Women in Rav Nahman's Court

WOMEN IN RAV NAHMAN'S COURT Shulamit Valler The theme of women in court has been studied extensively in the last three decades of research on women's status. As Israeli legal scholar Frances Raday writes in her essay, "On Equality," such studies are needed because "all of society's organizational and theoretical systems - of religion, philosophy and law - reflect that men are their subject."1 Many facets of the law's attitude to women have been studied, from women's rights legislation to the punishment of women, and to the punishment of men for crimes against women. In almost every area one can identify a paternalistic attitude towards women, or at least some traces of it, as a result of which women are forced into a system of defenses against their will and contrary to their interests. According to Frances Raday, this is because "Legal directives that indicate paternalism towards women still give the seal of approval to a paternalistic concept that knows no limits."2 The attitudes ofjudges toward women litigants are a particularly interesting aspect of this issue. It seems that judges, as individuals, cannot entirely shed the influence of the worldviews imprinted upon them; nor can these be eradicated by means of the directives of law. Rita G. Simon and Jean M. Landis, in The Crimes Women Commit, The Punishment They Receive,3 devote a chapter to women in the courtroom, quoting conclusions drawn by Deborah Anthony. In 1973, Anthony interviewed twenty-three judges in Chicago, Saint Louis, Milwaukee and Indianapolis on their experience with women defendants. More than half the judges said that they were more lenient with and considerate of women than men in their courtrooms . They also tended to mete out shorter jail terms to women than to men for the same offenses. Simon and Landis quote a later study by a another researcher, Angela Mossolino, who interviewed twelve judges in the Washington, D.C., area in 1988. AU admitted that they related differently to women than to men brought before them on the same charges. Nashim: A Journal ofJewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues, no. 4. ©200135 Shulamit Valier These studies give evidence of paternalistic attitudes towards women in the courts in the United States, where liberal ideas regarding such individual rights as gender equality are absorbed into the leading institutions of society relatively quickly and easily. In Israel, according to Raday, the declaration of the Law of Equal Rights for Women (1951) that "The law will be applied in the same way to women and to men in every judicial act" is viewed, as no more than "a guiding principle for the courts in the interpretation of laws whose meaning is ambivalent."4 She indicates that women are not yet treated in Israeli courts as equals of men. In view of these recent studies showing that courts today continue to treat women as "other," I set out to examine the attitude of talmudic judges, who lived in a completely patriarchal world, to women who appeared before them. A search for attitudes attributing complete equality to men and women in talmudic law is unimaginable. Clearly, talmudic literature was created in a patriarchal society and "reflects that men are its subject." Talmudic law is paternalistic, simultaneously endowing women with special protection and imposing limitations upon them, guided by a basic assumption that as regards a range ofjudicial matters, women belong in the same category as "the deaf, the mentally defective and the minor." Nonetheless, within this paternalistic attitude one finds islands of equality in principle, like the rule that equates women with men in civil matters (BT Kiddushin 35a), allowing women to participate as equals, theoretically at least, in economic life. Given this legal principle, I shall focus on civil cases in examining the attitude of talmudic judges to women who appeared before them. One may assume that it was no simple matter for these judges to see women as men's equals as litigants in the civil suits that formed the bulk of the cases brought before the courts. My purpose was to find out whether they were discriminatory, whether favorably or unfavorably, in their attitudes toward women. Did the judges...