which lay in a neat stack of typescript on my desk down in Sussex, was from a piece of research I was doing on women in the Talmud. The initial stimulus had been a vigorous discussion (an argument, it would have been, had it not taken place in Oxford) on the mouldy old theme of “Why Weren’t Women…?” In this case, it was: Why were women so conspicuously scarce in Jewish literary records? Essentially, the question was: Can a feminist be a Jew, or a Jew a feminist?
I am a Jew; I call myself a feminist: The question was of interest to me. A week after the discussion, I had presented the topic to one of my tutors, who had agreed to work with me on it, and in fact he was looking towards a joint publication. He had already scheduled a public presentation of our finds to date, on the twenty-eighth of January. It promised to be a lively meeting.
The focal point of the essay’s first section was a woman named Beruria, a remarkable member of the late first/early second century rabbinic community, a milieu in which were laid the foundations of what could be called post-Temple Judaism, as well as those of the separating sect of Christianity. Beruria was not, strictly speaking, a rabbi, that title being reserved for men. She had, however, completed the customary rabbinic training, and she was accepted first as a student, then a teacher, and finally as an arbiter of rabbinic decisions. Her martyred father and fiery husband were both prominent rabbis, which no doubt lent her a certain cachet for privileged action, but it was Beruria herself whom we glimpse in the Talmudic writings, not some clever pet. There can be little doubt that if her brilliant intellect, razor-honed tongue, voluminous learning, and profound sense of God had been placed in a man’s body, the resultant figure would have rivalled Akiva himself in stature. Instead, she comes to us as an enigmatic and perplexing footnote, who tantalises with what is possible, while at the same time being the exception that proves the rule that the intensely demanding realm of rabbinic thought is an exclusively male dominion. Her prominence eventually proved too much for the sages who followed her, and a thousand years after her death, her memory was fouled by the medieval scholar Rashi, when he attached to her a scurrilous story of sexual misconduct, giving it out that she allowed herself, a married woman, to be seduced by one of her husband’s students and then in shame committed suicide.
Through Beruria, I had been led back into Scripture itself, into (and here the reader will begin to see the point of this excursus) the feminine aspects of the Divine. Use of masculine imagery in speaking of God, of course, abounds: God takes the masculine gender in Hebrew, and the anthropomorphic imagery used in speaking of the Divine is predominantly andromorphic, from a hot-tempered young warrior to the wise, bearded gentleman depicted by Michelangelo Buonarroti on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Feminine imagery, such as in the passage whose (I was certain) correct translation I had given Margery Childe, does exist: Buried by redactors, obscured by translators, it is nonetheless there for the observant eye. The verses in Genesis which Margery Childe had called upon in her sermon had occupied me for three very solid weeks the previous October. I had taken the Hebrew to pieces, pounded the verses flat and resuscitated them, traced them through the rabbis and into the modern commentaries, eventually reached a tentative though solidly based conclusion, and finally written it up with voluminous footnotes and cross-references into part two of my paper. And then, two months later, to hear this untutored religious casually bringing out my laboriously formed hypothesis as something both self-evident and indisputable was, to say the least, intriguing.
With some pique, I went back to the Hebrew text and read it through, then again with care. It only took five minutes to conclude that she was
I am a Jew; I call myself a feminist: The question was of interest to me. A week after the discussion, I had presented the topic to one of my tutors, who had agreed to work with me on it, and in fact he was looking towards a joint publication. He had already scheduled a public presentation of our finds to date, on the twenty-eighth of January. It promised to be a lively meeting.
The focal point of the essay’s first section was a woman named Beruria, a remarkable member of the late first/early second century rabbinic community, a milieu in which were laid the foundations of what could be called post-Temple Judaism, as well as those of the separating sect of Christianity. Beruria was not, strictly speaking, a rabbi, that title being reserved for men. She had, however, completed the customary rabbinic training, and she was accepted first as a student, then a teacher, and finally as an arbiter of rabbinic decisions. Her martyred father and fiery husband were both prominent rabbis, which no doubt lent her a certain cachet for privileged action, but it was Beruria herself whom we glimpse in the Talmudic writings, not some clever pet. There can be little doubt that if her brilliant intellect, razor-honed tongue, voluminous learning, and profound sense of God had been placed in a man’s body, the resultant figure would have rivalled Akiva himself in stature. Instead, she comes to us as an enigmatic and perplexing footnote, who tantalises with what is possible, while at the same time being the exception that proves the rule that the intensely demanding realm of rabbinic thought is an exclusively male dominion. Her prominence eventually proved too much for the sages who followed her, and a thousand years after her death, her memory was fouled by the medieval scholar Rashi, when he attached to her a scurrilous story of sexual misconduct, giving it out that she allowed herself, a married woman, to be seduced by one of her husband’s students and then in shame committed suicide.
Through Beruria, I had been led back into Scripture itself, into (and here the reader will begin to see the point of this excursus) the feminine aspects of the Divine. Use of masculine imagery in speaking of God, of course, abounds: God takes the masculine gender in Hebrew, and the anthropomorphic imagery used in speaking of the Divine is predominantly andromorphic, from a hot-tempered young warrior to the wise, bearded gentleman depicted by Michelangelo Buonarroti on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Feminine imagery, such as in the passage whose (I was certain) correct translation I had given Margery Childe, does exist: Buried by redactors, obscured by translators, it is nonetheless there for the observant eye. The verses in Genesis which Margery Childe had called upon in her sermon had occupied me for three very solid weeks the previous October. I had taken the Hebrew to pieces, pounded the verses flat and resuscitated them, traced them through the rabbis and into the modern commentaries, eventually reached a tentative though solidly based conclusion, and finally written it up with voluminous footnotes and cross-references into part two of my paper. And then, two months later, to hear this untutored religious casually bringing out my laboriously formed hypothesis as something both self-evident and indisputable was, to say the least, intriguing.
With some pique, I went back to the Hebrew text and read it through, then again with care. It only took five minutes to conclude that she was
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