Review - American Jewish Archives

246 American Jewish Archives
curious that both essays also ignore lyric poetry. This omission leaves
them with mostly polemical and homiletical texts, and in Dishon's
case select maqamat with highly polarized female stereotypes. Dis-
hon credits the negative stereotype to "the misogynist traditions in
the Muslim and Christian cultures in which they lived1'(31), al-
though Jewish writers had plenty of internal resources to draw
upon for negative depictions of women. Moreover, "outside" influ-
ences equally inspired the lyrical love poetry of the Golden Age po-
ets and their descendants. Conventions vary considerably from
genre to genre, and author to author - compare Yaakov ben Elazar's
warrior-heroines with alHarizils fabliaux-women. True, medieval
Jewish writers reflect pervasive cultural attitudes among the
courtly and literary elite, but through a Jewish filter and in a Jewish
language. This point is made in the following essay, by Howard
Adelson, on the ambivalent portrayals of Jewish women in Italian
Renaissance literature.
Adelson provides an interesting survey of material. He relies on
literary debate texts, sermons, and polemical verse. He inexplicably
avoids both lyric and maqdma; both genres would have consider-
ably enriched his study. The polemical material is treated sometimes
as historical and sometimes as literary, a weakness in other essays
as well.
As the obvious interest of the book is the modern period, these two
essays sit uneasily among the others. They also create more gaps
than they bridge, particularly as there is no follow-up to any of the
Sephardic or Italian communities elsewhere in the volume. This
omission imposes a preordained homogeneity on the collectivity.
Kubovy treats Bejerano, a major figure, in terms of futuristic and
technological motifs. The Latina Jewish writers of Glickman's essay
are Ashkenaz. None of the essays treats Ladino or Arabic sources,
nor do any treat musical or folk genres, which would have
widened the range of themes and concerns defining women's
"texts" beyond the narrower, exclusively Western focus of Women
of the Word.3 Similarly, the liturgical composition of a poet like Far-
iha bat Yosef, an eighteenth century Moroccan woman, would have
made a lovely addition! as would essays on drama and film.
Amazingly, not a single voice is lesbian. But if the essays of Women
of the Word avoid what is nonwestern and nonrnodem, they also