Midrashic women
Subtitle: formations of the feminine in rabbinic literature
By: Judith R. Baskin.
Series: Brandeis series on Jewish women
Publisher: University Press of New England
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Hannover
Language: eng
Number of pages: 232
Subjects: Women in rabbinical literature; Aggada -- Commentaries; Midrash -- History and criticism; Feminism -- Religious aspects -- Judaism; Women in the Bible
Genres: Commentaries.
Description: "While most gender-based analyses of rabbinic Judaism concentrate on the status of women in the halakhah (the rabbinic legal tradition), Judith R. Baskin turns her attention to the construction of women in the aggadic midrash, a collection of expansions of the biblical text, rabbinic ruminations, and homiletical discourses that constitutes the non-legal component of rabbinic literature.

Examining rabbinic convictions of female alterity, competing narratives of creation, and justifications of female disadvantages, as well as aggadic understandings of 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 also consciously constructing women as other and lesser than men."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [165]-212) and indexes.
Table of contents: title: Distinguishing differences : the otherness of women in Rabbinic Judaism; title: Constructing Eve : midrashic revisions of human creation; title: Eve's curses : female disadvantages and their justifications; title: Fruitful vines and silent partners : women as wives in Rabbinic literature; title: Why were the matriarchs barren? : resolving the anomaly of female infertility; title: A separate people : Rabbinic delineations of the worlds of women.