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The Defiant Muse: Hebrew Feminist Poems from
Antiquity to the Present
A bilingual anthology edited by Shirley Kaufman,
Galit Hasan-Rokem, Tamar S Hess
The Feminist Press of City University. New York, 1999
ISBN 1 55861 224 6

Until very recently, Hebrew was reserved for religious purposes only. Talmudic study and the language of liturgy were not for women; special prayers for women were usually written in Yiddish, the ‘mother tongue’. That certain women dared to study and master Hebrew well enough to write verse in it made these writers early feminists – women who could express ideas and feelings in the language of men. And paradoxically, as the poet Yehuda Leib Gordon said, ‘The woman writes with the pen of a bird, the man with a pen of iron and lead’.

Claims have been made that some Biblical texts, such as the firstperson passages of the Books of Ruth and Esther, were written by women. The Song of Deborah, said to be the oldest long poem in the Hebrew Bible, seems to open with a double attribution: ‘Deborah and Barak, son of Abinoam.’ Here the feminine form of the verb ‘to sing’ implies Deborah’s primacy, because Biblical Hebrew verb forms often conform, in case and gender, to the ‘more important’ of two actors. The main post-Biblical Hebrew text is the Talmud, in both its Babylonian and Palestinian versions reflecting the scholarly debates from which it emerged. It was compiled by men, but an involvement by women can be inferred from introductory formulae, such as ‘mother told me’ or ‘the women of Shkanziv say’, which precede sections dealing with healing, nurturing, sex, and magic traditions.

Centuries later, Dunash ben Labrat was the first great Jewish poet of the ‘golden age’ of Moslem southern Spain, but a poem by his wife (whose own name is lost) is the first Hebrew poem by a woman to give lyric expression to her intimate cares (tr. Peter Cole):

Will her love remember his graceful doe,
     her only son in her arms as he parted?
On her left hand he placed a ring from his right,
     on his wrist she placed her bracelet.

As a keepsake she took his mantle from him,
     and he in turn took hers from her.
He won’t settle in the land of Spain,
     though its prince give him half his kingdom.

A tradition of monasticism made it possible for Christian women to develop their creativity as nuns, but there was no institutionalised way for Jewish women to escape matrimonial obligations, and after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, writing in Hebrew by Jewish women almost disappeared. In the sixteenth century, Asenath, daughter of a rabbi and widow of another rabbi in Kurdistan, left a long poem of lament and petition in the form of a rhymed letter. There are a few seventeenth- and eighteenth-poems in Yiddish by women from Central and Eastern Europe, and the female tradition of oral poetry in various North African Judeo-Arabic dialects is well-known, but the only two poems in Hebrew that have been discovered from that period were written in Morocco by Freyha Bat Avraham Bar-Adiba.

Rachel Morpurgo (1790-1871), the first modern woman poet to write in Hebrew, belonged to the Italian Jewish community. Though her poetry was conventional in form, its message was radically feminist, a protest against the status of women in Jewish religious culture as ‘nonpersons’(‘On Hearing She Had Been Praised in the Journals’; tr. Peter Cole):

My soul sighs, fate brings only trouble,
my spirit was lifted and I grew bold.
I heard a voice: ‘Your poem is gold.
Who like you has learned to sing, Rachel?’

[. . . . . .]

I’ve looked to the north, south, east, and west:
a woman’s word in each is lighter than dust.
Years hence, will anyone really remember

her name, in city or province, any more
than a dead dog. Ask: the people are sure:
a woman’s wisdom is only in spinning wool.

Signed: Wife of Jacob Morpurgo, stillborn.

Because Hebrew was not a secular language, a secular aesthetic which could be related to the Hebrew canon had to be developed. The fact that women had been prevented from reading and writing in Hebrew became an advantage. It was thought that they would be able to liberate Hebrew idiom from tradition because they were unaware of its constraints. But for decades most women were more inclined to write prose, since poetry exposed its author in a way that was in opposition to the code of modesty women were conditioned to obey.

The first poet in this anthology who spoke Hebrew as a child is Esther Raab (1894-1981). Until the 1950s, she, Rahel (1890-1931) and Leah Goldberg (1911-1970) were regarded as the emblematic women poets of Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine and Israel’s first years. Stanzas from Rahel’s ‘A Way of Speaking’ are a good example of the freshness (and also the ironic intelligence, often ignored) of her writing (tr. Shirley Kaufman):

I know many fancy ways to speak
endless and elegant.
They go mincing down the street,
their glance is arrogant.

But I like a way of speaking
as innocent as a baby, as modest
as dust. I can say countless words.
So I don’t say them.

Probably the recent women poets best known outside Israel are Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936-) and Yona Wallach (1941-1985). Ravikovitch skilfully combines classical mythology and Biblical references to comment on her own life and the political situation with a mixture of bitterness and tenderness, as in ‘A Mother Walks Around’ (tr. Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch), about a woman who carries a dead foetus that will be stillborn in due time – “She won’t have to worry about his future”:

And this is the history of the child
who was killed in his mother’s belly
in the month of January, 1988,
for reasons of state security.

Wallach died at the age of 41 but the influence of her vivid, radical and iconoclastic poetry is still apparent in much poetry by women writing today. Almost half of this comprehensive anthology is by poets of the same generation as, or younger than Ravikovitch and Wallach, from Shulamith Hareven, born in 1932, to Rahel Chalfi, born in 1941, and the youngest of all, Sharon Hass, born in 1966.

As always with a good anthology, one wants more examples from Hebrew the work of each contributor, and an even wider selection. Apart from this quibble, I have only praise for this handsome book. The editors’ Introduction to three thousand years of material is fascinating and informative about the poets, their critical reception, and the changing position of women poets in Israel. The range of translators is impressive, and to a non-reader of Hebrew their English versions read like real poems. Yona Wallach’s characterisation of the Hebrew language, quoted at the head of the Note on Translation, is so apposite that I quote it again here (tr. Lisa Katz):

Hebrew is a woman bathing
Hebrew is Batsheva clean
Hebrew is an unsculpted sculpture
with tiny beauty marks and stretch marks from giving birth
the older she gets the more beautiful she is
her judgement is sometimes prehistoric

The full text of ‘A Mother Walks Around’ appears in Palestinian and Israeli Poets (MPT 14), along with other poems by some of the Israeli women poets mentioned here.