L’importanza delle donne nella trasmissione dei valori ebraici

Abstract

In Jewish tradition, especially in post-biblical one, membership of the Jewish people is guaranteed by matrilineal descent. Rabbinic sources not only state that God freed the people from Egypt thanks to the merits of women (Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 11b) but also recognize their fundamental importance in transmitting traditional values, starting from the period of gestation. All this took place in a historical and cultural context that was not free from various kinds of male chauvinist influences. We will therefore attempt to focus, albeit amid “lights and shadows,” the dynamics according to which Jewish women continue to be the privileged and irreplaceable mediators of Jewishness in relation to the creation of a tradition centred on intergenerational transmission, which is not only a question of blood ties and connection to certain practices, but above all of interaction with the ongoing discussion of the textual sources that constitute the matrix of identity from both a religious and secular perspective.