Rereading The Rabbis: A Woman's Voice

by Judith Hauptman

Fully acknowledging that Judaism, as described in both the Bible and the Talmud, was patriarchal, Judith Hauptman demonstrates that the rabbis of the Talmud made significant changes in key areas of Jewish law in order to benefit women. Reading the texts with feminist sensibilities—recognizing that they were written by men and for men and that they endorse a set of social relations in which men control women—the author shows that patriarchy was not always and everywhere the same. Although the rabbis whose rulings are recorded in the Talmud did not achieve equality for women—or even seek it—they should be credited with giving women higher status and more rights. For example, during the course of several hundred years, they converted marriage from the purchase by a man of a woman from her father into a negotiated relationship between prospective husband and wife. They designated a bride's dowry to be one-tenth of her father's net worth, thereby ending her Torah-mandated disenfranchisement with respect to inheritance. They left the ability to grant a divorce in male hands but gave women the possibility of petitioning the courts to force a divorce. Although some of these developments may have originated in the surrounding Greco-Roman culture, the rabbis freely chose to incorporate them into Jewish law. Rereading the A Woman's Voice also breaks new ground methodologically. Rather than plucking passages from a variety of different rabbinical works and then sewing them together to produce a single, unified rabbinical point of view, Hauptman reads sources in their own literary and legal context and then considers them in relationship to a rich array of associated synchronic and diachronic materials.

Genres: Judaism, Jewish, Religion, Judaica, Feminism

304 pages, Hardcover

First published November 21, 1997

Reviews

[Steve Gross · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author's thesis is that the Rabbis generally tried to ameliorate the legal status of Jewish women from the Biblical period. I'm not 100% convinced of all her claims but a brilliant marshalling of sources nonetheless. Well worth reading.

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book explains how rabbinic tradition gradually moved towards a more pro-woman posture in several ways. For example:

*The Torah requires that a man who seduces a girl pay a "bride price" to the girl's father. The Talmud expanded this concept to require a ketubah (a payment to a wife herself upon the husband's death or divorce).
*The Torah is a bit fuzzy on the distinction between rape and seduction, instituting a uniform penalty for both; the rabbis added additional fines for rape.
*The Torah states that when a man dies, his property passes to his sons if there are any. The Mishnah makes it clear that this rule is not meant to exclude dowries (payments by a father to his daughter upon marriage) or lifetime gifts to daughters.
The author is a Conservative rabbi, and this book implicitly supports the ideology of Conservative Judaism: that just as the rabbis of 1500 years ago made Jewish law more egalitarian, today's rabbis can do the same.

[Marjorie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not too hard a critique of the sages of the Talmud, but she makes it clear that the main reason for keeping women out of the "religious loop" was due both to women's social position (under men) and to the fragile ego of men. Women's so-called "light headedness" etc. had nothing to do with it. For instance, women can serve as witnesses and testify in court when the other party is a woman but NOT when the other party is a man. So she has to find a male to do it for her. Good grief!