A unique look at how non-legal rabbinic writings imagine women and their lives.

While most scholars offering gender-based analyses of rabbinic Judaism concentrate on the status of women in halakhah (the legal tradition), Judith R. Baskin turns her attention to the construction of women in the midrash, arguing that these sources offer a more nuanced and complex view of women and their actual lives than the rigorous proscriptions of legal discourse. Baskin examines rabbinic convictions of female alterity, creation narratives, and justifications for female disadvantages, as well as aggadic positions on the ideal wife, the dilemma of infertility, and women among women and as individuals. Baskin shows that rabbinic Judaism, a tradition formed by men for a male community, deeply valued the essential contributions of wives and mothers while consciously constructing women as other and lesser than men.

Judith R. Baskin is director of the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies and Knight Professor of Humanities at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Pharoah’s Counsellors: Job, Jethro, and Balaam in Rabbinic and Patristic Tradition and editor of Jewish Women in Historical Perspective and Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing. Her scholarship includes dozens of articles on ancient and medieval Judaism, gender and the Bible.

“Baskin does a superb job compiling and explicating primary texts. She makes difficult Judaic texts available and cogent, and places them in the context of the most recent feminist theory.”
–Vanessa L. Ochs University of Virginia