Drawing on an impressive range of theoretical approaches, including disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, and new materialist ecological criticism, Julia Watts Belser's Rabbinic Tales of Destruction provides a rich examination of the rabbinic narratives of the destruction of the Second Temple and its aftermath. Centering around a close analysis of the relevant story cycle found in the fifth chapter of the Babylonian Talmud tractate Gittin, Belser's work makes two important interventions to the study of rabbinic responses to the Temple's destruction and Roman conquest. First, her book brings new focus to the material dimensions of Bavli Gittin's destruction narratives by directly engaging the graphic descriptions of imperial brutality, sexual violence, and enslavement that suffuse these stories. Through her nuanced readings of the descriptions of violence wrought on body, land, and nation, she elucidates the stories’ complex gender and sexual politics and critique of empire.
Secondly, her analysis highlights an understudied strain of rabbinic theological understandings of communal catastrophe. In both Palestinian and Babylonian rabbinic texts, the Temple's destruction is often understood in covenantal terms, where destruction and exile are viewed as divine responses to Jewish sin. However, Belser argues that Bavli Gittin deviates from this familiar theological framework, eschewing the expected tropes of sin and punishment and articulating a distinctly different “theology of destruction” (xv). In these stories, God's relationship to Jewish catastrophe is markedly different from that conceived in the covenantal framework. Here, it is not God, but the political power of imperial Rome that is the force behind the destruction, and, instead of divine wrath towards Jewish transgression, the text emphasizes God's empathy for Jewish suffering (xiv).
The chapters are organized thematically, with each chapter exploring a selection of narratives from Bavli Gittin's story cycle and employing parallel texts from Palestinian rabbinic literature to highlight the unique project of Bavli Gittin. The first two chapters carefully unravel the themes of sexual transgression, sexual violence, and the vulnerability of the captured Jewish body that permeate these tales, noting how these stories subvert the expected gender dynamics associated with the covenantal interpretation of destruction.
Chapter 1 begins by exploring the significance of the motif of the “wayward woman” in Palestinian rabbinic narratives of the destruction. In these texts, the “wayward woman” becomes a symbol for “social disorder” and “national danger” (11), whose behavior leads to communal disaster. Thus, the destruction becomes intrinsically tied to the perceived dangers of transgressive female sexuality. However, Bavli Gittin, despite the recurrent reference to the sexual violation of women, avoids the “wayward woman” motif and “refuses to blame women for their own violation” (2). Rather, the tractate highlights the themes of male sexual transgression and virtue, reflecting on both the “depravity of unbridled sexual desire” and the possibility of “men's sexual virtue and restraint” (38).
In chapter 2, Belser turns to Bavli Gittin's accounts of rape. In these stories, rape and sexual assault become symbolic for the violation of imperial conquest, conceptualizing “divine woundedness and rabbinic lament” (41). These stories provide further contrast to the tropes found in Palestinian rabbinic accounts of destruction, as here in Bavli Gittin, women's sexual transgressions do not trigger disaster. Furthermore, these acts of sexual violence are not presented as punishments or sanctioned by God. Rather, rape is clearly identified as “an act of violation that reveals the brutality of the conqueror” (41) and God is portrayed as empathizing with the suffering of the victims of Roman conquest. Belser's analysis in these first chapters is exemplary of the careful reading practices required to unpack the shades of meaning within these chilling accounts of sexual violence. Even as she explores the stories’ seemingly sympathetic attitude towards victims of sexual violence, she stresses how the deployment of rape as a symbol to “express divine and rabbinic lament” ultimately silences “the voices of the most direct victims of sexual violence,” the women, slaves, and others who are “vulnerable to the embodied experience of sexual violence” (58).
In the next three chapters, Belser examines the representation of the conquered body as a site both of resistance to colonial oppression and of remembrance and mourning for the suffering wrought by empire. Chapter 3 focuses on the imagined beauty of captive Jewish bodies in Bavli Gittin as an expression both of the vulnerability of the conquered subject and of the body unmarked by imperial domination, testifying to the “survivability of conquest” (61). Chapter 4 introduces disability theory to explore how conquest uses disability “to imagine and refashion the colonized subject” (78). Drawing on both Eikhah Rabbah and Bavli Gittin's description of starvation and fasting, she argues that starvation signifies the changes forced on the subjugated body by its conquerors, while fasting emerges as an “acquired disability” (79) and a practice of resistance. In chapter 5, Belser considers how Bavli Gittin's descriptions of the aftermath of destruction are characterized by “transcorporeality” or literary images that underscore the interconnections between the human body and surrounding “nonhuman natures” (103). In these stories, conquest transforms not only the body, but also the land on which it is situated.
In the concluding chapters, Belser examines the rabbinic eschatological “revenge fantasies” of God avenging Israel and bringing retribution on Rome (134) that emerge in these narratives. Here, she considers the particular resonance of these stories in the Babylonian Talmud, being told centuries after the events described and under the governance of a different imperial power. Engaging with contemporary scholarly discussions on the relationship between the Babylonian rabbis and the Sassanian Empire, she suggests that to situate these stories in their Sassanian context we must consider that for the Babylonian rabbis, Rome is not the oppressive hand of empire, but the rival empire of the Sassanians. As such, calling for revenge against Rome “may well be politically expedient,” as it aligns the rabbis with their Sassanian rulers by challenging their political opponents (170). Her understandably brief exploration of the reception and meaning of these narratives within Sassanian Babylonia raises intriguing suggestions about the Babylonian rabbis’ relationship to the Sassanian Empire that one wishes she had explored further.
Belser's eloquent work offers scholars of both rabbinic literature and late antiquity a thought-provoking, compelling read. Her analysis has wide-ranging implications for the study of ancient empire, the body, disability, and discourse around sexual violence. Additionally, the new theoretical frames she brings to bear on the rabbinic texts, especially from disability studies and new materialist ecological studies, suggest areas for future inquiry within rabbinic literature.
