How Early Reform Rabbis Used the Talmud to Achieve Religious Equality for Jewish Women

This study presents three examples of nineteenth-century Reform-oriented rabbis who invoked Talmudic rulings to justify granting women equal rights within the Jewish religion. These invocations are astonishing because all three figures actually rejected the continued rule of the Talmud regarding Jewish legal questions. The phenomenon can be understood given these reformers’ theological background: they did not argue in favour of disconnecting Judaism from its Talmudic past, let alone for Jewish antinomianism. Their aim was not to abandon halakah, but rather to modernize it, adapt it to their new ethical convictions, and express these convictions in legal terms.