I clearly remember first reading Milton Steinberg’s As a Driven Leaf (1939) when I was sixteen, after happily studying Talmud for five years. Up to then, the characters whose words I had parsed and whose intentions I had deciphered in the classroom were two-dimensional and without lives outside their opinions about the earliest time to recite the evening Shema. As I read As a Driven Leaf, the Tannaim from the Mishna shifted from flat figures on paper into entire societies of men, women, children, rabbis, and ordinary Jews, alive in three dimensions. Still, As a Driven Leaf was mostly about men—men with wives, children, and political adversaries, but men nonetheless. In contrast, the women of the Talmud remained a curious lot: sometimes heralded, sometimes vilified, often anonymous, and mostly simply absent.
When I first heard of Maggie Anton’s latest novel, I wondered what sort of tale one could weave about Rav Hisda’s daughter. Although historical fiction is a genre meant not to reflect reality but to imagine it, it was hard for me to understand how a full-blown reality could be imagined out of this one character, presumably mentioned a handful of times in the Talmud, but entirely unknown to me.
I needn’t have worried. I was enthralled by Maggie Anton’s Rav Hisda’s Daughter from the start. Here, finally, were the Amoraim in their study halls, at their Seders, stomping on dates to make date wine, and spending time with their families. The world first glimpsed in As a Driven Leaf did not end with the closing of the Mishna. Anton deftly weaves a novel full of characters in whom the reader finds herself invested, even those who are less likeable. The scope of time and geography is breathtaking. Particularly enthralling were the descriptions of travel between Babylonia and Eretz Yisrael, and the comparisons made between life under Sasanian Persian rule and life under Roman rule. Having visited the excavations in Sepphoris and Caesarea, I found reading the descriptions of tile works in Eretz Yisrael great fun, as was reading about the magic incantation bowls and amulets that Jews, just like gentiles, produced in Persian Babylonia and Roman Palestina.
Anton does particularly well at introducing us to the many tensions present throughout the Jewish Babylonian and Palestinian societies. First were the tensions between Rabbinic and non-Rabbinic Jews, including the “amha’aretz” (Jews who did not accept Rabbinic authority, in Anton’s communal structure) and between Rabbinic Jews and early Christians. Additional tensions existed between free Jews and enslaved gentiles; between Jews more assimilated into Babylonian Zoroastrian society (often women) and those who remained more separate (often men); between parents and children; between the Rabbis of Bavel and those of the Land of Israel; and between scholars and students. The latter two tensions are likely most familiar to those who study Talmud, but all were present. Especially interesting was how these tensions played out differently among women and men in the novel.
Of course, every historical novel has its detractors, who argue about the proper amount of creative license that an author may take or the necessity and nature of its sex scenes. (There are such scenes in Rav Hisda’s Daughter.) The only historical error that I noticed was that there was likely no Christian community in Sepphoris during this period in history, but the academic Talmud scholar may find more. Anton excels at the creativity inherent in historical fiction, and, as with her novels about Rashi’s daughters, no one should mistake it for a sober or authoritative scholarly tome with academic apparatus— although a useful map, timeline, cast of characters, and glossary are included. Although an afterword that describes her methodology and lists some relevant talmudic sources was useful, this book would have benefited from an appendix with English translations of the major passages on which the book was based. It would be helpful to easily reference the texts that Anton had available about the main character, which she wove into such a mesmerizing tale, rather than having to look them up oneself.