The intersection of law, language and gender perceptions should be a source of much interest for scholars. The theory and practice of law influences and is influenced by conceptions of gender, and the language used to frame legal arguments is not static – it affects social perceptions of gender and is in turn adapted to reflect the changing needs of the people who use it. However, it seems that it is only recently, in historical perspective, that the language of legal discourse – whether in the realm of legal theory or in the practical spheres of legislation and judicial precedent – has taken up the challenge presented by the changing perceptions of gender, and in particular, gender equality, as a relevant determinant in the formulation of modern legal doctrine
Dr Ben Outhwaite, Head of the Genizah Research Unit, my colleague Dr Amir Ashur and I organised a workshop in 2015 at Cambridge University Library in order to examine the junction between these three worlds, using the remarkable resource of the medieval manuscripts of the Cairo Genizah as a case study, aiming to illuminate the ways in which law, language and gender perceptions influence and are influenced by each other in the Judaeo-Islamic milieu of the medieval Middle East.
The Cairo Genizah Collection is one of the foremost medieval collections, a huge ‘accidental archive’ recovered 100 years ago from a synagogue storeroom in Fustat (now a suburb of Cairo, but originally the first capital of Islamic Egypt). Beginning in the late 10th century and continuing all the way to the 19th, the Jewish community of Fustat deposited their discarded writings into this storeroom, out of respect for the written name of God. While they did deposit hundreds of religious works – worn-out prayer books, Torah scrolls, treatises on religious law – they also stored away many more secular and even ephemeral pieces of writing: poetry in vast amounts, personal letters, hundreds of legal deeds (including a huge variety of divorce and marriage contracts), commercial documents, and so on.
The Genizah material is a remarkable source for the social history of the medieval Mediterranean world, and in the documents and letters it has preserved pertaining to the women of that world, it gives us an opportunity unlike any other to examine through primary sources women’s role in a thriving medieval society. To date, little concerted work has been done on gender relations in the Cairo Genizah and on women’s place in that society, aside from the general works of history produced by S.D. Goitein (‘A Mediterranean Society’, 5 vols, 1967–1985), which, while remarkable for their day, are distinctly ‘of their time’ in regards to questions of gender roles and the place of women. Our workshop represented the first major foray into using the documentary sources and judicial monographs preserved in the Cairo Genizah for this type of research.
The workshop brought together researchers working on medieval Jewish and Islamic law, on historical gender studies, on legal theory and legal practitioners. The overall aim of the papers that were delivered at the workshop and collected in this volume is to demonstrate collectively the degree to which the classical sources highlighted by each of the speakers, with particular emphasis on materials found in the Cairo Genizah, reflect the gender sensitivity of the legal discourse and cultural norms of the historical periods and geographical settings to which these sources relate. This sensitivity informed not only the theoretical exegesis expressed in the biblical and rabbinic sources highlighted by the speakers, but in the practical day-to-day aspects of the norms – in language as well as substance – implemented in the documents and decisions studied and presented by the workshop participants.
It may be safely stated that this discourse and these norms were “well ahead of their time” vis-à-vis gender equality, and while any conclusion in this regard must be tempered by due consideration of the prevailing norms of the surrounding societies in which Jewish societies functioned, the papers collected in this volume present a compelling argument regarding the relatively progressive attitudes toward gender that are reflected in the documents under study.
We open the volume with two articles on the language of women in the Cairo Genizah by Dr Esther-Miriam Wagner and Prof Renée Levine Melammed, who analyse the language of women found in the Genizah from a sociolinguistic perspective. Following these two linguistic articles we present two with a more historical perspective on gender, language and law. Dr Oded Zinger examines seven legal documents from the Cairo Genizah dealing with Jewish women in the Muslim legal sphere; and Dr Moshe Yagur examines aspects of conversion to Judaism that relate to gender in the medieval Near East. We close the volume with two articles focusing on the relations between gender and language in another popular genre of the Genizah, the rabbinical Midrash. Dr Tali Artman-Partock analyses Jewish traditions about women in midrashim, and Dr Moshe Lavee shows the existence of feminist considerations in the portrayals of biblical figures in Genizah midrashim.
We hereby make available the fruits of this scholarship to the broader public, scholars and laypeople alike, who seek to enhance and enrich their appreciation of the history of legal norms as expressed at the juncture of law, language and gender and as reflected in the documents of the Cairo Genizah.
Zvi Stampfer
The Genizah Research Unit of Cambridge University Library and The Research Authority of Orot Israel College