Sandra Seltzer Silberman HBI Conversations Series
A Brandeis University Press publication in the HBI Series on Jewish Women, Beyond Brutality is a feminist reading of one of the most troubling tractates of the Talmud addresses family law including laws relating to a sotah (a woman whose husband suspects her of adultery).
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, Professor 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 an instructive 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.
Rabbi Jane Kanarek is Professor of Rabbinics and Dean of Faculty at Hebrew College. She is the author of Biblical Narrative and the Formation of Rabbinic Law and the co-editor of Learning to Read Talmud: What It Looks Like and How it Happens and Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination, the latter two of which were finalists for the National Jewish Book Awards. Her work has been published in AJS Review, Teaching Theology and Religion, the Journal of Jewish Education, and Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas.
Beyond Brutality, Reclaiming Female Presence in Bavli Sotah is available at Brandeis University Press and many booksellers.
