Monograph by Mika Ahuvia
Angelic beings can be found throughout the Hebrew Bible, and by late antiquity the archangels Mi... more Angelic beings can be found throughout the Hebrew Bible, and by late antiquity the archangels Michael and Gabriel were as familiar as the patriarchs and matriarchs, guardian angels were as present as one’s shadow, and praise of the seraphim was as sacred as the Shema prayer. Mika Ahuvia recovers once-commonplace beliefs about the divine realm and demonstrates that angels were foundational to ancient Judaism. Ancient Jewish practice centered on humans' relationships with invisible beings who acted as intermediaries, role models, and guardians. Drawing on non-canonical sources—incantation bowls, amulets, mystical texts, and liturgical poetry—Ahuvia shows that when ancient men and women sought access to divine aid, they turned not only to their rabbis or to God alone but often also to the angels. On My Right Michael, On My Left Gabriel spotlights these overlooked stories, interactions, and rituals, offering a new entry point to the history of Judaism and the wider ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world in which it flourished.
Edited Volume by Mika Ahuvia
In this volume, scholars of Judaism, Christianity, and late antique religion demonstrate how spec... more In this volume, scholars of Judaism, Christianity, and late antique religion demonstrate how special attention to the ritual and rhetorical functions of space can improve modern interpretations of ancient literary, liturgical, and ritual texts. Each chapter is concerned with reconstructing the dynamic interaction between space and text. Demonstrating the pliability of the idea of space, the contributions in this volume span from Second Temple debates over Eden to Byzantine Christian hymnography. In so doing, they offer a number of answers to the seemingly simple question: What difference does space make for how modern scholars interpret ancient texts? The nine contributions in this volume are divided into the three interrelated topics of the rhetorical construction of places both earthly and cosmic, the positioning of people in religious space, and the performance of ritual texts in place.
Papers by Mika Ahuvia
Journal of Ancient Judaism
This article argues that recent scholarship on premodern composition can help to reconceptualize ... more This article argues that recent scholarship on premodern composition can help to reconceptualize the presence of diverse people, including enslaved women, in scribal spaces. A brief historiographic section reviews how scholars have imagined normative Jews to be elite literate men, neglecting evidence of dictation to scribes, and thus excluded evidence of lower-class women especially from their imagining of the past. Applying Wendy Doniger’s rejection of the category of the singular male author in religious texts to Jewish texts, it proposes a heuristic tool to identify women’s presence and perspectives in ancient prose, liturgical, and ritual texts. Finally, it analyzes four incantation bowls as test-cases of this approach. For every text produced by a scribe, scholars ought to imagine a dynamic compositional environment with at least two people, and they can look for evidence of inclusion and exclusion of perspectives based on religious markers, class status, and gendered concerns.
Studies in late antiquity, 2023
This article interrogates the historiography of the field of classical Judaism and suggests what ... more This article interrogates the historiography of the field of classical Judaism and suggests what a revisionist feminist historiography of this foundational period might look like. Feminist analysis of gender, class, and race in antiquity allows us to see how scholarly biases today reinscribe and even exceed ancient prejudices. Building on Blossom Stefaniw's essay "Feminist Historiography and Uses of the Past" and deploying Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation to analyze synagogue inscriptions and rabbinic texts, this article offers counternarratives of Jewish daily life in the period of Late Antiquity.
Studies in Late Antiquity, 2023
This article interrogates the historiography of the field of classical Judaism and suggests what ... more This article interrogates the historiography of the field of classical Judaism and suggests what a revisionist feminist historiography of this foundational period might look like. Feminist analysis of gender, class, and race in antiquity allows us to see how scholarly biases today reinscribe and even exceed ancient prejudices. Building on Blossom Stefaniw's essay "Feminist Historiography and Uses of the Past" and deploying Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation to analyze synagogue inscriptions and rabbinic texts, this article offers counternarratives of Jewish daily life in the period of Late Antiquity.
Jewish Studies Quarterly, 2021
Scholars have tended to overlook or dismiss the possibility of feminine angelic beings in ancient... more Scholars have tended to overlook or dismiss the possibility of feminine angelic beings in ancient Judaism. Close reading of texts reveals that gendered divine beings do not exceed the biblical source material, Hebrew linguistic possibilities, Late Antique Jewish texts or the Jewish imagination. Altogether, evidence in found in rabbinic literature, Yannai's liturgical poetry, liturgical practices, ritual texts and synagogue art demonstrate that feminine angels were conceivable by ancient Jews.
The Routledge Global History of Feminism, 2022
This lower-division, lecture course provides an overview of global development from roughly 30,00... more This lower-division, lecture course provides an overview of global development from roughly 30,000 BCE to 1500 CE. It introduces students to the main political, social, and cultural trends in a variety of societies while at the same time stressing the global perspective. Considerable emphasis is paid to comparative history and the study of cross-cultural encounters. "The Premodern World" aims to teach historical thinking as well as historical content, impart a basic grasp of the premodern past, and stimulate the development of largescale frameworks for historical analysis. Although this course has no prerequisites and assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, students are presumed to be capable of critical reflection upon both lectures and readings.
A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism, 2020
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Jewish Quarterly Review, 2018
We could not have organized or carried out this conference without them. Peter Schäfer's vision o... more We could not have organized or carried out this conference without them. Peter Schäfer's vision of topical, productive, and collegial graduate-student-led colloquia at Princeton University served as a model for us, and we hope that we succeeded in continuing this tradition even after his retirement. Finally, we wish to thank Dr. Henning Ziebritzki and the production team at Mohr Siebeck for their expert guidance in bringing this volume to press.
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion
The Blackwell Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism, 2020
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Placing Ancient Texts: the Rhetorical and Ritual Use of Space, 2018
THIS ESSAY TRACES the history of the term benot yisra’el, “daughters of Israel,” from its earlies... more THIS ESSAY TRACES the history of the term benot yisra’el, “daughters of Israel,” from its earliest usage in biblical passages and Second Temple sources to its appearance in late antique Jewish texts, focusing specifically on the connotations that the term carried with it in rabbinic sources and incantation bowls. It is striking that benot yisra’el is only used about seventy times in classical rabbinic literature, while the term nashim appears approximately five hundred times; additionally, the term appears in a notable number of incantation bowls.1 Why do some rabbinic pas- sages employ the term “daughters of Israel” and others do not? And what role does the term play in incantation bowls? We propose that late antique choices of terminology (rabbinic and nonrabbinic) are indicative of the buried history of this designation, and that there exist intriguing continuities with biblical and Second Temple usages. More specifically, we argue that in rabbinic literature from Late Antiquity, the Hebrew term “daughters of Israel” appears in sites of contestation, sometimes deployed in discussions about women’s innovation in ritual practice in ways that evoke references to women’s ritual agency from narrative biblical sources. In late antique incantation bowls, the Aramaic term for “daughters of Israel” (benot yisra’el) evokes the legal language of Second Temple marriage contracts that explicitly includes women and may have served to point out their particular agency. Thus in both sets of sources the term often signals moments when women act as subjects (rather than objects) of ritual and legal discourse. Rabbinic and nonrabbinic sources, then, can be understood more accurately when we uncover the full range of connotations of the term “daughters of Israel.”
We begin by situating this study within previous scholarship, and then we provide an overview of the term “daughters of Israel” as it is used in biblical and Second Temple literary and documentary sources. Next, we turn to an analysis of rabbinic texts and incantation bowls to demonstrate the long-lasting and surprising resonances that the term carried with it in these late antique sources. We conclude by reflecting on instances in rabbinic sources in which the term’s usage differs from what we have covered, pointing to the ways in which the term began to take on a diverse and diffuse set of meanings.
The so-called chapter on the wayward son (ben sorer u-moreh) is a foundational and popular text f... more The so-called chapter on the wayward son (ben sorer u-moreh) is a foundational and popular text for study in rabbinic schools of learning, wherein the ancient rabbis grappled with a severe biblical law that punished the willfully disobedient son with death issues, but the topics of gender and sexuality tend to be neglected in these institutional settings due to their uncomfortable misogy-nistic undertones. A feminist analysis attuned to philological, historical , and Talmudic research highlights the misinterpretations that result from neglecting direct engagement with these aspects of the text. This article unpacks the logical shortcuts that the rabbis have used to describe gender relations in one particular unit, but in doing so highlights the significance of analogical thinking in rabbinic literature more broadly. The rabbis have employed violent analogies as shortcuts to describe gender relations, and, unexposed, they continue shaping the imagination of readers and students today. In the pages of the Babylonian Talmud commenting on the last mishnah of chapter 8 of tractate Sanhedrin, we find the generations of rabbis debating ethical issues related to parents and children, violence and its prevention, martyrdom and the sanctity of life, individuals and society, and lastly and indirectly,
Encyclopedia Entries by Mika Ahuvia
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Monograph by Mika Ahuvia
Edited Volume by Mika Ahuvia
Papers by Mika Ahuvia
We begin by situating this study within previous scholarship, and then we provide an overview of the term “daughters of Israel” as it is used in biblical and Second Temple literary and documentary sources. Next, we turn to an analysis of rabbinic texts and incantation bowls to demonstrate the long-lasting and surprising resonances that the term carried with it in these late antique sources. We conclude by reflecting on instances in rabbinic sources in which the term’s usage differs from what we have covered, pointing to the ways in which the term began to take on a diverse and diffuse set of meanings.
Encyclopedia Entries by Mika Ahuvia
We begin by situating this study within previous scholarship, and then we provide an overview of the term “daughters of Israel” as it is used in biblical and Second Temple literary and documentary sources. Next, we turn to an analysis of rabbinic texts and incantation bowls to demonstrate the long-lasting and surprising resonances that the term carried with it in these late antique sources. We conclude by reflecting on instances in rabbinic sources in which the term’s usage differs from what we have covered, pointing to the ways in which the term began to take on a diverse and diffuse set of meanings.