Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues

by Bernadette J Brooten

Book by Brooten, Bernadette J.

Genres: Judaism

292 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

Reviews

[Matthew Colvin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ideologically motivated pseudo-scholarship. Every piece of dubious data that could support the idea that women held office in the ancient synagogue is wrestled into service, with or without argumentation. Half-destroyed and lost inscriptions are fancifully reconstructed in order to support the thesis; the genders of names are wilfully mistaken; titles applied to women are assumed to be terms for offices (e.g. presbytera, throughout); the Greek word συναγωγη is invariably translated as "synagogue", contrary to its more usual meaning of "assembly" or "community"; titles that could be honorific are assumed to be functional (archisynagoga, episcopa, etc.), contrary to all the evidence of our literary sources; functions and roles are exaggerated in order to maximize the liturgical role and institutional authority that women wielded in their alleged offices of leadership; texts without any context are pressed into supporting otherwise bare conjectures such as "most probably this woman was a head of the synagogue and presided over its meetings."

The OT, Josephus, Philo, the NT, the OT apocrypha, the Mishnah, the Tosephta, the Talmudic literature, the Midrashic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls — no mention of women leaders in the ancient synagogue is to be found in any of them. Not a single literary work of ancient Judaism contains so much as a hint to support Brooten's claim, and many of them contradict it. You would think this might make Brooten hesitate, but she is unfazed. “Non-literary materials should be a challenge, and not a simple complement, to the view of reality emerging from literature.” (p. 150) But this is not tenable; something must give. Either we must admit that the inscriptions are not proof of women holding functional offices in Jewish synagogues, or else the literary sources, from the OT to the Babylonian Talmud, have accomplished the unthinkable: a coordinated, centuries-long, blanket suppression of all mention of women officeholders in the synagogue, a complete damnatio memoriae belied only by a handful of ambiguous inscriptions, a tour de force made all the more remarkable by the fact that in a period of fierce strife between the church and the synagogue, both Jewish and Christian authors cooperated in suppressing evidence of women officeholders in Judaism — and this, despite the fact that the church fathers raised loud alarms against the Montanists for having women leaders. If the Jews had women synagogue leaders, would not Epiphanius and other anti-feminist church fathers have accused them of it loudly?

According to Google Scholar, Brooten's book has been cited 370 times since 1980. From what I've seen in the literature, most of those citations are uncritical and adduce her book as proof for the very contentious claim she made in its title: that women were officeholders in ancient Jewish synagogues. Her book is simply cited as proof that this was so, often in a footnote in the course of arguing for women officeholders in modern Christian churches.

[Julia · Rating 2 out of 5]

i might change my rating on this book, i read it in a bad time (mentally) and i don't think i gave it enough of a chance.