Recovering the Role of Women: Power and Authority in Rabbinic Jewish Society (review)

Book Reviews 183 reputable scholarly journals years ago would have done much to advance the critical study ofJewish art now. Richard Brilliant Department of Art History and Archaeology Columbia University Recovering the Role of Women: Power and Authority in Rabbinic Jewish Society, edited by Peter J. Haas. South Florida Studies in the History ofJudaism 59. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1992. 132 pp. $49.95. I can see no reason for publishing the seven essays contained in this volume, as none offers any original scholarship. All were first written as part of a graduate seminar held at Vanderbilt University in the spring of 1991. The authors of the various papers, whose topics range from the examination of the role of women as patrons of the ancient synagogue to the New York kosher meat boycott of 1902, share the laudable goals of wishing to offer some models of how women's voices might be recovered from the sources which document various periods of Jewish history and of suggesting what it might mean to read these sources in a "different, less male-centered way." Unfortunately for the unwary reader, these papers are based almost wholly on a generally uncritical use of secondary sources written in English (the author of a study ofJewish women in early modern Central Europe, for example, admits to knowing neither German nor Yiddish, nor apparently Hebrew). Moreover, aside from almost slavish dependence on selected works of important scholars such as Bernadette Brooten, Ross Kraemer, Judith Romney Wegner, and Paula Hyman, the authors of these student papers seem otherwise unaware of the growing body of literature on women in Judaism and Jewish history which addresses questions similar to their own with considerably more scholarship and expertise. Judith R. Baskin Department ofJudaic Studies State University of New York at Albany ...