Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature (review)

Reviews 213 Parergon 21.1 (2004) and orthodoxy. Rex likes his territory known and numerable, and The Lollards offers just that. In general, however, Lollard scholars understand themselves to be in a terra far less cognita, the features and alignments of which are only just beginning to be distinguished. Mary Dove Department of English University of Sussex Rosen, Tova, Unveiling Eve: Reading Gender in Medieval Hebrew Literature (Jewish Culture and Contexts), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003; cloth; pp. xvi, 264; RRP US$45, £31.50; ISBN 0812237102. Professor Rosen considers Unveiling Eve and her earlier articles to be ‘the only theoretically informed feminist sortie’ into medieval Hebrew literature (p. 18). She introduces the reader to a wide variety of texts, prose and verse, composed over four centuries in what is now Spain, southern France and Italy. She then unpacks each text as a modern resistant feminist reader influenced by Freud and French psychoanalytic criticism. But what of the medieval female reader/auditor of these texts? Those who produce literature themselves may be assumed to have first been consumers of the genre. Between the Old Testament and fifteenth-century Spain, a single poem ascribed to a woman (unnamed) has survived, due to its subject being the author’s famous husband, the tenth-century Spanish Hebrew poet Dunash ben Labrat. In the next century the Jewess Qasmkna composed only in Arabic, so Muslim literary histories preserved her reputation while Hebrew ones described the achievements of her father and brothers. Rosen does not try to ‘recover’ other woman-authored texts from her corpus and side-steps the debate over ‘authentic’ female voice in chansons des femmes. Nevertheless, the existence of at least two accomplished poetesses suggests a cultural milieu in which literary production and consumption were not only a vehicle for homo-social exchanges between men in a gender-exclusive environment. Rosen does not attempt to reconstruct that milieu; her book is emphatically not literary history, and readers unfamiliar with the complicated overlap and interchange between coexisting Jewish, Muslim and Christian cultures in the western Mediterranean will not gain a clear picture from her brief references to historical background. 214 Reviews Parergon 21.1 (2004) Following an introductory chapter covering the (mainly negative) feminine imagery in medieval Hebrew literature, relating it to previous studies of misogynist texts, Chapter 2 concerns eleventh- and twelfth-century Andalusian love poetry. The possibilities of cross-cultural fertilisation would seem promising, given its proximity in time and space to Continental Latin and vernacular lyric. However, the themes of feudal submission and love from afar favoured by poets such as Todros Abulafia, ‘a Jewish cavalier and troubadour’ (p. 50), already existed in classical Arabic authors like the Andalusian Ibn Hazm. For courtier-poets like Todros, Arabic, Iberian vernacular and previous Hebrew literature including the Old Testament all had status as alternative, co-existing canons. Rosen sees little difference in the emotional situation of the Hebrew courtly poet and his romantic object, compared with his Arabic and possible Occitan source-material. Given a monogamous medieval Jewish culture which condemned homosexuality and even celibacy, and which married both sexes off extremely young while guarding women both before and after marriage, I would expect to see some variations from the social situations to which Arabic and European lyrics allude. The Hebrew poet’s ostensible address must be a young (female) virgin who has everything to lose and nothing to gain from a relationship, as occasional female characters are allowed to reply: ‘Your discourse is lacking in reason and wisdom. / Your poem is like all poetry of flattery and lechery’ (p. 62). Instead of a troubadour’s rivals, the males with whom the Hebrew poet is in competition are the relatives of the unmarried girl, guarding the family honour and her value. So is marital union the poet’s goal? In the Toledan Judah Ibn Shabbetai’s thirteenth-century rhymed-narrative novella, a young misogynist falls for a prospective bride when he finds her to be his equal in composing and performing love lyrics. But her unlikely talent should have alerted the protagonist to his fairy-tale situation; the bridal veil is used by vengeful women to substitute a physically and financially...