RT Article
T1 Misogyny revisited: the Eve traditions in Avot de Rabbi Natan, versions A and B
JF AJS review
VO 36
IS 2
SP 207
OP 255
A1 Polzer, Natalie C. 1957-
LA English
PB University of Pennsylvania Press
YR 2012
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1650680538
AB This interdisciplinary study of gender in Avot de Rabbi Natan, using a theoretical frame from cultural anthropology, is an enterprise of feminist historiography. Focusing on ARNB's singular formulation of aggadic accounts of Eve's sin, it proposes a possible historical trajectory of Jewish women's experience and how that experience was perceived, manipulated and/or negotiated by the Jewish men who were the formulators and transmitters of rabbinic tradition. Generally speaking, traditions about women and gender in ARN demonstrate a stance on the natural, religious and social subordination of women to men, which I will designate “patriarchal stewardship.” Yet the Eve traditions, especially those in ARNB, go beyond articulating this androcentric stance on gender differentiation and social hierarchy; they negotiate a cognitive, religious problem: why do women, and women alone, suffer and die in the process of biological reproduction if “be fruitful and multiply” is a divine imperative in Genesis 1:28?
K1 Women
K1 Jewish rituals
K1 Sin
K1 Men
K1 Redaction
K1 Traditions
K1 Misogyny
DO 10.1017/S0364009412000177