Rabbinic Reproduction: An Anthro-Textual Perspective

• In Event: Compelling Reading: Access, Discipline, and Marginality in Reading Rabbinic Texts

Abstract

Schwartz and Tong will bring feminist, anthropological, and philosophic lenses to a discussion of b.Qid. 29a-b. Schwartz will talk about Torah study as a practice of filial kinship and the exclusion of girls and women from learning Torah both as a means of educational exclusion and as exclusion from the social and reproductive practice of family-based learning, which serves as a model for rabbinic education: i.e. learning as a practice of lineage making. The rabbis’ reproductive practices iterated reproduction in patriarchal ways that undermined women’s abilities to be participants in their lineage at all. This issue will be explored not only for its late-antique relevance, but because of the models of personhood that this generates, which can be seen to endure in contemporary struggles among women who are trying to become participants in today’s rabbinic lineage, either as scholars or as rabbis. Tong will respond by drawing in talmudic intertexts to explore the way the Gemara re-writes/re-interprets received tradition in order to collapse categories and render certain forms of gendered possibility unthinkable. Engaging continental philosophy, Tong seeks to challenge the authority of the Rabbis by exposing the gender ideology guiding their rewritings/reinterpretings of their own received tradition, and also to challenge the minoritized status of Jewish Studies within the broader Humanities. The proposal is that this sub-field is no mere heritage project, or "area studies" but is a unique resource for asking the questions that matter not only to the Jewish community, but to all of humanity (and beyond).

Author

• M Adryael Tong, Fordham University