A Woman Would Marry a Woman

AbstractThis article revisits the classic rabbinic midrash prohibiting marriages between women, found in Sifra or Torat Kohanim. The author proposes that the midrash be read as a construction of a parallel feminist science-fiction universe where lesbian marriages are commonplace and women are legal persons as well as active subjects. The complex interplay between the invisibility and visibility of lesbian sexual relations as well as the questioning of their existence and significance is examined in relation to their relative permissibility. Prohibition of lesbian marriages is linked to an acknowledgement of the substantive nature of sexual relations between women, while the denial of their existence is linked to permissive and dismissive positions. Maimonides’s ruling in his Mishneh Torah is analysed in view of his Talmudic influences, which are found to be competing with the radically divergent position found in Sifra, resulting in a position that both asserts and denies the significance of lesbian relationships.