This panel examines the cultural, religious, and gendered significance of Sarah, the Jewish matriarch, emphasizing her role as a maternal figure in Jewish tradition. Often portrayed negatively in the Bible—laughing at the promise of conception and casting Hagar and her son into the desert—later narratives reframe her with traits of faith, agency, and spiritual authority. These reinterpretations highlight her role as a religious ideal of motherhood.
The panel explores Sarah’s evolving image in three Jewish communities: Ashkenazi Jews (12th-16th-century texts in Hebrew and Yiddish), Bene Israel Jews (19th-20th-century Marathi texts), and the Ma’aminim, a crypto-Jewish Sabbatian group in the Ottoman Empire (19th-20th-century Ladino, Hebrew, and Turkish texts). Speakers will analyze Sarah’s portrayal as a maternal figure and its connections to classical Jewish texts, co-territorial religions (Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam), and localized Jewish practices, revealing how religious traditions reinterpret maternal figures across time and cultures.
The Binding of Isaac has held a central place in Judaism since Antiquity, but interestingly, Sarah is absent from the biblical narrative. Midrashic interpretations have filled this lacuna, and the story continued to acquire new layers of meaning in medieval Europe, especially following the First Crusade. Jews who chose death over forced conversion were often depicted as Isaac, and stories of parents killing their children to prevent their Christianization related to Abraham. Sarah, on the one hand, suffers and dies in response to Abraham’s actions, revealing similarities to midrashim as well as Mary’s response to the Crucifixion. On the other hand, despite her pain, she accepts God’s request to sacrifice her beloved son.
This paper will explore this innovative interpretation within medieval and early modern Ashkenazi texts, in both Hebrew and (understudied) Yiddish sources. In particular, the Ashkenazi portrayal of Sarah will be compared with that of the Virgin Mary.
This paper examines Sarah’s maternal role in Bene Israel songs of the Binding of Isaac, where she emerges as a repository of emotion, a divine protector, and an absent yet enduring presence. Drawing on Marathi Jewish texts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—composed in verse and influenced by Hindu, Christian, Muslim, and secular musical traditions—the author explores how Sarah’s absence from the biblical Akedah is reinterpreted through song and performance. These adaptations, shaped by South Asia’s multireligious milieu, draw on lyrical tropes of longing central to regional devotional and secular traditions. Through close literary analysis, musicological study, and ethnographic research with Bene Israel women in Bombay, this paper argues that song and performance were not ancillary to Bene Israel religious life but central to shaping scriptural interpretation, gender roles, and community identity in the context of Indian nationalism and Jewish diaspora consciousness.
This paper examines the mythical figure of Sarah as a maternal symbol in mystical ritual and the earthly experience of the Sabbatian Ma’aminim—followers of Sabbatai Tsvi (1626–1676), one of the most prominent Jewish messiahs, who converted to Islam in his footsteps and established secret communities in the Ottoman Empire.
Among nineteenth-century Sabbatian remnants, Sarah is depicted as a maternal cosmic force of redemption, intertwined with female community members and mothers. This paper explores the relationship between the mystical-theological elevation of her motherhood and actual gender structures through an analysis of clandestine, multilingual Sabbatian ritual songs, depictions of daily life, and Muslim-Jewish interfaith interactions. It examines divine and human Sabbatian mothers and how emotional expressions of motherhood were shaped through the community’s performative devotional practice. Ultimately, this case study raises broader questions about how mystical traditions reconfigure gendered symbolism and how theological innovation interacts with communal realities.