Tal Ilan

The Attraction of Aristocratic Women to Pharisaism During the Second Temple Period

Unlike Christianity, which regards the word “Pharisee” as synonymous with “hypocrite,” “legalist,” and “petty-bourgeois,” Jews have always understood Pharisaism as the correct and trustworthy side of Judaism. Since the eighteenth century, all disputants who participated in the great controversies and schisms within Judaism have claimed to represent the true heirs of the Pharisees. For example, adherents of the strong anti-Hasidic movement initiated by R. Eliyahu of Vilna in the second half of the eighteenth century, who are usually referred to in literature by the negative appellation “opposers” (םירננחמ), referred to themselves by the positive title “Pharisees” (םישורפ). When the Reform movement was founded in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the goal of reforming the Jewish religion to make it more “modern” and acceptable to its neighbors, the reformers perceived themselves as the true heirs of the Pharisees. In his important study of the Pharisees and Sadducees, Abraham Geiger, one of the founders, of Wissenschaft des Judentums and an important spokesman for the radical wing of the Reform movement, formulated the view of the flexible open-minded Pharisees, who reformed Judaism to the point of contradicting the laws set out in the Pentateuch, in order to accommodate them to their changing needs. Geigers opponents easily produced evidence that negated his findings and proved beyond doubt that they, in their conservative strain, were the real heirs of Pharisaism. To his opponents, Geiger was a representative of the detestable Sadducees or their later counterparts, the Karaites.

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

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.

On a Newly Published Divorce Bill from the Judaean Desert

A wifes right to divorce her husband does not exist in Jewish law, or so claims virtually every textbook on Jewish law. Over the years scholars have, of course, noted exceptions to this absolute assertion.1 In Jewish marriage contracts from Elephantine, for example, women have a right to divorce equal to that of men.2 Another example is the Gospel of Marks logion on divorce, which apparently implies that either a woman or a man

Premarital Cohabitation in Ancient Judea: The Evidence of the Babatha Archive and the Mishnah ( Ketubbot 1.4)

This article discusses one aspect of matrimonial practice in second-century CE Judea: whether a man and a woman could or would cohabit before they were officially married. I shall examine a marriage contract from the Babatha archive discovered in the Judean desert; this contract contains a clause that specifies that a couple had lived together for some time before the marriage contract was drawn up. This statement may be perceived as contradicting the picture of matrimonial practices derived from Jewish legal sources. In dealing with such contradictions it is possible to adopt either an apologetic or a provocative approach. This article professes to apply a provocative approach to the problem by accepting the content of this clause at face value and suggesting a fresh interpretation to a passage from the Mishnah. This mishnah attests different matrimonial practices in Galilee and Judea and suggests that premarital cohabitation was sometimes practiced in Judea, but certainly not in Galilee. The Palestinian Talmud interprets the mishnah, obviously apologetically, by assigning the Judean practice of premarital cohabitation to the aftermath of the Bar Kokhbah revolt, as a result of the imposition of the jus primae noctis (“the right of the first night”). The contract from the Babatha archive predates the Bar Kokhbah revolt, however, and thus attests a Judean practice of premarital cohabitation that is not connected to the Roman decree. In the article I shall suggest two possible interpretations for this practice. I shall conclude by arguing that the jus primae noctis in Jewish sources belongs, as has been shown for all other instances of the motif, to folklore and not to history.

The Torah of the Jews of Ancient Rome

Latin, comparable with the Septuagint in Greek or the Targum tradition in Aramaic. There is no RomanJewish philosopher comparable to Philo of Alexandria. There is no RomanJewish legal canon comparable to the Babylonian Talmud. Thus, what we know about the Jews of Rome is meager, and usually comes from external sources, or is derived from archaeology. In the following pages, I will try to outline what we know about the Jewish Roman community in antiquity, how we know it, and how reliable our sources of knowledge are. Throughout, an attempt will be made to understand what sort of relationship the Jewish community in Rome might have had with rabbinic Judaism, and what sort of literary legacy it might have left us.

Women in Jewish life and law

The Dead Sea documents are a major source of information regarding Jewish womens legal position. They include two archives that belonged to women, the Babatha archive and that of Salome Komaise, as well as numerous other documents that belonged to Jewish women. Scholars have attempted to harmonize the legal injunctions of the Dead Sea documents with rabbinic rulings found in the Mishnah. The idea that a womans place is in the home is clearly espoused in rabbinic literature. A major duty envisioned by the Rabbis for the woman at home was the raising of children, particularly when they were very young and dependent on her for sustenance. The rabbinic imagination envisioned the working woman primarily at her spindle or loom. Much of the evidence for the ancient synagogue derives from epigraphic documents from Palestine and the Diaspora and indicates that women were significant donors in the financing of the construction of synagogues.