More about leaned Jewish women in the 11th-12th centuries. Rashi's daughters weren't the only women who studied Torah or carried on a profession. His granddaughters, Hannah, Miriam, and Alvina, were scholars as well. According to Shoshana Zolty's "And All Your Children Shall Be Learned - Women and the Study of Torah in Jewish History," other educated women of this time include: Miriam, wife of Rabbenu Tam [Joheved's son]; Bella, sister of French scholar Isaac ben Menachem; the nameless wife of French Tosafist Samuel ben Natronai; Dulce, wife of Eleazar ben Judah of Worms and their daughter Bellette. Abraham ben Hayim of Falaise and Hayim ben Isaac of Vienne both decided issues of Jewish Law based on the testimony of their wives.
In "Written Out of History: Our Jewish Foremothers," by Emily Taitz and Sondra Henry, we learn of noted women scholars such as: the daughter of Samuel ben Ali of Baghdad, who taught Torah and Talmud to her father's students from behind a screen; Miriam Shapira Luria, who lectured in Talmud in Italy; Dulcie of Worms, plus Rashi's daughters and granddaughters. We also learn of Jewish women doctors – Sarah of Giles and Rebecca of Prague. Jewish businesswomen apparently thrived in England, or at least their names were better recorded there: Mirabel of Gloucester, Avigay of London, Belassez of Oxford, Henne of York, and Belia of Bedford. Of course there were countless other Jewish women merchants, financiers, doctors, and even scholars, whose names are lost to us.
Proof of Jewish women's high status in medieval Ashkenaz is demonstrated by 3 takanot [edicts] of Rabbi Gershom that radically altered their position in marriage - for the better. First, despite what it says in the Torah and Talmud, a Jewish man may not have more than one wife at a time. Second, though the Torah states that a man may divorce his wife if he finds something unseemly in her [i.e. for any reason] and she has no recourse in the matter, Rabbi Gershom decreed that a man may not divorce his wife without her consent.
Third, and most extraordinary, Jewish women in this time were given a mechanism to divorce their husbands. Should this be her desire, the Jewish wife went to the bet din [Jewish court] and announced, "I find this man repulsive, I cannot live with him." The court replied, “No one should have to share a basket with a snake [!]" and compelled the husband to write his wife a get [divorce decree] by threatening him with excommunication. Considering that most Jewish men earned their livelihood by trading with other Jews, excommunicating him essentially put him out of business. Which is why I never saw a case where a Jewish man refused his wife a divorce if she wanted one. Pretty amazing stuff considering the problems a woman has getting a divorce in Israel today.
So now I’m going to talk about Jewish women's high position in the 11th-12th centuries. For all practical purposes, this means Ashkenazi women [living under the Christians], since Sephardic women [living under the Muslims] don't seem to have improved their status like their Western European sisters did. As I researched the religious lives of medieval Jewish women, in order to determine the truth of legends about Rashi's daughters being learned and wearing tefillin, I found plenty of evidence that they were learned. I also discovered that some women in his community did wear tefillin, and that some women wore tzitzit, blew the shofar, dwelt in the sukkah, and performed circumcisions – all ritual obligations from which women are exempt [and rabbis in Sepharad would say forbidden]. Jewish women attended synagogue as often as men, and there were indications that Ashkenazi women were permitted aliyah to the Torah.
Torah education was not forbidden to these women, and apparently was common enough that an anonymous student of Peter Abelard in 12th century Paris was quoted as saying, "If the Christians educate their sons, they do so not for God, but for gain, in order that one brother, if he be a cleric, may help his father and mother and his other brothers … But the Jews, out of zeal for God and love of the law, put as many sons as they have to letters, that each may understand God's law … and not only his sons, but his daughters."
Jewish sources at this time give us two quotes about learned women:
1. "He [the father] must teach her Torah, for if she does not know the laws of Shabbat, how can she keep them? And the same goes for all the commandments, in order that she be careful in their performance."
2. Regarding a father teaching a daughter more advanced texts; "Women whose hearts have drawn them to approach the Holy One - surely they may ascend the mountain of the Eternal. Scholars should treat them with honor and encourage them in their venture."
I posted previously on Christian women at Judy Chicago's Dinner Table, and ended by mentioning a Hebrew woman, Rachel. Sure enough, when I found the page that described Rachel in more detail, her bio read, "Rachel was one of the daughters of Rabbi Shlomo ben Isaac, a preeminent biblical and Talmudic scholar. One text quotes Rashi as saying that, because of his infirmities, Rachel acted as his secretary, taking dictation from him. This would have required her to possess knowledge of Hebrew, which would have been unusual for a woman of that time. It suggests that she must have been trained by her father, as that would have been the only way for her to have acquired such an education."
One of the fascinating things I discovered about the 12th Century Renaissance was the many women involved in it, as opposed to the later Italian Renaissance where women were pretty much nonexistent. In Judy Chicago's monumental work of feminist art, The Dinner Party, 39 prominent women, from the dawn of history through the 20th century, are represented at the table. Four of them lived in the 11th-12th centuries - historian Hrosvitha of Germany, physician Trotula of Salerno, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Abbess Hildegard of Bingen. Sadly, the 4 women before these hail from the 5th century and those after from the 15th-16th, demonstrating what an isolated island in time this was for accomplished women.
Besides our 4 headliners, Judy Chicago lists over 100 other women of note for the 11th-12 centuries. Because daughters were allowed to inherit positions of leadership at this time if they had no brothers, some women ascended to rule medieval kingdoms, including Margaret of Scotland, Marie of Champagne, Blanche of Castile, and Matilda of England. Many more were sovereigns of duchies, baronies, and other small fiefdoms - including two mentioned in my novels, Adelaide du Bar and Adela de Blois, widows who ruled in the name of their young sons.
Our time period also saw a sudden blossoming of veneration for the Virgin Mary, with Notre Dame cathedrals rising in many European cities. The increase in women's religious status saw the population of convents mushroom with women eager to study theology. Great abbesses included Heloise of Paraclete [Peter Abelard's lover], Clare of Assisi, Agnes d'Harcourt, and Gertrude of Germany. Many were members of royal families, and as such were allowed the rights and privileges of feudal barons. Women also studied medicine and became physicians, as noble ladies preferred to be treated by one of their own sex.
Among the long list of Christian women in The Dinner Party, I was surprised and delighted to discover the name Rachel [ca 1070-1100] - Hebrew legal scholar. Rachel’s nationality wasn't given, but who else could she possibly be except the heroine of "Rashi's Daughters: Book III?"
The 12th Century Renaissance in Western Europe occurred during, and partly as the result of, the peace that existed between the final Norse invasion and the start of the One Hundred Years War. Ironically it was through the efforts of two unknown inventors that this period of prosperity, tolerance and intellectual accomplishment was set in motion. Midway through the tenth century, the ideas of covering both a plough's wooden nose and a horse's delicate hooves with metal precipitated a revolution in agriculture. With the power of a horse hitched to his sturdy steel-plated plough, a peasant was able to work the heavy soil deeper and faster. Productivity skyrocketed and for the first time in its history, these Christian lands yielded more food than its inhabitants could eat.
Peace and surplus produce meant that not all men were needed to work the land and defend it. Men [I'll get to women later] of intelligence and curiosity became traveling scholars, flocking first to cathedral schools, and later to newly created universities in Salerno, Paris, Bologna, Cologne and Oxford to study law, medicine, the arts, and theology. Education in Christian Europe was controlled by the church and entirely in Latin. [Trivia alert! At the start of the 11th century, there were four written languages in Europe - Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic - each with its own alphabet.] But by the end of the 12th century, non-clerics had put various vernacular languages to the Latin alphabet, creating ballads, romances, and all sorts of written works outside of the Church’s purview.
During the 11th century, some of these traveling scholars found their way to Spain, where they discovered an entire corpus of Greek scholarship that had been preserved by Muslims who translated it into Arabic and often improved upon it. The greatest works of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Archimedes, Euclid, and Plato, previously thought lost, were quickly translated into Latin and devoured by Western Europe. With them came the writings of Muslim scholars who had advanced the study of philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine while composing poetry on the side. An intellectual revolution soon arose in the West that continued for over 200 years.
For the next few weeks, I'll be posting about the extraordinary, yet mostly unknown, time in which my three "Rashi's Daughters" novels take place - what scholars today call the "Twelfth-Century Renaissance." To quote one of these modern scholars, Studying the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century recaptures the early Middle Ages from the dustbin of Dark Ages ignorance where all the centuries between the Fall of Rome and the better-known Italian Renaissance of the 15th Century are thrown."
This vibrant and vital period in Europe's cultural and intellectual history actually lasted about 200 years, 1050-1250, during which great strides were made in social organization, technology, intellectual pursuit and education. Scholarship and learning were vigorous, the liberal arts flourished in towns, cathedrals, monasteries, and the newly founded universities and therein lay the salvation of the Latin classics and laws, and rediscovery of Greek philosophy, literature, and sciences, and the influx of Arabic learning that was so influential in the later eruption of learning that led to the greater Renaissances and modern times.
Most books and Internet articles about the 12th century focus on scholastic advances brought to Western Europe by Christian men like Adelard of Bath, Anselm of Canterbury, Albertus Magnus, Peter Abelard, and Hugh of St. Victor. , but great as these men were, this renaissance was far more universal. It took place in the Levant, in Spain, in Byzantium, involving Jews and Muslims, as well as women [probably not Muslim women though]. Some of these historical figures show up as characters in my books, especially the final volume, "Book III - RACHEL," which partly takes place in Toledo, Spain, where King Alfonso set up a school for Muslim, Jewish and Christian scholars to translate the ancient Greek classics from Arabic [original Greek versions having been lost] into Latin.
Today is my introduction to the subject. Next post will concentrate on the Christian men of Western Europe, and get them out of the way, so to speak. Then the really interesting part will begin.
Finally I'm starting to deal with all the Rashi's Daughters business I had to let slide when my father died. Now Shiva is over, my sister and I have been up to his house to do a quick inventory [plus empty the fridge and freezer], and his banks and credit cards have his address changed to my house. So I take a deep breath, write a long to-do list, and tackle my email in-box as I count down 8 weeks until RACHEL's book launch on August 4.
I wonder what the print run will be; I guess it depends on whether Costco orders any copies. They took 10,000 when MIRIAM came out in 2007, and had the good fortune [or good foresight] for those books to arrive in stores the week between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. I was in my local Costco 3 times that week [not just to check on my books] and every copy was gone by my third visit, the day before Yom Kippur, when I picked up our shul's "break-the-fast" order.