The Woman Who Earned a Place Alongside the Rabbis of the Talmud

This is the second in a series of occasional essays by David Wolpe on lesser-known figures in Jewish history. The first, on the biblical king Josiah, is available here.

If you’re ever moved to ransack the Jewish past for voices you may feel are missing—the marginalized, the hushed, the heretical avatars of Jewish history—they’re right there, hiding in plain sight. The Bible itself tells us of problematic prophets like Jephthah and Samson. The Talmud preserves the voices of Elisha ben Avuyah, the esteemed rabbi who became a heretic, and of Reysh Lakish, the bandit who became an esteemed rabbi. In short, there’s ample room in the tradition for those whose origins or whose identities are not, let’s say, mainstream.

Perhaps no presence is more powerfully symbolic in this connection than that of Bruriah: the woman whose erudition, sharpness, and wit earned her a place alongside the rabbis of the Talmud but whose reputation at the hands of later commentators, both medieval and modern, would meet a varied and sometimes cruel fate.