Integrating Gender Studies into Jewish Studies

Abstract

92 SHOFAR INTEGRATING GENDER STUDIES INTO JEWISH STUDIES1 Judith R. Baskin Judith R. Baskin is the Chair of the Department of Judaic Studies at the State University of New York at Albany, and the editor of Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, a collection of twelve essays on Jewish women's lives in different epochs (Wayne State University Press, 1991). She is the author of Pharaoh's Counsellors: Job, Jethro and Balaam in Rabbinic and Patristic Tradition (Chico, CA, 1983), and she has also written on Jewish women in rabbinic tradition , and in the context of medieval civilization. The perception that women's lives and experiences in any particular historical epoch may differ from men's has profoundly affected the ways in which many scholars approach and interpret their subjects of study.2 In fact, introducing gender as a factor in the study of human societies, endeavors, and achievements has revealed a persistent pattern of limiting women's access to public activities and the status they confer, and has highlighted the ways in which women have been excluded from the education and empowerment 1This paper was presented as part of a panel entitled "Towards an Inclusive Curriculum: Gender and Jewish Studies," co-sponsored with the AJS Women's Caucus at the December 1989 meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies in Boston,MA. ~at historical change may affect men and women differently is an important insight. See Joan Kelly, "The Social Relations of the Sexes," reprinted in idem, Women, History and Theory: The Essays ofJoan Kelly (Chicago and London, 1984), p. 3. Volume 9, No.4 Summer 1991 93 which would allow them to function and achieve in the cultural sphere.3 Indeed , gender studies have shown that historical transformations in many eras affect men and women quite differently.4 Moreover, while women have rarely been a part of the events and cultural accomplishments that have been valued and taught in Western intellectual traditions, investigation can sometimes reveal contemporaneous and alternative women's histories and cultures. When women were excluded from "sanctioned" male cultural activities or religious observances, for example, they often created their own rituals and artifacts. In the Jewish realm one can point to such phenomena as women's prayer groups and other activities in the medieval synagogue,S the development of devotional literature intended for women and sometimes written by women,6 and women's needlework or other donations to the synagogue as forms of communal participation? And interestingly, in times of rapid social change 3For discussions of the distinctions between public and private domains, and the realms of nature and culture and how they pertain to women, see Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, "Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview"; and Sherry Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?" both in Women, Culture and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, CA, 1974). For applications of these insights to the Jewish realm, see Judith R. Baskin, "The Separation of Women in Rabbinic Judaism," in Women, Religion and Social Change, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Ellison Banks Findly (Albany, 1985); and Judith Romney Wegner, Chattel or Person? The Status of Women in the Mishnah (New York and Oxford, 1988). 4A classic exploration of this phenomenon is Joan Kelly, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?," reprinted in idem, Women, History and Theory, pp. 19-50. Explorations of the varying effects of historical events on Jewish men and Jewish women include Paula Hyman, "Gender and Jewish History," Tikkun 3:1 (Jan.lFeb. 1988); idem, "Gender and the Immigrant Experience in America," and Marion Kaplan, "Tradition and Transition: Jewish Women in Imperial Germany," both in Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Judith R. Baskin (Detroit, 1991). 5See Judith R. Baskin, "Jewish Women in the Middle Ages," in Baskin, Jewish Women; and Emily Taitz, '"Kol Ishah-The Voice of Woman: Where Was It Heard in Medieval Europe," Conservative Judaism 38 (1986), pp. 43-61. 6See Chava Weissler, "The Traditional Piety of Ashkenazic Women," in Jewish Spirituality: From the Sixteenth Century to the Present, ed. Arthur Green (New York, 1987); idem, "Prayers in Yiddish and the Religious World of Ashkenazic Women," and Ellen Umansky, "Spiritual Expressions: Jewish Women's Religious Lives...