notably Judith Baskin, have noted that the rabbis fashioned a Jewish world
that regarded men as the ideal and women as an inferior other. Thus, Baskin
argued, the rabbis dealt with women only insofar as they came in contact
with or affected the lives of their fathers, husbands, brothers, or sons. The
Mishneh, she noted, presented women largely as possessions to be acquired by
their husband from the bride’s father – thus precluding a wife from initiating
a divorce. Women, in other words, had little or no autonomous identity.
Other scholars, noted Judith Hauptman, revised some of the recriminations
against rabbinic tradition by noting a measure of improvement in the status
of women in the Gemara in comparison with the status of women in the
Mishneh. The Tannaitic denial to women of any participation or say in mar-
riage and divorce arrangements, was modified in the Talmud to preclude a
women being married against her will and allowing a woman who wanted a
divorce from an unwilling husband to obtain a divorce with the intervention
of the Jewish community.
More problematic perhaps was the Mishneh’s unsubstantiated exemption
of women from all positive time-bound commandments. When coupled with
injunctions that restrict the performance of a public or communal ritual to
those who are themselves obligated, this exemption eventually resulted in the
exclusion of women from communal roles in the synagogue and as witnesses
in Jewish tribunals. This became the basis of women’s second-class status in
Jewish communal life until the twentieth century.
The Babylonian Talmud also contains a political theory of the diaspora,
most notably a justification of accommodating foreign rule in the diaspora by
completing the sublimation of national impulses. Drawing on Jeremiah’s
instruction to the exiled, Samuel reaffirmed the legitimacy of serving a
Gentile sovereign by deriving the principle dina di-malchuta dina(“the law of
the land is the law”). A similar sentiment is expressed in a Midrashic com-
mentary on the Song of Songs, in which God extracts a promise from Jews in
exile not to rebel, not to attempt to hasten the arrival of the Messianic Age,
and not to return prematurely to Zion. In exchange, God extracts a promise
from the nations of the world not to persecute or place undue burdens on the
Jews. This willingness to submit to foreign rule is manifest in the revaluing
of the story of Hanukah. Once this was a celebration of a miraculous
Maccabean military victory, but the rabbis of the Talmud reinterpreted the
miracle in ritualistic rather than military terms: divine intervention allowed
one day’s worth of purified olive oil to burn for eight days.
Yet despite the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud at the end of the
fifth century, and the emergence of Babylonia as a center of Jewish schol-
arship, the constituency of Rabbinic Judaism was still decidedly limited,
in two respects. First, the rabbis were an elite intellectual caste, atypical
of the mass of rank-and-file Jews. The latter practiced more diverse forms
of Judaism that combined the teachings and dictates of the rabbis with
The rise of Rabbinic Judaism 59