Intercultural misunderstanding and how it created a proto-Protestant feminist hero.

When I was a student at JTS, one of my professors asked me if I could explain why there are no Jewish women mystics like Hildegard of Bingen.

Actually, I can:  the Jewish community does not have a social construct like the convent system as it existed in the Middle Ages, whereby a family that had too many daughters to marry off would oblate one (or more), giving her to the church at a young age, with the understanding that she would be fed, housed, and educated (as such).  In return, the Church got a nun.

When I was a student at Union  Theological Seminary (Protestant), I discovered that Protestants like Hildegard of Bingen:  they like believing that because she was a German nun, she had to be a proto-Protestant.  They also like believing that as an oblated child who became Abbess of her convent, she somehow succeeded against some unspecified odds.  They see her correspondence with Frederick Barbarossa as an indication of how esteemed she was by men of the period.  Because of these things, they hold her up as a feminist role model.

What they do not know (or choose not to know, which is not the same thing), is that because she came from a noble family, Hilde was oblated with the knowledge and intent that she would succeed to become Abbess of her convent—secular social status did translate to “religious” social status in the Middle Ages. 

Not only was it expected that she would become Abbess, it was not exceptional that, as a member of the nobility who had been donated to the Church, once she had risen to the position of Abbess, she would write to Frederick Barbarossa, and he would be obliged to make some kind of (theoretically) respectful reply.

She was neither proto-Protestant nor feminist.  She was a product of her age and social class.  That age did not include the Protestant world because it had not developed yet.  It did not include feminism because that, also, did not exist yet.

There was no similar social structure in the Jewish community in any historical period.