January / february 2006:

Princess Diaries
A wave of novelized versions of Biblical stories have tackled historical Jewish women. But have they succeeded in opening our views of Jewish matriarchs or just turned into the midrashic version of dime store romance novels?

Essay and Illustration by Bradford R. Pilcher


When Anita Diamant wrote The Red Tent in 1997, who knew it would be anything more than a first-time novel by a noted Jewish non-fictionalist? Instead, the midrash of Dinah, daughter of the biblical Jacob, became a bestselling sensation.

Then came the copycats.

There is Marek Halter's as-yet-unfinished Canaan Trilogy that tells the story of biblical foremothers (first Sarah, then Zipporah in book two). Rebecca Kohn made her first novel a fictionalized expansion of Queen Esther's story in The Gilded Chamber. Solomon and, more specifically, Sheba have been fictionalized in India Edghill's Wisdom's Daughter.

The list of such titles continues ad nauseum into the most miniscule of biblical figures (Avishag, concubine to King David, got her own novel in 2002's cleverly titled Avishag). Once they were exhausted, Jewish heroines from post-biblical history began receiving the midrashic treatment. Maggie Anton, for example, released the first in a series on Rashi's daughters last July, focusing on Joheved, the eldest.

The effort to bring greater attention to the women of Jewish history, particularly the matriarchs of the Torah, is a noble one. For reasons social, political, and ideological, these women have been marginalized in Jewish study. The result has been a parallel curbing on the roles for Jewish women in public life, and so far as these books help to overcome this, they deserve praise.

The problem, some eight years after Diamant opened the floodgates, is these books stopped opening our vistas on Jewish women almost as soon as The Red Tent went into its second printing. Most now fall into a formulaic (and often dull) approach that overly sentimentalizes biblical heroines and, in some cases, furthers old stereotypes.

Halter's book, for example, reduces the life of Sarah to mildly titillating sexuality amidst a rich backdrop of exotic antiquity. It's a recipe that makes for a decently entertaining read, but doesn't do much to enhance our understanding of the women's experience. Were they really little more than the sum of sex and silent suffering?

Sadly, the only alternative is the pairing of watered-down fictions with New Age spirituality or psycho-babble. The Women Who Danced by the Sea by Marsha Mirkin, for example, uses biblical women as a pretext for “contemporary psychological theories” about relationship issues. Fine, so far as it goes, but the feminine midrash harkened by Diamant were supposed to be about more than stereotypes and dime store romance novels. They were supposed to expand a cultural niche into a major vein of Jewish creativity and help us integrate women's understanding into our religious dialogue.

Or maybe all they ever were was a good way to push a few more books.



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