![\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/jewishmigrationtoscotland.is.ed.ac.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/DESTRUCTION-OF-TEMPLE.jpg?resize=300%2C191&ssl=1\")
The Siege and Destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans Under the Command of Titus, A.D. 70 (1850). Image in the public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n
not directly project-related, I felt certain that attending would enhance my wider appreciation of Jewish identity and cultural memory.<\/p>\n
A small turnout \u2013 due to the summer recess and a coterminous graduation ceremonies \u2013 enabled the planned lecture to seamlessly morph into an informal seminar, facilitating discursive analysis of various Midrash (passages from Lamentations and the Bavli Gittin).\u00a0 A fertile exchange of ideas revealed the multiple ways in which the body impaired by war has been retrospectively imagined in ancient Jewish texts.<\/p>\n
Penned between the 5th<\/sup> and 7th<\/sup> centuries, these trans-temporal texts re-conceptualize the earlier destruction of the Second Temple, and the ensuing cultural and political occupation.\u00a0\u00a0 Firstly, we explored how passages from Lamentations configured imperial oppression as effecting physical changes in the body, so conspicuous as to render \u201cZion\u2019s precious people\u201d unrecognizable: the potent imagery of their once bright and ruddy skin now \u201cdry as wood\u201d and shrunken \u201con their bones\u201d expresses imperial subjugation through physical degeneration and emaciation.<\/p>\n Consideration then turned to the story of Rabbi Tsadok \u2013 \u201ca small, shriveled old man\u201d exuding a quiet yet extraordinary spiritual power procured through frequent fasting enabling him \u201cto teach one hundred sessions\u201d although he \u201ceats but a single fig.\u201d\u00a0 The Roman authorities duly enforce medical intervention, ensuring that \u201clittle by little\u201d his frail body \u201cwas restored.\u201d\u00a0 The disabled body is thus represented as a site of political protest: implicit in this rehabilitation discourse is the premise that to restructure the body as functional \u2013 according to the definitions imposed by the dominant regime \u2013 is to neutralize personal and religious power by undercutting the agentic right to intentional self-denial.\u00a0 The Rabbi\u2019s chosen self-disablement is emblematic of his unwillingness to conform to Roman hegemony.<\/p>\n Contrastingly, extracts from the Bavli Gittin, a Babylonian Talmudic text, dwell upon the post-destruction Jewish body as still exquisitely beautiful.\u00a0\u00a0 The Roman captors are depicted as utterly decadent \u2013 reveling in opulence and covetousness \u2013 epitomizing the weakening of the state and pre-empting its downfall.\u00a0 Despite acknowledging the sexual abuse and subjugation of Jewish subjects, however, the text is clear that they remain physically undiminished and unstigmatised in the corporeal sense.\u00a0 Indeed, in an radical departure from prevailing and expected gender paradigms, the Bavli Gittin deals empathically with women as victims of sexual violence and conceptualizes the violated female body as the personification of shared corporate, communal and divine loss.<\/p>\n Julia\u2019s expert analysis of these passages emphasized the ethical imperative to consider the absence of the dismembered, amputated, nameless and faceless in this genre of literature: her work is a timely reminder that the politics of memory and storytelling inexorably influence exactly whose stories are told.\u00a0\u00a0 Her forthcoming publication, Corporal Catastrophe: sex and flesh in the ruins of Jerusalem, <\/em>promises to be a fascinating read.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fusing her passion for ancient Rabbinical culture with expertise in gender, sexuality and disability critical theories, the research of Julia Watts Belser (Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at Georgetown University) builds fascinating conceptual bridges between the early and modern. \u00a0\u00a0Her … Continue reading