Made-up tales, possibly true stories, and why any of that matters.

Finding out about women: “How it actually went down.”

The BIAJS conference in July this year had gender as its theme, so I presented a paper on the supposed great scholar Beruria and the inevitably doomed (by my reckoning) attempts to fashion her as a prototype feminist heroine. This is a short and less academic version. Here’s an example of the kind of tosh I wanted to critique:

“A lone female voice, Bruria argued passionately with the men of the Talmud and was recognised for her erudite scholarship in all matters of Jewish law.”

Every part of this statement is completely made up. I came across it heading a leaflet I was given in 1994 promoting a new bookshop venture called “Bruria Books” (English spellings of the translated versions of her name vary). You can still find much the same description of her in many online resources. The Beruria legend came up regularly in the 1980s and 1990s in print, and at conferences for feminist groups such as the Half Empty Bookcase and Jewish Feminist Network. I became marginally involved in those by chance, as I played in an all-women klezmer band and we were often asked to perform at events.

I found the lack of serious scholarship or textual analysis when ancient literature was being discussed annoying, as a researcher and teacher. It struck me as wrong to circulate myths and call that education. The Beruria texts were much more obscure and far more interesting than the myths made out, and there had already been fierce debates over using Talmudic texts as straightforward biography. It was puzzling that anyone would rely on a legend to claim historical legitimacy for women in modern times to be allowed to study Talmud. Why ask permission, and base your case on the (possible) example of a woman who (possibly) existed 1800 years ago? Why not just assert women’s rights to read, learn and critique the very texts being used to lay down religious laws affecting them?

“How it actually went down” is a quote from Tal Ilan’s old mentor who commented that Ilan, who went on to become a celebrated historian, had a weird focus on finding things out. Not all historians apparently shared that aim of working out how things really were. Ilan is open minded and doesn’t pursue any specific agenda apart from trying to establish what she can about “how it actually went down”. She is deeply interested in methodology and gives clear explanations of what is and isn’t OK about interpreting evidence. Her style is highly readable and she’s often very funny. It was a great relief to read her work after so much previous twaddle.

How not to read the ancient sources

Jacob Neusner repeatedly made the forceful point that we can’t take everything in an ancient text at face value. The Talmud is neither history nor biography. If it says person X made a particular statement, that’s not proof X said it, or even that X existed or the words were spoken at all. Without more evidence, all we can be sure about is roughly when words were written down in the texts that survive. I’d read a few of Neusner’s works when I first began looking into the Beruria stories. He’s described as having published more books than anyone ever but that really seems to have meant he published all his lectures, translations and teaching notes, helped by having set up his own publishing imprint. He was ridiculed for that output, often attacked for his uncompromising views by other scholars of Talmud and did his share of attacking back. There are vicious exchanges via footnotes in academic publications between him and his adversaries. Many of his critics refused to take him seriously or claimed he was wrong about everything. But Neusner changed the culture. He had a huge long-lasting influence, arguing for more objective study of ancient rabbinic texts to take place in mainstream university departments of history or religious studies and not in exclusive (and exclusively male) seminaries. While feuding with male scholars, he supported female students in the USA to gain doctorates and become experts on rabbinic literature for the first time. Judith Romney Wegner (author of Chattel or Person?), Judith Hauptman and Judith Baskin all credited his influence and support before they went on to publish their own books on women in the Talmud and Mishna.

But the creators and circulators of Beruria myths did everything Neusner said was not the right way to read these ancient texts. They selected extracts found in separate works written many hundreds of years apart in different lands, disregarded their contexts, took them at face value regardless of how unrealistic and obviously fictional the stories were, added them together to produce a biography and embellished it even further with their own imaginings. And there you have it: a great scholar, a tragic martyr, an embittered early feminist or whatever role model you want. For more credibility, add references. The source cited most often and without noticing the irony was David Goodblatt’s article The Beruriah Traditions published in 1975, which certainly sounds authoritative and was particularly useful for his list of relevant extracts from the Babylonian Talmud, the Tosefta and Rashi. Unfortunately Goodblatt, who was taught by Neusner and followed his analytic methods, had concluded that most of the texts were literary fabrications and there was hardly any evidence at all for a historical woman of that name. That didn’t trouble many authors who quoted the article, as it seems unlikely they read much of it.

The evidence, and how to follow it

Goodblatt was handy to cite because he quoted the original source texts that either mentioned Beruria by name or mentioned a woman who might have been her. In the second case, that was because an unnamed woman was described as the wife of Rabbi Meir and/or the daughter of Rabbi Hananyah ben Teradyon, while another text suggests Beruria had those relationships. But Goodblatt points out several inconvenient facts. There’s no certainty that the unnamed women were all the same person. Most of the texts are in Aramaic and date from Babylon around 500 CE or later, and one even dates from medieval France. The earliest texts are from Roman Palestine, in Hebrew, dated to around 200-250 CE , and Beruria is only named in one of them. Even that reference is to events from perhaps a century beforehand. He concluded that the later sources retrospectively constructed family relationships and re-used the name Beruria when telling particular types of stories. He saw virtually no evidence to support the “tradition” of a famous learned woman but conceded that a female scholar might have existed in Babylonian times. But if you ignored all that and used Goodblatt’s work as a summary of evidence, citing its impressive title, most readers wouldn’t enquire further. It would look like you’d done solid work. Readers might well assume that if you refer to a source, that means you’ve looked it up and understood it. That’s not always a correct assumption. (Ilan is brisker than that about such citations. She doesn’t go in for polite understatement.)

Here’s a version of Goodblatt’s table of textual sources, with my added notes. He saw strong evidence for literary constructions when there were obvious parallels with other literary forms such as folktales or moral fables, and with very similar stories using different characters.

TEXT	SOURCE	LANGUAGE	DATE	NOTES
B says to do something with a “klaustra”, regarding impurity	Tosefta	Hebrew	250?	Goodblatt and Ilan: credible source. But no one knows quite what it means
B quotes Psalms to husband	Babylonian Talmud	Babylonian Aramaic	500?	Goodblatt and Ilan: obvious literary construction
B quotes Isaiah to a Sadducee	Babylonian Talmud	Babylonian Aramaic	500?	Goodblatt and Ilan: obvious literary construction
B meets R. Yose, quotes rule on speaking to women	Babylonian Talmud	Babylonian Aramaic	500?	Obvious fiction but such a great story people want this one to be true
B quotes Samuel to a disciple	Babylonian Talmud	Babylonian Aramaic	500?	Goodblatt and Ilan: obvious literary construction
B learned 300 traditions in a day	Babylonian Talmud	Babylonian Aramaic	500?	Goodblatt and Ilan: obvious fiction. (What does “learned” mean here anyway?)
B asks husband to rescue her sister forced into a Roman brothel	Babylonian Talmud	Babylonian Aramaic	500?	Goodblatt and Ilan: obvious literary construction.
Unsavoury story of B’s seduction and suicide	Rashi, medieval French commentator	Hebrew	1070?	Goodblatt and Ilan: invented by Rashi in the 11th century or by an earlier source

Tal Ilan mostly approved of Goodblatt’s methodology, because he paid attention to the earliest attested date of a source, its language, whether there was an obvious literary model or parallel or no likelihood a story could be factual. But she noted sharply that his conclusion didn’t follow, as he ended up proposing that such a female scholar may have existed in rabbinic times in Babylon. His evidence and analysis don’t point that way as the most credible source referring to Beruria is the earliest one, written closest in time and place to when and where she lived if there was a real woman of that name in Roman Palestine. Ilan is right. I was curious both about that and Goodblatt’s reasons for examining the Beruria traditions in the first place. What got him interested?

There’s a clue in a footnote on his first page, even though he says nothing more about it. A couple of years beforehand, Judith Hauptman’s article “Women in the Talmud” was published in a special edition of the journal Response, following a first Jewish women’s conference held in New York in 1973. Hauptman was one of a pioneering group of female scholars fifty years ago beginning serious critical study of ancient texts and even using them to challenge orthodox opinion and rulings – for instance, about whether women were allowed to study Talmud at all.  Goodblatt obviously knew of Hauptman’s article as it got a footnote. He gave a demonstration in how to evaluate the source texts in a move you could regard as helpful or less charitably as laying down an authoritative line to those feminist upstarts. But he held back from entirely rubbishing the idea of a female scholar in rabbinic times, dangling the possibility that there could have been such an anomaly.

Tal Ilan tells it like it is

Ilan has no patience with such speculations. Where others fill the space with guesswork and made-up legends, she works out how to develop a reasoned, evidence-based process for using ancient texts as historical sources. She lays down two firm starting points if we’re interested in knowing about women’s lives in the past. First, texts such as the Talmud were composed by and for men, who had little interest in representing women or including their views on anything, despite discussing rules applying to them. There is undoubtedly misogynist content in those texts, just as there is in literature from other cultures written in the same eras. Ilan is not interested either in pretending there isn’t, or in exaggerating it. She doesn’t condemn or exonerate. Those are just general background facts about most ancient texts from most cultures. But second, if we want to know about the lives of women then, we need to accept that by far the most extensive and valuable sources are texts, simply because there isn’t much archaeological data. So the written sources, problematic though they are, shouldn’t be overlooked. And that means how we deal with and interpret them – the methodology – matters if we wish to learn anything as definite as it ever gets, rather than make stuff up to suit ourselves. She concludes that Neusner, for all the value in his support and example of methods, didn’t help feminist scholars make much progress researching women when he maintained rabbinic texts should be treated as literature and couldn’t be used at all as historical evidence.

Ilan is great at criticising work that doesn’t justify its conclusions, not only Goodblatt’s for failing to follow through the implications of his own approach. She comments, about another scholar, that there’s nothing to be said about their methodology as they don’t have any. The method she developed herself was subtle, nuanced and did make a few essential assumptions, but never about things we can’t really know. We do know, for certain, that the Talmud authors and earlier writers couldn’t in fact have inhabited an exclusively male world. Women existed, were present, had full lives, and were not less intelligent than men in the past any more than we are now. So their absence from texts is a result of choices made by authors and compilers as well as scribes and subsequent copyists. It’s absurd as well as insulting to think there was merely one single exceptional woman over hundreds of years who was an anomaly, a lone intelligent knowledgeable female with something to say. But the various men of the Talmud, quite obviously, were almost exclusively interested in other males like themselves and not in paying women’s views attention.

Scribes could delete whatever they found unnecessary in a text – a woman’s name, for example. Ilan doesn’t need to imagine an anti-feminist conspiracy to point that out. But some stories common in any culture can only work if there’s a woman included – exchanges between husbands and wives, or tales of sexual temptation for instance. One of Ilan’s assumptions is that when a female character is essential to a story or statement, she’s more likely to be a fictional construction. If storytellers needed to mention a woman they could just invent one. But if there was no essential reason for a woman to be included and one was mentioned anyway and perhaps even named, there must be another basis. Most of the Beruria stories can be explained as simply fulfilling a need for a female character, but that leaves at least one unexplained. On the other hand, if there’s only a brief mention leaving an information gap with nothing spelled out (perhaps because at the time everyone already knew the background story) later authors might guess at or invent the details, complete with misogynist bias. That could account for Rashi’s story five hundred years later purporting to be about Beruria but built merely on a passing reference to an “incident” leading Rabbi Meir to flee. Naturally that was later taken to mean sex and sinfulness were involved.

The stories: bad, witty and mysterious

We can ignore the most obviously fabricated and rather dull homilies in which “Beruria” uses quotations to rebuke snide outsiders or set her husband on a more righteous path. Little can be said about those of any interest. (One story is so ridiculous it’s amazing any commentator would treat it as factual, although some have – both her two infant sons die suddenly and she calmly conceals that from her husband until after the end of Shabbat, but then piously rebukes him for mourning rather than accepting their deaths.) That leaves two other fabricated tales that are intriguing enough to have gained plenty of commentary. The Rashi story claims that Beruria’s husband, the famous Rabbi Meir, instructed one of his own students to seduce his wife in to prove a point she had disputed, that women were naturally more immoral than men. She was duly seduced and then killed herself. Late 20th century scholars such as Daniel Boyarin and Rachel Adler had a lot to say about this nasty little tale without for a second taking it as true. They were interested in why the rabbis would invent it. Adler (The Virgin in the Brothel and Other Anomalies: Character and Context in the Legend of Beruriah, 1988) thought it showed their fear of the possible existence of such a woman as Beruria and was about male anxieties and inability to tolerate the idea of women as equals. Boyarin, crediting an unpublished (so I can’t find it) 1991 paper by postgraduate student Laurie Davis, “Virgins in Brothels: A Different Feminist Reading of Beruriah“, in five of his own publications, thought the rabbis were primarily anxious about their own responses to sexual temptation. At least these scholars tried looking inside the heads of the tale’s authors. The Beruria believers, on the other hand, taking her and all stories connected with her to be real, tried looking inside her head. They could then portray Beruria as a martyr, shockingly betrayed by her own husband and suffering an appalling fate.  Alternatively, they could preserve her integrity and assume the horrible story was a fraud deliberately contrived to besmirch the reputation of a great female scholar.

Yes, it’s all fantasy, but whose? We can imagine the teaching context, with an older rabbi and a younger male student who has little contact with women other than the rabbi’s wife. Maybe it’s a warning. Maybe it’s a feared or fantasised scene. If you think of this story as being shared between an older and younger man, you can see that it nudges uncomfortably transgressive thoughts into the open, in order to slap them down.

The story of Rabbi Yose the Galilean meeting Beruria on the road is the second famous much discussed tale. He asks her for directions. “By which way should I go to Lod?”

 She replies, “Foolish Galilean! Don’t you know one shouldn’t waste words when speaking to a woman? You should have said, Which to Lod?”

Pick how you want to interpret this one. If you’re a Beruria fan you could try looking inside her head as some commentators have done to conclude that she is making an angry, bitter comment about the treatment of women. Beruria as feminist heroine again, but this time not as a martyr. If you are not a feminist and consider her an ultra-respectable sage and genuine role model for religious women, you could decide she was teaching a sophisticated lesson about etiquette and proper conduct as Rabbi Yose should not have accosted her so rudely with his chat-up line. That last version, which I’ve seriously come across, is quite a stretch when you consider that in the original much more succinct Aramaic she gets his four words down to two. It’s got to be a joke, surely, and one that requires a woman speaking to make it work. It made me laugh the first time I read it. I can’t prove it was a joke originally but while we can’t assume the Talmud compilers either did or didn’t have a sense of humour, we can be entirely sure they didn’t witness this meeting and record the conversation.

Ilan has a good interpretation. She takes the context into account, as the whole of the sugya where this story is placed (a sugya is a long thematic Talmudic section) is about language issues including word play. The rabbis tell several stories against themselves about the times a woman or girl outwitted them with a clever speech. It’s significant that Yose is referred to as Galilean, because there’s also discussion about scholars in southern Israel being superior to northerners in Galilee on the grounds of accent and consequently linguistic accuracy and learning. A little light mockery of Rabbi Yose the Galilean fits right into the sugya theme.

I’d add to Ilan’s analysis that sarcastic put-downs don’t bother the rabbis at all when the speakers are girls or women, because that has no effect on their status. They can recognise when women are smart, witty and in the right without any of that disturbing belief in their own superiority. What such inferior people say has no real consequence. It would absolutely matter if one rabbi spoke disrespectfully to another or defeated him in a contest of wits. But in this section, quoting female speakers helps make a point without damaging anyone’s ego.

The third story worth examining is a mystery. It hardly gets discussed either by Beruria fans or other scholars, even though it’s the earliest source to name her and on the face of it, a credible one. It appears in the Tosefta, a compilation roughly contemporary with the Mishna and with similar but less systematic content. In each of those texts debates are highly condensed and much is left for readers to assume. This extract sits within a subsection on metal objects, in the division termed “Purities”, which refers to ritual purity and sanctification. Those ideas don’t have modern equivalents, are not the same as hygiene or cleanliness and are extremely hard to relate to today. The discussions deal with what can make an object ritually impure, which types of objects are or are not susceptible to ritual impurity, and what might be done about that. The language is Hebrew but an unusual word “klaustra” occurs, which seems to be from the Greek, and nobody knows exactly what it means so it is sometimes translated as “hinge” or alternatively as “door bolt”. The question under discussion is whether a “klaustra” is susceptible to ritual impurity. Here’s the Beruria extract, as translated in Sefaria (an online text repository):

Regarding a “klaustra” (door bolt): Rabbi Tarfon declares it impure, but the Sages declare it pure. Beruriah says, “[One may] remove it from this doorway and hang it on the neighboring doorway on Shabbat.” When these words were spoken before Rabbi Joshua, he said, “Beruriah has spoken well (i.e., correctly).”

Even the “on Shabbat” phrase has been translated in other ways owing to the absence of punctuation in the original text, so in some versions Beruria “spoke these words on Shabbat”, and in others the “klaustra” is dragged not simply moved.  It’s not surprising that commentators have largely given up trying to understand this passage, with a couple of brave exceptions. Goodblatt and Boyarin imagine a real woman growing up in a rabbinical household who has absorbed one highly specific piece of ritual knowhow and is able to pronounce on it with authority. They don’t attempt to explain what it means. Beruria fans, on the other hand, assume this is evidence that she was a recognised scholar and is here giving an important ruling. Some then look across to the Mishna, where essentially the exact same discussion of a “klaustra” appears but attributed to Rabbi Joshua and with no mention of Beruria at all. They spot a deliberate move to erase her, probably part of a wider effort to suppress all depictions of an anomalous female sage. But leaving aside that we can’t be sure which of these texts came first, those commentators don’t go on to consider anything else in the Mishna text although it gives us an interesting and rather different clue (translation from Sefaria again):

A door-bolt: Rabbi Joshua says: he may remove it from one door and hang it on another on Shabbat. Rabbi Tarfon says: it is like all other vessels and may be carried about in a courtyard.

The second statement refers to the prohibition on carrying objects on Shabbat, part of the laws about ceasing all work on the day of rest, but why is that mentioned here? There are exceptions to the carrying rule covering both what and where. As Rabbi Tarfon says, vessels can be carried within a courtyard on Shabbat, but not outside it. Here then, we have an excellent clue to what the “klaustra” discussion is about. I don’t think Beruria, assuming she was there, was issuing a ruling as a renowned sage. I think she was reporting an observation. I don’t think a “klaustra” can possibly be a hinge or bolt, which would not ordinarily be removed. But one object associated with doors that is regularly moved and carried around is a key. You can imagine people wanting to lock up a door and carry the key off with them, and those wouldn’t be modern little Yale keys but large iron objects, possibly with a hole at the top so you could hang them from a belt. But on Shabbat you can’t carry one outside with you, so how do you leave your home secure? Maybe you hang it somewhere else safe, still within the courtyard as that’s allowed. That means others might handle it so you can’t guarantee its ritual purity, as impurity – thought of as an invisible essence – can be transmitted by touch. The klaustra’s removal on Shabbat gives a relevant foundation to discussion as to whether it’s potentially susceptible. It isn’t a ruling but a rationale. If this speculative interpretation works, it positions Beruria as an observer of behaviour rather than a high-level sage full of esoteric knowledge.

As a child I walked with my dad on Yom Kippur to Bevis Marks, the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in the City of London. It was a long walk and at the end of a twenty-four hour fast it would have been hard walking back. We didn’t have to, as my dad had previously hidden money for a bus or taxi ride home in a secret cranny in the wall of a building. When you can’t carry keys or money for a day, you must think ahead.

The point of all this

The best reason for bothering with any of this was given by Shari Golberg, a Canadian scholar and activist. She brought together a group of Muslim and Jewish women from differing backgrounds to discuss Aisha and Beruria, emblematic of female wisdom and learning within Islam and Judaism respectively. They also talked about women’s exclusion and inclusion when it came to education, religious laws affecting their lives, and their knowledge or lack of it regarding those laws’ origins. The group discovered they had much in common. Golberg’s thesis, “When Beruriah Met ‘A’isha: Textual Intersections and Interactions Among Jewish and Muslim Women Engaged with Religious Law” is available online. It starts with a brilliant summary of other uses of the Beruria legend, digging into the motivations of writers such as Adler and Hauptman and their interests in developing a less sexist historical account of rabbinic Judaism or a more acceptable theology. Golberg was very alert to the downsides of positioning these two iconic figures as exemplars, anomalous exceptions or role models. She used them as a productive way in to exploring how women in religious communities today learn about traditions and laws, their impact and what women had to say about it.

The reason for bothering which framed the paper I presented at the conference is that feminist history ought to include these early attempts on the part of variously observant Jewish women to challenge restrictions on their lives and education, just as modern Jewish history ought to include those women’s campaigns. I’ve now passed on my archive of documents from the Half Empty Bookcase and Jewish Women’s Network to the library at University College London, which has a Hebrew and Jewish Studies department. They should be available to future researchers to consult to explore the ways – effective or not – women from religious backgrounds have long been challenging traditional restrictions and discriminatory practices.

As a more general conclusion, serious scholarship should mean the critical use of sources. Repeating made-up stories doesn’t qualify and nor does evidence-free speculation, even if backed up with references to articles and original texts that don’t seem to have been read. And even though men tended to ignore and exclude them, intelligent women who know stuff are not anomalies and never were. We now have plenty of great, really existing female scholars so it’s time to ditch the myths.

A brief note on sources: Sefaria (sefaria.com) is a good easily searchable resource for the texts both in their original languages and in translation. Goodblatt’s article was in Journal of Jewish Studies, no. 26. Judith Hauptman’s book Rereading the Rabbis traces changes over time in rulings about women, arguing that the rabbis tried to make them more lenient. Tal Ilan’s 1997 book Mine and yours are hers : retrieving women’s history from rabbinic literature is available online. So is Shari Golberg’s 2013 PhD thesis, from the University of Toronto. Both highly recommended. For access to archived papers from the Jewish Women’s Network and Half Empty Bookcase, contact the library at UCL.