A single poem attributed to a woman has reached us from the wide literary corpus of medieval Hebrew literature.¹ This lonely female voice, from the latter part of the tenth century, is a wife’s intimate recollection of her husband’s departure from Spain. Evoking the sad scene of parting with the exchange of farewell gifts, she conceals a subtle complaint for being deserted with a child:

Will her love remember his graceful doe,

her only son in her arms as he parted?

On her left hand he placed a ring from his right,

on his wrist she placed her bracelet.

As...

Issues of gender pervade almost every aspect of medieval Hebrew love lyric: What is the gender of author and audience? What is the gender of lover and beloved? Is it heterosexual or homosexual love?¹ Which gender roles do the partners assume? What is the real/imaginary power balance between the sexes? Who speaks and who remains silent? What are the moral and aesthetic values on which the love discourse is grounded? And whose values are they? What sexual politics do they serve? Whose interests do they tend to?²

Alongside these gender-involved concerns, another question arises, and this is the gendered identity...

When Touchstone, Shakespeare’s clever fool in As You Like It (right in the middle of the play, act 3, scene 3), wishes to express his dissatisfaction with Audrey, his gullible and unsophisticated beloved, he says: “Truly, I would the Gods had made thee poetical.” And when plain Audrey inquires: “I do not know what poetical is; is it honest in deed and word? Is it a true thing?” Touchstone answers: “No, truly; for the truest poetry is most feigning ... if thou wert a poet, I might have some hope thou didst feign.” The jester wishes his beloved to be...

“The maleness of the Man of Reason,” claims Genevieve Lloyd, “is no superficial linguistic bias. It lies deep in our philosophical tradition. . . . Reason is taken to express the real nature of the mind, in which, as Augustine put it, there is no sex.” However, the implicit maleness of our ideals of Reason can be easily brought to the fore, says Lloyd, even when they appear to be sexless. “Our ideals of Reason have historically incorporated an exclusion of the feminine, and that femininity itself has been partly constituted through such processes of exclusion.” Similarly, maintains Elizabeth Grosz:...

Based on a false syllogism, this witty anecdote aims to show how evil, that is, woman, is unavoidably built into the familial-social system.¹ The contradiction in terms inherent in the concept of “a house without evil” encapsulates two of the main concerns of medieval misogynist discourse: one is the discord between the negativity of woman and the positive postulate of marriage; the other is the contrariety between the philosopher’s spiritual path and the indulgence in matter which is caused by family life. In the male philosopher’s view, these were practical and indeed most excruciating problems.

In medieval ascetic thought (Christian...

A famous saying in Mishna Avot (81) warns: “Do not talk much with the woman. . . . He who talks much with the woman brings evil upon himself, and is idle from learning the Torah, and will end in hell.” In his commentary to Avot, Maimonides added: “It is well known that conversations with woman are mostly on matters of copulation. This is why it was forbidden to talk with them much. And the ‘evil that one brings upon oneself’ is the increase of passion. And by ‘end’ the sages meant that this talk will incite him to rebellion,...

Men disguised as women and women in men’s attire make their appearance in the four Hebrew maqāmāt discussed in this chapter. As a motif, cross-dressing (along with masking, veiling, disguising, and imposing) belongs in the typology of hide-and-seek games prevalent in the maqāma.¹ These motifs serve as most vital narrative devices. They thicken the plot, provide dramatic turning points, create tension, and produce humor and relief. However, in being a gendered form of disguise, cross-dressing the-matizes gender issues and is, thus, an effective clue to cultural interpretations of sexuality.

In her conclusion to Vested Interests, Marjorie Garber stresses both the...

An unusual wish of A male to become female appears in a well-known medieval composition, Even boban (lit. touchstone), written around 1322 by the Hebrew author and translator Qalonymos ben Qalonymos.¹

Our Father in Heaven! You who did miracles to our fathers by fire and water; you who turned [the furnace] in Ur of the Chaldees [cold] to stop it from burning [Abraham]; you who turned Dinah in her mother’s womb [into a girl]; you who turned the rod [of Moses] into a serpent in front of tens of thousands; you who turned [Moses’] pure arm into a [leper’s] white...

The symbolism of the “veil” seems to envelop significant parts of this book. Whether (and where and when) historical Jewish women were veiled is a question for historians to explore. My interest lies in the symbolical purport of “the veil” as a central trope in medieval Hebrew literature (and in its surrounding culture). In terms of the social reality, veiling, silencing, and immuring women were patriarchal acts of exclusion, for which “modesty” was often used as explanation and justification. If each member of a woman’s body (including her face, hair, and voice) manifests female sexuality (and is thus metonymic to...