Beruriah, reputedly the greatest Jewish woman scholar of all times, has figured prominently in anthologies describing the lives and deeds of Jewish sages, and in particular in books and collections dedicated to Jewish women. Most of these presentations are no more than paraphrases of the sources on which they are dependent, accepting their judgments at face value and thus giving an idealized description of the woman Beruriah.

Rabbinic responsa can at times furnish an entree into the private and public lives of individuals involved with the judicial system. The case under discussion provides an in-depth portrait of a marriage in twelfth-century Cairo and of a woman's life–in this instance, a woman struggling to maneuver within the strictures of Jewish law and contemporary Judeo-Arabic society.1 The original Judeo-Arabic of the two responsa under discussion, as well as the Hebrew translations, are, no doubt, well known to Judeo-Arabic, Geniza, and Maimonidean scholars alike, as are the basic details to some English readers. Nevertheless, the case is certainly worthy of a separate study of the text in conjunction with a detailed analysis.

Until now, the academic study of Lurianic kabbala has largely pursued three roads of inquiry. The first, following Scholem, has been the study of Lurianic kabbala as a mystical and eschatological response to the historical events of the Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492, an event viewed as the root of the mystical heresy of Shabbtai Tzvi. The second pathway has been the scholarly analysis of Lurianic teaching as the most extreme example of kabbalistic theosophy, surpassing both the Zohar and Cordoverean Kabbala in its intricate and complex delineation of the cosmic world. The third approach has addressed the unusually complicated task of deciphering, categorizing, and pointing out the voluminous manuscripts of Luria's students, a literary oeuvre which is as diverse as it is complex. While all of these are important and contribute to the overall understanding of what is the most influential kabbalistic doctrine since the Zohar, I would like to approach the Lurianic material from a different perspective.