Presences Feminine Within Jewis-2016-3-6-2024

Editions Belin
Presences of the feminine within Judaism

Author(s): Claudine Vassas and Anne Stevens
Source: Clio. Women, Gender, History , 2016, No. 44, Judaism: Gender and Religion
(2016), pp. 200-228
Published by: Editions Belin
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26485963
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A research itinerary
Presences of the feminine within Judaism
Claudine VASSAS
It is generally acknowledged that a long-standing tradition within

Judaism assigns men to the order of the Letter, or the Book, and
women to the order of Custom: allowed an admittedly important role in
ritual, but ritual confined to the private sphere. In this particular case,
the meaning and origin of this assignment may be found in the notion
of the “covenant” between the chosen people and their God, which,
according to the foundational texts, seems to have only involved men.
The “Law of the Covenant” given to Moses laid down the religious and
civil law which was to be followed henceforth. It established the priests
and Levites as servants and guardians of the organization of worship
and divine service. Male pre-eminence was established and would be
maintained.1 Since they were, from the very beginning, excluded from
religious functions and hence from handling the sacred objects attached
to them, women were “dispensed from” learning Hebrew, the sacred
language, which was likewise exclusively for men. Similarly, they were
not obliged to attend places of worship, which were arranged in ways
which limited the space they might occupy. The laws equally subjected
them to rules of “purity” which had the effect of increasing
1 See the relevant chapters of the Old Testament. The French edition of the Old
Testament, published as La Bible, Ancien Testament, Paris, Gallimard, NRF,
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, tome 1, 1956, edited by Edouard Dhorme, is prefaced
by an illuminating introduction.

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The presence of the feminine within Judaism 201
discrimination between men and women.2 These features provided the

outline for a relatively stable and homogeneous religious landscape,
even if its colours and composition might vary depending on the
community concerned, the social environment or the historical period.
The point here is simply to call attention to an underlying state of affairs
which has taken on varied forms in different contexts and which is
nowadays undergoing intense upheavals.
The model sketched above seems to me to constitute the core of a
possible delineation of the relationships (inclusion or exclusion)
connecting them to religion and the sacred, which men and women
experience throughout their lives, and the inevitably unstable
definitions corresponding to these concepts. The discussion cannot
be confined simply to “representations”. Representations are given
weight and reality by the persistence of customs, habits and rituals,
including objects, that are highly contested. Their reality is conveyed
by the debates and challenges which still today, indeed more than
ever, continue to permeate contemporary societies, emanating from
those women who, in defending their belonging to Judaism – and
hence the legitimacy of their access to the sacred – are making efforts
to emancipate themselves from this model.
I hope, by examining these features, to revisit some of the
manifestations of the “feminine” component of religious life, a theme
which I have been studying for many years. Here I shall simply
attempt to explore some new strands and develop my investigations. 3
2 For Rashi [1040-1105 CE] and Maimonides [fl. c. 1160- 1204 CE] women are only
“exempt”. It therefore seems that the transformation of this exemption into a
prohibition occurred over several centuries. Indeed the Talmudic texts are not in
agreement on this matter. According to some medieval sources, men and women
were not separated in the synagogue, but more often there was a space reserved for
women. At Carpentras it was almost subterranean, but elsewhere it was, in contrast,
at a very high level and set back, like the women’s gallery in the ancient Mellah of
Fez, situated beneath the rafters. A curtain or a wooden lattice might also separate
the women from the area reserved for men. In large synagogues with several levels,
the women’s place was most frequently “in the gallery”.
3 See the bibliography for the publications which have accompanied my research
since 1995.

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202 Claudine Vassas
It was as a result of my initial interest in what might seem a rather

prosaic aspect, cooking and the management of mealtime rituals
taking place within the home, that I drew attention to the role of
women in the creation of a particular form of holiness stemming
from the ways in which food is prepared and consumed, explicitly
associated with the memory and transmission of an episode of Jewish
history recounted in the Bible. This association caused me to look
deeply into the Book of Esther as a foundational text, and its
appropriation by women.
Alongside Esther, I encountered and studied other female figures
central to Judaism (Rachel, Leah, Sarah...). All of them had in common
that they pointed towards a higher entity animating the heart of the
divinity itself: the Shekhinah, an incarnation of the divine presence,
worshipped both by women in their humblest prayers and by the
Kabbalists, who linked it to God (The Holy One, blessed be he), and,
drawing on this model of a divine couple, developed a gendered
understanding of souls. If we go beyond medieval mysticism, the
concept of Shekhinah opens up questions about female desire and
sexuality. 4
This figure of the Shekhinah accompanies human couples (when
they marry and also during the key moments of the Shabbat) and is
also linked to the Torah, to which every devout Jew has long been
supposed to dedicate himself. If we follow men through the rituals
which are exclusive to them, and pause to observe their contact with
objects used for worship which are imbued with holiness (and most
particularly the scrolls of the Torah), we shall be able to grasp what is
at stake in precisely those places from which women are excluded or
within which they are controlled.
4 On the presence of the Shekhinah during the Shabbat, see Ehrlich 1978;
Starobinski-Safran 2007. On the theme of the “eternal betrothed” and the
incarnation of the Shekhinah, in which Esther is one of the major figures, see
Fabre-Vassas 1995 and 2016. On the Shekhinah’s place in Kabbalism, refer to the
work of Charles Mopsik (in particular his introduction to Lettre sur la sainteté. La
relation de l’homme avec sa femme by Joseph de Hamadan, Lagrasse, Éditions Verdier,
1993: 45-46).

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A study along these lines deepens our understanding both of the

demands being made by women today and of men’s reluctance to
accede to them.
Women’s holiness
If the view is taken that “religion” is not confined merely to those
places where liturgical celebrations occur, but also permeates the most
ordinary family and social activities, through practices intimately linked
to domestic settings, then studying Jewish food becomes particularly
pertinent. Food must conform to the rules outlined in the biblical texts
and set down in the tractates of the Talmud. These, because they
extended to foodstuffs the purity rules which applied to the body,
brought food directly into the sphere of religion. 5 The intimacy
between food and religion is visibly enacted whenever there is a
celebration. In every household, each religious festival in the Jewish
calendar is accompanied by a meal consisting of obligatory dishes
directly linked to the founding stories which require them or which
derive from the texts themselves. As is well known, at the feast of
Purim, the book of Esther is read out in the synagogue. This tells the
story of Esther, who, on account of her beauty and because she had
hidden her true identity, became the wife of King Ahasuerus. She then
saved her people, who were threatened with extermination, with the
help of her uncle Mordecai, who foiled a plot concocted by the
perfidious Haman, the King’s favourite minister. In the end, Haman
was hanged on the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai. Every time
the reader of the Megillah – the scroll of Esther – utters the name of the
traitor, those present “kill Haman” by making a very loud din. This
ritual is repeated in the Yeshivot schools, where the pupils hang or burn
an effigy of Haman, and then at home, where students put on a play of
the punishment of Haman or tell the story in exchange for edible
treats, for a feast is prepared, echoing the banquets which occur
throughout the story. For these feasts, the body of the wicked minister
is “broken into pieces” and eaten as cakes and pastries – his ears, his
5 On the prohibitions relating to foodstuffs see Vassas 2006a. I shall not tackle the
issue of the Kashrut in this article.

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204 Claudine Vassas
fingers, his moustache, his eyes, etc. – alongside other dishes equally
linked to the characters in the story and prepared by the women, who
organize the customary activities and who are duty-bound that day to
hear or to read the Megillah. It is through them too, and through their
adherence to the Bible which commands remembrance (zakhor), that
the memory of these events is transmitted.
There is a similar intimacy between Pesach (Passover) and the seder
meal, which is the occasion for an unchangeable ritual. Alongside the
obligatory reading of the Haggadah, the famous account of the exodus
from Egypt, it involves the youngest child of the family asking
questions about each of the foodstuffs served on the table that day,
which represent events and objects recalling the captivity of the
chosen people and their exodus under Moses’ leadership. This
occasion for convivial sharing, organized by the women, switching as
it does back and forth between the Bible and the consumption of
appropriate dishes, becomes, by its respect for ritual in consuming
food, the occasion for a celebration within a private house that is fully
in accordance with the liturgy of the synagogue. Whilst the text,
entering into, and being read within, the house, takes on a
“customary” aspect, the foodstuffs which accompany, illustrate and
extend it take on the characteristics of rites textuels (text-based rituals)
utilized within a liturgy of remembrance. 6
The case of Marranism in Portugal, where the organization of an
entirely domestic religious practice is entrusted to women, provides an
exemplary instance. A community of Marranos was discovered still
living in Belmonte in northern Portugal by Samuel Schwartz at the
beginning of the twentieth century. The ethnographical study he
devoted to them, as well as the evidence provided by the trials of the
conversos who had emigrated to the New World, which Nathan Wachtel
has analysed, revealed a devotion to “Saint Moses” and “Saint Esther”,
6 Gérard Haddad suggests a psychoanalytic interpretation of the seder, reducing it

to no more than the concept of “a paternal function”. I do not share this view
and have had occasion to discuss it with him (see Haddad 1984). I have
borrowed the useful formulation rites textuels (text-based rituals) from Tsili
Dolève Gandelman and Claude Gandelman, two researchers to whom my own
work is much indebted (see Dolève Gandelman & Gandelman 1994).

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modelled on Christian worship of the Virgin and the saints. This cult
linked the two Old Testament figures to each other: thus a woman
appearing before a Tribunal of the Inquisition in Rio de Janeiro in
1718, described Moses as “the son of Queen Esther”. 7 This mysterious
attribution of descent has become more comprehensible as a result of
the discovery of the Marranos of Belmonte. In 1988, Frédéric Brenner
filmed a ceremony that brought together in one single ritual the
remembrance of the foundational events of their history. It recorded
men and women assembled in a house with closed doors, all similarly
dressed in long white garments and with white head-coverings, all
jointly kneading dough and cooking “holy” unleavened bread. Asked
“what are you celebrating?” the woman who was leading them in
reciting prayers, and who was the first to sing the hymns which
accompanied the baking, replied as follows:
The exodus from Egypt and the arrival in the Holy Land... The exodus
from Egypt was at the time of the Inquisition. The people were driven
out of Egypt and went to the Holy Land. That is what I have been told.
The people arrived and held a festival. And the Holy and Blessed Queen
Esther demanded that her people should not be killed, and they were
not, and the people held a festival and that became the holy festival.
There, that’s all. 8
Marranism, itself a religion vowed to secrecy, thus made a woman
who had hidden her identity into a tutelary icon venerated by a strict
respect for the “Ayunos de la Reyna Esther”, the concealed fasting
7 Samuel Schwartz’s book La Découverte des Marranes, published in Lisbon in 1925,

has recently been reissued in France by Éditions Chandeigne in their Péninsules
collection, followed by Marrano prayers collected by the author. See also Wachtel
2001, a book on the conversos who emigrated to the New World, in particular
Chapter VII “Moïse, fils de la reine Esther” (Moses, son of Queen Esther). In
his later work on the same topic, Nathan Wachtel has turned to testimonies from
contemporary life stories. He is concerned with the “pathways in the Brazilian
sertao” of men and women who have kept the memories of Marrano customs,
which were mostly transmitted by women (Wachtel 2011).
8 The film by Frédéric Brenner and Stan Neumann “Les derniers Marranes de
Belmonte” (1989) [The last Marranos of Belmonte] provides a good illustration of the
liturgical functions of women within domestic rituals. Photos have also been
brought together in an album published by Éditions de la Différence in 1992
with text by Yosef Yerushalmi.

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206 Claudine Vassas
which she undertook, so it is said, at the court of King Ahasuerus.

This was, for the Marranos and their descendants, the extent of their
celebration of Purim.
It would be a mistake however to suggest that historical
conditions (the prohibition that led to secrecy and concealment) were
the only factors motivating the choice of Esther as an object of
veneration. In fact it reveals the nature of the link which, I maintain,
exists between the feminine and the sacred, whilst equally suggesting
that it is not simply a matter of the fulfilment of a function, even if
women do achieve the title “sacerdotisa”. Esther, Stella, the Shining
Star, is associated within Marranism with other recurring female
figures, amongst them “Sancta Saquiné”, who is invoked in a Marranist
prayer, known as the “Prayer of exaltation – Oraçao da formosura”,
through which women place themselves under her protection. In this
mangled version, we can still recognise the word Shekinah, the term
used more generally in Judaism as the name given to the feminine and
poetic manifestation of the divine presence since the withdrawal of
God. According to a long-standing tradition, the Shekinah shed light
on several women in the Bible, being particularly attached to them.
These included Sarah, Rachel and Esther, whom the Shekinah
wrapped in an aura like a veil, even taking on their likeness in some
circumstances, so as to protect them from men’s lust, whilst still
rendering them even more desirable and attractive.
The Shekinah is said to be present during Shabbat. Shabbat is made
holy by the role of the wife in a ritual intended to renew the covenant
between God and his people, and on that day the wife herself becomes
again the “fiancée” – the betrothed – which is another face of the
Shekinah. So, when a man and his devout wife come together, she is
there. 9 Every woman therefore contains a fragment of her flame.
9 On the reiteration of the covenant with Israel enacted by the Shabbat, following
the example of marital connection, see Gross 2015, especially the chapter entitled
“L’accueil du Shabbat, la fiancée et la reine” [Welcoming the Shabbat, the betrothed
and the queen] p. 111-125.

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“Male and female he created them...”

Celebrated by the Kabbalists in several forms, the feminine component
of the sacred finds its most intense expression through the person of
this same Shekinah, seen as the bride of God. Charles Mopsik, who has
devoted a lifetime of work to the study of the great texts of this
medieval form of Jewish mysticism, has demonstrated that it both
reintroduces a feminine element into the divine, and – through the
interplay of various “male and female” components, which, under the
name sefirot, contribute to the construction of a dynamic structure for
the divine – restores the notion of the “divine couple” to a leading
position. God, in this conception, is both feminine and masculine, as is
his creation, and so too are the beings he creates. Man and woman
stem from one being, originally both male and female, which was
divided into two halves (and hence sexed) when it came down into the
world. Everybody, however, has an androgynous soul, consisting of
interactive male and female elements on the divine model. It is only the
predominance of one element rather than another that allows for
classification into male or female. Moreover the force of attraction,
which propels souls to recreate the one by uniting the bodies that house
them, also operates between elements with the same nature. It is thus
the “feminine” element of the man that attracts him to the “feminine”
of the woman, and the woman’s “masculine” element that draws her to
the masculine of the man. In his final work, appropriately entitled Le
Sexe des âmes (The Sex of Souls), Charles Mopsik attempted to draw out
from this unusual concept what its more practical consequences might
be, and to discover how it might converge with what are nowadays
termed “gender theories”. He maintained that the notion of a
“gendered” construction of souls emerged from the tractates he
studied, and defended this idea in his thesis. Besides its originality and
its almost dizzying complexity, this notion suggests that fertility and
infertility are related to “deficiencies in desire” and implies that
“passage” from one sex to another is possible. When, as is sometimes
the case, a concept of this kind combines with the doctrine of
reincarnation, surprising encounters result. 10 We know that only men
10 Mopsik 2003.

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208 Claudine Vassas
(who are protected from Gehenna by their study of the Torah) may,
because of their sins, pass through the cycle of reincarnations (gilgul) to
achieve “purification”, and may therefore be reincarnated in the bodies
of women. This temporary cohabitation of two souls (one from
someone who has died and one from a living person) in one body has
come to be called dybbuk in Judaism. 11 However, it can be that, without
there being any punitive aspect to it, the soul of a dead woman
“returns” into the soul of a living woman and unites with it in order to
endow it with “sparks of new souls”. This possible fertilization of souls
between themselves which the Kabbalists call ‘ibour (impregnation/
pregnancy) seems to be applicable only to women, but to such an
extent that it is cited as the explanation for the conversion of infertility
into fertility in some women. For that to occur, at the moment of
union between the human partners – between a man and a wife who is
“masculine” because of a deficit in the feminine element – a female
soul must descend to the wife through the “miracle and secret of
‘ibour” and through her participation supply the element that is missing
for fertilization. 12
I read this work several years after having studied the episode,
narrated in the book of Genesis, of Jacob’s marriage to two sisters, of
whom one, Rachel, was infertile and the other, Leah, was fertile. I
immediately remembered the stratagems they deployed between
themselves, and with the help of two younger servant girls, to gain
the fertility that was missing in the one case and diminished in the
other. The episode when they make use of their servants as surrogate
mothers may be the first instance of assisted conception stricto sensu,
but it seems to me that a close reading of the methods utilized by
11 On the dybbuk see Fabre-Vassas 2006b. On the basis of a corpus of ancient and
modern stories, I showed how these tales effect a sexed division of roles. More
generally they induce consideration of the categories “male” and “female”, of the
qualities attributed to these concepts, their limits or their ability to acquire a sort
of transcendence through taking on other or multiple identities.
12 Mopsik 2003, chapter “La femme masculine” [The masculine woman]. Indeed,
this phenomenon is alleged to have occurred in the case of the temporary
barrenness with which the wife of Joseph Karo, a master of the Kabbalah in
Safed, was afflicted on account of her “masculine” soul, which was corrected
by just such a miracle.

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Rachel and Leah tells us about more than just this simple expedient.
They engaged in a circular transmission and dual exchanges intended
to cause a “fertile principle” to circulate amongst the four women, a
principle which had previously been blocked or immobilized by one
of them, and then to share it in a supposedly equitable way. This
interplay was based on the idea that female bodies can be open to
each other and porous and on the idea of a capacity for sexual
generation enhanced by forces of desire and longing. 13
Returning to Mopsik’s text and the argument he defends, we may
conclude, from what has just been said, that in this thought system,
“masculine and feminine transcend the social identification of sexual
difference”. Does this, however, fill the gap, and answer the question
raised by women, and modern women in particular? That is whether
there is, in Judaism, any acknowledgement, whether or not it has any
practical consequences, of the lack of congruence between the place
which is actually granted to women as social beings and the place
which is accorded to the “the feminine” as a value, a component of
religious life and of the sacred, indeed of the divine. 14
Even if, as Charles Mopsik shows, in Kabbalism, “masculine” and
“feminine” carry equal values which may combine without the
intervention of a “differential valency of the sexes”, 15 this has no
impact on everyday Jewish life. There, as in so many other religions,
there was, long ago, a shift in the balance between the two halves of
humankind, from a horizontal plane to a vertical one. The difference
between the two has been maintained by attaching to each of them
primary characteristics from which, in an always hierarchical manner,
their specific roles and functions are derived.
13 See Fabre-Vassas 2001 for this power which, according to a midrash, is said to
have allowed the two sisters who were both pregnant at the same time – Leah of
a male child and Rachel of a female child - to “exchange” their embryos in utero.
This is how Rachel gave birth to Joseph and Leah to Dinah.
14 It does not, however, seem that in the corpus of fundamental texts surveyed so
far, any one of them emanates from a woman, even if Kabbalistic mysticism
does accord an essential role to the feminine component on which Charles
Mopsik insists.
15 This is the term Françoise Héritier coined to describe the relationship between
men and women.

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210 Claudine Vassas
The double covenant

Far from being confined to Kabbalist groups, the conviction that
marriage is indispensable to ensure the completeness of every being is
widely held, and union with one’s predestined partner considered the
best kind. It is as if the image of the divine couple looms over that
formed by every human couple.
Judaism, as I said at the beginning, is dominated by the concept of
the Covenant between the chosen people and their God. The first
covenant, made with Abraham, instituted the rite of circumcision as a
“sign in the flesh”. The covenant was renewed after the gift of the
Torah to Moses. It was symbolized by the text of the law engraved
on “the two tablets of witness, tablets of stone written by the finger
of God” which definitively sealed the link to scripture. Henceforward
every Jewish man subject to these texts was incorporated into the
order of the Letter. However, what is not always sufficiently
acknowledged is the particular shape taken by the reiteration of
circumcision in this second covenant. Two verses of Exodus 4
(verses 24-25) give an account of this mysterious and dramatic
episode. While Moses, accompanied by his wife and young son, was
returning to Egypt to free his people from captivity, Yahweh sought
to kill them “But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin
and touched Moses’ feet with it and said ‘truly you are a bridegroom
of blood to me”. 16 Here, then, it is a woman who takes the initiative
of the life-saving circumcision, and perhaps follows it up by a second,
symbolic, one, by touching the foreskin to the “feet” (a term for the
male genitalia) of Moses, who was himself uncircumcised. Thus she
made him “bridegroom of blood”. 17
The divine covenant must thus be duplicated by a human covenant,
the two becoming indissociable and henceforward bound up together
16 Translator’s note: translation from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
17 Claude Lévi-Strauss tried to unravel the mystery of these two verses, regarding
his attempt as a “game”, and using the comparative method, so as to undertake a
parallel analysis of the Bororo people’s ritual of the bestowal of a penis sheath
(see Lévi-Strauss 1988). I have learnt that Jean-Christophe Attias has recently
published a “biography” of Moses – Moïse fragile (Éditions Alma 2015) which
assigns an important place to the action, and hence to the character of Zipporah.

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since, as we shall see, every Jewish man’s relationship to the sacred

writings was shaped as a “marriage to the Torah”. To optimize this
marriage, a very real marriage to a human partner is involved.
From this starting point, we can see that this model of the
covenant is shaped and renewed for every man by a series of rituals at
important points of his life (redemption of the first-born,
circumcision, bar mitzvah, marriage). These rituals, undertaken in
order to make him into a Jew, involve a life-long companionship with
the Book, with the Torah, which he must study throughout his life.
Henceforth the sacred text forms part of all the rituals that lead him
on towards adult life. Indeed, for the boy schooled “in the Torah” his
bar mitzvah, which makes him into a “betrothed of the Torah”,
includes the solemn moment of “going up to the Torah” to read a
portion of the text and comment on it. He will previously have put
on a prayer shawl for the first time and bound on the tefilim, the
phylacteries which contain verses from the bible. This initiatory rite
allows a Jewish man to approach the Torah for ever after, and
especially on the feast day of the Torah, celebrated like a wedding, at
which he may occupy the place of the “betrothed of the Law” or the
“bridegroom of the Torah”.
In Ashkenazi communities, this title is ritually bestowed on the first
and last “betrothed” of the year on the day of Simchat Torah, which
marks the passage between the end and the restart of the reading of the
sacred text. They are automatically required to undertake the office of a
reader of the Torah, having been proclaimed Chatan Torah (grooms of
the Torah). One of them – the youngest – reads the final verses. He is
immediately followed by the oldest, who follows on with the first
verses so that there is no break between them. The ritual intended to
ensure the continuity of the reading thus, by analogy with the
ceremony that will one day commit them to their future wife, seals the
link between the young men and the Torah. This joyful celebration
sometimes looks quite like a wedding. Occasionally a chuppah, the
canopy beneath which the wedding couple take their places, may be set
up over the Torah while the “bridegroom” performs the reading,
followed by the men dancing with the decorated scrolls and by other
rejoicings worthy of a wedding.

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212 Claudine Vassas
Equally the covenant between a man and a woman evokes the

same model, but on this occasion by suggesting an identification
between the new bride and the Torah. 18 Sometimes this is clearly
expressed and acted out during the wedding ceremony, which in
many ways resembles the joyful festivities of the Simchat Torah. This
occurs in the Hasidic community when the badhan, the cantor and
master of ceremonies directing the ritual, first celebrates the “dear
bride” in an epithalamium where she is described as a “Crown” and
then invites her to show the greatest joy by saying “you have
absorbed into yourself the perfect Torah of the everlasting”. After
the meal, when the time for the dance, the mitzvah tantz, arrives, he
starts it off by recalling the ceremony during which the young men
(bridegrooms of the Torah) have been honoured and invited to “go
up to the Torah”. The bride then dances with each of the guests and
then with the bridegroom, having first been joined to him by the
gartel, the long sash which the devout Jew winds around his waist
when he prays. It is this almost mystical dance which ensures that the
Shekinah descends upon the couple as they are joined and turning
together, and blesses their union.
The law of desire

Marriage, therefore, unilaterally validated the special relationship to
scripture from which women were dispensed. Their principal mitzvoth,
according to ancient tradition, are limited to lighting the Sabbath
candles, to raising the dough and to respecting the rules of purity.
18 Zborowski & Herzog (1992) devote some fine pages to how boys are taught the
Torah, and the associated rituals (p. 85, 103 and 193), as also to the linkage
between marriage and the Torah (p. 256-270). See also Baumgarten 1993. The
achievement of an ideal couple – a poor student intending to study and a
wealthier girl whose family could support her – was considered a mitzvah (a good
deed), to which the families might make a mutual commitment even before the
birth of their children. Since in any case marriages were organized when the
partners were still very young (but considered adult after physiological puberty in
the case of girls and for boys after the bar mitzvah ritual at the age or 12 or 13) it
could happen that the marriage contract set out the actual terms of this support
by the girl’s family.

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These rules, which weigh so heavily on the woman (and indeed on

the man, since ignoring them affects the life of the couple both on
earth and in the hereafter) are notorious both for their rigour and for
their perpetuation into the present day, even if in attenuated form.
For example the mikveh has now become only a ritual preceding
marriage. The constraints and limits which they impose on sexual
practices are said by the rabbis to be outweighed by the advantages
they bring. If sexual relations are regulated, that is because they affect
the balance of the couple. They are a duty from which the man
cannot abstain (however assiduous a student he may be!) and it is his
responsibility to care for his wife’s pleasure and provide it for her
(scripture clearly says this again and again). This assists conception,
which is regarded as a “divine blessing”, a benediction from God, a
sign that a couple who respect their duties towards him is approved
by him. The weekly celebration of the Shabbat, when all work is
forbidden, is a special time for the sex life of the couple. As we have
seen, God, who makes all things fruitful, blesses unions by making
them fertile, but infertility, which is always blamed on the woman, is
regarded as a curse. 19 In ancient times, barrenness could justify
polygamy, and still today, in ultra-Orthodox societies, may lead to
repudiation. This is an iniquitious law which, in 1999, provided the
Israeli film-maker Amos Gitai with the theme for his film Kadosh. In
the film, Meier and Rivka are a couple in love, but their harmony
begins to be dented by social and religious pressure (they follow the
Orthodox lifestyle) because, after ten years of marriage, they still have
no offspring. 20 Barrenness can of course only be blamed on the
19 And it is, of course, according to the numerous tractates which discuss them,
associated with failure to comply with the purity rules. For one of the most
rigorous examples, I would mention Evyatar Marienberg’s study of the Baraita de-
Niddah, a pseudo-Talmudic text from the fifth century CE on the rules around
menstruation, which, however, had a long-lasting impact (Marienberg 2012: 70-
71). It says “we may observe that the prayers of the matriarchs were immediately
granted when they kept the laws of niddah” (citing Sarah, Rachel, Leah...). The
author points out that the word niddah comes from two roots meaning
“rejection” and “expulsion”.
20 The lack of children authorizes the husband, according to Jewish law, to
“repudiate” his wife by giving her the get (divorce document). Women are

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214 Claudine Vassas
woman and on a sin related to compliance with the purity rules. In

spite of his love, Meier loses all desire for Rivka and all inclination to
continue his study of the Torah, to which he had previously been
assiduously devoted, while his wife provided for the household by
working as a bookkeeper. Persuaded by the rabbinical authorities he
decides to take another wife. Rivka is rejected and lost, and loses her
mind and her life.
This infertility is all the more tragic and unacceptable because the
woman is loved, and sexual pleasure and enjoyment are supposed,
according to rabbinical doctrine, to encourage conception. But in this
case it is a much-loved woman who is unable to bear children! Here
we find a paradox: the bible stories (the case-studies, we might say)
which, in this field, are the precursors of Freudian theories, provide
substantial illustrations of it. They make a distinction between the
woman one desires and the mother of one’s children. The Shabbat
may be seen as an attempt to reunite both these figures in one single
person. The wife who is the cook, who kneads the leavened loaf
which will appear on the table, on this day suspends all her culinary
and household duties, and arrays herself in her finest garments and
her jewellery to become again the “bride” whom her husband, in a
replay of the of the wedding night, will lead to the matrimonial bed.
These two images are embodied in Rachel and Leah, preceded in the
Bible by other rival pairs of women: the fertile Eve and the seductive
Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who refused to submit to him in the sexual
act and flew away, taking with her the name of God; 21 the two wives
of Cain, the unlovely Adah whom he is said to have taken for the
sake of offspring, and the very beautiful Zillah, whom he took for his
pleasure; Sarah, the beloved wife of Abraham and the Egyptian
servant Hagar... 22 The Kabbalists were even said to believe in two
nowadays contesting this unilateral measure and it is the object of some

rethinking on the part of the Rabbinical courts.
21 In the 1970s an American women’s movement (Jewish women, feminists,
Lesbians, and adherents of Jungian psychoanalysis) claimed the name and created
the periodical LILITH. They wanted to assert this archetypal figure as a positive
one – the incarnation of pure desire and insubordination – as opposed to a
submissive and fecund Eve.
22 On these female figures and pairs see Fabre-Vassas 2001.

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Shekinah, and their invocation resulted in a night-time ritual

celebrated by the Kabbalists of Safed which took the form of a
“sacred marriage” with the sisters Leah and Rachel. 23
Rachel in the end continues to be remembered as the barren
beloved, even though eventually, following her conflict with her
sister, and thanks to the use of mandrake root, she became fertile; a
fertility which proved fatal to her, since she lost her life from bleeding
in giving birth to Benjamin. For this reason, her person and her tomb
– near which mandrakes grow – are the object of a cult which still
today draws women who cannot have a child.
The body of the text

It might seem that this interplay between female incarnations of the
sacred is characteristic only of Kabbalist mystical thought. However,
I have made a lengthy study of the rituals which reveal, in particular,
the degree of proximity or distance that members of each sex
experience, not only in relation to the text, the written Word, but also
to the Sefer Torah, the sacred scrolls: my finding was that the scrolls
are imbued with female corporeality and, like women, possess an
irreducible ambivalence.
The identification of the Torah, the sacred text of the Law, with a
female body is not the prerogative of mystic groups alone; every
Jewish person can experience it.
In earlier publications, I have shown the almost exact analogy
drawn between the Torah and the body of a woman; the Torah is
dressed, adorned, decorated, danced with joyously and placed beneath
the wedding Chuppah. Other researchers have discovered this analogy
in other fields. Novelists have utilised this theme for short stories,
recounting the jealousy of a woman who was infertile despite her
efforts to make herself attractive, and how powerless she was in face of
her husband’s exclusionary love for the Torah. In La Légende du Scribe
[The Legend of the Scribe] the Israeli writer Shemuel Yosef Agnon
23 For further discussion of Rachel see Fabre-Vassas 2000. The ritual is described
by Gershom Scholem (Scholem 1966 [1960]: 156-169) and by Moshe Idel (Idel
1998: 308ff).

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216 Claudine Vassas
imagines a woman who, having abandoned all hope of becoming

pregnant, asks her husband (a scribe by profession) to write a scroll of
the Torah for her, and sets about making a baby layette in which to
dress the scroll. But she dies before she can finish it. 24
This analogy also perhaps allows us to understand the exclusion of
women, another paradox of Judaism. Indeed, if we pay attention to
the identification we have proposed, we can make sense of a certain
number of precautions, in relation both to women and to the Torah.
If they are seen as analogous, we grasp that the manufacture, the
writing and the handling of the scrolls (in life and death, for when
scrolls become unusable they are buried) obey rules of purity that are
as strict as those for women. The rabbis ask questions about the
nature of the holiness attached to them in the same terms. Just as the
body of the Torah contains the text, the sacred word, so a woman
pregnant with a child carries it folded up within herself “like a page of
scripture”. The foetus contains within itself complete knowledge of
the Torah. But, according to the myth, it instantly forgets it when it
comes into the world, and the little depression in every person’s top
lip is the mark left by the finger of an angel, who imprints it at birth
as a sign and a hint of this forgetting. The baby will henceforward
have to spend his lifetime relearning the Torah – “his”, because this
will only apply to the boy and the man.
In order to accomplish this, the first ritual in which he is involved
is the rite of circumcision, which introduces him both into the world
of men and into the order of the “Book”. If the tiny flow of blood
produced by the operation of circumcision is intended to bring into
existence the covenant between the newborn, God, and the
community of men, we should nevertheless consider the nature of
this blood. The Hebrew word for the foreskin (’orlah) alludes to the
idea of impurity, associated with the blood of the delivery. This
24 See Claudine Fabre-Vassas 1995. Emmanuela Trevisan Semi shows how the
identification between the Torah and either a female body (wife or betrothed) or
a male one (man or child) provided the Israeli writer Shemuel Yosef Agnon with
the plot for this story.

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explains the gap of seven days before circumcision takes place, as it

confirms the separation between the newborn and his mother. 25
This blood from the circumcision did sometimes offer a Jewish
boy the occasion for his first deciphering of the Hebrew scriptures.
In some countries, the bar mitzvah ritual included the unwrapping of a
scroll of the Torah which had been rolled up in the circumcision
cloth (mappah) of the newborn boy. This used to be the case in
Alsace, where the cloth was preserved to encase the Torah, after the
mother had used the bloodstains as an element in embroidery,
including ornamental designs of animals and flowers, but also
religious motifs (sacred objects, an important person carrying a scroll
of the Torah, a wedding couple beneath the canopy). Biblical verses
in appliqué Hebrew letters ran along the length of the band of fabric,
which when opened out looked like a scroll. And of course the
devout wish most frequently found amongst these embroidered texts
was “may God raise him up to study the Torah, to marry, and to
perform good deeds”.
Women preserve this precious cloth on which they have made
their mark in more ways than one – by sewing their name and their
sexual identity on to it in red thread and using a special embroidery
stitch which the Italians call “punto scritto” from its likeness to
writing. 26 They “present it to the Torah” two or three years later.
Then the cloth is solemnly taken to the synagogue by the father
accompanied by the child – the little boy – and handed over as the
first part of a ceremony that will be concluded ten or so years later.
25 Patricia Hidiroglu notes the parallel with the seven days of abstinence from
sexual relations with her husband following a woman’s menstruation. In her
Chapter IV (Sens commun et interprétations – Common sense and interpretations)
she examines the meanings attached to it (ranging from a psychoanalytical
reading to the use of a notion of “sacrifice”) and considers them alongside those
offered by her interlocutors (traditional practitioners and parents of circumcised
children), She shows that, while no approach rules out the others, there are no
grounds for preferring one meaning over the other. Nowadays, for people who
continue the practice of circumcision, the aspect of “identity” is more important
than the religious aspect (Hidiroglu 1997).
26 This red thread embroidery [in double running (Holbein) stitch] usually depicts a
stylised pattern of flowers and a text. See Klagsbald 1981: Mappah 128.

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218 Claudine Vassas
The cloth is then unfolded and wrapped around one of the Sacred
Scrolls in a way that ensures close contact with it. The cloth will serve
as its cover – some people do indeed say its “swaddling cloth” – until
the boy, who has now come of age, is invited to “go up to the Torah”
on the day of his bar mitzvah, and solemnly unwraps the cloth and
reads aloud the message from his mother before continuing with the
ceremony which makes him a “betrothed of the Torah”. 27
It would seem therefore that this contribution to the ritual by
women, which is a de facto sign of their belonging to Judaism, ensuring
that their inclusion within Judaism is transmitted between themselves
without the need for any ritual to “make them Jewish” – the direct
contact of this blood with the scroll of the Torah, with its
“nakedness”, and the blood’s contiguity to the scroll without any loss
of the scroll’s “holiness” – all of these testify to women’s belonging,
to their own blood’s belonging, to the same manifestation of the
sacred, and thus to its essential “impurity”.
What are we, then, to make of women, given that they are exempt
from the study of the Torah as a very consequence of their natural
identity? Perhaps we should see the fact that Jewish identity is
transmitted by women, to women, by blood, as a unique trait. Might
they be the carriers of the very essence of Judaism, without needing
rituals to constitute, enhance and maintain their identity?
We only need examine the way in which conversions to Judaism are
performed. In cases where a male Jew who had left the faith wished to
return to it (as might occur with a converso in sixteenth-century Spain),
since it was not possible to undertake a new circumcision, his nails and
27 The way in which a mappah (still called a Wimpel Torah – Torah’s swaddling cloth)
may be handed over to the synagogue can vary. There is an extensive
ethnographical description of the ritual and the customs in the study by Patricia
Hidiroglou (1997). She devotes a chapter to this, entitled “Gift of the Mappah
(circumcision cloth)” (p. 139-171), accompanied by illustrations (between pages
192-193) and by a catalogue of mappot identified in the archives of the
Association consistoriale israélite de Paris (ACIP) (p. 279-291). Under the
heading “mappoth” encyclopaedias of Judaism describe this custom and reproduce
the embroidery motifs, as do books on folk art. Two fine examples are illustrated
in the study by Freddy Raphael and Robert Weyl on the Jews of Alsace (Raphael
& Weyl 1977).

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his hair were cut very short. This is why, in Provence, those who had
undergone this procedure were known as “retalhat” [i.e. “cut again”]. A
woman merely needed to immerse herself completely in the mikveh
(ritual bath) to become, or return to being, a Jew.
This affinity which I am suggesting exists between femininity and
naturalized Jewishness was maintained within Christianity. A woman
who had given birth had to wait forty days before she could be
reintegrated into the church by means of a ritual (churching) which
was later abolished because it was felt to be humiliating. However,
just as by the blood of the birth she renewed her link with an inborn
Jewishness, in the same way the child might be considered a “little
Jew” until baptism. 28
Following this line of argument it appears that, as the carrier of an
identity which she transmits to her female children, a woman has no
need of rituals, whereas a boy has to undergo them repeatedly. 29 If
she already possesses the knowledge, the intrinsic skill, of the Torah,
she does not need to learn it over again. Of course this is an
unacceptable extrapolation, but it could exist, at least implicitly,
because some rabbis seem to have responded precisely to it by
insisting, against the general opinion, on the need for women to be
taught the Torah.
Men’s Torah, women’s Torah

The medieval scholar Rashi is often mentioned as having taught
women. Of course, as we have seen, the ideal of a scholar married to
a “devout Jewish woman”, who is content to fulfil her wifely and
maternal duties, was current until very recently. Moreover it has often
been the subject of satires, especially in Yiddish literature, where the
figure of the schnorrer, the Jewish pauper, is sometimes equated with
that of the poor student who cannot manage to marry, their devotion
to the Torah not always being sufficient to achieve a wedding in real
28 And sometime even until the child’s first communion. I discussed this in
chapter 5 of Fabre-Vassas 1993.
29 On this point the contribution of Riccardo Di Segni (1989) concerning the
matrilineal transmission of Jewishness is crucial.

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220 Claudine Vassas
life. Moreover, it is clear that men’s relationship to learning could

(depending on the surrounding society and on the period) be just as
varied as women’s relationship to lack of learning. There is no point
in looking for examples to prove that here or there “learned women”
existed. Indeed in this respect I do not think that Judaism was very
different from Christianity. Very useful monographs on particular
places, such as Angela Scandialato’s work on medieval Sicily,
demonstrate that in some great families, as a consequence of special
circumstances (family tradition, inheritance, widowhood), Jewish
women did become professional gynaecologists (not just midwives)
while others even opened yeshivoth (schools) while still others, as their
wills reveal, possessed books. Several researchers have attempted to
identify some of these women and draw them out of obscurity and
anonymity. I would mention the work of Danièle Iancu-Agou on
medieval Provence (one of the key places for Kabbalism) and her
work on several “exceptional women of the Middle Ages”. 30
Such cases are rare enough to be remarkable. For example
Glückel Hameln, a diamond merchant and businesswoman in
Hamburg in the seventeenth century, undertook, towards the end of
her life, the writing of a memoir to record her life for her children.
Underneath her apparent freedom, the dismay of a woman concerned
to put herself into a right relationship with God shines out. Her story
is not only an autobiography, but equally belongs to a literary genre
then current amongst women, known as tekhine (written
supplications). Jean Baumgarten has analysed these in the context of
other “writing activities” [prises d’écriture] by women. 31 The starting
point of this analysis was a form of publishing which, even if it was
sometimes concealed, caused some upheaval in the printing industry,
without, however, overthrowing male hegemony. The desire to
30 In particular Régine Abram Dhuoda, described by Danièle Iancu-Agou in Gravel

et al. 2014.
31 I have taken this phrase from Daniel Fabre (1993). See Hameln 1971. Amongst a
range of very varied approaches I would mention Daniel S. Milo “L’histoire juive
entre sens et référence. Et Glückel?” and Hervé Le Bras “Glückel Hameln une
paysanne de l’Allemagne du Nord”, in Boureau & Milo 1991, p. 145-167 and
p. 169-184 respectively. Natalie Zemon Davis paints a quite different picture
(Davis 1995).

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distribute the texts of the faith to an audience which had not

previously had direct access to them produced, amongst the
Ashkenazi, a unique innovation. 32 As soon as letterpress printing had
been invented, the sacred texts, including the Torah and
commentaries on it, were translated from Hebrew to Yiddish. This
recognition of a spoken vernacular as a language in its own right was
very rapidly associated with the emergence of a specific literature
meant for women. Amongst this literature was a famous book – the
Tseno Ureno [Tseenah urenah], still today referred to as the “women’s
Torah”. A particular typeface was created for this purpose and for
this language, which was known as “waybertaytsh” – women’s Yiddish.
This immediately allowed women, mostly widows or daughters of
printers and already familiar with the skills of the trade, to translate
and produce books. One of them, Rivka Tiktiner, a young woman
from Prague, produced a rhymed version of the Pentateuch for
women, which she entitled “Simhes Toyre – the Song of the Torah”.
Having had the Torah made available to them through the simple
mechanism of translation from Hebrew to Yiddish, women could
now rejoice in it amongst themselves, through the free and joyful
celebration of the Simhes Toyre to which she invited her readers, who
were thus allowed to dance with the Torah (in the form of her book,
of course) as men did on the day of its festival...
The Torah is a ritual text, the most precious of all objects.
Handling it, undressing it, stripping it naked, all risk causing damage
which might result in the loss of its sacred status. The object is thus
subject to precautions, kept out of sight, and in particular protected
from women whose mere presence, it is believed, might bring about
deterioration.
Let us go back to the celebrated “rejoicing in the Torah” as it may
be observed today. Let us suppose we are in a synagogue at the point
of the greatest explosion of joy, when the curtain of the Holy Ark is
32 On the various translations made at the same time and the massive distribution
of the Torah and the book of Esther, see Baumgarten 1993: 141, 200-214 and
351. Moreover works written by women for women were so successful that a
number of male authors used female pseudonyms. It is therefore difficult to
know exactly what the proportions of women were. See Fabre-Vassas 1995.

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222 Claudine Vassas
opened and the great “sefer Torah” appear. Each scroll is royally dressed
in a heavy red or blue cloak embroidered with gold thread, crowned
with a double coronet embellished with little bells, and adorned with a
silver pendant on a chain. The men who can grasp them hold them in
an embrace as if they were a full-size (woman’s) body and immediately
start to dance with them. Those who have not been able to take hold
of one crowd round them, as if pulled into the circle of the dance, and
try to touch them as they go by. Meanwhile the women, who, up in the
gallery, have all stood up together as soon as the scrolls appeared,
stretch out their hands towards all these splendours, then touch their
hands to their faces and press them against their eyes in a gesture of
deep devotion. Some of the women weep, all the more overcome by
emotion because they cannot approach the Torah or touch it and may,
according to the customary law, only enter the synagogue if they are
sure that they are not “impure”. Maimonides, however, in his treatise
Sefer Ahavah about the rules and precautions surrounding the Torah,
sets out the criteria under which a scroll could lose its status. He
maintains that “any impure person, even [a woman in] a niddah state or
a gentile, may hold a Torah scroll and read it. The words of Torah do
not contract ritual impurity.” 33 All that is required, he explains, is that
they wash their hands.
Although nothing in the texts of the law justifies such rigour, the
maxim that women must be kept away is stated, repeated and
respected like a real prohibition, in spite of modern developments.
Women’s current claims to the same rights as men meet with
resistance in the name of the venerable tradition which unites every
Jewish man to the Torah. The very popular work Shulchan Aruch
asserts that every man, in his devotion to the Torah, repeats and
strengthens the first covenant of the people of Israel, which was
celebrated through the mediation of Moses “under the chuppah of
Mount Sinai”. 34 Moreover in this work anyone who abandons the
33 See Maimonides Mishneh Torah, book Sefer Ahavah. Translator’s note: Sefer Ahavah
Chapter 10 paragraph 8. English text from
http://www.chabadoceandrive.com/library/article_cdo/aid/925432/jewish/Tef
illin-Mezuzah-and-Sefer-Torah-Chapter-Ten.htm.
34 The Shulchan Aruch is a four volume work by Joseph Karo which examines the

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Torah is compared to “an adulterous man”; as we have seen above,

the learning of the texts is accompanied by rituals which unfold as if
there were betrothal and marriage to the Torah. 35
Multiple femininities
A conflict thus exists around everything related to the place of
women in the public sphere; their visibility, their access to worship, to
study, and to the offices which stem from them, including the
rabbinate, linked as it is to training in Hebrew, but also the right to be
a shohet (a ritual slaughterer) or a mohel ( a circumciser). 36
Over the last forty years, women’s claims to this place have had
some impact on Judaism in general, with the outcome varying
according to the branch of Judaism involved (liberal or orthodox). 37
The conflict is being waged on several fronts, and in particular for
ritual “parity”. This involves, for example, the creation of the bat
mitzvah for girls along the lines of the bar mitzvah for boys, and also
the right to embrace the scrolls of the Torah and dance with them on
the day of their festival, the right to put on the tallit (prayer shawl)
and to surround oneself with texts by wearing the tefilim as men do.
However, even within liberal Judaism, some young couples have
trouble in admitting that a woman may “touch the Torah or wear a
talit or tefilim”, which is a crucial point in the light of all that has been
said above.
rules which govern daily life. It was printed in Venice in the sixteenth century.
An abbreviated text is known and translated into French as “La Table dressée”.
Translator’s note: although the work is known in English as “The Prepared
Table” no English translation seems to exist.
35 See also the contribution “Torah and children: symbolic aspects of the
reproduction of Jews and Judaism” in Goldberg 1987, p. 107-132.
36 Several entries under these headings in Bebe 2001 deal with these various points.
37 I shall not discuss the different branches of Judaism in detail. Despite their
differences they take similar approaches to the growing role and position of
women in religious life. See Tank-Storper 2015. Some women, asserting their
allegiance to Judaism even while insisting upon their lay status, are actually
forming study groups along the lines of the male religious beth midrash.

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224 Claudine Vassas
The conflict is at its fiercest in Israel. It is waged by the “Women

of the Wall” group in Jerusalem, who, ever since 1988, have been
demonstrating on the first day of each month, determined to
confront hostility, and occasionally even violence, as they defend the
right of women equally with men to take their place at the Western
Wall, the kotel. 38 Their demands have a very strong symbolic
dimension. “Making an exhibition of themselves” (as their opponents
put it) in a sacred place, supposed to be the remnant of the ancient
Temple, by appearing wearing a talit and tefilim and carrying a Torah
only compounds the scandal caused by women contravening the
Code of the Law. A further abomination (according to Deuteronomy
22: 5) is that they are breaking the rule of differentiation between the
sexes. If they wear male appurtenances, do they not look like
transvestites? The Israeli women who defend their right to be in that
place, to be present bearing the symbols that were formerly reserved
for men, think their determination is all the more legitimate because,
since the destruction of the Temple, the Shekinah, that female
incarnation of the presence of God, discussed several times above, is
thought never to have left the Wall. 39
It was the liberal movements which first, by granting women the
right to become rabbis, did away with the exclusive privileges
attached to this male function. Women from various branches of
Judaism, however, and within the framework of various religious and
lay groupings, have, for several decades, been taking action to defend
their rights to receive instruction in the sacred language as well as
bible study. From this they have drawn arguments showing that many
of the prohibitions, exclusions and limitations to which they are
subject are not to be found in the foundational texts, but are the
result of masculine and misogynist interpretations. To confront these
readings, they therefore propose a review of the foundational texts,
seeking to emphasize the major parts which women have played, and
38 On this point see Storper-Perez & Goldberg 1989, photos by Frédéric Brenner.
39 Ibid. It seems as if their demands may have produced a result. Following a vote in
their favour in January 2016, the Israeli government has undertaken to install a
mixed space in the area, which was previously divided into two separate parts by
the ultra-orthodox, who had a monopoly of control there.

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they are pressing for a re-evaluation of their roles and functions. They
cite the matriarchs and female prophets, including Sarah, Miriam,
Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Huldah and Esther, the latest in date... 40
Indeed, even the fleeting figure of Zipporah, whom we met at the
start of this article, has been invoked when women demand their
right to the office of mohel. They advance the argument that she was
one of the first circumcisers mentioned in the Bible. 41
I have myself discussed some of them in my publications: Rachel,
Leah and Esther. Their aspirations, their initiatives, their choices, which
thwarted the fate for which they were destined, have led me, alongside
committed feminist scholars who had initially considered them
“subversive” or “branded by the seal of illegitimacy”, to recognize in
these biblical women “figures of desire” asserting themselves against
the divine project and liberating themselves from the male paradigm. 42
This article has therefore also been chiefly concerned with “female
religious life”, and with a possible convergence between approaches
which do not a priori derive from a shared endeavour.
Translated by Anne STEVENS
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Presences of the feminine within Judaism

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26485963

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Presences of the feminine within Judaism

It is generally acknowledged that a long-standing tradition within

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discrimination between men and women.2 These features provided the

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It was as a result of my initial interest in what might seem a rather

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A study along these lines deepens our understanding both of the

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6 Gérard Haddad suggests a psychoanalytic interpretation of the seder, reducing it

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7 Samuel Schwartz’s book La Découverte des Marranes, published in Lisbon in 1925,

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which she undertook, so it is said, at the court of King Ahasuerus.

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“Male and female he created them...”

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The double covenant

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since, as we shall see, every Jewish man’s relationship to the sacred

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Equally the covenant between a man and a woman evokes the

The law of desire

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These rules, which weigh so heavily on the woman (and indeed on

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woman and on a sin related to compliance with the purity rules. In

nowadays contesting this unilateral measure and it is the object of some

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Shekinah, and their invocation resulted in a night-time ritual

The body of the text

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imagines a woman who, having abandoned all hope of becoming

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explains the gap of seven days before circumcision takes place, as it

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Men’s Torah, women’s Torah

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life. Moreover, it is clear that men’s relationship to learning could

30 In particular Régine Abram Dhuoda, described by Danièle Iancu-Agou in Gravel

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distribute the texts of the faith to an audience which had not

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Torah is compared to “an adulterous man”; as we have seen above,

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The conflict is at its fiercest in Israel. It is waged by the “Women

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Translated by Anne STEVENS

BAUMGARTEN, Jean. 1993. Introduction à la littérature yiddish ancienne. Paris: Éditions du

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