The <em>Mikveh</em> Rebellion that Wasn’t: Recovering Ritual Space Beyond Jewish Law
JEWS AND LAWMeirav Jones
Meirav Jones is assistant professor of Religious Studies at McMaster University and a fellow of the Kogod Research Center at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
In 1176, ten years after Maimonides moved from Spain to Egypt, he issued an edict to suppress what is remembered in Jewish history as the “mikveh rebellion.” In his edict, written in Judeo-Arabic, the renowned rabbi and philosopher describes Jewish women who resided in Egypt at that time categorically refusing to comply with the requirements of niddah, the rabbinic laws regarding menstrual purity, even when instructed to do so by Maimonides himself. The women did not wait the required seven days after menstruation before purification, and they did not immerse in the “living waters” of the mikveh (ritual bath) as rabbinic law demands, washing instead in the “drawn waters” of the communal bathhouse. Maimonides’s edict placed harsh penalties on women who deviated from halakhic norms, ultimately leaving them no choice but to conform to them and abandon their previous practice.1
Credit: Kurt Hoffman-Stable Diffusion
Yet despite the portrayal of these Egyptian Jewish women as rebellious, both in the edict and in history texts, recent research by Eve Krakowski and Shaye D. Cohen suggests that Maimonides’s edict did not extinguish a rebellion at all, but only the form of menstrual purity that had been practiced among Egyptian Jews from the first century until the twelfth; an example of what Krakowski has termed “common Judaism.” According to this research, the women of Egypt were not brought back to halakhic tradition by the great rabbinic authority so much as they were forced, through sanctions, to abandon the traditions of their mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers in favor of this authority. Indeed, evidence of mikveh immersion in Egypt—such as records of questions directed to rabbis and references to menstrual purity in marriage contracts—begins to appear in historical materials only in the period after Maimonides issued his edict.
Understanding the “mikveh rebellion” as a story about halakhic authority forcefully suppressing longstanding women’s traditions has implications both for how we view the history of niddah and how we might critique and construct feminist approaches to halakhah today. While Orthodox feminism has significantly increased women’s involvement in the world of halakhah, particularly when this concerns female practice, in reflecting on Maimonides’s edict I want to draw attention to how focusing feminist efforts exclusively on halakhah reinforces its hegemony and may effectively support the loss of extralegal practices and spaces traditionally configured by women. Maimonides’s efforts in Egypt highlight how halakhah, because it prizes codification, abrogates women’s customs and practices that historically took place in unregulated spaces. Within and beyond halakhic Judaism, the reflections offered here challenge us to consider the significance of extralegal female practice in a world where legal codes and normative guidance have been shaped and enforced by men, and to consider the possibilities for an approach that takes women’s practices seriously.
The Mikveh “Rebellion”
Maimonides’s edict seems to tell a relatively straightforward story: the women of the Egyptian Jewish community did not follow halakhah on the matter of niddah, menstrual purity. More specifically, they did not wait “seven clean days” after menstruation and then go to a mikveh to immerse in “living water” in preparation for intimate relations with their husbands. Rather, they went to bathhouses immediately after menstruation, and there they cleaned themselves with “drawn water” and performed a ritual Maimonides calls sakb. In sakb, which means “pouring,” a non-menstruating woman pours clean water over a woman who just concluded her menses as a means of purifying her to resume sexual intimacy with her husband.
Maimonides was not the only rabbi of the time to discover communities where, despite general adherence to rabbinic law, women did not conform to halakhic norms in the realm of niddah. While we have examples from Northern France and the Rhineland as well as from Spain, a particularly well-documented case is that of R. Isaiah Ben Mali (the Elder) of Trani, known as Ha-Rid, who travelled throughout the Byzantine empire and found that none of the women on the Byzantian mainland practiced halakhic immersion. His efforts to convince the women of Crete to do so—efforts he undertook with another foreign rabbi and his local wife, who did practice halakhic immersion—initially failed, as the women of that community claimed their longstanding practices were equally valid, and even requested that he not instruct them on the matter of halakhic immersion so that they could plead ignorance while continuing their local traditions. While R. Isaiah was eventually successful in persuading the women of this community, he laments that in other places where he found that women did not immerse according to halakhah, he was unable to convince them to change their ways.
Maimonides’s edict reveals that unlike R. Isaiah, he was willing and able to impose halakhah on the women of the Egyptian community even after he failed to persuade them to adopt halakhic immersion. Whereas R. Isaiah reported conceding defeat in most communities where he encountered deviation from halakhah on this matter, Maimonides allied himself with the men in the community—men who had previously found no fault in their wives’ menstrual purity practices—to coerce the women to obey. The edict Maimonides issued, with the support of the men of the community and the court, decreed that from that date onwards, any woman who failed to immerse in a mikveh, who failed to wait seven clean days, or who engaged in the “pouring” ritual with or without an immersion, would be divorced by her husband and refused her dowry. The edict further indicated that, for a widow to receive her dowry after her husband’s death, she would have to swear an oath that she had immersed in accordance with rabbinic law.
Maimonides’s tactics to enforce halakhic immersion took advantage of Jewish community control over matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance, all of which placed women at the mercy of men, even when the community’s ability to sanction men was extremely limited in comparison. It was the severe threat of being left alone and empty-handed that ultimately suppressed the mikveh “rebellion,” bringing Egyptian women in line with the halakhic practice without persuading them that their existing custom was wrong.
I want to call attention to two aspects of the edict that I will discuss further in the following sections of this article. The first of these is what Maimonides does and does not do with the female voice or female perspective. Unlike the text we have from R. Isaiah, Maimonides’s edict does not include a report of any conversations with the women of the community. Maimonides refers to them only in generic terms as “bat Yisrael” (a daughter of Israel) and “b’not Yisrael” (daughters of Israel), that I believe allude to the limited to non-existent role he is willing to give women in shaping the halakhah that will govern their lives. The second aspect of the edict I want to call attention to is the immensity of Maimonides’s outrage at the existing ritual of sakb. Taken together, these two aspects of the edict speak to Maimonides’s aggressive assertion of rabbinic authority and the extent to which halakhic regulation and codification came at the expense of women’s established practices. This was the case in Maimonides’s time, and the prizing of codification continues to this day, even though the original discussions of niddah in the Talmud looked to the lived practices of “b’not Yisrael.”
The Absence of Female Voice, and the Daughters of Israel
Maimonides’s edict does not include any arguments the women of Egypt may have made in favor of sakb or against halakhic immersion. We are left to surmise that women preferred the bathhouse for comfort or ease, or to infer that they, like the women R. Isaiah encountered, found value in their local customs, which Jewish women before them may have practiced for centuries. But whatever reasons these women may have had must have seemed inconsequential to Maimonides, who emphasized only the law and his own authority to impose it. To this end, he writes that if “a daughter of Israel” does not immerse in the mikveh or count seven clean days as per the custom of “the daughters of Israel,” she will be punished.
The terms bat Yisrael and b’not Yisrael recall this Talmudic passage:
Rabbi Zeira says: Jewish women [b’not Yisrael] were stringent with themselves to the extent that even if they see a drop of blood the size of a mustard seed, they sit seven clean days for it. By Torah law, a woman who experiences menstrual bleeding waits seven days in total before immersing, regardless of whether she experiences bleeding on those days. If she experiences bleeding during the eleven days when she is not expected to experience menstrual bleeding, she is a lesser zava and waits one day without bleeding and then immerses. The Jewish women accepted upon themselves the stringency that if they experience any bleeding whatsoever, they treat it as the blood of a greater zava which obligates one to count seven clean days before immersing. (bBerachot 31a)
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This passage is the primary source for the rabbinic law that a woman should count seven clean days after the end of menstruation before her ritual immersion. That is, seven days in which she does not bleed must pass before she can immerse. This stringent practice is often attributed to Rabbi Zeira but as we see in the text, he credits the b’not Yisrael, the daughters of Israel, with taking it on themselves. Scholars do not agree on the significance of this. Some see it as an example of female agency, while others suggest that the agency attributed to women in the Talmud was merely a rhetorical trick aimed at authorizing and legitimizing a practice imposed by rabbinic authorities. Maimonides’s use of the phrase could similarly be a reference to female agency or another rhetorical trick.
I want to advocate for a kind of middle ground. In my view, the text of the Babylonian Talmud may very well offer a historically accurate description of Jewish women developing their own menstrual purity practices, including the stringency of waiting seven days beyond the biblical requirement. Though the Talmud does not explain why, we can see how these practices might have served women, either in developing a distinctly feminine form of piety, or in claiming autonomy over their bodies and their more intimate practices. After all, in the Talmudic tractate Niddah, passages discussing the “stringency” of the daughters of Israel appear alongside discussions of laws regarding premenstrual child brides, a practice that was allowed at the time. This juxtaposition invites us to imagine that extending the customary period of separation between wives and husbands was a way to allow young girls—or any women—refuge from marital relations. There well may have been other reasons women preferred a longer period of separation.
Yet even if women’s practices were once passed down from mother to daughter and attuned to girls’ and women’s needs, as this reading suggests, once codified by the rabbis, these practices became a rigid structure over which women now lack any control. Waiting an additional seven days after menstruation moved from being the “practice of b’not Yisrael” to being the “stringency of R. Zeira.” Not only were male rabbis the ones who codified these practices, they became the only ones who could adapt now-codified norms to new circumstances. In short, once women’s practices became rabbinic law, women could no longer choose to be “stringent with themselves” or pass down this stringency to their daughters as an option; rather, they would be required to do so.
Further, though the Talmud attributes the original stringency to women, the fact that it records no reasons why b’not Yisrael took on this practice is significant for the fate of the stringency in halakhic discourse. This lack of reasons makes it harder for later rabbis who might want to adapt the laws to changing times and needs. Had women’s reasons for the stringency of the additional seven days of separation been given, we might have seen that it was related to their particular circumstances. As circumstances changed, the stringency could have become irrelevant, or it could have been modified to accommodate differences between women’s menstrual cycles. In codifying the stringency absent women’s reasons or any reasons, what we find is the establishment of a particularly inflexible standard.
The far-reaching consequences of compelling women to comply with this standard in our own time is exemplified by the fact that the practice of an additional “seven clean days” renders some Jewish women “halakhically infertile.” For most women, the practice of niddah encourages sexual intimacy at the time of ovulation, when a woman is most likely to conceive. But now that we have the technology to determine when a woman is ovulating with relative precision, we understand that for some women, ovulation falls during the seven “clean” days of their monthly menstrual cycle, when they are prohibited from sexual intimacy with their partners. Halakhic infertility refers to this condition of being prohibited by Jewish law from engaging in sexual relations at exactly the moment when one is most likely to conceive.
Had reasons for stringency been given in the Talmud, later rabbinic decisors might have felt more free to address the problem of halakhic infertility by adjusting the length of the post-menstrual separation period to accommodate those women who ovulate earlier in their cycles. Such adaptation would allow these women to comply with the halakhah of menstrual purity while also fulfilling the biblical command to be fruitful and multiply. It would thus also relieve the anguish that so often accompanies infertility. But this is not what typically happens. Rather, rabbis generally direct those rendered “halakhically infertile” to fertility specialists for hormone and drug treatments. In these cases, the “seven clean days” function as an inflexible, standardized practice that leads to the medicalization of women’s issues that are not, in fact, medical. It is hard to imagine any woman who wants to become pregnant choosing to be stringent in this way in our time.
Ancient Usha Mikveh. Credit Wikimedia Commons
Maimonides’s neglect of the arguments of women of Egypt in favor of their practices, and his use of the term “b’not Yisrael,” makes his edict continuous with the original codification of the “way” of women in tractate Niddah. Since the completion of the Talmud, any female practice outside the realm of halakhah, even if it is a longstanding tradition, has effectively become deviant.
The Sakb Ritual and the Rabbis
In addition to his insistence on rabbinic practices of niddah, Maimonides also argues against the women’s existing sakb ritual by claiming it reflects the influence of Karaism, a Jewish sect that adhered to the written law of the Torah but rejected the oral Torah of the Rabbis. Yet in comparison with the discussions of other rabbis of Maimonides’s time, his prohibition of the pouring ritual seems unusually harsh. Some would have considered it halakhically irrelevant for women to pour water on one another in the bathhouse as long as they were also immersing in the mikveh at the appointed time. Many sources even distinguish between the end of menses and the end of the entire period of niddah after seven further clean days. As long as couples maintained the mandated separation during the additional days, need it have mattered if a woman chose to mark the end of menses and the shift to her seven clean days with a pouring ritual?
According to Maimonides, washing after menstruation was absolutely not something women could choose to do, and the bathhouse could not be a space for such a ritual even if women went to the mikveh for immersion after the seven clean days and refrained from marital relations until that time. His reasoning following the Talmudic paradigm of “elu v’elu,” meaning “these and these,” or the possibility that women might think that both sakb and mikveh were necessary for purification. But the logic seems extreme. Maimonides did, after all, find some non-halakhic practices tolerable, such as the seclusion of women during menstruation. It is possible to imagine a way that the bathhouse—and even the sakb ritual—could have been retained for Egyptian women who were also following the halakhic rituals of purification. Sakb could simply have been an unmandated but traditional way to mark the transition from menstruation to the seven clean days. Its separation in time from the final immersion would have alleviated the elu v’elu concern. Such an option (but not a requirement) for a “first immersion” directly after menstruation could have taken many forms, and the rabbis could have refrained from taking an interest in these women’s practices.
In the end, as Krakowski argued, Maimonides’s coercive efforts to get women to immerse in accordance with halakhah, and to mark the end of their menstrual periods in no other way, suppressed longstanding women’s practices and also solidified his own authority within the larger community. In the case of niddah, that authority came at the price of women’s practices and women’s knowledge; insofar as Maimonides did not think it worthwhile to record how the women understood their practice, he also deprived us of a full historical record. We can only conjecture as to the reasons why they developed and maintained the practice of pouring, and what it meant to them.
Halakhah, Niddah, and Unregulated Space
Maimonides is generally considered the most important rabbinic authority to shape halakhic Judaism beyond Talmudic times, and his edict from 1176 has provided us with some insights about the halakhic project’s approach to women’s practices and, in particular, its pattern of male rabbis entering female spaces to abrogate or otherwise radically alter them. With regard to menstrual purity practices, we can trace this intrusion from the initial establishment of the rabbis as experts in female discharges, through the Talmudic codification of women’s practices of delaying immersion, to Maimonides’s outlawing of cleansing rituals women had developed and practiced for centuries, and to the barriers of halakhic infertility in our time. We can also note the establishment of ritual baths as state-regulated institutions in Israel, or as communally regulated institutions in Orthodox communities, under the authority of a male rabbi. This pattern reflects what Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert has described as women becoming “objects of rabbinic knowledge.”
At least since Blu Greenberg published On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition in 1981, Orthodox feminists have focused their efforts largely on bringing women’s voices and perspectives into the realm of halakhic authority that regulates women's issues. Change has been sought—even in regard to niddah—from within a purely halakhic discourse and paradigm. The locating and even championing of a realm of female autonomy within spaces and times that are not halakhically regulated has been set beyond the pale. Perhaps to distinguish their work from the work of non-Orthodox feminists inventing or recovering women’s rituals; perhaps because halakhah is so central to Orthodoxy; or perhaps for some combination of the two reasons, Orthodox feminists have not prioritized the space outside halakhah.
Recognizing the coercive nature of Maimonides’s efforts to quell the so-called “mikveh rebellion” and the radical change in Egyptian Jewish women’s ritual lives that he imposed upon them in 1176 should lead us to reconsider what a feminist Orthodox approach to Jewish practice should entail. Seeking and gaining recognition—and protection—for unregulated spaces and times can push back against the halakhic structures that have abrogated women’s practices in the past, while still respecting halakhah in spaces and times that are regulated today. Elevating the value of unregulated space and time—and the rituals that may happen there—attributes meaning to acts and rituals that are not commanded, as if to question the Talmudic statement that “the person who is commanded and acts is greater than the person who is not commanded and acts.” To the extent that activities and rituals that take place outside the realm of command, unregulated by halakhah, are recognized as part of Jewish life and as worthy of space being held for them, there is the possibility that such areas of women’s activity could purposely remain unregulated by halakhic Jews and yet could still be considered meaningful Jewish practices.
The distinction between regulated and unregulated space is key to understanding a recent Israeli Supreme Court case, in which women demanded the right to immerse in the mikveh unsupervised by an attendant. They justified their demand by describing it as a quest for privacy and autonomy in their connection with the divine. Mikvaot in Israel are part of a state institution whose female employees—the mikveh attendants—are accountable to local councils, who are, in turn, accountable to Israel’s Chief Rabbinate. The court ruled in favor of the women seeking unregulated mikveh immersions. It’s ironic that this new right to immerse without rabbinic oversight rests on state law and is likely to be overturned with the new coalition government sworn in in December 2022. We should note, as well, that most halakhic authorities continue to insist that supervision is necessary, so that the state’s ruling is not only temporary, but relevant only to the small number of women who both seek the halakhically-mandated ritual of immersion and are willing to defy mainstream halakhic authorities in pursuing privacy in the mikveh.2
Even as some women are seeking mikveh immersion without attendants, these same female attendants often serve beyond their formal role in enforcing the requirements of halakhah, even creating unregulated time and space worthy of protection. When I presented the material in this essay at a workshop, one participant reflected on the shiva of her late grandmother, who had been a “mikveh lady,” as these attendants are often called. Visitors to the shiva remembered her grandmother for playing this role, not because of her halakhic know-how, but because of the safe space she provided to women attending the mikveh. They described how she would allow them to stay and talk after their immersions, providing a refuge that was both outside the halakhic purpose of mikveh and outside the obligations that shaped their lives at home. For some women, such mikveh attendants can be an unexpected gift.
How can we protect the attendants who go beyond their formal role to offer women the mikveh as a protected female space? How can we ensure the preservation of this practice, when it is plausible that halakhic authorities could start to wield codified law to regulate the amount of time a mikveh lady can spend with each individual woman, to limit the topics that can be discussed, or to rule out using the mikveh for anything other than immersion? Recognizing the price that women have paid for the hegemony of codified law, we must work to ascribe value and offer protection, within Jewish thought and practice, to spaces into which the law does not enter. Spaces like these cannot be taken for granted, in light of how halakhah has functioned historically.
Reflections Beyond the Mikveh
The implications of the approach I am suggesting run beyond the mikveh and even beyond women’s practices. In fact, there is an interesting parallel between the feminist approach offered here and the critique of over-textualization condemned as a corruption of traditional Judaism by Haym Soloveitchik in his famous essay, “Rupture and Reconstruction”—a piece that is itself problematic from a gender perspective, as the extra-textual Judaism described there is no less male dominated than the textual Judaism he critiques.
Beyond the mikveh, there are additional spaces that have often been seen as female, and in these spaces as well, there are centuries-old rituals that are halakhically unnecessary or indifferent. Rabbis have tended not to enter these spaces, but when they do enter them, they typically do not recognize any value in such rituals, and then frame them as unnecessarily burdensome. Consider, for example, certain Passover cleaning rituals that may not be strictly required by Jewish law but that have been sacred to many Jews, particularly Jewish women, for centuries. In the lead-up to Passover 2021, in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and again in the lead-up to Passover 2022, a modern Orthodox rabbi with a strong presence on social media sought to clarify the laws of Passover cleaning for his readers in Israel and North America. Stating that several practices of their “bubbies,” their Jewish grandmothers, were in fact unnecessary, he explained that according to halakhah, books did not need to be removed from bookshelves to search for breadcrumbs and benchtops did not need covering if they had been cleaned. Searching for hametz, he claimed, should be less of a burden than generations of maternal ancestors would have us believe. When confronted with the problematic gender dynamic he was perpetuating by dismissing the (halakhically indifferent) rituals of Jewish grandmothers in favor of (male-controlled) halakhic considerations, the rabbi’s response was that he sought to relieve women of unnecessary work that was sometimes oppressive: he was “on our side.” He did not consider the possibility that the “unnecessary work” could be laden with meaning or considered redeeming, or that it its value might lie in the fact that it had been passed down. Extrapolating from the example of the mikveh, it’s not hard to imagine that excessive cleaning could someday be deemed halakhically forbidden, potentially leading to any number of other irrelevant interdictions.
The identity of the Jewish people as “commanded” through the generations is tied to the biblical revelation at Mount Sinai, in the presence of all the people—including women. Without a doubt, the rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud and rabbinic authorities since that time took this intergenerational responsibility seriously when developing and then interpreting and enforcing the laws of halakhah. But alongside these halakhic authorities, there have been women and others whose sense of commandedness led them to develop their own rituals alongside halakhah. As halakhah continues to claim more ground and to be backed by more rigid structures of authority, including rabbinic councils and now the state of Israel, such rituals have been devalued and may even be outlawed. As we consider what we want Jewish life to look like today, I think that including women in the discussion of halakhah is an important step, and women rabbis defending the need for unsupervised mikveh immersion is an interesting case in point. But we must recognize that for generations, in the shaping of halakhah as it was passed down to our generation, women were not in positions of authority, and could not defend women’s practices or their needs with halakhic reasoning or with any reasoning at all. Women’s practices were lost, along with the meanings they derived from them.
To advance change, I believe that feminist efforts in the world of halakhic Judaism should be reconfigured not only to include women in halakhic discourse, but to create protected spaces outside halakhah. In these spaces, it should be accepted that rituals may lack uniformity, and they may change as women’s needs change. The spaces where such rituals take place must be protected, which means that they should neither be seen as insignificant nor be seen as requiring rabbinic supervision. I would even suggest that women today might take on the responsibility of cultivating such spaces as a reparative gesture of appreciation towards women silenced by halakhic authorities, both historically and in our time. Their practices may be unprotected, and some authorities may look down on them, but they have served and continue to serve important social and human purposes.
While this essay ended with a call to feminists working within rabbinic Judaism to reclaim female voices rabbinic law silenced over time and female spaces it abrogated, I feel obligated to clarify that my work only barely scratches the surface of the problems in the rabbinic approach to menstrual purity, and the changes that would be warranted from a gendered perspective taken to this entire issue. In limiting my critique and suggestions to spaces that could be halakhically indifferent, I barely mentioned the violence towards women and children that is also present in rabbinic works I cited. BNiddah, for example, includes theoretical discussions of sexual encounters with toddlers, as well as premenstrual girls as I mentioned, and less shocking but still offensive, male rabbis describing what menstruation feels like and providing outrageous accounts of women’s vaginal discharges. Insofar as teenage boys, as well as men, still study these sources as authoritative, violence beyond the silencing of women’s voices and violation of women’s spaces is continually normalized in our time, and women are harmed by those who have internalized the tradition. I cannot help but consider whether, in fact, alongside seeking out the halakhically indifferent and fortifying it against rabbinic interference, we might live in a good time for a “mikveh rebellion” truer to the name. Perhaps realizing that there was, in fact, no rebellion in the 12th century could inspire us to struggle with Maimonides, who can no longer write us out of our inheritance, and with the rabbis of the Talmud, whose codification has been good for some and devastating for others. It may be time for women to rethink menstrual purity altogether, both in the language of halakhah and beyond.
This article appears in Sources, Spring 2023.
Endnotes
1 Maimonides, Responsa, ed. Blau (Jerusalem, 2014), no. 242; English translation in Eve Krakowski, “Maimonides’ Menstrual Reform in Egypt,” Jewish Quarterly Review 110:2 (2020); Abraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe (New England: Brandeis University Press, 2004).
2 For such women, Rabbi Michal Tikochinsky’s teshuvah offers a halakhic rationale supporting unsupervised immersion in most cases: https://gluya.org/tvilah-without-balanit/ (Hebrew).
