Rabbinic Tales of Destruction

In Rabbinic Tales of Destruction, Julia Watts Belser examines early Jewish accounts of the Roman conquest of Judea. Faced with stories of sexual violence, enslavement, forced prostitution, disability, and bodily risk, Belser argues, our readings of rabbinic narrative must wrestle with the brutal body costs of Roman imperial domination. She brings disability studies, feminist theory, and new materialist ecological thought to accounts of rabbinic catastrophe, revealing how rabbinic discourses of gender, sexuality, and the body are shaped in the shadow of empire.

Focusing on the Babylonian Talmud's longest sustained account of the destruction of the Temple, Belser reveals Bavli Gittin's distinctive sex and gender politics. While Palestinian tales frequently castigate the 'wayward woman' for sexual transgressions that imperil the nation, Bavli Gittin's stories do not portray women's sexuality as a cause of catastrophe. The Bavli's resistance to Rome makes a critical difference. While other rabbinic texts commonly inveigh against women's beauty as the cause of sexual sin, Bavli Gittin's tales express a strikingly egalitarian discourse that laments the vulnerability of the beautiful Jewish body before the conqueror.

Bavli Gittin's body politics, Belser maintains, align with a significant theological reorientation. While most early Jewish narratives link the destruction of the Temple to communal sin, Bavli Gittin's account does not explain catastrophe as divine chastisement. Instead of imagining God as the architect of Jewish suffering, it evokes God's empathy with the subjugated Jewish body. As it navigates the ruins of Jerusalem, Bavli Gittin forges a sharp critique of empire. Its critical discourse aims to pierce the power politics of Roman conquest, to protest the brutality of imperial dominance, and to make plain the scar that Roman violence leaves upon Jewish flesh.


This important book by Julia Watts Belser demands that we look again at rabbinic responses to the Roman conquest of Jerusalem ... [S]he pays particular attention to theoretical studies, including methodologies of related disciplines such as feminist, disability, ecological materialist, and post-colonial studies. In all, Belser brings insights from the crises and successes of our own era in order to reveal new interpretations of these ancient texts. --Susan Marks, Reading Religion

Drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and critical disability studies, Julia Watts Belser probes the scars of rabbinic memory of Jerusalem's destruction with a depth and dimensionality that are as illuminating as they are devastating. Her book provides the sharpest lens yet on rabbinic accounts of this paradigmatic moment in Jewish history.--Cynthia Baker, author of Jew

Julia Watts Belser's book on the narratives of destruction of the Temple as found in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Gittin, represents nothing less than the coming together and mutual perfection of several trends in the scholarly, literary study of the Talmud of the last two decades. Her work incorporates post-colonial, gender, sexuality, and disability studies in addition to the methods of slow, detailed reading developed in literary critical circles to uncover layers of meaning within the text of which we had hardly suspected the existence. A major contribution to all of those fields as well as presaging some new directions in thinking about the history of rabbinic thought. A beautiful piece of writing in its own right as well.--Daniel Boyarin, author of A Traveling Homeland: The Talmud as Diaspora

Julia Watts Belser's vivid readings of the Talmud's stories of destruction expertly elucidate the pathos and tragedy as well as the heroic struggle depicted in the texts. She brilliantly explores the literary artistry and unpacks the complex meanings of these fascinating Talmudic narratives.--Jeffrey L. Rubenstein, Professor of Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, New York University