Tag Archives: Rabbinic Literature

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Rabbis thinking of the Gendering of the Body

Rabbinic legal thinking, which provides much of the structural framework of subsequent Jewish cultures, aims first and foremost at instituting a rather pronounced dual gender grid, imposed on the social organization of Jewish society as the rabbis envisioned it. Most of the individual laws of rabbinic halakhah apply to either men or women. Differently put, in rabbinic legal thinking it is almost always important whether the halakhic agent is a man or a woman.
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Representations of the body are an important means for grounding gender, and for justifying the distribution of legal privileges and disadvantages. As theorists of gender have come to recognize, representations of the body often serve the aim of naturalizing and therefore legitimizing legal privilege. Hence, so the theory goes, almost everyone may agree now that gender differences are cultural constructs. Gender is variable, and gender differences are scripted differently in different social and cultural contexts. But the fact that gender differences exist to begin with is traditionally considered to be based in biological fact. Nature – or biology – has made bodies different, male and female, and different cultures only inscribe this reality with their specific ways of differentiating between genders. In the rabbinic case, this translates, for instance, into the prohibition of cross-dressing, inherited from biblical law (Deuteronomy 22:5), in order to uphold the clear distinction between the sexes. Or it famously translates into the general positioning of men as always “obligated” by Jewish law, while women are only sometimes obligated and mostly “exempt” (M. Kiddushin 1:7), a legal rhetoric that already early feminists have recognized as a way of privileging the male position in Jewish law.

Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, “Regulating the Human Body: Rabbinic Legal Discourse and the Making of Jewish Gender,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, eds. Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Martin S. Jaffee (Cambridge & New York City: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 271.

“…the Mishnah should still remain an important source for the legal, social and intellectual history of the first two centuries of Roman Palestine”

In light of the creative dimension of the Mishnah’s redaction and a critical refusal to accept on faith the reliability of attributions to Sages in the Mishnah, the Mishnah is sometimes excluded from historical studies of first- and second-century Palestine. this is a shame because even Jacob Neusner, the scholar most identified with a highly sceptical approach to attributions, argues that many mishnaic statements with attributions truly cite positions which stem from the generation of their attributed tanna. While Neusner believes that we cannot verify whether a sage actually said or held the position attributed to him (and therefore rabbinic biographies cannot be written), he believes that we can verify if an attribution stems from the generation to which it is attributed. After applying his verification method, Neusner concluded that many an attribution may be dated roughly to the generation of its attributed tanna, a find of great significance for historians. Furthermore, the existence of a great number of mishnaic statements whose early dating cannot be verified (by Neusner’s verification method or by source criticism) or falsified are probably reliably dates as well. Although we cannot test the reliability of the attributions in these materials, I believe that we still dealing with levels of certainty common in the study of ancient history. In short, despite the strong redaction of the Mishnah, the Mishnah should still remain an important source for the legal, social and intellectual history of the first two centuries of Roman Palestine.

Amram Tropper, “The State of Mishnah Studies,” Rabbinic Texts and the History of Late-Roman Palestine, ed. Martin Goodman & Philip Alexander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 103-104.

“today there is a broad consensus that the Mishnah should be viewed as a tightly edited composition”

At times, the redactor preserved his sources as he inherited them, at times, he mildly altered them, and, at times, he significantly shaped them. How to find the precise balance between the conservative and creative dimensions of this editorial process is still unclear, but today there is a broad consensus that the Mishnah should be viewed as a tightly edited composition (see Wald 2007a). Even if the editorial process may have been limited at times to the selection and arrangement of earlier materials, these editorial judgements are of major significance since they reflect the concerns and goals of the Mishnah’s redactor/anthologist. In short, the Mishnah is now viewed not merely as a conduit through which earlier tannaitic literary materials were preserved, but also as composition it its own right.

Amram Tropper, “The State of Mishnah Studies,” Rabbinic Texts and the History of Late-Roman Palestine, ed. Martin Goodman & Philip Alexander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 103.