Editors' Introduction: Engendering Jewish Knowledges

Editors' Introduction EDITORS' INTRODUCTION: ENGENDERING JEWISH KNOWLEDGES 1 In choosing a title-and an organizing framework-for this issue of Shofar, we became intrigued by the double meaning of "engender" in "EngenderingJewish Knowledges." On the one hand, to "engender" is to produce something new: to bring into existence, propagate, give rise to, or originate. In this sense, new feminist scholarship "engenders" by creating and distributing new knowledges and insights about women's lives. In the context of Jewish Studies, feminist scholars have produced whole new areas of research. At the same time, we recognize the"gender" embedded in "engendering ." Our project encompasses not merely the generation of the new; we turn attention to the ideological gendering of what is already present and familiar. Here it becomes important to interrupt the common, and taming, substitution of gender for terms such as ~'women" and "feminism." Finding the gender-most often a sexist or masculinist gendering-already present in familiar texts allows us to re-evaluate the knowledge they present. Such a re-evaluation of the scholarly and historical "classics" of Jewish Studies calls into question the androcentric and masculinist character and politics ofcurrently accepted versions ofJudaism and Jewish history. Jewish historical and other knowledges are still-in some ways rightfully and necessarily-based on "classics" such as S. D. Goitein's A Mediterranean Society, The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents ofthe Cairo Geniza,l Jacob Katz's interpretation ofJewish emancipation Out ofthe Ghetto/ or Paul Mendes-Flohr and 's. D. Goitein, A Mediterrarwan Society, Thejewish Communities ofthe Arab World as Portrayed in the Docurrumts ofthe Cairo Geniza (Berkeley: UniverSity of California Press, 1978). For a feminist reading of some of this material see, Judith Baskin, "Jewish Women in the Middle Ages," injewish Worrwn in Historical Perspective, ed. Judith Baskin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), pp. 96-102. 2See Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background ofjewish Emandpation, 1770-1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973). Two volumes that offer critical reevaluations ofKatz' work areJonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein, ed., Assimilation and Community: Thejews in Nirwteenth Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Pierre Birnbaum and Ira KatZnelson, ed., Paths of Errumdpation: jews, States, and Citizenship (princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). While these volumes 2 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No~ 1 Judah Reinharz's The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, to mention only a few. These and others will need to be reworked as new and old data are reconceptualized.3 Engendering Jewish knowledges also calls into question the terms, categories, and definitions used within Jewish Studies, and makes them subject to revision. Research on women, gender and sexuality challenges in very local and intimate ways the inherited notions of explanatory terms for the modern and contemporary periods, terms such as "modernization" "assimilation," "emancipation" and "theEnlightenment." Similarly, truisms and accepted notions of what constitutes "critical" study with regard to ancient Rabbis, biblical writers, and medieval Judaism, are called into question, as the interrogation of sexuality, gender, bodies, and materiality becomes more prominent.4 offer rereadings of the question of emancipation, they offer little by way of a feminist critique. ~Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz ed., The jew in the Moderrl World: A Docunumtary History, second ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). This second edition begins to redress some of the gaps in the first edition by adding texts by women. There is, however, still much work to be done. Although Ellen Umansky and Dianne Ashton, ed., Four Centuries ofjewish Women's Spirituality: A Sourcebook (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992) offers readers a broad range of religious sources by Jewish women that fill in some of the remaining gaps in the Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz collection, it is a very different kind of volume. What is still needed is a focused reader that looks at both secular and religious sources by Jewish women, and that organizes "primary" sources in ways that conceptualize both male and female Jews as central within various practices and experiences ofJudaism and Jewishness. 'See section two, below. Of special interest are these books that in various ways .reconceptualize terms and categories of their fields...