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Elior, Rachel. Dybbuks and Jewish Women in Social History, Mysticism and Folklore. Jerusalem: Urim, 2008.
Rachel Elior's slim volume Dybbuks and Jewish Women in Social History, Mysticism and Folklore loosely connects two essays that were translated from Hebrew. Elior, professor of Jewish philosophy and Jewish mystical thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discusses the phenomenon of the dybbuk (the possession of a living body by the soul of a deceased person) as a manifestation of patriarchal silencing of women.
The first essay in the volume is a jeremiad against Jewish patriarchal society - though sometimes it appears that the author can't decide whether she wants to criticize the Jewish patriarchal order specifically or patriarchal society in general. She reminds us (p. 36) that the name of the allegedly female ailment of "hysteria" is related to "hystera", Greek for "uterus", but that "life-sustaining feminine values such as compassion seem to be situated at the bottom of the masculine hierarchy of values." But the Hebrew word for "uterus" is rehem, from the same root as the word rahamim - compassion - one of the attributes of God that all Jews, male and female, are expected to imitate as part of the obligation of imitatio Dei, thus clearly not on a low rung. The word "hysteria" has no bearing on the Jewish patriarchy. Elior wishes to demonstrate that, though there were in every generation and every location by fortune of their family a few women who had a degree of freedom, by and large, regardless of place or time, most women suffered lives of "coercion and misery, of limited possibilities, constrained initiative, silenced voices and attenuated free will" (14-15). Further, this suffering was the result of the coercion and discrimination of the men in their families and their communities, by use of ancient laws and ancestral customs or by governmental decrees.
The essay consists of quotations and citations, mostly form Jewish sources, but also from ancient Greek sources and early Christian sources, stitched together with her commentary on them, a running diatribe, all in a trajectory towards condemnation of the patriarchy, in particular, the Jewish patriarchy. Thus, the words of "the Jewish Pharisee Saul of Tarsus", known, of course, as "Paul", from Timothy 2:11-15, are used...