Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (43 page)

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[Babylonian Talmud] holds like R. Eliezer that it is entirely forbidden for women to study Torah and not like Ben-Azzai, it omitted the menstruants from that law and included only the men'' (Waldenberg). It is virtually certain that Waldenberg is justified in his claim, if for no other reason than that the Babylonian version of the text is incoherent and self-contradictory: those who have had intercourse have also had a seminal emission, so the text ends up saying at the same time that they are permitted and forbidden to study Torah.
¹⁵The emendation of the
baraita
, which the Babylonian Talmud undertakes even at the cost of introducing a self-contradiction within it, is an index of how much concern the notion of women (menstruants!) studying Torah caused for the producers of the Talmud.

As we shall see below, it is this very text, the Tosefta, which also cites a woman as an authority in religious law. Menstruants can study Torah in Palestine. Thus we have once more evidence that in Palestine the notion that women might study Torah was not by any means unacceptable. Indeed, the very casualness with which the Tosefta reveals that women study Torah and with which the Palestinian Talmud cites such study (inadvertentlythat is, by the way, as it were) constitutes an index of the acceptability of that notion there. It is a principle learned from my teacher, the late Saul Lieberman, doyen of critical talmudic studies in our century, that the presuppositions of a talmudic statement are a more reliable index to social reality than the manifest content of its statements. In this case, the Tosefta and Palestinian Talmud, by telling us that menstruants and parturients may study Torah, presuppose that women study and provide striking evidence for the plausibility of at least occasional study of Torah for women in that time and place. In the Babylonian Talmud, on the other hand, any voice dissenting from the stricture on the study of Torah for women was simply interpreted (in this case, edited) out of existence. Having proposed this context, we can begin to read the legend of Beruria, the female Torah-sage, as part of a significant cultural practice and historical development.

The Legend of Beruria


If we do entertain the notion that Athenian citizen-wives had at least certain kinds of informal power, we must also be clear that it was


15. Compare Lieberman, Tosefta Ki-fshuta , ad loc.

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socially necessary for men not to acknowledge itto deal with it at most indirectly through myths of Amazons and through their cultural fantasies of rebellious wives in tragedy or comedy.


(Winkler 1989, 7)

Beruriah's learned status has often been used in apologetic arguments that seek to minimize rabbinic misogyny. I assume rabbinic culture to have been fundamentally sexist and even misogynist. The Beruriah texts and their portrayal of women should be understood as a way of nuancing that misogyny; it wasn't monolithic, but variegated. In some eras, it was more severe, in some less. In every age, there were likely to be at least a few dissenters and non-conformists: rabbis who taught their wives and daughters Torah, wives and daughters who naturally wanted to display their knowledge to other women. The Beruriah materials, which span a thousand years, are a discourse on gender whose existence testifies to the possibility of imagining women in unfamiliar ways.


(Davis 1991; emphasis added)

Running through the talmudic and midrashic literature are narratives about a very learned woman, generally called Beruria and often portrayed as the wife of one of the greatest of the tannaitic sages, Rabbi Meir. In this section of my text, I propose to read this narrative complex as just such a "cultural fantasy" as Winkler has describedthat is an acknowledgment/denial of at least some access to Torah-study that women seem to have had. Although we have no way of knowing whether or not such a woman actually existed, the stories about her are certainly significant in relaying some "reality" about the culture of the Talmuds.

The Palestinian text of ritual law, the Tosefta, the very text which had taught us that women may study Torah, actually cites two cases in which a learned woman made a point regarding ritual purity that was accepted and approbated by the Rabbis. The first case involves a woman in the guise of an anonymous daughter of R. Hanina:


An oven . . . which was plastered in purity and became impurefrom whence can it be purified? R. Halafta of Kefar Hananya said, "I asked Shim'on ben Hananyah who asked the son of R. Hananya ben Tradyon, and he said when they move it from its place. But his daughter said when they disassemble its parts. When this was told to R. Yehuda ben Babba, he said, "his daughter said better than his son."


(Tosefta Kelim Baba Qamma 4:17)

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