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REVIEWS
| Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe. By Avraham Grossman. Trans. Jonathan Chipman (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2004. xv plus 329 pp. $29.95).
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| This important and pioneering book presents a panoramic overview of the lives of Jewish women in the Muslim and Christian worlds of the Middle Ages, as well as in the transitional environment of medieval Spain. Grossman, Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, brings a thoroughgoing expertise in the legal, exegetical, ethical, social, and literary sources of medieval Jewish life to this systematic exposition of what can be surmised about that voiceless female half of medieval Jewry who left virtually no written documents of any kind. A regrettable weakness of this abridged translation of a Hebrew original, published in 2001, however, is that much of the scholarly apparatus and bibliography, as well as many excerpts from primary texts, are absent in the English version. |
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The topics discussed in Pious and Rebellious include the image of woman in rabbinic literature, the parameters of medieval Jewish family life and marriage, woman's domestic and social status and her place in economic and religious life, female education and roles in family religious ceremonies, violence against women, and the position of the divorcée and the widow in various Jewish societies. Grossman also examines what the sources have to say about women's behavior in moments of crisis, such as the First Crusade of 1096. Each chapter begins with a brief discussion of the relevant biblical and talmudic heritage underlying the topic at hand, followed by a comparative survey of Muslim and Christian practice. Grossman then goes on to examine separately the evidence for Jewish communities in the Muslim world, Germany and France, Spain, and occasionally Italy. |
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