GENDER AND WOMEN’S HISTORY IN RABBINIC LITERATURE TAL I LAN How does one write women’s history using sources that were not written as history and are not interested in women and their experiences? Rabbinic literature is composed, frst and foremost, of a legal codex (the Mishnah, ca. 200 CE) with a complex and at times highly imaginative commentary at- tached to it: the Talmudim (Palestinian, or Yerushalmi, third–fourth century CE; and Babylonian, or Bavli, fourth–sixth century CE) and the Midrashim (the ones relevant for us dating from the third to seventh century). Legal codi- ces such as the Mishnah are by defnition prescriptive rather than descriptive. In other words, they posit an ideal society, and many of their rulings hint more at behavior they wish to combat than at standards currently in practice. Te commentaries (i.e., the Talmudim) are thematically linked with the Mishnah’s legal matter. Te Midrashim are imaginative interpretations of the Bible for both legal and other information. Although the Mishnah (and the Bible) lead the commentators into many exciting avenues of discussion, history and his- torical inquiry are usually not part of them. From a feminist perspective, Rabbinic literature is a typical cultural product of late antiquity: It was written by men and for men and presents a patriarchal and androcentric outlook, which is sometimes misogynistic. Te study of women’s history from Rabbinic literature is hampered by the Rabbis’ disinterest in the lives of women as human subjects rather than as appendices to their husbands’ households and property. Te Rabbis were a small group of scholars who began their exegetical and legal activity in the wake of the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and who, over several centuries, sought to become and eventually succeeded in becoming the leaders of the Judaism that survived from antiquity into the Middle Ages. Aside from their legal program, which aimed at bringing Jewish women under men’s direct judicial control, 1 the Rabbis were primarily interested in themselves—an intellectual male elite