Encyclopedia of Jewish-Christian Relations Online Managing Editor: Ehrensperger, Kathy Ed. by Homolka, Walter / Kampling, Rainer / Levine, Amy-Jill / Markschies, Christoph / Schäfer, Peter / Thurner, Martin https://doi.org/10.1515/ejcro.12311232 Published Online 2020 Feminism Katharina von Kellenbach Feminism starts with the notion that women are full human beings, endowed with spiritual subjectivity, moral agency, and political rights. The world’s scripture-based religions are patriarchal and relegate women to the reproductive realm of the family and the household, their sexuality subject to male control. Women are generally invisible except as mother of, wife of, daughter of, sister of, or temptress of some man. Despite this textual and historical distortion, women have always been active participants in religion. In history, there are exceptional women who enjoyed literacy and access to religious instruction, such as queens or nuns, daughters of famous rabbis or wealthy women who left some traces in the records of religious traditions. But their presence is not enough to speak of Jewish-Christian women’s dialogue. And there certainly was no feminist Jewish-Christian dialogue among these exceptional women, because they did not subscribe to feminism. The idea of feminism, argues historian Gerda Lerner in The Creation of Feminist Consciousness , involves the quest for women’s equal rights to education, political and religious representation, as well as personal and sexual autonomy. Feminism presupposes awareness of women as a “caste” and commitment to solidarity across religion, race, class and nationality (Daly 1973). This idea of gender equality has galvanized women across all religious traditions and become a global movement beginning in the nineteenth century. The first wave of the women’s movement is historically associated with the campaign to abolish slavery in the United States and the emancipation of Jews in Europe, while the second wave grew out of the civil rights movements, anti-colonial liberation movements, as well as post-Shoah Jewish-Christian dialogue and the peace movements during the 1960s. Racism, antisemitism, and sexism are linked ideologically and enmeshed politically as structures of entitlement and inequality. Structurally, Blacks, Jews, and women occupy positions of inferiority and marginality. Misogyny, the hatred of Jews, and contempt for blackness are correlated. But they also intersect, which means that Jewish women can be racist, Black women harbor antisemitic sentiments, and white women carry “invisible knapsacks” of privilege that erupt in contempt and condescension (McIntosh 1989). Solidarity amongst these different groups has always been fragile and fractured by betrayal: Already in the 19th century, the abolitionist coalition collapsed when Black men received the suffrage in 1870 and white suffragists advanced racist arguments in support of white women’s enfranchisement. The earliest Christian feminist writings, such as Elisabeth Cady Stanton’s Women’s Bible (1895, 1898) and Mathilda Gage’s Woman, State and Church (1893) used not only anti-Jewish tropes in their argumentation but also racist claims. The first wave of feminists built political alliances but did not consciously engage in Jewish-Christian dialogue: for instance, the English Jewish League for Woman Suffrage (JLWS) was co-founded by Lily Montague in 1912 and organizationally integrated into the “National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies,” led by her sister, Henrietta Franklin. But these political alliances did not encourage dialogue across religious affiliations. The Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine was founded in 1894 and included the Jewish Women’s League under Bertha Pappenheim, as well as the German Protestant Women’s League, and the Catholic Women’s Federation as an affiliate. But here as well, these women’s associations seemed not intent on creating greater inter-denominational and inter-religious solidarity and understanding. Rabbi Regina Jonas, as far as we know, never reached out or received support from her Protestant and Catholic fellow graduates with university degrees in theology and philosophy seeking religious office and ordination in the churches. When Regina Jonas wrote her halakhic master’s thesis Can A Woman Hold Rabbinic Office in 1933, she used biblical precedent and legal hermeneutics that could have been useful for Christian women pursuing ordination in the Protestant churches. But as far as we know, they remained unaware and uninterested. This kind of feminist collaboration blossomed only after the Shoah in the second and third waves of feminist theology. The second wave of feminist theology evolved in a more religiously pluralist and inclusive spirit of exploration. Jewish and Christian female scholars collaborated early on and explored strategies to challenge legal restrictions, reinterpret biblical texts, and dispute conventions that proscribe women’s equality in religious communities. One early anthology, Womanspirit Rising (1979), was co-edited by post-Christian feminist Carol Christ and Jewish feminist Judith Plaskow, who affirm in their Introduction: “The fundamental commitment that feminists in religion share to end male ascendancy in society and religion is more important than their differences.” Feminist theology demands and seizes the right to speak, create, interpret, and contribute to the conversation about God. When Jewish and Christian feminists read sacred texts, develop hermeneutic approaches, design legal strategies, and experiment with the poetry of prayer, learning and exchange happens across the traditions. For instance, feminists exchange hermeneutic strategies to confront toxic passages in the sacred scriptures that ordain women’s silence, constrain women’s movement, control women’s sexuality, and prohibit women’s public authority. The Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Mishnah and Talmud, and the Quran contain nuggets of misogyny that portray women as vain, seductive, slanderous, deceitful and unworthy of authority and credibility. How such passages can be contextualized and reinterpreted becomes knowledge that circulates among feminists of different religious communities. Debates over the presence of antisemitism and racism in the women’s movement in general, and of anti-Jewish theological patterns in Christian feminist writings in particular, erupted in the 1970s and early 1980s. Jewish feminists, such as Judith Plaskow, Annette Daum, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Susannah Heschel raised the alarm. Christian feminists responded in conferences and publications that remained separate from and parallel to the institutional structures of Jewish-Christian dialogue. In Europe, Jewish feminists travelled from Israel and the United States to attend feminist conferences in the shadow of the Shoah, which had destroyed vibrant Jewish communal life across European nations, along with the memory of the Jewish women’s movement. In the United States, concerns over antisemitism were usually framed in the context of racism as matters of diversity and inclusion. Out of these debates emerged the concept of “intersectionality” in feminist theory that reframes patriarchy beyond binary gender inequality to an interwoven system of subjugations that involves multiple and intersecting ideologies of marginalization (Crenshaw 1988). Patriarchy Unauthenticated Download Date | 11/27/20 5:56 PM