Rabbis and “Guerrilla Girls” A Bavli Motif of the Female (Counter) Voice in the Rabbinic Legal System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Normal 0 0 1 215 1227 10 2 1506 11.1539 0 0 0 Rabbinic Judaism created a system of laws and legal categories that generally functioned to put women at a social and material disadvantage. Intriguingly, then, rabbinic sources also include scattered stories of women in their own, rabbinic context(s) confronting and finding ways to maneuver within the details of those laws so as to attempt (and even to succeed) to secure a favorable result. Rachel Adler and Charlotte Fonrobert have used terms such as trickster and to describe the character and actions of Yalta, the protagonist of one such story. Each has thus identified and highlighted a critical feature of this story that contributes to the subversive potential that a female figure like Yalta exhibits in this episode: both the (likely) ruse and the ability to function not just as an object but as a participant to some degree in rabbinic legal discourse. In this article, these criteria will be used to seek to identify other stories in the Bavli that might speak to this theme, and to analyze the presentation of female characters that come before legal authorities and the actions they take in the course of their cases. Put another way, can we identify other stories about other female characters that might function as tricksters and/or “legal guerrillas” (to use another of Adler's terms)? And if we can, what might this imply about rabbis and rabbinic culture that such episodes are incorporated, presumably by the rabbis themselves, into Talmudic literature?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".