Wife= “a piece of meat”? “a fish… broiled or cooked”?

8. And then, women must never forget that all this addition to the text was not only the work of men exclusively, but of men who, in their day, were, as Jews, bitter opponents of the teachings and of the spirit of Christianity. Furthermore, if we may judge from the spirit of the teachings of the Talmud on the “woman question” (for the Talmud was then in the ascendancy, and the sayings of the rabbis considered more authoritative than Scripture itself), these amenders of the original text, as a class, held women in utter contempt. Dr. Paul Isaac Hershon (to quote one of the many witnesses to this statement) says: “The rabbis, over and over again, teach the utter inferiority of woman: they put a definite seal as it were on the degraded life of the female sex which for ages has been lived by women in the East as in the West.” A certain Rabbi Yochanan, we are told, quotes the Mishnic (the Mishna is the most ancient and important part of the Talmud) rabbis as teaching that a man may do as he pleases with his wife: “It is like a piece of meat brought from the shambles, which one may eat, salt, roast, partially or wholly cooked.” A woman once complained before Rav (a great rabbi) of bad treatment from her husband. He replied: “What is the difference between thee and a fish, which one may eat either broiled or cooked?” But Jews alone did not hold women in contempt at that time in human history. It was an unfortunate time, as regards women, for fixing the sense of the Holy Scriptures.