Overview

A feminist reading of one of the most troubling tractates of the Talmud. Beyond Brutality draws on feminist analysis and gender studies to examine tractate Sotah of the Babylonian Talmud as a literary unit. By interrogating how, why, and where women are invisible within Bavli Sotah, Jane Kanarek brings to light a ubiquitous female presence throughout the text. Despite the brutality of the sotah ritual—in which the woman accused of adultery is put through a divine ordeal intended to reveal her innocence or her guilt—this book demonstrates that Bavli Sotah is not primarily concerned with describing the sotah ritual or establishing male control over women. Instead, Bavli Sotah becomes a pedagogical text in which the sotah is secondary to moral and sinning men. As the sotah herself fades into the background, the sotah ritual nevertheless overflows its boundaries and weaves its way through a range of other topics within the tractate. In the process, Bavli Sotah teaches its audience who transmits and how one transmits rabbinic culture.

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9781684582990

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Reviews

“Kanarek’s insightful feminist reading of Bavli Sotah traces how a disturbing ritual designed to expose and humiliate women accused of adultery is transformed, through rabbinic legal and narrative discourse, into an opportunity to articulate the values and practices of a pious society. Kanarek persuasively models a new way of reading rabbinic literature that assumes that women played a role in the world of the rabbis and impacts our understanding—from individual passages to the corpus writ large.”   -- Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Yale University “A deeply persuasive argument for reading Bavli Sotah as a cohesive tractate that subverts and reframes the brutality of the biblical and Mishnaic accounts of the sotah ritual. With scholarly insight, Kanarek integrates Talmudic and feminist methodologies to illuminate a rabbinic turn away from female transgression and toward shaping the ideal male. A critical resource for investigating the sotah ritual."" -- Marjorie Lehman, Jewish Theological Seminary

Author Information

Jane Kanarek is Professor of Rabbinics and Dean of Faculty at Hebrew College. She is author of Biblical Narrative and the Formation of Rabbinic Law and coeditor of Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination.

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