Tal Ilan is currently a professor of Jewish studies at the Free University, Berlin (Germany). She was born in Israel and received all her degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a historian who specializes in Jewish women’s history in antiquity.
Beruryah is the only woman in rabbinic literature who studies Torah. Identified as the daughter of Rabbi Hananiah b. Teradyon and the wife of Rabbi Meir, she delivers halakhic and homiletical statements and is described as a prodigious learner.
A descendant of Herod the Great, Berenice was queen of Chalcis and Cicilia and opposed the Jewish Revolt in 66 CE. She eventually became the lover of Titus, the Roman general (and later emperor) who destroyed Jerusalem.
Babatha, daughter of Shim’on, a Jewish landowner who lived in Roman Arabia, owned a document archive found in a cave in the Judaean desert. Babatha’s archive is an extremely important resource for many issues, especially on the question of Jewish women’s legal position in Greco-Roman Palestine during the second century CE.
