The Religion of Traditional Ashkenazic Women: Some Methodological Issues

Abstract

What does it mean to study women's religion? How are we to define our subject matter? How are we to understand the relationship of the history of women's religious life and practice to the history of particular religious traditions? I shall explore these questions within the context of a very specific topic: the religious life of Ashkenazic (Central and Eastern European) Jewish women in the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, as seen through the popular religious literature of the period. This literature, which was addressed primarily to women, was in Yiddish, the vernacular of Ashkenazic Jews, rather than in Hebrew, the sacred language, understood almost exclusively by men. My thinking about the different approaches one could take to this material, and the different uses to which it could be put, was stimulated by a lecture given by Joan Scott on the study of women's history. Using a framework of analysis suggested in part by Scott's work, I will distinguish between three general approaches to the study of women's religion: (1) those that add an account of women's religious lives to an already existing history of Judaism; (2) those that consider women's Judaism within the framework of other groups usually omitted from the history of Judaism; and (3) those that seek to transform our understanding of Judaism through the incorporation of the perspective gained from the study of women's religion.

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