Circumcised Cinderella: The Fantasies of a Fourteenth-Century Jewish Author

An outstanding passage in Qalonymos ben Qalonymos's Even boḥan (1322) is a male's prayer to God to turn him into a female. Understanding that his transsexual wish is unrealistic, the speaker reluctantly complies with his bitter and irreparable fate as male, uttering the formula of the morning prayer: Blessed art Thou who did not make me a woman."

Labeling the passage as "parody" or "satire," critics hitherto ignored the historical context in which the piece was written. Similarly, they did not attend to the cultural implications of its unusual treatment of gender. As I will suggest, Qalonymos's piece is an early (probably the earliest) written response to the women's prayer: "Blessed art Thou . . . who hast made me according to His will." (Two extant early fourteenth-century rabbinical testimonies to this spreading custom are dated later than that of Qalonymos.)

Qalonymos's text ventures to explore the boundaries of Jewish masculinity and femininity. Investigating the assumptions of Jewish gender and examining the social and religious practices through which it is constructed, Qalonymos produces a subversive critique of fundamental issues in Jewish life-the life of the man as well as the life of the woman. To be male, he claims, is to be physically impaired and intellectually frustrated. Femininity, on the other hand, is presented as perfection and as a source of attainable happiness.

The transition from the man's monologue to that of a woman's enables the text to furnish two specular perspectives of gender. The masculine and feminine speakers describe their own gender roles, while also fantasizing about the "other." This, however, is not a fully symmetrical play in reflections. The biblical and especially talmudic allusions with which the text is saturated disclose the androcentric bias: the text is written by a male intellectual and intended for a learned male readership. The ironies created by allusion indeed encourage the reading of the piece as a satire. Nevertheless, leaving it at that would mean ignoring the rich psychoanalytical and cultural possibilities offered by the text, which are further explicated in the article. Qalonymos's experiment in Jewish gender thus widens the scope of the male's subjectivity so that it can include the repressed or excluded feminine aspect.