Pardon the double entedre, but I'm writing a "quickie" blog post about yesterday's article in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, titled "Everything you always wanted to know about JEWISH SEX but were afraid to ask your rabbi."
Bad news: the article's author complained about how much sex BOOK III - RACHEL contained. Good news: a review complaining about too much sex is sure to sell lots more copies. You have the link above, readers, what do you think?
I had a great time speaking in Canada and Colorado last week, and I took advantage of 6 lengthy plane flights, 3 train rides, 2 bus shuttles, and lots of sitting around waiting for them to get quite a bit of research reading done. I concentrated on information about life in 3rd-5th Century Roman Palestine, which was documented by Jewish, Christian, and Roman sources. Unfortunately [but understandably] much more has been written about Jews living in Roman lands than in Persia.
I realize that I must be careful about anything I extrapolate from Jewish life in Palestine under the Romans to the lives of my Babylonian characters in RAV HISDA'S DAUGHTER, yet the two communities were strongly connected and shared many similarities. Jewish merchants and scholars regularly traveled between the two lands, and Babylonian Jews made pilgrimages to Israel. Jewish law applied to both places. The Romans left local Jewish rule, including responsibility for collecting taxes, to the Patriarch, just as the Sasanians allowed the Exilarch to administer his own bureaucracy. Both Patriarch and Exilarch were considered princes, whose families descended from King David.
But there were differences. With the destruction of the Second Temple, the Patriarch no longer shared power with the priests in Israel, but his authority was limited by the Sanhedrin, the high court of rabbis. The Exilarch, however, had governed Babylonian Jewry for hundreds of years, and while he was happy to employ rabbis as judges, he refused to countenance any threat to his sovereignty. Babylonian rabbis tended to fall into two camps - those who accepted the Exilarch's rule and served him, and those who thought the rabbis should lead the Jewish community.
Of course the biggest difference was in their overlords, Sasanians vs. Romans. Jews had lived peaceably in Babylonia for 1000 years, and as long as the Sasanians continued the same tolerant treatment as previous rulers, Jews remained loyal citizens who paid their taxes and followed Persian law. Sasanian rule was stable, with Shapur I and Shapur II each reigning for over 30 years, and most Jews made a decent living in agriculture, most on their own land. Not so in Palestine. Because the Jews in Israel had revolted against Rome several times, they were thus viewed as potential troublemakers whose country must be occupied by Roman troops. Roman rule was highly unstable, with new emperors taking power on the average of every two years, and with each new ruler came new oppressive laws, higher taxes, and a complete change in local authority as supporters of the previous emperor were purged. With each new regime, the Jews of Palestine became further impoverished, and many emigrated to Babylonia.
Another difference between Romans and Sasanians, one that greatly impacted their Jewish population, was their state religions. Judaism and Zoroastrianism had much in common, and for the most part, Persian kings did not allow the Zoroastrian priests to persecute his Jewish subjects. In fact, it was the Christians in Babylonia who suffered from persecution. Third-century Rome was officially pagan, but the Church was gaining power, and in 303 CE, the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. More on this in my next post.
It was an interesting experience reading Julius Newman's Agricultural Life of Jews in Babylonia [written in 1930] vs. Moshe Aberbach's Labor, Crafts and Commerce in Ancient Israel [written in 1996]. Although much of the subject matter was similar, the two styles couldn't be more different. Rabbi Newman writes exactly like you would expect for a proper Englishman's PhD thesis.
For example "Beer was very largely drunk in Babylonia … Mar Yanuka and Mar Kashisah, the sons of Rav Hisda, related that they were once visited at their home, most probably either in Sura or Kafri, by Amemar, who is known to have lived in Nehardea. At the termination of the Sabbath, it was found that there was no wine in the house for recital of Havdalah. They offered him beer instead but he would not use it. The following year Amemar again happened to stay with them, and again there was no wine in the house, and they proposed to use beer for Havdalah. From the foregoing it clearly emerges that beer was a common drink in the district of Sura, in the southern portion of Babylonia, but was little used in the northern portion around Nehardea." So can we can use He'Brew beer for Havdalah today?
Professor Aberbach not only writes in a more casual style, but he appears to have a sense of humor. In the section on Undesirable Trades he mentions, "barbers to whom women [who did not indeed attend beauty-parlors which were, as yet, for better or for worse, unknown to womankind] would bring their children for haircuts" and "bath-attendants, who prepared the public baths for female [as well as male] visitors, carried women's bathing clothes to the baths, and presumably enjoyed opportunities for peeping Tom exercises denied to ordinary mortals."
As for fascinating information that I've learned recently, it seems that women in the Talmud used a large number of perfumes and cosmetics [rouge, eye shadow, skin whiteners, hair dye] as well as various oils to soften their skin and depilatories to remove unwanted hair from their armpits and pudendum. Ouch! All these beauty products tended to be supplied by peddlers who specialized in women's merchandise and who sold them door-to-door. No surprise that these peddlers had the same lecherous reputation with their clients as the more modern traveling salesman with the farmer's daughter.
Now that I'm home again, I'm trying to digest all the reading I did. I finished Agricultural Life of Jews in Babylonia, and read most of Labor, Crafts and Commerce in Ancient Israel. Definitely learned some interesting stuff, but not as much about women as I would have liked. I read that women prepared their bread at home, and then took it to a communal oven to bake. Interestingly, it was men who bought the family's meat, not women, perhaps because the rabbi was in charge of supervising the Jewish butchers. Women do not seem to be agricultural workers, unless they assisted their husband and sons on a small family farm. Women were expected to work indoors rather than out, so that one of various female occupations was that of "treasurer" for the family business [nice to know that Jewish women weren't completely consigned to cooking, cleaning, and clothing]. I'll have to make sure that Hisdadukh gets taught math, perhaps by her mother.
Babylonia is located in what is now Iraq, with most Jews living in the incredibly fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The map here is from before Talmudic times, but it's the best I could find in a short search of the web. Agricultural land in this area was highly productive, and the most commonly cultivated plants were cereals [wheat and barley] and pulse [peas and beans], while the most profitable were grapevines [for wine], sesame [for its oil] and saffron. However the most popular local foodstuff were dates, with wild date palms found throughout the area. Dates were eaten as is, with the inferior fruit fed to animals, but some of the date crop was fermented into a local beer. In fact the Talmud explains that Rav Hisda became wealthy through manufacturing and selling date beer. Apparently some date palms were so fruitful that one tree's worth could pay a man's taxes for a year.
Several large canals connected the Tigris to the Euphrates, in addition to numerous smaller canals leading off the large ones. Due to this complex irrigation system, agricultural production did not depend on rainfall to the same extent as in Israel. In fact, floods were more common than drought, and when the canals overflowed their banks, nearby residents hurried to pick up the thousands of fish stranded in their fields. This happened so regularly that Rava allowed Jews to salt fish they'd collected this way during a festival week. What a scene that will make. Imagine Hisda's household waking at dawn to learn that the Nehar Hindieh has flooded during the night; quickly they dress, grab hemp bags, and rush to the date groves where they and their neighbors run around frantically collecting the dead and dying fish. Doesn't that sound like fun?
Tomorrow I'm off to the East Coast for 5 days: Garden State Women's League for Conservative Judaism education day in Clark NJ, then a scholar-in-residence weekend in Bensalem PA, followed by lunch & learn at JPS offices in Philadelphia proper on Monday. [see my website schedule for details] I don't do too many weekend programs; it takes me away for 3 days and I sell the same amount of books as at a single event. But Congregation Tifereth Israel really wanted me, and they made it worth my while.
Best thing about this long distance traveling is that it gives me a chance to catch up on reading all the photocopies I've been making recently; I mean there's not much else to do on a long flight or while waiting in the airport. Now I have to choose what research to take with me. Definitely "Agricultural Life of Jews in Babylonia," but should I also take "Labor, Crafts and Commerce in Ancient Israel" or maybe all those articles about Magic Bowl incantations? Or I could grab everything I have filed under "Talmudic Life."
Yes, besides the many and various books on my shelves [including all 73 volumes of the Schottenstein Talmud], I have a file cabinet full of photocopies. In addition to Talmudic Life, folder subjects include Biographies, 200-400 CE Jewish Hx, Talmud/Bavel Hx, Women in Talmud, Sex, Women Hx, Talmud on Marriage, Niddah/Mikvah, Medicine, Magic, Astrology, Science/Technology, Persians/Zoroastrians, and Magic Bowls.
I go through these pages with a colored marker to highlight the important stuff, while the really important stuff gets a post-it tab to mark the page. At the moment the majority of my articles are still waiting to be read, but I'm slowly working my way through them. I try to be careful to copy the title page as well as the call number and specific library it came from, just in case I need to find it later [I learned this the hard way while researching RASHI'S DAUGHTERS].
But already I goofed up. Having made a pdf file at HUC's library without the book's title page, I had no idea where those pages came from. The heading at the top of the page, "chapter nine: rabbis in society," wasn't much help, and neither were the notes at the bottom. Then my husband came to my rescue by suggesting that I type one sentence into the Google search bar on my computer. Bingo! Up came Google Books with the entire page along with the title and author – "Sages and Commoners in Late Antique Eretz Israel" by Stuart Miller. A quick search of the HUC library website turned up the call number: BM 177 M5.5.
Another way Google can be helpful to the historical novelist: its maps site can tell you how long it will take a person to walk from one place to another, as well as how long on bicycle or horseback. It worked fine when I was researching France, but trying to get directions in Iraq is useless.
Back to research. Having found what I hope are all the Talmudic references to Rav Hisda's daughter, next I needed to see what the Talmud says about her father and two husbands. First I did a quick online search, looking for both Hisda and Chisda. Then I checked various books that contain biographies of the sages, such as Who's Who in the Talmud, The Encyclopedia of Talmudic Sages, Stories of the Sages, and Encyclopedia Judaica. As I began to copy the most interesting information, I soon realized what I was up against. While there are probably only a few dozen mentions of Rami bar Hama [her first husband], Rav Hisda appears hundreds of times, and Rava [her second husband] is easily the most quoted sage in the Talmud, with almost 4000 citations. Oy!
I learn that Rav Hisda married the daughter of Hanan bar Raba [she was Rav's granddaughter as well], and that they had 7 sons. Five were rabbis [Mari, Pinchas, Hanan, Tachlifa and Nachman] and two not [Yenukah and Keshisha]. Eventually I will need to determine, or invent, their order of birth, but it appears that Hisdadukh and her sister were younger than their brothers. I will also need to create wives for them, women with unique personalities and talents. However I will not need to create husband for Hisdadukh's sister; interestingly, she married Rami bar Hama's brother Ukva.
The various biographies will give me much of the basic data I need about my characters. But not necessarily the interesting tidbits that could lead to a scene in my novel. So I turn to Jacob Neusner's opus magnum, the five-volume "History of the Jews in Babylonia," published in 1969. His opinions on the Talmud's historicity may be outdated, but nobody else has such an extensive index linking sages to subject matter [over 100 entries for Rava in Volume 4 alone], as well as 20 pages of legal decisions made by Rava, arranged by Talmud tractate.
Here I learn that Rami and Ukva's mother was a widow who manipulated her sons by continually promising her estate first to one and then to the other. I learn that Rami had a sister who married a rabbi and that Rava had a sister who rarely visited him. Rava also had a brother, Rav Seorim, who was with Rava when he died, and a son, Rav Joseph, with whom he had such an angry argument on Erev Yom Kippur that neither of them ate the final meal that night. But all this info needs to be confirmed. For example, tractate Beitzah 29b says that Rami bar Hama's daughter married Rav Ashi, which is highly unlikely since Rami died before 295 C.E. and Rav Ashi wasn't born until after 350.
