is, after all, the very paradigm case of a daughter learned in Torah. If R. Eliezer's dictum is true, in the way that the Babylonian Talmud understood itnamely that there is an intrinsic connection between the woman studying Torah and sexual immoralitythen Beruria's fall into license is a structural necessity. Any other denouement to her biography would constitute a refutation of R. Eliezer. Another way of putting this would be to say that the same cultural forces in the Babylonian rabbinic community that did not even permit Ben-Azzai's voice to be retained as minority opinion could not tolerate the exceptional case of even one woman learned in the Torah. The horror of her end, the extraordinary lengths to which the text goes, even defaming one of its greatest heroes to achieve its purpose, is once again a symptom of the extraordinary threat that the learned woman represented to the
Babylonian
(and later European) rabbinic culture, a power that threatened to upset the whole apple cart of gender relations and social organization and that had to be suppressed, therefore, by extraordinary means. The best context for this legend is, in my reading, the discussion of ritual law that we have read above, and the differential between the Palestinian and Babylonian texts is reproduced in the differential of the readings of Beruria in these two traditionsin both she is atypical, but only in one does she become a scandal.
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In the rest of this section, I wish to deepen and extend this reading of
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(footnote continued from the previous page)
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 | | prepared to defame both husband and wife in order to preserve the force of R. Eliezer's opinion, is much more plausible. Cynthia Ozick has gotten much closer to this reading in her suggestion that, "To punish her for her impudence, a rabbinic storyteller, bent on mischief toward intellectual women, reinvented Beruriah as a seductress. She comes down to us, then, twice notorious: first as a kind of bluestocking, again as a licentious woman. There is no doubt that we are meant to see a connection between the two" (Ozick 1979, 44). I wonder, however, why Ozick makes it worse and turns Beruria into the seducer, rather than the seduced, indeed the seduced after much resistance. See also Schwarzbaum (1983, 6970), who argues that the story is a realization of an international folk topos of the best of women seduced. This element is surely present in the story, but by no means enough to explain it entirely and certainly not enough to account for its presence here. See Boyarin 1990a. None of the interpreters that I have seen, except Adler, has pointed out the parallels between the stories of the two sisters (see below), but she reads them differently: "It is no coincidence that Rashi juxtaposes his story to the story of Meir's adventure in Rome. The two stories share several motifs. In both, Meir conducts a chastity test. In both, female sexuality brings shame and causes Meir to leave home. In both, women are assumed to be solely responsible for sexual behavior, even when pressured, deceived, or entrapped by men" (1988, 103). I believe that my analysis of the
contrastive
structure between the two tales, and the way that the earlier one clones itself in mirror image, as it were, to produce the later one only strengthens the points that Adler wishes to make about how the story represents women.
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