Reading Rayna Batya: the rebellious Rebbetzin as self-reflection.(Biography)

This paper seeks to examine the life and contemporary afterlife of the nineteenth-century Rebbetzin Rayna Batya Berlin. Although there are no surviving writings by Berlin, and only one extant source written about her by any of her peers, she has recently become a touchstone for discussions of Jewish women and Torah scholarship. According to the memoir of her nephew, Barukh Epstein, Rebbetzin Berlin was not only learned, but also consumed with questions regarding women's role in traditional Judaism. A juxtaposition of verifiable facts about Berlin, and analysis of the major source about her, with examples of recent academic treatments of her will show that while at times acknowledging the problematic nature of the sources, contemporary academics have nonetheless co-opted the Rebbetzin as an exemplar of their own divergent points of view. While this is an attractive and useful proposition, the historical Rayna Batya Berlin remains beyond our grasp.

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   Such was her way, to sit always near the winter oven that was in 
   her kitchen (even during the summer) with all sorts of books spread 
   before her on the table: Bible, Mishnah, Ein-Yaakov, various 
   midrashim, Menorat hamaor, Kav hayashar, Tzemah David, Shevet 
   Yehudah, and many other books of this nature, as well as volumes of 
   Aggadah. All of her focus and concentration ... [was] in the 
   books--her hand hardly moved from them! But of all that concerned 
   the maintenance of the household, she knew little, almost nothing. 
   (1) 

So does Barukh Epstein, author the memoir in which this quote appears, describe his learned aunt Rebbetzin Rayna Batya Berlin, wife of Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, dean of the Volozhin Yeshiva and one of the foremost talmudists and rabbinic leaders of the nineteenth century. According to Epstein, Rayna Batya not only spent her time immersed in sacred Jewish books, but also used these rabbinic texts to make sense of her own anomalous position as a learned Jewish woman in late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. Ever since the contemporary rediscovery of Berlin in the past decade and a half, scholars have been fascinated by this extraordinary woman, and have sought to describe and understand her particular rebellion. Here was a woman intimately connected to the greatest Torah sages of her age, and yet not only marginal to them, but seemingly aware of her marginality.

Rebbetzin Rayna Batya Berlin is just one example of a historical figure who has been adopted by contemporary academics and laypeople and, I will argue, adapted to meet contemporary needs. She has thus entered the lists along with other Jewish women of the past whose stories are used to make claims about women and Judaism today. Among the best known are Beruriah, Glueckel of Hameln, the Maiden of Ludmir and Sarah Schenerir.

Beruriah, the legendary learned wife of the second-century talmudic sage Rabbi Meir, has been used both as a symbol of the potential for women's leadership in Judaism, and, because of intimations that she ultimately came to grief, as a cautionary tale of the limits of that potential. (2) The memoirs of the seventeenth-century widow and merchant Glueckel of Hameln are amongst the most popular of historical sources and, Robert Liberles has recently suggested, among the most overused and misunderstood as well. (3) Whereas earlier treatments reached contradictory conclusions, Nathaniel Deutsch's exhaustive work on the enigmatic hasidic figure known as the Maiden of Ludmir ultimately seems to tell us as much about ourselves as about its subject. (4) Sarah Schenirer, founder in post-World War I Poland of the first Bais Yaakov school, has, interestingly, become both the ultimate example of a pious "daughter of Israel" and a model for Jewish feminists. (5) The list could go on. (6) As readers and writers answering to the canons of scholarship, we are well aware of the ways in which different historiographic genres produced outside the academy, such as rabbinic hagiography or Orthodox historiography, can reshape and even homogenize important personages. (7) But we are far less attuned to our own leanings in this direction, and how these are perpetuated in popular culture.

In this paper I will explore the actual, surviving, extant sources on Rayna Batya Berlin, and how they have been read by contemporary scholars. I will demonstrate that the instability, constructed nature and questionable accuracy of the major source on Berlin have largely been ignored. Scholars writing in the fields of rabbinics, anthropology, education, literature, history and feminist theory have nonetheless appropriated Berlin as proof of a variety of views.