Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine: An Inquiry into Image and Status.

• Author: Kraemer, Ross S.
• Position: Review

By TAL ILAN. Translated by Jonathan Price. Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum, vol. 44. Tubingen: J. C. B. MOOR (PAUL SIEBECK), 1995. Pp. xiii + 270. DM 158.

Concerns about the utility and reliability of rabbinic literature as a source for Jewish women's history in the Greco-Roman period have become particularly acute, as scholars both of early Christianity and early Judaism have sought to mine this corpus seeking to recover the realities of Jewish women's lives, particularly in the formative first century C.E. While Tai Ilan's revised doctoral dissertation in Talmud at the Hebrew University continues to demonstrate the quagmire that rabbinic literature constitutes for historians, feminist or otherwise, it is nonetheless an important and judicious contribution that provides a crucial foundation for future work.

The former dissertation begins with a useful history of research on Jewish women in Greco-Roman Palestine. An impressive survey of the potential evidence (and its utility to historians of Jewish women) follows: rabbinic literature, particularly the Mishnah and Tosefot; Josephus and his sources; the NT; the Qumran scrolls; the so-called apocrypha and pseudepigrapha; funerary inscriptions from the region, and papyri and ostraca from the Judean desert. Subsequent chapters are titled: "Daughters, Marriage, A Woman's Biology"; "Preserving a Woman's Chastity"; "Crises in Married Life and the Breakdown of Marriage"; "Women and the Legal System"; "Women in Public"; and "Other Women" (servants, proselytes, prostitutes and witches). A brief conclusion, bibliography, and indices (of sources, subjects and ancient names) complete the book.

Ilan's findings range from specific details to larger generalizations. Of the latter, the most significant (if unsurprising to me) may be that rabbinic ideals are often inconsistent with social reality, and that in any case, the social realities of rabbinic circles cannot be extrapolated beyond those circles. Some examples: while rabbinic sources envision twelve as the ideal age for Jewish girls at first marriage, the available demographic evidence provides "no firm indication that 12 was the customary age of marriage for girls. Women older than 20 were still desirable brides, not old maids" (p. 69). While in the rabbinic ideal, women are not to be found in the marketplace (where the risks to their chastity - even in death! - are enormous), incidental references presume without comment that ordinary women pursued their daily affairs in the marketplace (p. 129).

Regarding marriage, Ilan further concludes that the transition from Aramaic ketubbot to Greek marriage contracts, which appears to take place in the period 70-135 C.E., points to a diminution in the authority or efficacy of Jewish courts, for contracts in Greek could be enforced in Roman courts (p. 94). Ilan considers polygamy more likely to be an upper class phenomenon, where it was relatively "widespread." Wealthy men without heirs, she reasons, can afford to take other wives while keeping the first, while poorer men are more likely to divorce a first wife under such circumstances (p. 88). Elsewhere, though, she argues that the relatively high costs of divorce, as set forth both in surviving ketubboth, and in m. Ketubboth, would have made divorce expensive and infrequent (pp. 90-91, 147).

In the Second Temple period, Ilan proposes, levirate marriage, not the release of halitzah, was common; while after 70 C.E., halitzah becomes the norm, a change she suggests avoids the practice of polygamy (p. 155). Ilan also finds little evidence that Jewish women, when widowed, remained so for very long (p. 151). Unfortunately, she doesn't pursue the potential discord in these two conclusions, since polygamy clearly increases the potential for widows to remarry, a situation we may find in early Christian communities, with their substantial populations of widows, "real" and otherwise (see, e.g., 1 Tim 5:3-16).

Concerning women's education and study of Torah, Ilan concludes that girls learned to read and write only if someone at home taught them. Women were especially likely to know the rules for keeping a kosher household, particularly in Pharisaic and tannaitic families, and may even have had a more specialized knowledge of such rules. If women studied scripture, Ilan believes it was probably confined primarily to Genesis (p. 204). She considers Beruriah, the...