Middle Eastern Jewish Women and Religion

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is Middle Eastern (ME) Jewish women’s engagement with their religion and ritual life from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. Like their European Jewish counterparts, the historical relationship between ME Jewish women and their faith has been deeply influenced by the structures of patriarchal religion, both internally within their own Jewish communities and the patriarchal religious authority of their surrounding majority cultures. The first part provides an overview of ME Jewish women’s engagement with their faith inside the context of religious patriarchy, both Jewish and Islamic, during the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. As the ethnographic literature attests, ME as well as European Jewish women of the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries found spiritual fulfillment primarily outside of the synagogue: through their participation in life cycle rituals such as births, weddings, and deaths, and in the observance of Jewish laws related to the home, such as kosher laws and sabbath preparations. The second part examines the influences of Zionism and Western feminist currents on ME Jewish women’s religious lives from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. Today, ME Jewish women are part of a growing movement of religious Jewish feminism, where women are fighting for participation in ritual, reclaiming traditional texts, and reinterpreting halacha (Jewish law).