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. 

Jane Kanarek is professor of rabbinics at Hebrew College. She is the author of Biblical Narrative and the Formation of Rabbinic Law and the coeditor of Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination.

Introduction
Chapter One: The Disappearing Sotah and the Moral Man
Chapter Two: Changing the Subject
Chapter Three: Erased Women and Talmudic Redaction
Chapter Four: Language and National Catastrophe
Chapter Five: Failures of Care
Chapter Six: Giving Women the Last Word
Conclusion
Bibliography