Judaism Since Gender

Miriam Peskowitz, Laura Levitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136667220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Judaism Since Gender offers a radically new concept of Jewish Studies, staking out new intellectual terrain and redefining the discipline as an intrinsically feminist practice. The question of how knowledge is gendered has been discussed by philosophers and feminists for years, yet is still new to many scholars of Judaism. Judaism Since Gender illuminates a crucial debate among intellectuals both within and outside the academy, and ultimately overturns the belief that scholars of Judaism are still largely oblivious of recent developments in the study of gender. Offering a range of provocations--Jewish men as sissies, Jesus as transvestite, the problem of eroticizing Holocaust narratives--this timely collection pits the joys of transgression against desires for cultural wholeness.

Part One:

Knowledges

Engendering Jewish Religious History

Miriam Peskowitz

Scouting for Discourse

The experience of undoing long-accepted histories, logics, and truths provides feminist intellectuals with a “heady sense of encountering the future,” as we work to complete these tasks.¹ Although I speak here of feminist pursuits, in my study of Judaism I imagine kindred spirits and ancestors among the early maskilim.² This fantasy of connection evokes an ethos of Jewish intellectuals meeting in living rooms in Berlin, drinking wine in Parisian cafes, reveling in ragingly new Enlightenment challenges to long-standing truth claims, roaming among a terrain of fractured traditional authorities, and in the midst of all this “headiness,” returning “home” on the Sabbath to a coeval world that still presumed itself whole and intact. With the new tools of the European Enlightenment, my imagined maskilim came to recognize the outlines of the world that had been familiar to them. Their commitments to “modernity” painfully highlighted the newly perceived differences.

Of course, there is some irony in my use of the maskil as hero and predecessor, especially since I challenge the permanence of much of what the maskilim and the consequent academic movement, the Wissenschaft des Judentums, or Science of Judaism, achieved.³ The irony extends through to my objections to the Enlightenment fantasy of a universal human subject who is unified, seamless, and coherent, a fantasy that is as false as it is culturally persuasive. Even more ironic, this universal, unified, seamless, and coherent subject is masculine, hardly an obvious starting point for feminist work. Despite these ironies, the fantasy of the maskilim provides a nostalgic comfort. If only momentarily and provisionally, I have retrieved some prepackaged and easily available Jewish ancestry for my feminist project.⁴ At the same time, I recognize the seduction of this nostalgia, the seductive offer of even the transient comfort of a perceived intellectual ancestor. Such nostalgia for an intellectual heritage is simultaneously comforting, contradictory, and complicated. It romanticizes those thinkers who propounded the very same Enlightenment and/or Wissenschaft paradigms that currently keep us from seeing and writing Jewish religious history with both male and female agents. It ignores the fact that these same thinkers posited “gender” as a series of “natural” sex differences, which has of course made more work for those of us who insist that neither sex nor gender is a naturally occurring difference but, rather, is a cultural product constantly in (re)production. And such nostalgia hides the fact that these same thinkers were almost exclusively men.

Feminist accounts of women and gender intend to challenge masculinist traditions (long perceived as “neutral”) for presenting the past. Important new insights and information have emerged from feminist studies of Judaism. Yet, even as we change histories and challenge history, many feminist studies of Judaism still work within the categories (and utilize the methods) of Enlightenment-based scholarship. These categories and methods are highly restrictive, but for the most part they have not yet become a topic of sustained, public discussion among those of us who are feminist scholars. At their best, though, our intellectual engagements will challenge not only “traditional” masculinist conversations but the very terms of our own conversations as well.⁵

My starting point lies in the recognition that some aspects of feminist analysis have been strategic and necessary. They have served us well, for a time. Given our location in European and American intellectual life, these choices made sense, they were readily available, familiar, and helpful. But they need not always organize and limit our inquiries. In what follows, I work to undo very real conceptual constraints. I scout out some emerging and already-present discourses, and I consider the possibilities for thinking about women, gender, and feminism.⁶

In the beginning years of feminist scholarship, institutional discouragement and impediments provided external challenges to feminist research. Currently, additional challenges for feminist scholarship come “from within.” Feminists take many positions, and this sometimes puts us at odds with one another. Some college and university environments have changed, making it easier for some of us to do our work. Institutional barriers have not ceased (far from it), but differences among and between feminist thinkers today can be as great as between thinkers along the whole continuum from feminist to masculinist. Writing feminism has not become easier; only the specific challenges have changed. Scholars in the late twentieth century are surrounded by a proliferation of theoretical possibilities and scholarly performances, many of which are intellectually enticing, and none of which are essentially or necessarily liberatory. As I write, I realize (and attempt to make real) the necessary critique of the contents of Jewish religious history. I see, and attempt to make visible, the categories of traditional scholarship.⁷ “Traditional scholarship” refers to the overlapping discourses of domination that organize knowledge in ways that hide the basic categories by which that knowledge is produced: to name just a few, these discourses include masculinism, colonialism, the European Enlightenment inheritance that veils a specific Christian-ness behind its claims to the universal. In naming problems, I purposely shift attention away from the sexism of individual authors, since such a focus repeats and reinscribes the Enlightenment fallacy of human subjects that can be independent of culture. The analysis of these constraints makes it possible to detect the categories that have structured knowledges, and that have come to seem familiar, normal, objective, and true. These are also the most easily, and the most problematically, replicated.

This essay, then, is about complexities and comforts such as these, about how they provide the terms of conversations within which we feminist thinkers may conceptualize, research, teach, and write a gendered Jewish religious history. I offer this as work-in-process. In places I remain speculative, even idealistic and optimistic in a quest for more powerful questions and more convincing explanations of how gender works and is worked in Jewish religious culture. The essay contains at least some of the traces of its own production, traces left visible as a gesture to a critical practice that does not smooth over the seams nor attempt to erase the construction of knowlege within culture. And I have attempted to identify and expose those constructs that constrict each of us, individually and collectively, from thinking best about things that demand our best thinking.

Constrictions (Spring 1993)

One place that I perform as a feminist thinker of Judaism is in a classroom of undergraduate students.⁸ This spring I have been teaching a course with a familiar title: “Introduction to Judaism.” The course is taught within Duke University’s Department of Religion, and is cross-listed in History. No matter who teaches it, it aims to give students basic knowledge of Judaism “as a religion” and basic knowledge of the historical development of Jewish communities.⁹ In addition, each semester around registration time, the Women’s Studies Program at Duke compiles and distributes a list of courses under two rubrics: first, courses that place women’s lives and experiences explicitly at the center of study; and second, “other” courses in which women’s lives and/or the construction of gender are not at the center of curricular attention but are attended to in intellectually defensible ways. My course, “Introduction to Judaism,” ended up in the second category. I had been away from campus that fall and couldn’t be reached to confirm that my course was appropriate for this second category. But the Women’s Studies office had assumed such, given my training in feminist theory, my work as a research assistant for the introductory course in Women’s Studies, and all my other involvements in producing new scholarship on women and gender,

I had assumed this also. In a workshop on pedagogy the previous summer,¹⁰ I had spent time conceptualizing the integration of “women” into a course on “Judaism.” I was concerned to do this in a way that did not continue to marginalize—and would in fact reverse the marginalization of—women’s experiences. I wanted to avoid the model that teaches “Judaism” and then, as an additional gesture, speaks to “women in” Judaism. I found that the current state of conceptualizing the problem does not yet facilitate this project in ways that are elegant and/or consistent. “Women” remain marginal, extra. The religious tradition’s use of gendered relations to organize itself remains invisible and critically untouched. This was the problem with my conception that summer of the need to “integrate” the two: the liberal model of “integration” is impossible because it ignores the categorical structures that marginalize “women” in the first place.

It is already a truism that one cannot “add women and stir.”¹¹ The earliest second-wave feminist historians had worked hard to achieve the addition of women to history. And their earliest feminist critics soon realized that women cannot truly be added unless—and until—the historical frameworks have been changed and the masculinist ideologies of those frameworks exposed. Most recently, scholars writing on women, Judaism, feminism, and gender have further articulated the point that the many varieties of “adding women and stirring” are insufficient.

There is a second truism, that gender must be a category of analysis. Yet, even as we repeat it to one another, this truism remains mostly untheorized within most studies of women, gender, and Judaism. Beyond the repetition of the axiom “gender is a category of feminist analysis,” some of our research continues pre-“gender-as-a-category” methods, assumptions, and results. Currently, and for a variety of reasons, large gaps exist between these recognized truisms, the production of critical feminist scholarship, and a satisfactorily gendered religious history of Judaism.¹² So, I pose and pursue the following question: Why has it been so difficult for women and gender to be part of the narrative of Jewish religious history?

“Women in X”/“Women and X”

The other place that I perform as a feminist thinker of Judaism is in the production of scholarship. My project for the past several years has used cultural texts about spinners and weavers to investigate the construction of gender in Roman-period Judaism.¹³ Roman-period Judaism includes the earliest centuries of rabbinic Judaism. And feminist studies of rabbinic Judaism had already established a topic called, variously, “women in rabbinic Judaism,” or “women in early Judaism,” or “gender and Talmud.” These include surveys of “images of women,” explanations for patterns of rabbinic law for women, and others. Adding to these concerns, I wanted to know how specific and partial accounts of the activities and personae of men and women were naturalized into truths about gender. I was interested in Roman-period images of Jewish women as initial data for an inquiry into how images of femininity, masculinity, female work, and female sexualities “got to be the way they were.” In other words, I decided to eschew “what” for “how,” as in how did the kinds of genders and sexualities articulated in Jewish texts of the Roman period become possible?

We cannot fully explain and account for the development of Judaism during its classical period without taking into account the presence and the constructedness of gender in all aspects of Jewish religion and history. Current scholarly practices in the field have continued to divide “Jewish religion” and “women.” For instance, the very terminology of the subject—“women and rabbinic Judaism”—implies that “rabbinic Judaism” and “women” are separate entities. Consequently, the study of “women” is inadvertantly kept marginal to the enterprise of studying rabbinic Judaism.¹⁴ Conceptualizing these things as separate has another ramification: it allows some scholars to continue to study “rabbinic Judaism” without considering women and gender. The “and”—the space between “rabbinic Judaism” and “women/gender”—is never bridged. The “and” both connects these things and simultaneously keeps them separate. In practice, the model of “women in rabbinic Judaism” or “gender in rabbinic Judaism” (although much better than ignoring women/gender in the first place) contributes to the traditional and ongoing strength of the dichotomy that places men and masculinity at the center of study, and positions women and femininity at the periphery. It allows us to continue investigating “rabbinic Judaism” without asking how that entity is itself gendered, and how the history of its study has been gendered.

The polarized division between “women” and “rabbinic Judaism” in the phrase “women in rabbinic Judaism” is neither essential nor natural. We don’t have to think about these things in these ways, through constructs whose strategic usefulness has for the most part come to an end. These ways include a set of inherited intellectual modes for examining men and women as participants—of whatever kind—in Jewish life and religion in Roman Palestine. These modes—the mostly unspoken, unwritten, unarticulated notions that underwrite and provide the logic for our reconstructions of Jewish religion in that period—should be understood as a master code of rabbinic studies. This particular, and peculiar, master code shapes the field of study.

When we locate master codes and make them explicit, we begin to see why it is still so difficult to write a (gendered) Judaism. For example, the phrases “Women in X/Women and X” and “Gender in X/Gender and X” are tools—or c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Editors' Introduction: “A Way In”
• Part One Knowledges
• Part Two Studies
• Notes on Contributors