Cynthia M. Baker. Rebuilding the House of Israel: Architectures of Gender in Jewish Antiquity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. 260 pp.

Abstract

Cynthia Baker's Rebuilding the House of Israel is one of a handful of studies that seek to interpret Jewish culture during late antiquity by setting rabbinic sources and archaeological remains from the Land of Israel in dialogue. Baker is a careful and perceptive reader of both the primary tannaitic sources that she discusses and of the material record. In fact, the body of the book, in which she discusses the domestic context (well titled “The Well-Ordered Bayit: Bodies, Houses and Rabbis in the Ancient Galilee”) and the marketplace (“Men, Women and the Shuk: Cultural Currencies on the Open Market”) is a well-written description and analysis of the preserved evidence. Baker shows, for example, that rabbinic notions of privacy and the placement of windows within extant structures reflect similar interests. More important, she shows the ways that various spaces, both public and private, were used by ancient Jewish women, and how gender issues played out within environments constructed by Jewish men and women in Roman Palestine. The impetus for this study was not ultimately Rabbinic literature or archaeology, however. It is what Baker sees as a misconception in recent scholarship. Baker argues against a position whereby Jewish women in antiquity were starkly limited to the domestic realm, while the public realm (and even elements of the private) were reserved for men.