Some decades back, when the second phase of the Modern Midrash movement was gathering steam and I was but a young pup, things were getting heady. Aviva Zornberg had just came out with her incredibly dense midrashic readings on the book of Genesis, was featured (for the first time) on PBS, and I have vague recollections of Shabbat afternoon debates about the implications of this new trend - though again, I was just a pup, and an imaginative one at that. The movement has morphed and realigned itself, and at the same time split off into further movements. Still, it retains its anti-nomian roots and its strong connections with the feminism movement. Menachem Mendel's post about a recent collection of women's midrash called דרשוני brought a lot of these memories flooding back. On a personal level, it's interesting to reflect back on my reaction to the movement circa a decade ago (which, if we want to be charitable, could be described as harshly dismissive skepticism) and compare it with where I am now - a combination of bemused, excited, interested, invigorated, yet still skeptical.
Recent comments reminded me of a parallel movement to claim that certain classical (and biblical!) Jewish writings actually stem from women. These include Pseudo-Philo and parts of the Book of Judges. On the whole, I must say that I am not terribly convinced by the arguments, not because I don't want womens' writings from antiquity, rather because the politics of literacy and the transmission of knowledge through writing were such that it would be highly unlikely for women's writings to have been able to gain wide enough distribution to survive the long process of transmission necessary to reach us today. At the same time, forms of literature that developed orally could have been "composed" (whatever that means in the early stages of oral composition) via the input of women, and this might include certain works and parts of midrash.
In addition, said scholars working on the book of Judges (and other books as well) have suggested that what is more important for gender studies is the characteristics of the work as feminine verses masculine, assigning "F" to a feminine work, and "M" to a masculine one. According to this argument, it does not matter whether or not the work or passage was authored by someone who is chromosomally female or male as much as it reflects certain feminine or masculine characteristics. Here, I must say, the argument is rather troubling. The fact is that being male or female lead(s) to certain experiences, particularly in a system like Judaism or Israelite religion. It does matter which gender wrote a work, particularly if we're interested in recovering the experience of people who were (physiologically) female. Assigning letters to books that display certain characteristics misses the point. As difficult and maybe impossible as the recovery of women's perspectives is from the rabbinic corpus, in my opinion the search must go on. Still, if we were to play with the criteria, if only for amusement, which books and passages do you think would be assigned an M and which and F? After recently making my way through Eicha Rabbah I would have to say, following Hasan-Rokem's lead, that the feminine voice is uniquely preserved in this collection - if perhaps stimulated by the subject material.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
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2 comments:
You make a very good point, but isolating those texts that portray masculine and feminine characteristics is really the only way of going about establishing actual authorship. The whole process is slightly suspect, but attention (in New Testament circles) has been drawn to Luke-Acts for precisely that reason and, in the realm of the Hebrew Bible, to Ruth and Song of Songs.
Unless I am mistaken, the supposition that Judges may have had a female author derived from the fact that the book appears to be mocking men - rather than from the overriding presence of feminine motifs. I think that there is a stronger claim to be made for Ruth and for Songs, but even there one must be careful.
Still, I also think one should bear in mind that women were not necessarily as excluded from the domain of scribal activity as they later came to be, and so the idea is not as automatically far-fetched as one might suppose.
Thanks for your comments.
"Unless I am mistaken, the supposition that Judges may have had a female author derived from the fact that the book appears to be mocking men - rather than from the overriding presence of feminine motifs. I think that there is a stronger claim to be made for Ruth and for Songs, but even there one must be careful."
Correct. I think that argument is much better than saying something even vaguer, like the poetic flavor of song of Songs, or the perspective of Ruth is feminine.
"Still, I also think one should bear in mind that women were not necessarily as excluded from the domain of scribal activity as they later came to be, and so the idea is not as automatically far-fetched as one might suppose."
I don't know exactly what you mean by earlier and later here. When it comes to classical texts like Pseudo-Philo, I would be very surprised that a literate woman could have physically written it. Biblical books though are less clear. You're right - when even have the four thousand ear old poetry of a woman!
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