Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (49 page)

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Authors: Daniel Boyarin

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BOOK: Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture
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The Sister
Beruria
behaves light-mindedly (-)
studies Torah(+)
sent to brothel (-)
marries scholar (+)
passes R. Meir's test (+)
fails R. Meir's test (-)
rescued by miracle (+)
commits suicide (-)
The paradoxes of these oppositions and the reversal of the usual expectations of reward and punishment mark all the more strongly the significance of this narrative as an exemplum of the danger of teaching a daughter Torah. But I again emphasize that this explanation for the story is intelligible only on the Babylonian Talmud's interpretation of the Mishna. This story is not told, nor does it fit in with the Palestinian interpretation in which Ben-Azzai holds that there is real merit for women in studying Torah. Moreover, even R. Eliezer's view according to the Palestinian reading is that there is merit for women in studying Torah, and that this merit would protect them from punishment for adultery, thus removing the very deterrent that the Bitter Waters is meant by the Torah to be. This interpretation implies no
necessary and essential
causal relation between a woman studying Torah and sexual license, and indeed, in the Palestinian texts there is no hint of censure of Beruria for studying Torah or her father for teaching her Torah. She is certainly an anomaly in Palestine as well, but her halakhic opinion was cited as authoritative and there are no stories condemnatory of her.
Another rabbinic authority, slightly later than Rashi, has quite a different understanding of what the "incident of Beruria" is. In his tradition, it is not the "incident" of Beruria but the "
precedent
" of Beruria, and the "real story" is that R. Meir was exiled because he did not listen to his wife on a point of ritual law!
22
Furthermore, according to this same authority, it was not her brother that she bested in knowledge and acumen (see above, n. 16) but her father, the great scholar R. Hanina himself, which
22. Namely the requirement that one study out loud. See Babylonian Talmud Eruvin 53b54a, where Beruria rebukes (or kicks) a disciple who was notstudying out loud. Davis is absolutely correct in her reading that that passage, along with several others she cites, brooks no anxiety or defensiveness over the fact that it is a woman rebuking a man and citing chapter and verse to do so. Adler's notion that these are texts of gender reversal imposes notions of gender on the texts that are not presupposed by them. It nevertheless remains the case that nearly all of the stories about Beruria (including the ones in which she is given an unambiguous positive valence and could be any Rabbi, like this one) all portray her as besting a man at some halakhic/midrashic task.
 
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establishes her even more firmly as an actual halakhic authority (Kalonymos 1963, 3134). According to R. Yehuda ben Kalonymos's traditions, then, the story of Beruria is a decisive refutation of R. Eliezer's dictum. I would read these antithetical productions of Beruria's end as evidence that the conflict over women studying Torah continued into the eleventh and twelfth centuries in Ashkenaz, too. Indeed, seen in this light, the persistent legends that Rashi's daughter was a medieval "Beruria" (moreover, without any evil end) become highly charged as well.
The legend of Beruria is precisely the sort of ambivalent, troubled acknowledgment/denial of women's autonomy and intellectual achievement as the Greek plays that Winkler refers to or the legends of Amazons, althoughand this is importantit is not until the grotesque end to the story is supplied in the medieval commentary that the denial that the Babylonian Talmud achieves in regard to the other texts considered is consummated in respect to Beruria as well. Davis (1991) astutely notes that in another text of the Gaonic (post-talmudic) period, Beruria is neutralized in another wayby being turned into the ideal Jewish wife and mother (Midrash Mishle 31:10). Her motherhood is never mentioned in the talmudic texts themselves. This provides, then, a less violent and therefore perhaps more insidious mode of eliminating the threat of the daughter who studied Torah. Indeed, this Beruria ends up more like Rachel! Notice that all of this evidence is consistent with the hypothesisand it is only a hypothesisthat a change took place in Jewish gender ideology in the early Middle Ages, a change that resulted in a much more essentialized notion of women as dangerous and threatening.
It is difficult to find any historical context for the daughter who studied Torah, precisely because, as we have seen, the energy expended to suppress even this limited autonomy was great. However, the material discussed by Bernadette Brooten (1982) provides some help. Brooten shows that in approximately a dozen synagogue inscriptions from the talmudic period, women are mentioned as having the title of "Head of the Synagogue." This evidence has traditionally been dismissed by scholars too willing to take at face value the talmudic statements of the forced ignorance of women in Torah. Brooten argues, plausibly in my view, that the evidence should a priori be taken seriously, and if the inscriptions refer to women with the title "Head of the Synagogue," it means that the women performed the task as well, and, moreover, that such a position implied learning (Brooten 1982, 537, esp. 3031).
The relevance of Brooten's work has recently been a subject of discus-
 
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sion. Shaye Cohen, a historian who accepts her reading of the evidence, has nevertheless argued (1980, 2728) that since the inscriptions come from the non-rabbinic communities of Crete, Thrace, Italy, and North Africa, they are not relevant for the history of that form of Judaism that achieved historical hegemonytalmudic Judaism. In contrast, Judith Plaskow contends that precisely the evidence for non-rabbinic forms of ancient Judaism "leads us to question rabbinic authority as the sole arbiter of authentic Judaism"; Plaskow argues that "texts may reflect the tensions within patriarchal culture, seeking to maintain a particular view of the world against social, political or religious change" (Plaskow 1990, 45). I do not intend to enter here into the theological questions involved, but it certainly seems relevant to me to emphasize that the readings done here bring those tensions home, as it were, locating them within the talmudic texts and thus the rabbinic discourse and power structure themselves. They certainly help to answer the questions that Brooten raises: "Could Jewish women actually have been scholars? Could they have had some say about the reading of the bible in the synagogue?" (Brooten 1982, 55).
The geographical irrelevance of the inscriptional data for rabbinic Judaism is disappointing, however, in another respect, as it does not help us evaluate the presented evidence for greater anxiety about learned women in the rabbinic community of Babylonia than Palestine. Does this represent more or less Torah-study by Babylonian women than their Palestinian sisters? But there is, perhaps, one piece of tantalizing evidence for the first possibility (i.e., that women studied
more
in Babylonia). In the very talmudic text that interprets the Mishna in Sota by claiming that the study of Torah does not give a woman any merit, the conclusion is that a woman's merit comes from "her taking her sons to study Torah and Mishna." But this passage could, as well, be translated "from
teaching
her sons Torah and Mishna"in fact, this is the literal, grammatical reading of the phrase. In order to teach, they obviously must have learned.
23
This would strongly suggest that the Babylonians' energetic denial of any merit for women in the study of Torah and, indeed, the erasure in the Babylonian Talmud of the Palestinian remarks on women studying are more a "wishful" prescriptive determination than a reflection of actual social conditions. We could then interpret the evident threat of the texts that
23. That is, we have here causative forms of the verbs for "reading Bible" and "studying Mishna." This significant point was made to me by Milan Sprecher.
 
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denote women studying as owing to the fact that women did study in that culture and it is this which explains the greater anxiety of the Babylonian Rabbis. In either case, the suggestion remains valid that the increasing ambivalence about women studying Torah, as reflected both in halakhic proscriptions and in the changes in the traditions about Beruria, provides a parallel for the introduction of gynecophobic expressions into rabbinic Judaism in the same period, which I have discussed in Chapter 3 above.
Within a literary, cultural tradition, there are always forces contending for hegemony. This is at least as true in the heterogeneous texts of the Talmuds produced over hundreds of years and in two separated geographical areas as it is in Shakespeare, where also cultural studies finds both patriarchal hegemony and forces contending against it. The Babylonian tradition with Rashi as its definitive interpreter achieved hegemony in medieval and post-medieval Jewish culture. Within the ancient Jewish texts, however, there is also vivid dissent from the exclusion of women from the study of Torah. The texts we have read here precisely in the differing ways that they suppress this dissent provide symptoms of a cultural difference between Palestine and Babylonia, suggesting that while in Babylonia (at any rate, late in the rabbinic period) it was unthinkable and perhaps terrifying that a woman might study Torah, in Palestine it was merely uncustomary and noteworthy.
24
I would claim much more than Brown for the possibilities of learning cultural history from the talmudic texts. We must very carefully tease out from these texts the different strands of discourse and counter-discourse which they preserve and suppress and sometimes preserve
by
suppressingcomplicating our reading of ancient ideology and not simplifying it.
Just as in the case of Rachel discussed in the last chapter, Beruria remains a paradigm for traditional Jewish women until this day. As evidence for the effectiveness of the story of Beruria in forming practice, I need only remark that as recently as in our century, her (Palestinian) story has been cited as a precedent for the empowering of women to study Torah and that argument rejected by other rabbis who cited the legend of her death as counter-precedent (Waldenberg ad loc). The story of Beruria
24. I am not forgetting, of course, R. Eliezer's misogyny, which is also Palestinian, of course. It is not my intention to reify either of these cultures into one monolithic position, and certainly not to claim that the Palestinian culture was anything like egalitarian, but only to surmise that dissent on this issue was more tolerated there than in the other culture.
 
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