The Beruriah Traditions

Goodblatt, David

doi:10.18647/739/jjs-1975

Cited by 98 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…23. Goodblatt (1975) also argues for this historical difference, but in a quite different direction from the reading proposed here. Moreover, the very intimacy of the relationship with the ideal study partner, when that partner is potentially a woman, makes it impossible for Beruriah to fit in, on Adler's reading.…”

Section: Chapter 3 Paragraph 4 19 Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 22 Fmentioning

confidence: 52%

“…One is entirely justified, therefore, in seeing this story as the production of later Babylonian talmudic tradition. For discussion of this question, see Goodblatt (1975) The paradoxes of these oppositions, and the reversal of the usual expectations of reward and punishment, mark all the more strongly this narrative's significance as an exemplum of the danger of teaching a daughter Torah. But I again emphasize that this explanation for the story is intelligible only on the Babylonian Talmud's interpretation of the Mishna.…”

Section: Chapter 3 Paragraph 4 19 Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 22 Fmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Reading Androcentrism against the Grain: Women, Sex, and Torah-Study

Boyarin¹

1991

Poetics Today

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The more we learn about comparable gender-segregated, pre-industrial societies, particularly in the Mediterranean area, the more it seems that most of men's observations and moral judgments about women and sex and so forth have minimal descriptive validity and are best understood as coffeehouse talk, addressed to men themselves. Women, we should emphasize, in all their separate groupings by age, neighborhood, and class, may differ widely from each other and from community to community in the degree to which they obey, resist, or even notice the existence of such palaver as men indulge in when going through their bonding rituals. To know when any such male law-givers-medical, moral, or marital, whether smart or stupid-are (to put it bluntly) bluffing or spinning fantasies or justifying their druthers is so hard that most historians of ideas-Foucault, for all that he is exceptional is no exception here-never try. (Winkler 1989: 6) One of the most important insights of feminist research into ancient societies in the last several years has been the realization that it is not possible to take what texts say about women's position in society at face value (Bynum 1986: 258). This is the case even when what is being

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Section: Chapter 3 Paragraph 4 19 Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 22 Fmentioning

confidence: 52%

Section: Chapter 3 Paragraph 4 19 Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 22 Fmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading Androcentrism against the Grain: Women, Sex, and Torah-Study

Boyarin¹

1991

Poetics Today

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“…4 The entry about Beruriah found in the Encyclopedia of Religion puts her popular significance succinctly: "Beruryah's contemporary importance lies in her prominence as a rare woman-scholar in the male-dominated rabbinic culture." 6 Within this point of view, Beruriah is a kind of rabbinically fashioned golem: a mute instrument of the rabbinical mind, tasked with a single, limited purpose. For him, Beruriah "exemplifies the possibility, though quite uncommon, of a woman receiving formal education within rabbinic society."…”

Section: T H R E E T a L E Smentioning

confidence: 99%

“Beruriah Said Well”: The Many Lives (and Deaths) of a Talmudic Social Critic

Hartman¹,

Buckholtz²

2011

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This article revisits the iconic Talmudic figure Beruriah. We examine both her representation in the Talmud and several significant appropriations in the medieval and modern periods, focusing on her depiction in Rashi's disturbing gloss on the "Beruriah Incident." One of the only women represented in rabbinic literature as a Torah scholar on par with the rabbis themselves, dominant modern readings of Beruriah have tended to present her as a kind of proto-liberal feminist, a woman who can function competently and successfully in the male-dominated spheres of intellectual achievement and cultural power. The modern Orthodox Jewish community has appropriated her as a traditional precedent for the legitimacy of women's Torah study. We argue that approaches limiting Beruriah's significance to her status as a "woman who is like a man" has overlooked the words attributed to her, and missed what we claim is a more radical social-critical voice. Our reading acknowledges Beruriah's vaunted equality with her culture-hero contemporaries, while highlighting the ways in which she is also represented as an outsider identified with those at the margins of cultural power, who knows the many ways in which that power is abused and when confronted with such abuses speaks out to critique them. Repeatedly affronted and disappointed by what she sees as a gap between the core values of the tradition and the thoughtless and/or irresponsible ways in which she experiences the rabbis (her relatives and peers) treating her and others, from her words emerge a social-critical voice that is also a voice of rabbinic self-critique.

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“…He claims that the existence of such a woman was impossible in second-century Palestine, but not in third-and fourth-century Jewish Babylonia, where the Talmud was composed and the talmudic traditions developed. 16 In making this claim, however, Goodblatt fails to bring any other example to verify its historicity. On the other hand, Boyarin claims exactly the opposite.…”

Section: Beruriahmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Quest for the Historical Beruriah, Rachel, and Imma Shalom

Ilan¹

1997

AJS Review

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Beruriah, reputedly the greatest Jewish woman scholar of all times, has figured prominently in anthologies describing the lives and deeds of Jewish sages, and in particular in books and collections dedicated to Jewish women. Most of these presentations are no more than paraphrases of the sources on which they are dependent, accepting their judgments at face value and thus giving an idealized description of the woman Beruriah.

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The Beruriah Traditions

Cited by 98 publications

References 0 publications

Reading Androcentrism against the Grain: Women, Sex, and Torah-Study

Reading Androcentrism against the Grain: Women, Sex, and Torah-Study

“Beruriah Said Well”: The Many Lives (and Deaths) of a Talmudic Social Critic

The Quest for the Historical Beruriah, Rachel, and Imma Shalom

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