The religious world of Jewish women in Kurdistan

Despite a promising early beginning, with the work of Erich Brauer in the 1930s, followed by Dina Feitelson in the 1 950s, Donna Shai and Yona Sabar in the 1970s, the study of Kurdish Jewry has not developed much over the years. Those scholars attempted to reconstruct conditions in Kurdistan on the base of fieldwork among immigrants in Israel, and they contended with the difficulties of 'doing ethnography at a distance'. But they lacked an advantage that other scholars had, who worked in a similar way in the field of North African Jewry. The latter benefited from a tradition of major anthropological scholarship, the work of Westermarck, Gellner, Geertz and numerous other leading anthropologists. That led to a rich corpus of theory, and hence the interest in the work of both Judaists and Islamists of North Africa. Work in the Kurdish field had little theoretical focus. The importance of the work of Susan Sered, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University, is that it breaks away from the old model of work in the Kurdish field, and operates with a theoretical model. It is part of the wave of feminist anthropology, which evinces a fresh sensitivity to the activities of women and explores their particularities. This probing leads the present study, devoted to religiosity, to the discovery of a shade of piety that, Sered argues, constitutes a female speciality. The women were concerned in particular with practices that would be auspicious for the home and its members. They were little concerned with matters beyond the circle of intimacy. Sered brings evidence that Kurdish Jewish women even conceptualized the great Jewish national themes in terms of personally relevant matters. The author suggests that these traits constitute a 'nurturing characteristic' of Kurdish Jewish women's religiosity. The theoretical thrust of the paper leads the author at the end to raise questions in the general field of religion.