A core task of scholarship is to rescue from obscurity works of merit that have been overlooked. It is to just such a task that Dr. Julia Schwartzmann turns in publishing The Path of Moses, an essay dealing with the position of women in Jewish religious life. She makes the case admirably on behalf of a slim pamphlet written at the turn of the twentieth century by a small-time Hungarian rabbi. It becomes, under her careful attention, a bold precursor of Orthodox feminism, foreshadowing arguments that would have to lie in wait until the 1970s to emerge.
There is a great deal of interest in this short volume, which surprises and rewards its reader at every turn. First, there is Schwartzmann’s excellent introduction, which does what few scholarly prefaces manage to do: communicate clearly the context, significance, and current relevance of the primary text. She argues, “Reading R. Salamon’s essay renders it more difficult to dismiss the basic arguments of Jewish religious feminism as a pathetic attempt to impose Western feminist values on Judaism by ill-informed female academics, as has been maintained by the Orthodox establishment” (p. 3).
R. Salamon achieves this, as Schwartzmann goes on to discuss, by arguing that the Torah itself reflects a fundamental gender equality between men and women. This original intent was later subverted. According to Schwartzmann, “Salamon’s central claim throughout his essay is that the present halakhic situation is the result of a change that occurred in the sages’ attitude toward women during the later generations of the Tannaim” (pp. 18–19). In Salamon’s words, the Tosefta’s reading takes precedence over the Mishnah’s: “When we look properly into what is in front of us with no blemish in our eyes, we will know the great difference between the language of the Tosefta and that of the Mishnah in the matter in which we are [engaged]. The Tosefta will teach us the right way (ha-derekh ha-yashar) to understand the Mishnah.”1 However, it seems to me that Schwartzmann oversells Salamon, even as she underplays the radical nature of his claims. On one hand, Salamon is a ponderous writer; it’s not difficult to see why his work found few readers. On the other hand, his core contention that there is an original intent in the thought of Ḥazal that can be uncovered in the Tosefta, and that was deliberately obscured by the more conservative authors of the Mishnah, stands outside of Orthodox thought.
I came away unconvinced by Schwartzmann’s minimization of Salamon’s Neolog affiliation. The Neolog movement was a liberalizing trend among nineteenth-century Hungarian Jewry that emphasized integration into modern Western society. It was complicated by the emancipation of Hungarian Jews, which required them to officially affiliate with a state-recognized community, one of which was the Neolog faction. Schwartzmann’s point that the Hungarian Reform movement should be seen as disparate from German Reform is well taken. Yes, Salamon, like many of his generation, was born and bred within the precincts of Orthodoxy and chose the Neolog designation primarily in acquiescence to sociopolitical forces. Salamon’s language indeed bears the dint of traditional writing. But the very project of revealing an original rabbinic intent speaks to the influence of Wissenschaft, or academic Jewish studies, on his thought. In fact, the English translation of the essay’s title elides its self-identification with secular scholarship. It is not that the translation is in any way inaccurate; it’s that, in the Hebrew of 1899, a ma’amar meḥkari is a clarion statement of one’s mentality and affiliation. So too, mishpat ha-nashim is a phrase that falls noticeably outside halakhic phraseology.
Schwartzmann contends that The Path of Moses is particularly relevant to Orthodox Jewish feminists today, owing to its early espousal of core tenets of later feminism. It, in effect, provides us with a location within the tradition to which we can point in order to ground our claims. With this, too, I struggle. I am not sure that Salamon can provide this for us. The primacy of the Mishnah in the process of halakhic decision-making cannot be so easily dismissed. Regardless, The Path of Moses makes for lively reading and is sure to stimulate discussion. The mission to rescue Rabbi Salamon’s words from obscurity has handily been achieved in this small but powerful book.