[279]Tal Ilan,
Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine. An Inquiry into Image and Status. Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentum 44. Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1995. ISBN 3-16-146283-1.
Another dreary Israeli dissertation consisting of a collection and arrangement of information masquerading as scholarship, this dull book asks no important questions and conducts no penetrating analyses. Dr. Tal Ilan of the Hebrew University covers these topics: daughters (birth, relations between father and daughter, the daughter as only child, etc.); marriage (the virtuous wife, the bad wife; marriage and spinsterhood, polygamy, economic and legal arrangements, etc.); a woman’s biology (virginity, menstruation, sexual relations, etc.); preserving a woman’s chastity (talking with a woman, looking at a woman, etc.); crises in married life and the breakdown of marriage (adultery, divorce, widowhood, levirate marriage); women and the legal system (punishments and judgments, women as witnesses, inheritance); women in public (commandments, occupations and professions, study of Torah); other women (maidservants, proselytes, prostitutes, witches). There is a conclusion of exactly three and a half pages; as usual with Israeli dissertations, we may say,
iqqar haser min hassefer, that is to say, the book misses the point. To state matters in more accessible terms, as we shall see, after assem- bling diverse facts out of diverse and incoherent sources, the author finds nothing to say about them.
[280] The sources that supply the data scarcely intersect. They are formulated at different times and set forth different propositions and perspectives. All that they have in common is that, here or there, they contain allusions to topics of interest to Dr. Ilan, and what interests her is anything to do with women. She brings to the sources no interesting questions, and she derives from them no data pertinent to the testing of important hypotheses. In the same paragraph we will find the Book of Jubilees, a citation of
Sifre Zuta, a passage of the Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan; the next paragraph is devoted to Josephus, and the prior one to Palestinian and Babylonian Talmudic passages on a given theme. In fact, the whole conveys little more than a paraphrase, if that. Any passage, chosen at random, yields the same conceptual chaos. So the whole adds up to little more than a report of what is in a variety of writings, lacking all coherence, whether social, whether theological, whether legal. What, indeed, are we supposed to learn from this sequence of paragraphs on “relations between father and daughter” (pp. 48-50):
Ilan wrote:A girl was brought up in her father’s house until she was married. The longest comment on father-daughter relations can be found in ben Sira [followed by various sayings]... Thus in Ben Sira’s eyes a daughter is a constant aggravation to her father...
A slightly different picture emerges from parables in rabbinic literature. Clearly the fathers and daughters in these parables are usually allegorical representations of God and Israel, but still the authors were describing reality as they saw it when they depicted mutual feelings of love and respect between father and daughter...[here the citations are to “the Tannaim” meaning Song of Songs Rabbah [sic!], and to Leviticus Rabbah].
The halakhah, too, exhibits a double standard regarding boys and girls, imposing many obligations on a father in connection with his son but awarding rights and benefits in the case of a daughter [here the references are to the Mishnah];’
A similar picture arises from the halakhic discussion of whether a father is required to provide for his daughters [here: Yemshalmi Ketubot]...
In sum, the various sources treated affection between a father and daughter as exceptional and worthy of note.
Even the halakhah treated daughters as less valuable [281] than songs. But the propounders of the halakhah changed their minds on this matter..., at least in one place where it seemed to them that the ‘standard halakhic attitude was liable to endanger the lives of daughters.
Not a single question of a theoretical character, not a single initiative in relating text to context, an isolated fact to a larger conceptual or social theory, enlivens this tiresome, yet shallow and superficial, collection of topically-pertinent data. All Dr. Ilan has done is collect card-files, arrange them, then empty the box into neat piles and copy down what she found. Yet even here, in a mass of platitudes and banalities, she misses even the simplest opportunity to compare and contrast, so seek context and meaning, for her data. She observes, in a footnote in context, “Father-daughter relations in Judaism — if our sources present a true picture — are quite the opposite of father-daughter relations pictured by Roman sources of the same period, at least as presented by Judith P. Hallet,
Fathers and Daughters in Roman Society: Women and the Elite Family.” An alert scholar will have turned to another body of data to ask, if I know this, what else do I know? If these facts characterize the social order before me, then what more do I know about that social order, about the larger theory of the world and of woman in that world?
And raising tough questions in the quest of interesting hypotheses and suggestive theses begins in an exercise of comparison and contrast, first among the sources of the data that are surveyed (what indeed do Ben Sira,
Leviticus Rabbah, Song of Songs Rabbah, and the like, have in common, other than that circumcised males made them up and wrote them down?) For Dr. Ilan, “Jewish” imposes on diverse data a single point of origin and interest; failure to differentiate among sources as to time and place of origin, social status and economic interest of authors and sponsors, theological position and moral perspective of the framers of documents — that failure bears devastating consequences for Dr. Ilan's work. It leaves her, as is clear, simply with nothing to say.
And so at the end, she produces commonplaces, generalizations so stupefyingly obvious as to make one wonder, upon what demonstration of intellectual merit was a doctoral degree conferred, if this is all Dr. Ilan has claimed to prove [pp. 226-229]:
Ilan wrote:a. All sources surviving from the Second Temple period were written by groups who maintained very high [282] moral standards and viewed licentiousness as one of the most serious threats to those standards...
b. These social norms were anchored in law, as it is laid out in halakhic literature. Yet here we are able to make a clear distinction between the law of the pietists and the more pragmatic Tannaitic-Pharisaic law. The laws of the pietist circles resemble the requirements for an ideal society, and thus make severe demands.... By contrast, the Tannaitic-Pharisaic halakhah takes into consideration both real conditions which depart from the ideal picture of society, and human nature, which is much more complicated than that of the ideal member of society...
c. Yet we may ask whether the lenient Tannaitic- Pharisaic halakhah was in fact equal for every person, and whether Jewish society of the Second Temple period did in fact follow it. reality turns out to be different from the legislated ideal...
Dr. Ilan has labored to collect and arrange over two hundred pages of passages on her chosen topic only to present platitudes as insight, banalities as worthy of attention. Who can find any of this surprising—or provocative?
In the same concluding pages, she has two more major conclusions in the same setting, each with its own subhead:
The Heterogeneity of Jewish Society in Palestine
In the Second Temple period, Jewish society was highly heterogeneous. Different groups lived by different versions of Jewish law. Tannaitic halakhah was not fully adhered to in that period, both because it was not yet fully developed, part of it being written after the destruc- tion of the Temple, and because only a particular group attempted to live by it before the Destruction...
Social Class and Tannaitic Literature
In contrast to the heterogeneity of Jewish society, the authors of Tannaitic literature and of most of the other surviving sources like Josephus and Ben Sira belong to the upper-middle and aristocratic classes...Thus the requirement that men and women be kept separate comes from social circles whose members had the means to put this into practice. Likewise, only a social class whose women could hire wet-nurses in order to save themselves the trouble and possible deterioration of the [283] body would determine that nursing was neither an obligation nor a religious duty. Only families worried about preserving their own property would place great importance on the family backgrounds of the husbands for their daughters, and in fact would make every effort to ensure that the husbands came from related families or families of similar social position. Poor families, by comparison, would have preferred to marry up into wealthier classes. Yet as we have seen, laws made by only these upper social classes were not always appropriate for the lower classes: “A decree cannot be made for the people unless most of the people can endure it” (b BB 60b).
And that is the concluding paragraph of the book — a wild farrago of self-evident but pointless observations (who is going to find surprising that the poor try to marry into money?) and undigested, inarticulate yearnings for a theory and a point (who will wonder at the — unsubstantiated — claim that upper class law in general does no favor for lower class life?)! The pity is, the glimmerings of speculative thought, e.g., on the relationship of gender to class, could have illumined the discussion throughout and turned a collection of inert facts into a purposeful and constructive argument. What we have here is no book, nor even a monograph, but what is no more than a collection of notes lacking a text — a primitive and intellectually flaccid research report, and the editors of the series, Martin Hengel and Peter Schaefer, have done the author no favor by printing undigested data in book-form. I very much doubt that they made the effort to suggest how she should revise and recast her findings into a systematic statement; they serve as mere gate-keepers.
Now let me say a word in apologia for this obvious failure of scholarship. Dr. Ilan clearly has done the best she could, given the retrograde circumstances of her work. She has undertaken a project in feminist studies in a setting in which the entire enterprise is prohibited. She worked with no model, an autodidact, doing her best with what she had. Her first dissertation director was the late Menahem Stern, the classicist, and the second, Y. Gafni, who works on what is called in the State of Israel “the period of the Mishnah and the Talmud,” and who wrote a history of the Jews in Babylonia that has yet to be translated into a Western language. Neither has published in feminist studies, nor have they worked even in the realm of social and intellectual [284] history; they are garden-variety, hard-core positivists, who collect and arrange what they conceive to be historical facts.
As a young doctoral student, Ilan had not only to qualify and make a contribution to learning; she had also to invent the field in which she would pursue learning. Her opening paragraph is the one passionate and compelling statement in the entire book and deserves respectful attention to its honesty:
Ilan wrote:This book began its career as a Ph. D. dissertation in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Although it was written in the late 1980s, when feminism and women studies [sic!] were making enormous strides in many disciplines the world over, working in Jerusalem was like working on another planet. The works of feminists were both unknown and viewed with suspicion as devoid of sound scientific methodology. The literature on the subject of women in the Greco-Roman period was not systematically collected by any of the libraries. Some of the most important books...were not found in any library in the country.
As the author of books that have been proscribed in Jerusalem for thirty-five years, indeed, even kept under lock and key in the Hebrew University Library until the death of E. E. Urbach scarcely a decade ago, my heart goes out to Dr. Ilan. For she took on a scholarly community that, in its way, aped the academic ethics of Bolshevik universities. In the vulnerable position of a doctoral student, depending on the good will of omnipotent masters to validate her work and allow her entry into the profession, she nonetheless chose a forbidden subject and made her way without teachers, without colleagues, without access to a scholarly tradition at home — and yet fully aware that, elsewhere in the world, teachers, colleagues, scholarship and intellectual tradition flourished. The book is a work of remarkable courage and tenacity, and if it is an utter failure as a contribution to learning, it succeeds in revealing that human side of scholarship that does not always dare to show its face. Here is a truly great woman, and I hope that in future work of a more mature and penetrating character, she will prove worthy of her subject. Her book, in its negative, but also in its positive, aspect, forms an indictment of the setting in which it was written. It is heartening to be able to end on a positive note.