Journal 3 in 2003
Bezugspunkte: Europa / Israel / USA

weiter I Übersicht I zurück

Mark Cohen
New Impulses for Male Academics
American and European Jewish Feminism in Comparison

In his very interesting paper, Moshe Shalvi bemoans, correctly, the long absence of women's voices in history and cheers recent developments in social history that have pointed to “the wealth of material contained in humble, everyday documents,” material that has enabled scholars to give women a place in history long denied them. As an American Jewish historian who studies such sources, who has experienced the feminist revolution in American academia, and who davens in a minyan in New York where Jewish feminism pays a prominent role, I would like, first, to share with you some tidbits from my research on Jewish women in a particular place and time, the Islamic middle ages, the period more or less when Maimonides and other men dominated the Jewish intellectual landscape. Then I will reflect on how these three facets of my experience, the historical, the academic, and the Jewish feminist, interact in my personal life.

The historical material consists of documents from everyday life discovered in the famous Cairo Geniza at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the responsa of Maimonides himself. We must keep in mind, of course, that the stories of women who acted on their own or in the world of men are exceptional, “Ausnahmen bestaetigen die Regel,” to quote from this conference’s manifesto, exceptions that prove the rule of male dominance and power in premodern Jewish societies everywhere. But they are not less interesting for that reason, for they illustrate the possibilities for women to take their lives into their own hands even in such a closed world of male control. In this respect, they constitute historical symbols of the potentialities for women in modern times.

The most famous, or I should say infamous woman in the Geniza is Wuhsha, whose Arabic name, coincidentally anticipating her love life, can be translated “Désirée." Daughter of a Jewish banker from Alexandria, she lived in the eleventh century in Cairo, more specifically Old Cairo, where the synagogue of the Geniza is located. Like the even more famous Glickl of Hameln, who lived in Germany from 1646-1724, Wuhsha was a successful businesswoman, a broker, moving about the company of men. Wuhsha was not totally unique. The documents indicate that other women might have had similar success and independence.

Wuhsha, however, was particularly unique in her scandalous personal life, having born a son out of wedlock just about the time of her divorce from her marriage, from which she had a daughter. Among various papers relating to the life and activities of this independent woman we have her will, showing her to be quite wealthy and giving away about one-tenth of her assets to charities, but, so she writes, “not one penny” to her son’s natural father. She never married him, doubtless because he had another wife in his hometown of Ascalon, Palestine, who would not grant him permission to take a second spouse.

Related to this is a fascinating example, documented in the Geniza, of how the Jewish law of marriage and divorce could be “bent” in favor of women, in effect giving them power that male-dominated Judaism traditionally denied them. In the Islamic world during the middle ages Jewish men imitated their surroundings and practiced polygyny, that is, multiple marriage. This was actually nothing new because the Bible, mirroring general Near Eastern mores, implicitly condones plural marriage. In the Arab world, Jews also imitated their surroundings by taking slave-girls into their homes as concubines, also practiced in biblical times, as we all know. But both polygyny and slave-concubinage could erode marital harmony as it sometimes did with our forefathers in the Bible.

Thus, in Egypt around the beginning of the twelfth century, we find marriage contracts containing a novel clause stipulating that the husband may not take a second wife nor keep a slave-girl against his first wife’s will, on penalty of having to divorce her at her, not his, initiative. This was somewhat radical because in Jewish law divorce is unilaterally the husband’s prerogative. The rabbis of Egypt recognized the social abuses against women resulting from assimilation of Islamic family mores and adapted the law to protect Jewish wives.

Some fascinating insight into how common women might take control of their lives, swimming against the current of male-dominated and halakha-determined society, emerges from two fascinating responsa of Maimonides contemporary with the Geniza documents. They relate the case of a young wife and mother. Her husband was frequently absent, rendering her nearly destitute because he failed to leave her money to live on. She was strapped financially, with a growing family, first one, then two children (the husband kept coming home and impregnating her). In desperation, she turned to working as an elementary school teacher with her brother (unusually for a woman, she had learned to read the Bible, possibly from her husband). The husband, who had returned to find his wife living in the apartment that doubled as her schoolhouse, protested her working and living out of the house, especially since her brother had gone away and left the business in her sole hands.

Jewish law frowned upon wives working as teachers of young children, fearing possible sexual improprieties with the children’s fathers when they came to fetch them from school. The husband threatened that if his wife refused to abandon her job and come home to live with him as a dutiful wife, he would take a second wife. He did not wish to divorce her, for that would mean alienating her share in the family home to another man if and when she remarried. Maimonides, in his responsum, could not flout Jewish law. The wife should not be teaching, he rules. But he offers her some astounding advice: forfeit your marriage settlement in return for a divorce document and then you may teach whomever you please.

From Maimonides I return to my opening remarks, trying to relate my historical research to my personal experience in the present. I think that I have become more sensitive in my studies of the Jewish past to women’s and gender issues because of my experiences with two aspects of feminism in the United States. I have taught at the same university for thirty years. It is a major university, one of the three or four most elite institutions of higher learning. When I came to Princeton in 1973, less than a handful of women held tenured posts. There were many young women in assistant professor and lecturer positions, for instance teaching foreign languages, but hardly any at the advanced professorial rank.

My own department, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, numbered about a dozen members and had one woman assistant professor, in fact she taught Hebrew, and one female lecturer who taught Persian. During the late 70s and early 80s things began to change, both generally within the university and in my own department. More women were promoted in the university to tenured positions from within and more senior women scholars were brought in from the outside. A women's studies program was inaugurated. In my own department, the number of women grew slowly, until, today, we have eight women and nine men, five of the women on long-term contract.

What happened? How did my university change and so rapidly--I have to add that Princeton now has a woman president (the last president was a Jewish male), a woman provost, and a woman dean of the undergraduate college (the last two happen to be Jewish)? Is it men’s good will or something else? I think it is a bit of both. The something else is Affirmative Action. By law, we in the university are required to seriously consider woman candidates. By law, we must report for each search how many women applied and how many we interviewed (we must do the same for African-Americans, for Asians and Asian-Americans, for people with Spanish surnames, and for other disadvantaged minority groups--Jews, incidentally, are not included, for obvious reasons).

We report these statistics to the United States Department of Education. There is oversight, in other words, and this oversight has the potential of affecting government grants, especially to departments like mine that regularly receives federal money for its teaching of critical Middle Eastern languages. To be sure, one tries to select the best candidate, but one gives highly qualified women a greater opportunity in the competition than before because the law says so. I have experienced this pressure--which I consider a positive pressure--while chairing over the years several searches in Hebrew, all of which ended up with female appointments. In other words, I believe that the progress women have made in American academia has very much to do with legislation, legislation that has made men more cognizant than in the past of women’s right to a fair share of the academic market.

Indirectly, I suppose, this has a little to do with Jewish feminism, insofar as my department has made some appointments of women to its Jewish studies section. My own main exposure to Jewish feminism, however, comes from my life outside the university. I live in New York and belong to an egalitarian minyan of about 225 adult members. In this minyan, called Minyan Ma’at, women enjoy full participation. They lead services, leyn from the Torah, chant the Haftarah, deliver sermons, and occupy leadership positions, all equally with men. There is a large number of ordained female as well as male rabbis in the group, none of whom function as rabbi for the minyan, for the minyan is entirely voluntaristic, with no paid professionals. This kind of an atmosphere conforms with my conviction about the equality of women and men in all sectors of life and coincides with and nourishes my approach to women in my profession. I believe, moreover, that the advances women have made in American Judaism in the past couple of decades is part and parcel of the success they have had in the workforce in general as a result of progressive legislation.

Much has been said at this conference about the difference between America and Europe, particularly as regards feminism. America is different, not better, but different. It differs from Europe because it is a non-traditional society with a very different history. We had no middle ages to outlive, no ancien régime of entrenched estates to overthrow (the British represented the old world, but that old world was far away and went away quickly upon the departure of the British at the close of the American Revolution). In the nineteenth century, American society did not, indeed could not develop a new, monolithic tradition, faced as it was with massive waves of immigration from so many different parts of the world--people who themselves were often escaping the constraints of lingering old-world traditions. In recent decades among Jews, lack of a medieval tradition, of a ghetto past, has operated in tandem with the general fluidity of gender roles in American society to propel the Jewish feminist movement along a progressive trajectory.

These, then, are the reflections of an American Jewish historian on thirty years of observing and experiencing the feminist revolution in academia and in Judaism, which has, in turn, had an impact on my scholarship. I do not think that these things are at all unrelated.

Rabbi Prof. Dr. Mark R. Cohen - historian at Princeton University, this year (1993) Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, numerous publications, including "Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages" (1994)