"I noticed that you included a bunch of gender scholarship in your secondary reading list, even though it's not related to your main interests. Can you explain why?"
I wasn't expecting this question from one of my PhD comprehensive examiners. But once it was asked, it got me thinking.
It's true that my main interests as a researcher of Talmud and rabbinic literature is the close reading and interpretation of texts, and the ways traditions change over time as they are transmitted and retold. Approaching these texts through the lens of "gender" is not a core part of this approach. In fact, it is not something I'm particularly good at.
As a straight Jewish man who understands his role in life to have children and live according to the Torah, I am acutely aware of my immense privilege. In many ways, the Talmud—and all of Jewish tradition—was written for me, transmitted and handed over to me. It is all too easy for me to gloss over problematic passages and not to notice the ways in which the material of my studies are made to be relevant to me specifically, a process which excludes so many of my friends and colleagues.
All of this is to say: why, when I was selecting the secondary readings for my comprehensive exam, did I put these works of gender analysis on the list?
I think it boils down to one particular experience with one particular book. In her discussion of the system of purity and impurity in the Mishnah (Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature), Prof Mira Balberg writes about the construction of gender that goes along with it. She describes the discipline of staying away from food, people and objects that are "impure" as central to the Mishnah's definition of what it means to be a "man," namely: self-discipline. Men are intentional beings who sometimes are overtaken by passion or desire. The way a man displays his masculinity is by mastering these feelings that attempt to control his action from without, as it were.
In contrast, the way the Mishnah characterises women and femininity is a lack of discipline and control, over their minds and bodies. Rather than men, who are fundamentally rational people who sometimes act irrationally, to be a woman according to the Mishnah is to be essentially controlled by passions and desires. These form the core of femininity. They are not the forces that take over a man from the outside; instead these are forces from within that reveal a woman's true nature.
A lot could be said about the historical background that gave rise to such a picture of these two genders. (In particular, the Mishnah’s misogyny is more or less guided by two factors—and this is my explanation, not Balberg’s: (i) part of what cultivates discipline is education; in the Mishnah's world, men are educated and women are not. (ii) The Mishnah, by all accounts, was produced by men who had little interest in asking women about their inner experience, so they ascribed a more sympathetic and complex inner life to men than to women.)
But I do not come to excuse or defend, and this is not the point. The point is that Balberg's description of mishnaic gender made me feel deeply uncomfortable. To see such hurtful stereotypes—with clear echoes to misogyny today—in a sacred text gave me my initial reaction: Balberg must be wrong.
But the more I sat with the mishnaic evidence, Balberg's words and my own discomfort, the more I realised that I was feeling uncomfortable because I thought she was right.
This feeling—a fragment of what many of my non-straight, non-male friends and colleagues deal with much more frequently than I do—was important. And this, I realised, was why I added gender scholarship to my comprehensive reading list, even though it was tangential to my main interests. It mattered to me to be exposed to the parts of my tradition which were not written for me and that held hurtful assumptions which I deemed morally wrong. This was not for me—unlike for many others—a normal part of my study and research experience in rabbinic literature. I wanted to make sure that it was at least present and integrated into my thinking as I attempted to get a handle on the full breadth of modern rabbinic scholarship to pass my exam.
I would recommend this approach for everyone, even more so for the Talmud's original intended audience: straight, male, Jewish householders. It is important to be challenged by the things you hold most dear, in order to be aware of its flaws as well as its strengths and come out with a more nuanced and deeper—not necessarily better—relationship with it.
To this end, here is the gender scholarship I included in my reading list. It is not intended to be exhaustive or even representative, only books or articles I read that had an impact (and I felt I knew well enough to be examined on). I hope it can serve as a starting point.
- Balberg, Mira. Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.
- Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva. “Regulating the Human Body: Rabbinic Legal Discourse and the Making of Jewish Gender,” in Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, pp. 270-294. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Ilan, Tal. Jewish Women in Greco Roman Palestine. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1995.
- Ilan, Tal. “‘Stolen Water is Sweet’: Women and their Stories between Bavli and Yerushalmi,” in Peter Schäfer (ed.), The Talmud Yerushalmi in Graeco-Roman Culture Vol. III, pp. 185-224. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003.
- Lehman, Marjorie. “The Gendered Rhetoric of Sukkah Observance.” The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 96, No. 3 (Summer, 2006), pp. 309-335.
- Satlow, Michael. “Rabbinic views on marriage, sexuality, and the family,” in Steven Katz (ed.), Cambridge History of Judaism, Vol. 4: The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period, pp. 612-626. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- Secunda, Shai. The Talmud’s Red Fence: Menstrual Impurity and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and its Sasanian Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.