The Talmud from a woman’s point of view

For much of her adolescence, Gila Fine was fascinated by the Talmud. However, because she was a girl in a small right-wing Jewish community in London, she was outright forbidden to study this fundamental text. 

Now, she has become one of the most influential voices when it comes to Talmudic studies, especially when looking at the Talmud through a female lens. Though she is not trained in rabbinics ‒ she, in fact, studied English literature ‒ she has amassed a wide following teaching the Talmud, which started in a friend’s living room. 

So as Midrasha Melton celebrates 20 years of Midrasha Melton adult Jewish learning in Cape Town, and launches the International Scholars Programme, it seems a no-brainer to have Fine give four lectures, on Tuesday evenings from 12 May to 2 June. 

Her book The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic: Rereading the Women of the Talmud, is a literary exploration of female figures in the Talmud. 

“Women in the Talmud are almost always anonymous; they are the mother of Rabbi X, or the daughter of Rabbi Y, or the wife of Rabbi Z. In fact, in all of rabbinic literature, there are just 52 named women, as opposed to more than a thousand named men,” she said. 

In the book, she examines six women from the Talmud, many of whom are marginal, misunderstood, or briefly mentioned. At first glance, these women seem to fit negative stereotypes of “bad” or unfeminine characters. But a closer reading reveals they are actually complex and nuanced figures, and their stories suggest that the rabbis held unexpectedly progressive ideas about women, gender, and relationships. 

Fine remembers that one night as a young teen, after her parents had fallen asleep, she crept over to her father’s bookcase and pulled a volume of the Steinsaltz Talmud, a groundbreaking edition that makes the Talmud far more accessible to readers. 

“I didn’t even open it, I just stood there holding the volume, honestly waiting for the lightning bolt to strike me down,” she said. 

But that never happened. She completed her high school and national youth service. She went to seminary to study Talmud. 

“I had many questions, many struggles growing up ‒ about Judaism, about my place as a woman in Judaism, about the truth of the tradition ‒ and I held on, believing that one day I would study Talmud, and that is where I would find the answers. I finally got to study Talmud, and everything fell apart.” 

She was shocked at how human the Talmud actually was; the text had all of the imperfections, the trivialities, the multiplicity of voices, the wild associations, everything that characterises human conversation. “At 19, when you’re looking for the truth, with a capital T, that discovery was devastating,” she said. 

In fact, she struggled with her religion throughout her teens. That struggle started three days before her 12th birthday. She was at her grandparents’ home and was told to do nothing but write her Batmitzvah speech. Her family had gone out for the day, while she was left behind with a pile of her grandfather’s books and strict instructions to write her speech. 

“Not knowing much about, well, anything, I reached for the first book on the pile, The Book of Legends, a collection of the stories of the Talmud and other rabbinic works, organised according to theme,” she said. 

She opened the theme of women, thinking she would get valuable insight going into her Batmitzvah. 

“Three stories in, I felt a little uneasy; by the tenth, I was in tears, sobbing as only a nearly-12-year-old can. I was so hurt, so deeply offended that the rabbis, the architects of my religion and heroes of my childhood, could have such a low opinion of me and my kind,” she said. 

The women seemed to her weak, irrational, petty, promiscuous, and vain. “When woman was created, the Devil was created with her,” one of the sources read. Woman was the mother of all vice, Fine said. 

That day fundamentally changed her. Her simple, unquestioning faith was gone, and questioning of everything began. 

“I fought to make peace with a religion I so loved, knowing that its founding fathers felt about me the way they did. I spent many years questioning, searching, and reading everything in sight. I went to seminary, which didn’t really help. In fact, it wasn’t until I went to university to study literature that I began to find the answers I was looking for,” she said. 

“Learning how to read Talmudic stories as Talmudic stories ought to be read, I discovered that they aren’t at all as they first seem; that there is a great deal more to the heroines of the Talmud than initially meets the eye; and that the rabbis had some surprising ‒ so as not to say proto-feminist ‒ ideas of marriage, childbirth, female sexuality, and what it means to be a woman in the world.” 

Fine explained that it was in fact this struggle that pushed her to write The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic. She wanted to write a book for her 12-year-old self. 

“And for anyone who, like me, might be fighting to make peace with their religion. Anyone who might be struggling with the place of women in Judaism, or any marginalised minority in Judaism. One of the central claims of the book is that when the rabbis tell a story of a woman, nine times out of 10, they tell a story of another with a capital O. Anyone who, opening the Talmud or the Torah, is confronted by the inevitable and sometimes heartbreaking gap between what they believe and what they see in the text,” she said. 

Fine sees a direct line between English literature and why she loves the Talmud. “The stories of the Talmud are literary masterpieces; they are exquisitely crafted and intricately stylised. You have whole worlds of passion and emotion, conflict and drama, held together in three short lines. There’s something uniquely challenging and extremely fun about trying to unpack a Talmudic narrative, especially if you approach it, as I do, from a literary standpoint,” she said.