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Nahanni Rous: Hi, it’s Nahanni Rous, here with another episode of Can We Talk?

First, a word from our sponsor, Film Independent—presenting Always Remember, in partnership with the Cayton-Goldrich Family Foundation and Claims Conference. Always Remember is a series of free, virtual screenings that raise Holocaust awareness through cinema. The series features films that amplify unique voices and exclusive interviews with some of the filmmakers. At a time when Holocaust awareness is at an all-time low and antisemitism is on the rise, our commitment to Always Remember is more important than ever. Learn more and register at filmindependent.org/alwaysremember.

Now, on to the show.

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Nahanni: Welcome back to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive, where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet.

The weeklong holiday of Sukkot, which we are currently in the middle of, celebrates both the fall harvest and life’s fragility. To symbolize our vulnerability, we build a temporary structure, or sukkah, and invite guests, or ushpizin, into it—both real-life guests and the ancient kind. Traditionally, the ushpizin are the biblical forefathers.

More recently, feminist interpretations have added women, or ushpizot, to this tradition—from biblical matriarchs to historical and contemporary figures. For example, my family’s sukkah decor includes a photo of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

This time on Can We Talk?, we’re welcoming a special guest from the past into our virtual sukkah—one who, at first glance, comes with some baggage.

Gila Fine: Homa is a three-time widow, a black widow. Halachically, she is known as an isha katlanit. An isha katlanit is a woman who has lost a number of husbands and is somehow suspected to be the cause of their deaths.

Nahanni: That’s Talmud scholar Gila Fine, talking about Homa, whom Gila has dubbed the “femme fatale of the Talmud.” In this episode of Can We Talk?, Gila introduces Homa and tells us what makes her a fitting guest for Sukkot.

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Nahanni: Gila Fine teaches rabbinic literature at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. She says women in the Talmud are notoriously anonymous.

Gila: In all of rabbinic literature, there are just 52 named women, as opposed to over a thousand named men. And of these 52, exactly six are heroines of their own Talmudic story. They are Yalta, Homa, Martha, Herutah, Bruria, and Ima Shalom.

Nahanni: These six women are the subject of Gila’s new book, The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic: Rereading the Women of the Talmud. The title is a play on the 1970s feminist text The Madwoman in the Attic, which dissects depictions of women in nineteenth-century literature. In her book, Gila compares the six female protagonists in the Talmud to classic female archetypes, then takes a closer look to find the hidden meaning in their stories.

Gila: The one thing that really unifies these otherwise very diverse women is that each of them appears, at first reading, to embody an anti-feminine archetype, to be a caricature of a quote-unquote “bad woman.” So Yalta is a perfect shrew, Homa is a classic femme fatale, and Martha is a paradigmatic prima donna.

And yet, with almost every one of them, we find that if we read the story a second time, this is not at all the case. The woman is actually far more complex than she initially appears, and the Rabbis had some surprisingly proto-feminist attitudes toward marriage, childbirth, sex, and what it meant to be a woman in the world.

Now, at no point do I make the claim that the Rabbis were feminists. But they were fundamentally moralists. They cared greatly about the moral treatment of the other. And women, for the Rabbis, were the ultimate other. They were the avatar of all minorities, of anyone who was marginalized. And the Rabbis use these stories of women to impart moral messages about how to treat the others in our midst.

Nahanni: So, the woman that we want to talk about today is the woman you call the great femme fatale of the Talmud. Can you tell her story?

Gila: Homa, who is the wife of the recently deceased Abbaye, arrives at court to determine the size of her widow's allowance. According to rabbinic law, a widow is given a regular stipend out of her late husband's estate so that she can live in the same comfort to which she was accustomed during her husband's lifetime.

Now, presiding over Homa’s case is Rava, who happens to be her late husband's study partner. Homa asks Rava for an allowance for food, and Rava gives her an allowance for food.

Homa then says, "But also, I would like an allowance for wine." And this time, Rava pushes back. He says, "I know Nachmani"—Nachmani was Abbaye’s real name, used only by his nearest and dearest—"and I know that he did not drink wine. If you did not drink wine with your husband while he was alive, you certainly do not deserve to receive wine now that he is dead."

In the halachic discussion that comes directly before our story in the Talmud, we're told that a woman who is on her own—whose husband has either died or is living elsewhere—should not be given too much wine to drink. The reason is that wine in a woman causes promiscuity and sexual impropriety. That is especially dangerous when there is no male guardian around to keep the woman's sexuality in check.

Nahanni: Fascinating.

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Gila: Essentially, sexual desire was believed by the Rabbis to be a uniquely powerful force—which, I don’t think we can dispute. But they believed that only men had enough willpower and rationality to control it. Even for them, it was a struggle, but they had to struggle, whereas women didn’t have a fighting chance. A woman was powerless against sexual desire, and so she had to have it controlled for her by her male guardian.

Nahanni: So, give her a glass of wine and... forget about it.

Gila: Give her a glass of wine when her husband is not around—well, perhaps not one glass. The Rabbis actually say one glass of wine is fine. Two is not as good. Three, you’ll have her basically begging for sex publicly. And four, she will actually solicit a donkey in the street and not care. [Nahanni laughs; instrumental music plays]. So, just don’t give her four glasses if she’s drinking alone, basically.

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Nahanni: All right, so let’s get back to Homa and her request for her allowance.

Gila: I think what is happening here is that Rava is, in a way, trying to become Homa’s guardian now that she no longer has her husband to guard her. He is determined to protect her chastity in place of his dearly departed study partner, and so he refuses to give Homa wine.

Except that Homa now pushes back. She says, “Excuse me, but we totally did drink wine. In fact, my husband would pour wine for me in glasses that were yea high.”

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And as she gestures, her sleeve falls away. For me, this is very reminiscent of those scenes in film noir where you have the femme fatale in a detective's office, slowly stripping off a long black glove. Because she’s so beautiful, light from her exposed arm shines over the courtroom...

Nahanni: Mmm-hmm.

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Gila: At which point Rava gets up—he’s immediately aroused. But rather than fall to the clutches of this manipulative femme fatale, he rushes home to consummate his passion with his lawfully wedded wife, Rav Hisda’s daughter.

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Except that Rav Hisda’s daughter—who’s clearly not used to her husband coming home in a surge of passion in the middle of the day—is immediately suspicious. She says, “Who is in the courtroom today?” To which Rava responds, “Homa, Abbaye’s wife.”

So Rav Hisda’s daughter picks up a bar—back in rabbinic times, they would keep their belongings in chests and fasten them shut with a threaded bar. She takes this bar and beats Homa until she runs her out of town, saying, “You have already seduced and destroyed three men; do not come after mine.”

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And in this dramatic final line of the story, we discover what is perhaps the most important piece of information about Homa: Homa is a three-time widow—a black widow. Halachically, she is known as an isha katlanit. An isha katlanit is a woman who has lost a number of husbands and who is somehow suspected to be the cause of their deaths.

Gila: Now, because halachically you are meant to protect your life and not put yourself in harm’s way, you are not allowed to marry such a woman. The term itself is really interesting. Isha means “woman,” and katlanit means “fatal.” So an isha katlanit is literally a “femme fatale.”

What we have here is a really interesting case of a general literary archetype that turns into a very real halachic concept. And Homa, at this point, is about as fatale as a femme can get. Which explains why Rava ran out of the courtroom in such a panic. Three men—including his own study partner—have fallen prey to this woman’s deadly charms, and if he doesn’t escape her, he could very well be next.

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This is the story of Homa, and judging by the first reading, what we have before us is a classic femme fatale narrative. We’ve got the pious man overcome by desire, we’ve got the seduction by striptease, and we’ve got a dangerously beautiful black widow who has seduced and destroyed three men.

And I ask, as I do with every woman I look at in the book: Is this really the story the Talmud is telling?

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Nahanni: To help answer that question, Gila compares the story of Homa to other classic femme fatale narratives, like The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, in which Hester Prynne is humiliated and cast out for having a child out of wedlock. Gila thinks the Rabbis of the Talmud, like Hawthorne, want us to see the woman behind the archetype. The femme fatale, like all archetypes, is a projection.

Gila: It is not the femme fatale’s promiscuity they fear, but rather their own. Not her seductiveness, but their own susceptibility to seduction. And so now that we've deconstructed the archetype, we can try and reread the story of Homa—this time from the point of view of Homa herself.

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Gila: So if we go back to the opening scene, we've got this courtroom scene, very much like the courtroom scene from The Scarlet Letter. On the one hand, we have Rava, who is a presiding judge, representative of law, authority, and power. On the other hand, you have Homa, who is a woman, a single woman, and a fatal woman. And you don't get any more marginalized, any more “other,” than that.

So, very much like Hester Prynne, Homa enters the courtroom with the odds stacked firmly against her. And very much like Hester Prynne, she walks into the courtroom surrounded by an air of prejudice—of people whispering behind her back about the deadly femme fatale who’s killed her three husbands.

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Gila: She also knows that this is her last day in court. She is now an isha katlanit, which means it is forbidden to marry her. So any kind of settlement she can get in today's hearing will be the thing she has to live off for the rest of her life.

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Gila: And so she asks for an allowance for food, and she gets her allowance for food. Then she asks for an additional allowance for wine, at which point Rava refuses, saying, “I know my chevrutah—I know he did not drink wine.” To which Homa insists that he absolutely did.

And what we have here is a very interesting kind of love triangle. There is a tacit contest about who knew Abbaye better—who was more intimately familiar with him? And so Homa, staking her claim to her late husband’s memory, raises her arm, sending a ray of light over the courtroom and a wave of desire through the judge.

And I want to claim that this is not a mere act of strip tease. What Rava sees in that moment, when Homa’s sleeve falls away, is not a bit of skin—it’s an entirely different kind of marital life.

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Gila: His own marriage, we can assume—because we know how his wife is about to respond to his advances—is very proper, quite prudish, possibly devoid of passion.

And here Homa comes along and offers him a glimpse into something else—an intoxicated, playful, erotic marriage.

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Gila: And Rava is suddenly struck by the thought that Abbaye, the man he spent so many years studying with, might have been a great, solemn sage by day and a passionate lover by night.

And this is what excites him. This is what he wants. It isn’t at all about Homa herself—it is a different kind of marriage she suggests.

And so Rava runs home and takes his wife into his arms and tries to do what he tries to do, and his wife stops him cold.

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Gila: She’s having none of this promiscuous behavior—not in her home. She is, after all, a respectable woman.

She also has been widowed once before, which probably explains why she’s so terrified of Homa seducing and destroying her husband. Because if she loses two husbands, she too is well on her way to becoming an isha katlanit, no different from Homa herself.

And so in the final act of the story, she takes this bar and beats Homa until she chases her out of the town of Mechoza. Now, this is highly symbolic because this bar, as I said, was used as a lock, and locks in antiquity were a pervasive symbol for female chastity.

It’s as if Rav Hisda’s daughter is saying to Homa, “You are promiscuous, you’re a danger to our men, you’re a menace to society, and there is no room for you here.”

Nahanni: I think it’s interesting that the one who’s actually doing the policing of Homa is also a woman.

Gila: It’s not at all unusual for women to enforce the patriarchal order on other women. But I think we should extend our empathy to her as well, because she’s also in a very difficult situation. She’s on her second husband. Her first husband died. She, by all indication, really genuinely loves her husband, and she doesn’t want to lose him.

Nahanni: Yeah. What lessons do you take from Homa?

Gila: I think the lesson of the story is very much in how the Rabbis choose to tell it. Because, again, I go back to the story’s final line: Rav Hisda’s daughter says to Homa, “You have already killed three men, and now you come to kill another.”

Now, the Rabbis could have begun the story by telling us that Homa is a three-time widow. But they don’t. They withhold that information until the very end, and they do so precisely because they want to ensure that the reader will not be prejudiced against Homa in the way that Rava, his wife, and the people of Mechoza are.

We can empathize with her as no one in her own world can. We can now see Homa not as a dangerous femme fatale who’s seduced and destroyed three men, but rather as an ill-fated widow who has lost every man she’s ever loved.

Nahanni: Not a femme fatale, but a victim of fate.

Gila: Correct. She’s a victim of fate, she’s a victim of other people’s projections, she’s a victim of prejudice.

The people of Mechoza might have banished Homa from within their midst, but the Rabbis—the Talmudic storytellers—in telling her story, they bring her back.

I say very early on in the book that one of the hallmarks of rabbinic storytelling is the false front. What these stories seem to be saying and what they are actually saying are often diametrically opposite to one another.

And so we have to go back and look a second time—more sensitively, more closely, more in context. The way we have to reread a story in the Talmud is also ultimately the way we have to reread the people in our lives. We have to look at them more closely, more sensitively. We have to consider the greater context of their lives.

And I think exactly here is where we find the great lesson of the story of Homa and perhaps why it’s so relevant to the holiday of Sukkot. Sukkot is all about inviting people in. It’s all about recognizing that that person could have been me—the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the destitute, the other.

It’s a lesson that the people of Mechoza fail to learn with regards to Homa, and I see it as a tikkun, as a corrective—to make a point of inviting her back in, back into our space, back into our midst.

And if the story of Homa is meant to teach us anything, it’s that we have to be especially careful, especially considerate toward the other. We have to make a point of inviting them in as we do on Sukkot, because those people who appear dangerous, they’re usually just different. And those who appear different are probably a lot more like ourselves than we imagine.

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Nahanni: That’s Gila Fine, talking about the Talmudic heroine Homa. Gila’s new book is called The Mad Woman in the Rabbi’s Attic: Rereading the Women of the Talmud. Thanks to Gila’s re-reading of Homa’s story, we’re inviting this femme fatale into Can We Talk’s virtual sukkah this year. Moadim l’Simcha and Chag Sameach to all who are celebrating.

Thank you for listening to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive. Our team includes Jen Richler and Judith Rosenbaum. Our theme music is by Girls in Trouble. In this episode, you also heard Callison, Stanza for Nori, Plasticity, Cherry Heath, and Light on the Jetty from Blue Dot Sessions.

You can find this and all our previous episodes online at jwa.org/canwetalk.

I’m Nahanni Rous. Until next time.

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