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Book <strong>Review</strong>s 245<br />
Baskin, Judith R., Ed.<br />
Women of the Word: <strong>Jewish</strong> Women and <strong>Jewish</strong> Writing.<br />
Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 1994.382 pages.<br />
Welcome! the tall woman comes to me<br />
with a jar on her head<br />
She asks about me in the neighborhood<br />
"I am her friend and I ask about her."<br />
(Iraqi <strong>Jewish</strong> women's song, from a lament for a woman friend)'<br />
By its own definition, Women of the Word is a "collection of insightful<br />
literary essays" conceived as a companion volume to Baskin's earlier<br />
anthology, <strong>Jewish</strong> Women in Historical Perspective (19). A few essays<br />
are very strong, offering the <strong>American</strong> reader access to unfamiliar texts<br />
and authors, and are presented in a range of informative styles aimed<br />
at wide readership. One is nonetheless left with the feeling that the<br />
whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts. The reasons are both<br />
theoretical and organizational, and it seems useful to consider them.<br />
Baskin's earlier work, <strong>Jewish</strong> Women in Historical Perspective, con-<br />
tained historical essays surveying women's activities from biblical<br />
through rabbinic, medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and mod-<br />
ern times. Baskin claims that "certain significant gaps: identified as<br />
studies of eastern Europe, Israel, and Latin America, motivated the<br />
sequel work (19). Yet while the earlier volume at least represented a<br />
familiar sequence of canonical divisions in <strong>Jewish</strong> studies, the newer<br />
essays do not. Despite two opening essays on the medieval and<br />
Renaissance periods, Women of the Word focuses on nineteenth-, and<br />
twentieth-century topics.<br />
The shift in focus explains why the medieval and Italian Renais-<br />
sance essays seem so poorly connected to all that follows. Both survey<br />
representative attitudes toward women illustrated in literary and<br />
polemical texts by men. It is true that there are not many options<br />
for the medieval period. There is one extant medieval Hebrew<br />
poem attributed to a woman, the wife of Dunash ben Labrat, and<br />
there are fragments of Arabic verses by Qasmuna, the daughter of<br />
Samuel haNagid.' Dishon, however, acknowledges neither. Still, it is
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