and Rachel is thus historical in precisely the sense that Eva Cantarella argues that the Homeric epics are historical:
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 | | For all the centuries of the so-called Hellenic Middle Ages, the
aidoi
and
rhapsodoi,
singing the deeds of their ancestors, fulfilled not only a recreational function but an important pedagogical one as well. They taught the Greeks what to feel and think, what they should be, and how they should behave. As men learned from the
epos
to adapt themselves to the model of the hero, so women listening to the poets learned what sort of behavior they should adopt and what they should avoid. It is in this sense that the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
are considered historical documents.
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| | (Cantarella 1987, 25)
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Our romantic historical fiction is a historical document in precisely this sense. The romance of Rabbi Akiva and Rachel is foundational for the two-edged sword of European Jewish patriarchal culture, which often gave women much power and prestige in the "secular" realm while denying them participation in the religious sphere. My great-grandmother ran a large lumber business while her husband devoted himself to the study of Torah. Such is the cultural power that the figure of Rabbi Akiva commands.
36
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All was not smooth, however, in the innovation of the practice of the married monk. The Talmud itself shows us the cracks just under the surface of the utopian solution. The amount of conflict that the new social practice engendered is marked by the astonishing final story in the collection, which is truly one of the most appalling stories of a Rabbi's behavior in the Talmud. After reading it, we are not at all surprised at the cultural
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| | 36. He lived, at any rate, at home, but into the nineteenth century (!) many young husbands were sent to study away from their wives in perfect imitation of the story of Rabbi Akiva (Biale 1992). (I wonder to what extent the practice of a wife "putting a husband through graduate school," widely practiced as recently as my own formationand by usis a fossilized relic of this Jewish cultural practice. The contribution of Jewish culture, both positive and negative, to post-Reformation European marriage practice has not yet been investigated. Given the wide knowledge by Gentiles in the early modern period, such as Milton, of rabbinic literature, Ithink this issue is not trivial.)
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| | Finkelstein (1964, 80) also sees that this story of Rabbi Akiva is crucial in establishing the practice of married students staying away from home for years on end, but he takes it to mean that Rabbi Akiva actually established the practice, while I, of course, see it as a later Babylonian story that enforces the practice instituted there. For another example of the power of stories about Rabbi Akiva in forming Jewish practice, see Boyarin 1989.
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