Books in Brief

Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue

Bernadette Brooten (Scholars Press: Chico, California, 1982) 292 pp., $20.00

Rarely does a book come along that challenges an entire generation—or more—of the best historical scholarship in America, Britain, Europe and Israel. This is such a book.

Several years ago Tom Kraabel suggested in his Ph.D. thesis at Harvard (“Judaism in Western Asia Minor under the Roman Empire,” 1968) that the title “archisynagogos” or “head of a synagogue” might not be simply honorific when it was conjoined to a woman’s name in an ancient inscription. This was a somewhat iconoclastic suggestion because the consensus among scholars was that women could not have had a substantive role in Jewish worship in antiquity. Therefore, it went without saying that women in antiquity could not have had a substantive role in synagogue administration. Accordingly, titles like “archisynagogos” when applied to women must have been purely honorific. Until Bernadette Brooten of the Institute of Antiquity and Christianity in Claremont, California, published this brilliant book, no one had picked up Tom Kraabel’s challenge to accepted scholarship in any sustained fashion. In this book Brooten has thoroughly undermined accepted scholarship in this area.