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Fertility and Jewish Law: Feminist Perspectives on Orthodox Responsa Literature
... Religious consultation regarding reproduction is an especially fertile case study for exploring the popularity and diversity of religious authority, for several reasons. First, a historical analysis of Jewish texts regarding reproduction shows that procreation ideals are not uniform and have continually been interpreted (Irshai 2012). According to Irshai, even though most opinions in Jewish law require two children (one of each sex), contraception exists within a complex legal system of concerns that may be taken into consideration, such as physical and mental health, financial issues, and child welfare (e.g., Shulchan Aruch, Aruch Hashulchan Even Haezer 1:8). ...
... Cracks in the authority of rabbis are also emerging as women rethink and critique the traditional link between male rabbis and religious rulings, especially regarding women's autonomy around reproductive decisions (Fonrobert 2000; Raucher 2020). As the phenomenon of female scholars grows together with a substantial scholarship of feminist critiques of rabbinic legal discourse (e.g., Irshai 2012Irshai , 2014Zion-Waldoks 2015), vocal calls to "get rabbis out of our womb" are slowly growing. 7 In my own work, I have demonstrated the gendered aspects of authoritative knowledge across the continuum of Jewish Orthodoxy, highlighting how women are interpreting and reinterpreting religious texts to articulate rights to sexual and reproductive autonomy in ways that engender new frameworks of religious authority (Taragin-Zeller 2014; Taragin-Zeller and Kasstan 2020). ...
... While procreation holds supreme discursive importance in Judaism, the religious obligation "to be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 1:28) has continuously been reinterpreted by religious authorities and families alike. According to Irshai (2012), most opinions in Jewish law require a minimum of two children (one of each sex). Crucially, the obligation for reproduction falls on men, and hence from a position of Jewish law, women are exempt from the obligation to procreate. ...
This article examines the varying ways religious devotees utilize, negotiate, embrace, and reject religious authorities in their everyday lives. Ethnographically exploring the ways that Orthodox Jews share reproductive decisions with rabbinic authorities, I demonstrate how some sanctify rabbinic rulings, while others dismiss them, or continue to “shop around” until they find a rabbinic opinion that resonates with their personal desires. These negotiations of religious authority and ethical freedom are worked out across a biographical trajectory, opening new possibilities to explore how religious authority fluctuates and changes over the life course. I argue that analysis of engagement with rabbis without attention to the inner diversity of interpretations and practices perpetuates a hegemonic and overly harmonious picture of religious authority. Highlighting these variations, I show how the process of consultation was more significant than mere submission to religious rulings. Religious consultation, in itself, then constitutes a significant node for making an ethical Jewish life. Attending to these aspects of religious authority has great potential to further develop and contextualize the field of ethical freedom while complicating binary models of submission versus resistance. My approach demonstrates the need to broaden our anthropological tools to better understand the ways individuals share everyday decisions with mediators of authoritative knowledge. [ religious authority, ethics, reproduction, gender, Judaism ]
... In several respects, the Jewish model, if applied, might plausibly lead to higher fertility levels. However, certain forms of birth control-limited to women, in any case, forbidden to men-can be retrieved in normative Judaism, with great restrictions (Feldman 1968;Irshai 2012). Normative Judaism does not impose to maximize the birth rate but demands that each adult marry and procreate at least one boy and one girl. ...
As an essential prerequisite to the genealogical study of Jews, some elements of Jewish demographic history are provided in a long-term transnational perspective. Data and estimates from a vast array of sources are combined to draw a profile of Jewish populations globally, noting changes in geographical distribution, vital processes (marriages, births and deaths), international migrations, and changes in Jewish identification. Jews often anticipated the transition from higher to lower levels of mortality and fertility, or else joined large-scale migration flows that reflected shifting constraints and opportunities locally and globally. Cultural drivers typical of the Jewish minority interacted with socioeconomic and political drivers coming from the encompassing majority. The main centers of Jewish presence globally repeatedly shifted, entailing the intake within Jewish communities of demographic patterns from significantly different environments. During the 20th century, two main events reshaped the demography of the Jews globally: the Shoah (destruction) of two thirds of all Jews in Europe during World War II, and the independence of the State of Israel in 1948. Mass immigration and significant convergence followed among Jews of different geographical origins. Israel’s Jewish population grew to constitute a large share—and in the longer run—a potential majority of all Jews worldwide. Since the 19th century, and with increasing visibility during the 20th and the 21st, Jews also tended to assimilate in the respective Diaspora environments, leading to a blurring of identificational boundaries and sometimes to a numerical erosion of the Jewish population. This article concludes with some implications for Jewish genealogical studies, stressing the need for contextualization to enhance their value for personal memory and for analytic work.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, synagogues faced closure, and many non-Orthodox communities transitioned their prayer services to online platforms. This presented a significant challenge for community leaders and rabbis who were faced with a profound community crisis. An innovative response emerged including new prayers and the adaptation of existing ones to better address the pandemic’s unique realities, integrating aspects of health, divinity, community, and the environment. This study engages in a textual analysis of these prayers, exploring how these mirror cultural and social attitudes toward the body and embodiment. While the body was seen during the COVID-19 period as problematic, an object of contagion and spreader of disease (e.g., by not keeping proper distance or masking), in these particular texts it is no longer slandered, but revealed as an obedient and disciplined agent. The prayers seek to overcome the disruption in the individual’s relationship with their body and with other bodies. The prayer authors propose to the worshipper, while also conceptually changing traditional ideas and practices, to view the body as an object that must be cleaned, vaccinated, purified, and allowed to continue its function. The concern for both the well-being of the living body and the dignity of the deceased extends to care for society and humanity as a whole. Therefore, this liturgy can be seen as a pragmatic means to promote a “theology of humanistic responsibility.”
This article examines Rabbi Ovadia's sermons, exploring his stance on women through folktales and narratives dedicated to halakhic scenario-building. Yosef's editorial intervention in a folktale by Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad is discussed, revealing his departure from the trope of woman as seducer and a shift in the status of the evil inclination. In short narratives of halakhic scenarios, Yosef prefers depicting religiously empowered "good" women. However, the subtext of these sermons is not an untheorized feminism; instead, they express Yosef's pragmatic worldview. Yosef's positive concept of the human psyche and its capacity for reason, dignity, and virtue guided his editorial decisions in severing the link between women and sin, endowing women with responsibility and agency. Yosef believed negative depictions of women as temptation's embodiment, lacking inherent religious value, harmed the religious well-being of both men and women. Thus, pragmatic considerations led him to craft narratives with reduced misogyny and gynophobia.
This chapter presents a broad overview of major changes in the Jewish family over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as part of broader processes of demographic and cultural modernization and integration of Jews in European and other societies. Jews often anticipated socio-demographic change in comparison to the non-Jewish surrounding majority, but the actual pace of change reflected each country’s very different level of development and modernization. Along with the general socioeconomic context of Jewish population change and international migration, attention is given to the peculiar Jewish normative framework of family trends. The chapter discusses the pace of Jewish population growth as determined by mutations in the death rate and the birth rate, and focuses on family formation patterns: frequency of marriage, age at marriage, choice of partner, and intermarriage. The conclusions are interpreted within a broader model of demographic transition among Jewish and other minorities.
During the past 15 years, there has been a rapid increase in interfaith initiatives in the United Kingdom. Even though the “interfaith industry,” as some have cynically called it, has rapidly increased, the involvement of women in these groups has been relatively low. Based on ethnographic data, including 20 interviews and 3 years of fieldwork with female interfaith activists in the United Kingdom (2017–2020), this ethnography focuses on the emergence of Jewish and Muslim female interfaith initiatives, analyzing the creative ways religious women negotiate their challenges and struggles as women of faith, together. I examine the ways Jewish and Muslim women form nuanced representations of female piety that disrupt “strictly observant” gendered representations, thus diversifying the binary categories of what being Jewish, or Muslim, entails. Further, whereas former studies have focused on interfaith settings as crucial for the construction of religious identities, I show that interfaith activism also serves as a site for religious minorities to learn how to become British citizens. In a highly politicized Britain, where allegations of racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia prevail, I argue that Jewish-Muslim encounters are sites for the construction and performances of British civic citizenship well beyond the prescriptions of the state. Drawing on these findings, I situate interfaith activism at the anthropological intersection of gender, religion, and citizenship, and as a site that reproduces and disrupts minority-state relationality.
The current abortion conversation is disordered by a justification framework rooted in patriarchal and misogynist assumptions about women, pregnancy, childbearing, and mothering. This traditionalist framing of the abortion conversation relies heavily on misleading and damaging stereotypes about women who have abortions that have functioned to stigmatize abortion and the women who have them. This stigmatization has contributed to the effective erasure of women’s voices and experiences in discussions about abortion. Recognizing the value of the feminist methodological claim for situated knowledge, this paper examines the moral wisdom of women who have terminated pregnancies for fetal anomalies, in order to explore how their experiences might contribute to a more morally robust framework for understanding the moral complexity of abortion decisions and theorizing new ways of understanding the ontological meaning of gestation.
While much Jewish thought, culture, and professional ethics increasingly accommodate a range of gender roles and expressions, sexualities, and family structures, they also remain deeply pronatalist. This overwhelmingly frames reproduction as a core Jewish value and the choice not to bear or raise children as contrary to Jewish values. I argue that Jewish pronatalism masks the true extent to which the whole community must support the care and formation of all its generations. Through a counter-reading of a passage from the Babylonian Talmud in which three sages neglect their wives and children in various ways that allow a careful reader to notice “person-shaped holes”—narrative features whose presence implies various people’s nonparental labor—I argue that multiple people in multiple roles within a community make it possible to sustain its continuity in a robust and all-encompassing way.
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