Lisa Joffe

Women of the Wall (WOW) is an international community of women who, since 1988, have sought the freedom to conduct women-led Torah services in the women’s section at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. The group has been at the center of a controversy raises several complex issues. Its legal claims and political strategies raise questions about women’s rights to equality within Judaism and under Israeli law, the nature of religious toleration for non-Orthodox Jewish movements, and Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state. The decades of violent opposition to WOW highlights the role of tradition and patriarchy at the heart of Jewish nationhood, but WOW’s success in turning around Israeli public opinion, winning international support, and succeeding in court has expanded the horizon for religious feminism.

As a rule, marriage in ancient Mesopotamia and adjacent areas (and also in ancient Egypt) was monogamous, with couples comprising a husband and a wife. But there were exceptions. Especially within the higher echelons of society, husbands were allowed to marry a second woman if their first wife proved unable to bear them children (Westbrook: 103–11); and if merchants engaged in long-distance trade lived over extended periods of time, separated from their spouses, in “colonies” far away from home, such as the Old Assyrian merchants from Aššur who conducted their business in the central Anatolian city of Kaneš (Kültepe), they could likewise take an additional wife. The status of such women vis-à-vis the first wife remained, however, inferior, and the unions with them were temporary, with the women staying behind when the merchants returned home after a few years (Michel).