Women are real. At least so women think, most of the time, but more than other human people women are also imaginary creatures—figments—constructed by cultural and linguistic fantasy, myth and literature. All this we know, as women, as readers of texts, and viewers of art, and consumers of culture in nearly all its forms, and it is no less of a factor in scholarship. It is not always easy to tell the dancer from the dance.

The following is adapted from Anne Albert’s introduction to the forum in our pages.

The rabbis have a deep distrust of individual authority, deferring to the rabbinic collective, for example, and not the inspired prophet. Even individual rabbinic authority is rhetorically mediated in the corpus through meaning-conferring, and meaning-controlling, layers of paideia and performed deference to previous authorities, inherited wisdom, and the sacred text.

JQR 114.4 is now available, online and in print. 

In this issue: