Women and Jewish literature.(Essay)

This essay explores the genesis of "Women and Jewish Literature," a course I developed at the University of Maryland. The course emphasizes the interconnectedness of reading and writing, particularly within a feminist Jewish literary context, and introduces the particular ramifications for Jewish women of this relationship between consumption and production. Situated at a secular university and teaching a Jewish Studies course cross-listed in Women's Studies and English, I became highly conscious of the challenges faced by many of my students in approaching materials that require some degree of Jewish literacy. The relationship between the struggle for Jewish literacy in a Jewish Studies course at a secular university and the struggle for Jewish literacy by women who traditionally were denied the rudiments of scholarly Jewish culture became readily apparent as the course progressed. The pedagogical strategies I designed to illustrate the experience of women claiming the right to author Jewish literature also empowered my students in confronting dramatically alien material.

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The first time I taught "Women and Jewish Literature," in the fall of 2003, a distraught student approached me midway through the semester. We were just completing a unit on the place of Torah study in the lives of women in traditional east European Jewish society. My student, a young, married Orthodox woman, came to my office soon after our discussion. "I have all the tools I need to study Torah," she said, "but I don't use them." Pressed to elaborate, she told me that the Orthodox community in which she lived did not seem much more amenable to women's Torah study than did the communities in Eastern Europe that we had been discussing. Although she was yeshiva educated and relatively proficient in classical Hebrew, it had never occurred to her that she, too, like her husband who studied Talmud daily with a neighbor, could choose to study the sacred texts of her tradition.

I told my student that the key to beginning any course of traditional Jewish study could be found in the well-known mishnah in Pirkei avot (Ethics of the Fathers) 1:6, where Rabbi Joshua Ben Perahyah says, "Make for yourself a teacher and acquire for yourself a friend." There are many interpretations of this statement, but the one that I have always favored is that finding a study partner (hevruta) is akin to finding a friend (haver). My student thereupon asked me to become her study partner, and I accepted. We studied together for over three years, in my university office and on the telephone, celebrating the completion of several tractates of the Mishnah. The culmination of our learning took place on a Chanukah night in 2005 when we gathered to teach Torah, together, to members of our respective communities.

My student's exercising her right to study Torah is only one step removed from the experience of women in an earlier generation, who, emerging from a similar set of traditional Jewish intellectual norms, wanted to assert their right not only to study Torah, but, in a sense, to write Torah. The Torah they wanted to write, however, was not the Torah of traditional legislation, but a Torah of modernity, of poetry and prose, of fiction and non-fiction, in Hebrew. I call this body of secular literary work "Torah," because without a firm grounding in traditional Jewish literature-liturgical as well as biblical at the very least--it was impossible in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to become a Hebrew writer. The Hebrew language up to that period had been a scholarly and literary language, not a spoken one, and there had existed no easy vernacular voice in which to compose the texts of modernity.

The spoken voice and the written text are clearly interdependent, particularly when an ancient language like Hebrew, which for two millennia had been almost exclusively textual, is reinvented as the basis of a modern literature, depicting modern institutions and relationships, modern consciousness and, perhaps most importantly, the modern unconscious. Those writers of the Modern Hebrew renaissance who attempted to create a Modern Hebrew literary idiom in the absence of a vernacular language did so through extremely skillful manipulation of the tools of traditional Hebrew literary culture, identifying different strata of Hebrew over time and using different types of Hebrew for different purposes. In some of their stories, for example, Mendele Mocher Seforim (the pen name of S.Y. Abramovich, 1836-1917) used the Aramaic of the Talmud to represent Yiddish, while Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934) used the language of rabbinic aggadah to develop folk motifs. Any writer of Modern Hebrew literature was, necessarily, a reader of traditional Hebrew literature. As Robert Alter has pointed out, the literature of the Modern Hebrew renaissance was an "echo chamber" of texts from other times and other places. (1) Those who wrote it, according to him, were necessarily the cream of the intellectual crop, working in a language for which they were never taught grammar and which did not have the basic idioms to describe a modern kitchen, a car or a train. (2)

"Women and Jewish Literature" was born of the question of how women were able to become Hebrew writers at the turn of twentieth century, when they had for so long been prohibited from engaging in the study of Torah. It was inspired by my work on Dvora Baron, the only woman canonized in the prose fiction of the Modern Hebrew renaissance. (3) The class was not limited to an investigation of Hebrew woman writers, however. Rather, we spread our nets wide and considered the relationship between Jewish women and Jewish textuality, or the necessary connection between readers and writers within Jewish culture. The underlying assumption is that in becoming writers, Jewish women pay tribute to the texts they have read, entering into dialogue with the tradition that has facilitated, or blocked, their access to the literary worlds that influenced and enabled them.