Now in her early 40s, Fine (pictured below), who lectures in rabbinic literature at the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem, has built up a reputation as a creative interpreter of talmudic fables. Their deceptive simplicity often belies a more complex viewpoint. Her book, The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic, which focuses on six stories, some just a few short lines, is a masterclass in reading aggadah, the narrative, non-legal parts of the Talmud.
Stories that appear to show a negative treatment of women by the sages on first reading reveal a far more nuanced understanding.
“You have in rabbinic literature for the most part patriarchal thoughts because rabbinic literature, the Talmud specifically, is ultimately a product of a patriarchal age and it is very steeped in that kind of thinking,” she explained.
“But then you also have a not insignficant number of moments of what I call in the book proto-feminist sensitivity — where the rabbis show a great ability to sympathise with what it meant to be a woman in the world, in a way which was completely ahead of their time. My book focuses on these latter moments.”
Author Gila Fine[Missing Credit]
Her elegant and lively style makes her work a delight to read. As its title — an allusion to Jane Eyre — suggests, it also shows a breath of interest, comparing talmudic depictions of women with those in the literary canon and modern culture.
Her method draws on the field of “archetypal criticism” — which looks for recurring “character types, motifs, plot devices, with the assumption that if you find an archetype in stories throughout history and across culture, it is because they are an expression of deep fear or fantasy. We humans work through our fears and fantasies — what Jung calls our collective unconscious — by telling stories.”
Hence you find the shrew, the femme fatale, the prima donna etc. The rabbis “adopted archetypes from neighbouring cultures but they were also brilliant at adapting these archetypes, taking these recurring figures or motifs or plot devices and putting their own unique rabbinic spin on them,” she said.
That she has come to be a teacher of Talmud was “providential”, she believes. “English born but not bred” — her family made aliyah when she was two — she went to a right-wing Orthodox girls’ ulpanah (high school) where the Talmud was “taboo”, reflecting the stance of the sage Rabbi Eliezer that it was “licentiousness” to teach Torah to girls. She did begin to study Talmud at seminary, but it was only when she went to the Hebrew University to read philosophy and literature that she found an approach that enabled her to see it in a whole new light.
Learning to read rabbinic stories as literature, she “realised for the first time that these stories are deeply literary in a way that may religious Jews don’t realise. They read these stories as didactic, or historical, which is an even worse mistake.”
She discovered that “these stories were not at all what they first appeared to me to be all those years ago — there was a great deal more to the women of the Talmud than initially met the eye and that the rabbis had some surprising views of marriage, childbirth, sex and what it meant to be a woman in the world.”
Post-university, she devoted herself to other’s people’s books as a ghostwriter and editor. One year attending a lecture during an all-night learning event on Shavuot, “out of absolutely nowhere I had this really strong instinct of ‘why I am not doing that?’” The next day at lunch she fell into conversation with another young woman who invited Fine to give a Talmud shiur to her friends.
When she finished, they immediately asked her what she was going to teach the following week. And so her career her as an educator began. She was an instant hit at Limmud UK when she appeared a decade ago — she is planning to return to speak this winter.
During one trip to London, her talk was attended by Rabbi Lord Sacks, which was, she said, “terrifying”. As editor-in-chief of Maggid, the Jewish thought imprint of Koren Books, she had been working closely with him. When the talk ended, he “came up to me and said, ‘You have to stop editing my books and you have to go and write your own’.”
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The early rabbis formed an intellectual vanguard, she believes, whose radicalism for the time led them “in some ways to be proto-feminist, to subvert patriarchal thought”. But as rabbinic culture became mainstream, over the centuries the radical edge was lost and the more subversive voices concealed.
While she sounds a caveat — one should take care not to retrospectively impose modern feminist views on the material — she believes that sensitive analysis can detect those voices afresh.
Meanwhile, there has been a “sea-change” in the Orthodox world. When her baby sister went to the same high school ten years later, Talmud was on the curriculum.
“It’s very easy for Jewish feminists to look forward and see how far we still have to go and be frustrated and resentful,” she said. “And we do have a lot more to do. But I’m a big believer in also looking back and seeing how far we have come… I have no doubt that we are going to be ok.”
Gila Fine’s book The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic: Rereading the Women of the Talmud, Maggid Books and Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, is out now at £22.99. She will be in online conversation with Rabbi Dr Raphael Zarum at the London School of Jewish Studies on Monday, September 16 at 8pm: details from lsjs.ac.uk
