made me according to His will." (Two extant early fourteenth-century rabbinical testimonies to this spreading custom are dated later than that of Qalonymos.)

Qalonymos's text ventures to explore the boundaries of Jewish masculinity and femininity. Investigating the assumptions of Jewish gender and examining the [End Page 225] social and religious practices through which it is constructed, Qalonymos produces a subversive critique of fundamental issues in Jewish life-the life of the man as well as the life of the woman. To be male, he claims, is to be physically impaired and intellectually frustrated. Femininity, on the other hand, is presented as perfection and as a source of attainable happiness.

The transition from the man's monologue to that of a woman's enables the text to furnish two specular perspectives of gender. The masculine and feminine speakers describe their own gender roles, while also fantasizing about the "other." This, however, is not a fully symmetrical play in reflections. The biblical and especially talmudic allusions with which the text is saturated disclose the androcentric bias: the text is written by a male intellectual and...

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