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| ISBN-13: | 9789655240986 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Urim Publications |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 125 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Dybbuks and Jewish Women in Social History, Mysticism and Folklore
By Rachel Elior
Urim Publications
Copyright © 2014 Rachel EliorAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-965-524-098-6
CHAPTER 1
"Like Sophia and Marcelle and Lizzie"
The woman, says the Law, is in all things inferior to the man. Let her accordingly be submissive, not for her humiliation, but that she may be directed; for the authority has been given by God to the man.
Josephus Flavius, Against Apion 2:24
IN AN INTERVIEW published about eight years ago, Israeli writer Dorit Rabinyan, born in 1972, incisively described the anguish of the women among whom she had grown up: "Like Sophia, Marcelle, and Lizzie, lest they remain in a position of limited possibilities, constrained initiative, and attenuated will."
The question I want to consider is whether a position of limited possibilities, constrained initiative, and attenuated will were the lot of women only in particular communities or whether they were the fate of most women until the second half of the twentieth century. Let me say at the outset that I am inclined toward the latter premise, for the historical record shows that the lot of most women in most places was aptly characterized by the comments of Creon, King of Thebes: "Slaves, bring them inside. The freedom of women must be constrained" (Sophocles, Antigone 578–580). Moreover, it seems to me that Tolstoy's famous remark in the Introduction to Anna Karenina – "All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" – applies to our subject. At all times and in all communities, happy women have resembled one another in that freedom of choice, a life of liberty, freedom of speech, and multiple possibilities were available to them to a greater or lesser degree, such that they were able to live their lives as they wished within the bounds of their communities. On the other hand, those who suffered coercion, rejection, discrimination, inferiority, stigmatization, silence and enslavement were unhappy in all places and at all times. The possibility of choice and a degree of freedom were available to men and women to different degrees in various places by virtue of love of parents, familial brotherhood, marital love, or love of children. The select, fortunate few might also attain a degree of freedom by force of their intellect or through customary practices that enabled the subjugated to free themselves from the oppressive social order. For the most part, however, it was a patriarchal social order in which all institutions, from family to government, were led by men. Women were prevented from raising their voices and participating in any communal arena involving intellect, influence, teaching, justice, law, liberty, or authority.
From time to time, individual women could dare to shape their lives as they chose. These fortunate few benefited from love, wisdom, knowledge, justice, tolerance, cooperation, freedom, or equality within the bounds of happy families. But unfortunate women in all communities suffered lives of coercion and misery, of limited possibilities, constrained initiative, silenced voices and attenuated free will. The men of their families and their communities subjected them to constraints, coercion, discrimination, marginalization, ignorance, silence and rejection; they did so by force of ancient laws, ancestral customs, changing rules, governmental decrees, and powerful myths that traced the lowly state of women to the beginning of time. The regnant patriarchal worldview regarding male-female power relationships is concisely summed up in the words of Josephus Flavius, the first-century C.E. Jewish historian. Josephus, commander of the Jewish fortress of Yodfat (Jotapata) during the war against the Romans, betrayed his command and went over to the Roman side, later living in Rome under the shelter of the imperial family and writing there in an effort to explain the Torah and the Jewish point of view to the Gentiles. The worldview he describes grounds its explicit authority and implicit utility in a divine source that cannot be disputed and that precludes its implicit human purposes:
The woman, says the Law, is in all things inferior to the man. Let her accordingly be submissive, not for her humiliation, but that she may be directed; for the authority has been given by God to the man.
Josephus's contemporary, the Jewish Pharisee Saul of Tarsus – later known as Paul – developed this position further. The New Testament includes his statement reflecting the widespread viewpoint in the Jewish world of his day, which connected mythological stories with concrete punishments of exclusion and silencing: "Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty."
Until the twentieth century, all Jewish communities lived, to one degree or another, under the patriarchal order reflected in the words of Josephus Flavius and Saul of Tarsus. Men enjoyed exclusive authority over knowledge, government, public discourse, and law and had the exclusive power to shape the public arena, for they were regarded by their very nature as pure beings able to draw near to holiness and learning and to become scholars. Women, meanwhile, occupied a secondary position – socially inferior, denied a public voice, excluded from the circle of scholars, maintained in ignorance, and legally discriminated against – for they were regarded as periodically impure by reason of their menstrual cycles, which excluded them from holiness and study. Women, like men, internalized the array of beliefs and opinions that portrayed women as inferior, impure, sinful, guilty and punished, ignorant, and subjugated to their fathers and their husbands – a situation going back to the time the spokesmen for the patriarchal order linked a mythological sin (Eve's dealings with the snake) to concrete punishments ("and he shall rule over thee"; Gen. 3:16) that gave rise to the conventional social order and the power relationships between rulers and ruled. Moreover, the overseers of these arrangements intimidated women through a system that would brand anyone who dissented from the patriarchal order, or even criticized it, as a rebel, a whore, a harlot, a traitor, or a deviant. In this way, there emerged a situation in which women (impure, silent, and ignorant by reason of being removed from sanctity and knowledge) were subservient to men (pure and learned, near to holiness and study, publicly vocal) in many areas, both external and internal. They were denied access to many sorts of knowledge, their entry into the study hall was forbidden, their entry into the synagogue was limited, and they were required to maintain complete silence in the public domain. They were entirely dependent on those who possessed knowledge and wealth, and their fathers and husbands exercised nearly absolute dominion over them. A woman was under her father's authority until she married, at which time she passed to the dominion of the husband who had acquired her from her father ("A woman is acquired in [any of] three ways" [Mishnah Kiddushin 1:1]). Women at a very early age – girls, really – were given in marriages arranged by their families and were denied economic independence or sovereign status. They were unable to approach the circles of study, sanctity, and authority; and they were destined primarily to marry young, serve their husbands, fulfill all their needs, and bear them children.
Did women in certain communities necessarily suffer more than those in other communities? Were coerced marriages, or marriages arranged by parents for a girl of twelve, more difficult for a girl in Yemen than for one in Frankfurt? Was bearing children at age thirteen or fourteen easier for a girl in Frankfurt than for one in Aden? Did their ignorance distress women in Casablanca and in Venice to differing degrees? Did women in Vilna, Djerba, and Miedzyboz, in Dar'a and Sana'a have the same yearning to study? Did rape victims in Constantinople or Rabat suffer more than those in Moscow or Lodz? Were poverty and economic dependency more difficult for women in Zhitomir and Cracow than for those in Cairo and Baghdad? It appears that most women in all Jewish communities were entirely dependent economically on their husbands. That dependence was the consequence of the inheritance and property laws articulated in Scripture and halakhah (under which women did not share with their brothers in their fathers' estates), of the marriage laws detailed in those sources, and of the widespread norm and expectation that men would be scholars and women would support them in realizing that goal, which stood at the pinnacle of the community's value system. Scholarship, property ownership, and authoritative opinions were limited to men. Women acquiesced willy-nilly in the limitations imposed by the patriarchal order, given their ignorance, subservience, dependence, and downtrodden state, grounded both in halakhah and in the myth of Eve's sin and curse. All of these, together with the biological reality that left them as pregnant or nursing for a substantial part of their lives, starting at a very early age, kept them from protesting against these hallowed arrangements. But everywhere there were women who suffered intensely as a result of this corrupt order, with its grounding in sacred traditions and ancient myths; and they sought various ways, explicit and implicit, to free themselves from it.
By the nature of things, every human community operates in different cultural, political, geographical and historical circumstances. These depend on geographic reality and ambient social norms, on prevailing law and hallowed conventions; but the Torah is unique in casting the biological and psychological difference between the sexes as a punishment and in unambiguously declaring the power relationships between the sexes to be a divine curse: "I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail; in pain thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee" (Gen. 3:16). Alongside it, there developed the halakhah, which unequivocally declared the inferiority of women in all Jewish communities when it said, summarily, "A man has precedence over a woman with respect to saving a life" (Mishnah Horayot 3:7), adding "A man may divorce only if he wills it, but a woman may be divorced against her will as a matter of Torah [as distinct from rabbinic] law" (Mishnah Yevamot 1:14). Common adages limited woman's capabilities to narrow areas: "There is no wisdom in women except at the spindle"; "Women's minds are frivolous"; "Do not converse excessively with women." These were connected to the blessing recited by men every morning in all Jewish communities; immediately after praising God for not having made him a slave, a man would praise God for not having made him a woman (Tosefta Berakhot 7:10, 18). All of these left their mark on the shared consciousness of gender-based superiority and inferiority and molded the male-female relationship as one of dominance and subjugation, sovereignty and dependence, enslavement and obedience, freedom to speak and obedient silence. This grim picture, of course, was not unique to rabbinic Judaism and was characteristic as well of the surrounding cultures that exercised considerable influence on how the rabbis and sages lived. Indeed, it would have been surprising had they acted against the contemporary mores of their time on this issue. It should be noted, moreover, that the rabbis expressed respect for obedient and diligent women within their families as daughters, sisters, wives and mothers and took various steps to ameliorate the condition of women – for example, by giving them some economic protection in the event of divorce. This favorable attention, however, was always limited to the private domain. Definitive halakhic statements exclude women from the seats of authority and judicial institutions ("A woman neither judges nor testifies" [Yerushalmi Yoma 6:1, 43b]); exclude them from the public domain generally ("A woman's voice is nakedness" [Kiddushin 70a]); consign women to ignorance forever throughout the Jewish world ("One who teaches his daughter Torah is as if he were teaching her lewdness" [Mishnah Sotah 3:4; Sotah 20a]); and preclude forever the establishment of institutions for the education of women ("Let words of Torah be burned rather than be given over to women" [Yerushalmi Sotah 3:4]). All of these bolstered the patriarchal order, with its power relationships between the intelligentsia and the ignorant, enslavers and enslaved, masters and servants – an order summed up briefly by R. David Abudarham (1340): "A woman is subservient to her husband, to meet his needs"). The sages detailed the sorts of labor a woman was obligated to perform in order to meet her husband's needs: "These are the duties a wife must perform for her husband: grinding [flour] and baking [bread], washing clothes and cooking food, nursing her child, making his bed, and working in wool. [If she brings him servants, she may avoid some or all of these tasks, depending on the number of servants, but] Rabbi Eliezer said, 'Even if she brings him a hundred servants he should compel her to work in wool, for idleness leads to immorality'" (Mishnah Ketubbot 5:5). In the twelfth century, Maimonides sharply explained what that meant: "Any woman who declines to perform any of the labors that she is obligated to do is compelled to do so, even with the rod" (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Ishut 21:1). He added that "Her handiwork is her husband's ... and she must serve him" (21:4). Even earlier, the Talmud anchored the relationship between the sexes in an ancient myth for the benefit of readers of Scripture who failed to pay attention to the verse "And he shall rule over you": "Was it not to Adam's gain that he was deprived of a rib and a handmaid presented to him in its stead to serve him?" (Sanhedrin 39b). That incisive statement is connected to the striking but infrequently noted fact that the words for "servant" "maidservant" and "family" are connected in various languages: in Hebrew, they are, respectively, shifhah (specifically, a maidservant) and mishpahah; the English "family" is derived from the Latin famulus, servant or slave, and is related to the master's cadre of servants. The rabbinic Hebrew term for sexual relations is tashmish, associated with a utensil that may be put to use (lehishtamesh) and with providing service (leshamesh), or be'ilah, an assertion of "ownership" (ba'alut). That is, the handmaid given to Adam to serve him – Eve, the mother of all humans and archetype of all women, who "is subservient to her husband, to meet his needs" (as Abudarham put it) – is delivered to Adam's sexual dominion and bound to do whatever task he imposes on her. He is the owner and she is the property, as the Mishnah states in the context of describing how various sorts of property are acquired: "A woman is acquired in [any of] three ways – by a document, by money, or by sexual relations" (Kiddushin 1:1). That a woman is her husband's property is suggested as well by Maimonides' words quoted earlier, for the human property's refusal to obey the master authorizes the master to employ force, including flogging, to compel obedience. Jewish law did not act in isolation, and various cultures expressed male-female relationships in terms of acquisition and ownership; subordination and obedience; compulsion, punishment, flogging, and taming. Roman law uses the term sub virga ("under the rod," indicating the master's authority to flog his subordinates to punish or train them) to convey the idea of a woman being subordinate to her husband in the same manner as a slave. The English expression "rule of thumb" in punitive context derives from the idea that the husband may flog his wife with a rod no wider than a thumb – his right to discipline her by flogging was not questioned; the only issue was the maximum width of the rod he was permitted to use. The halakhic responsa literature includes discussions of husbands beating their wives, and Avraham Grossman's studies of violence against women amply document it. Domestic violence today – or, more precisely, the beating by men of women and children – flows directly from this ancient notion of the husband's rights and the wife's duties, a notion that continues to exert influence even when social and legal norms have significantly changed.
The biblical world recognized a range of public roles for women; they acted as poets and prophets (Miriam, Deborah, Huldah); political leaders (Deborah, Jezebel, Athaliah, the Queen of Sheba); or sources of wisdom and sage counsel (Abigail "of good understanding" [1 Sam. 25:3], the wise woman of Tekoa, the Queen of Sheba). In rabbinic times, however, the situation changed.
In the world of the sages, these modes of socialization were closed to women and all sorts of self-realization – other than through marriage and motherhood – were precluded. The lives of women in the Jewish community came to be shaped by the position of the sages, who limited the place of women to home and family and valued them solely as wives to their husbands and mothers to their children, barring them from participation in the circles of holiness and study. Some scholars considered the important effect on the sages' worldview of the legal reforms introduced by the Roman Emperor Augustus in the first century C.E. The reforms aimed to strengthen family life from an androcentric point of view and to encourage and enforce procreation. Other scholars, however, regard the Jewish worldview and androcentric-procreative legislation as an internal socio-cultural development related to the theological and legal disputes between the School of Hillel, which stressed procreation, and the School of Shammai, which adopted a more abstemious and ascetic position. The foregoing quotations from hallowed and influential Jewish sources represent in any event only a very small percentage of the underlying cultural and legal premises that, in extreme cases, transformed women into enslaved dolts, ruled over by husbands who were free to beat them and impose their wills on them while expecting them to be procreative, dependent, ignorant, and obedient. The discriminatory halakhah was uniform throughout all Jewish communities, and its rules applied regardless of geographical location ("all happy families resemble one another"). Its principles, established without exception by men – who possessed exclusive intellectual authority, inasmuch as they were holier by reason of being obligated to observe the commandments – applied equally to all subordinated women and all dominant men. But the suffering it caused took diverse forms ("every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"), and each community had its own mechanisms for expressing the differing rights of men and women in the practical world and enforcing enslavement, discrimination, silence, and exclusion in various areas. In many communities, twelve-year-old girls were married to thirteen-year-old boys, and in some communities, the engaged girls were overfed and fattened to the point of immobility in order to make them pleasing to their husbands or were kept in closed rooms until their wedding. Some communities permitted sexual relations between maidservants and members of the family, and in some communities many women in their despair fled to Christian convents.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dybbuks and Jewish Women in Social History, Mysticism and Folklore by Rachel Elior. Copyright © 2014 Rachel Elior. Excerpted by permission of Urim Publications.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,Note on Translations,
I. "Like Sophia and Marcelle and Lizzie",
II. Speaking Voices, Silencing Worlds, Silenced Voices,
Index,
Notes,
About the Author,