S2E4: Blemished Brides: Women’s Bodies and Disability in Ancient Judaism

With Dr. Julia Watts Belser

In Episode 4, Dr. Julia Watts Belser talks to us about ancient prenups, dancing at weddings, and what the rabbis had to say about beauty. We meet an Etruscan woman named Seianti Hanunia, an Egyptian Jewish woman Tapamet, and hear the (sometimes damaging) ideas of sages Shammai and Hillel. Paying attention to disability matters because it’s noticing a person’s full human experience.

“The kind of longing that I have is actually for a very different kind of grappling with other ways of thinking about beauty, magnificence, presence that actually center disability.

That don’t look past disability, but center it in its own right as a kind of interesting dimension of human experience.

An ordinary, even if sometimes rare or unusual, part of what it means to be human.

Not something that needs to be ignored or silenced, but also not something that needs to be treated with this overly sweet false praise.”

— Dr. Julia Watts Belser

BIO

Dr. Julia Watts Belser is Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University, and a core faculty member in the Disabilities Studies Program. She researches ethics and theology, as well as gender, sexuality, and disability in rabbinic literature. Julia has written multiple books—including Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem (2018) and Power, Ethics, and Ecology: Rabbinic Responses to Drought and Disaster (2015). Her most recent book, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole (2023), won a 2024 National Jewish Book Award. She co-authored an international Health Handbook for Women with Disabilities (2007), and she directs Disability and Climate Change: A Public Archive Project. Julia earned a BA from Cornell University, an M.A. from the Academy for Jewish Religion, and a Ph.D. from the University of California - Berkeley. She is also a rabbi, a wheelchair hiker, and a queer feminist advocate for disability and gender justice.

• Transcript

   [Opening podcast music]

  Rebekah Haigh: Welcome to Women Who Went Before, a gynocentric quest into the ancient world. I’m Rebekah Haigh!

  Emily Chesley: And I’m Emily Chesley!

  Rebekah: Scholars, friends, and your hosts!

  [opening music finishes]

  Rebekah: In today’s episode, “Blemished Brides: Women’s Bodies and Disability in Ancient Judaism,” we talk with Dr. Julia Watts Belser about ancient prenups, dancing at weddings, and what the rabbis had to say about beauty.

  [music interlude]

  Emily: In the second or third century BCE, an upper-class Etruscan woman named Seianti Hanunia suffered a severe fall in her teens, crushing the entire right side of her body.[1] She lost teeth, her jaw locked, her pelvis and joints were damaged, and she developed arthritis. Seianti would have spent the decades after her accident with reduced mobility and lingering pain, eating a liquid diet and perhaps struggling to talk.[2] Pathologist Bob Stoddart suggests her injuries and musculature are consistent with a horse-riding accident, though there’s no way to know for sure. She may have lived with bodily limitations, but she did not live alone. Seianti bore at least one child and continued to live an active lifestyle, well-nourished and supported by her family or community until her death in her mid-fifties.

  Rebekah: As Christian Laes, an expert on disability in late antiquity, points out, the Western idea of dis-ability only emerged during the Industrial Revolution, when so-called “able” bodies were those that were able to contribute to societal progress.[3] We cannot map the modern analytical category of disability (any more than modern categories like race or gender) one-to-one onto the ancient world. The Etruscan, Roman, and Rabbinic worlds had their own categories and vocabularies for differently-abled bodies. The literary, artistic, and archaeological records show that lots of people lived with various inhibiting conditions that put them at social or legal disadvantage. But what conditions were considered inhibiting and the categories used to talk about them differ from culture to culture.

  Emily: For example, is gender a dis-abling experience? Statistically speaking, American women who contract cancer or multiple sclerosis are six times more likely to be divorced by their partner than men [who contract cancer or MS].[4] Being a woman is a liability in more ways than one. The Roman Empire permitted infant exposure until 374 CE, which is a euphemistic way of saying that unwanted children could be left outside to die or be gathered up for slavery.[5] Infants were commonly abandoned due to physical deformity, illegitimate birth, family poverty, believed ill omens, and for their sex.[6] Families’ preference for boys over girls came into stark bodily terms here. A satirical Greek poet from the 4th century BCE Philipparchus commented wryly, “Everyone, even if he is poor, rears a son / But exposes a daughter, even if he is rich.”[7]

  Rebekah: Another complicating factor is that the distinction between “illness,” “disability,” and “limitation,” was not so clear cut. In addition to those injuries Seianti contracted in her fall, she also suffered from arthritis and scoliosis, further crippling her body and limiting her movement. Should these illnesses also be considered disabling?

  Emily: The rabbis used their own category of “blemishes” (mum/mumim), things that could limit a person’s participation in communal ritual life. Everything from going to synagogue, to getting married, to interacting with other people. Some blemishes like menstruation might seem more obviously ritually limiting because the Torah says blood causes impurity (Lev 12:1–8). But others seem to have been down to the rabbis’ personal beauty preferences! According to Rav Hisda, scars from dog bites and a “coarse voice in a woman” were also blemishes (Bavli Ketubot 75a). Rav Ashi added that a woman’s breasts should not be separated by more than three finger-widths, or else that too would be a blemish (Bavli Ketubot 75a). The sages detailed the differences between a large mole and a small one, a mole with a hair, and its placement on the body. They weren’t medieval dermatologists checking for cancer, but rather rabbis debating what counts as a blemish!

  Rebekah: Just as there were many different cultural ideas about what constitutes a disability, there were lots of ideas about what caused it and what disability meant. Ancient Egyptians believed physical deformities were divine attributes bestowed by the gods. Those with blemished bodies were respected and often held positions of power in court.[8] Early Christian theologians Augustine of Hippo and Isidore of Seville both taught that people born differently-formed—whether with an extra limb, missing toes, or possessing both sex genitals—were created by God under divine will.[9] In the final Resurrection, these children would be re-formed with a perfect and harmonious human body.[10] On the one hand, Augustine and Isidore saw God’s perfect will at work and insisted that such people were fully human ([sarcastically,] a low bar, I know!). But on the other hand, they still believed that people with differently-abled bodies—whom they call “monsters” and “prodigies”—needed to have their bodies fixed or altered. They couldn’t be perfect as-is. Other Christian theologians had more sinister takes. Irenaeus of Lyons and Pseudo-Clement drew upon the Gospels of John and Matthew to interpret disabled bodies as the result of personal sin.[11] Jerome specifically attributes children born with deformities or maladies, like leprosy, to men who slept with women who were on their periods.[12]

  Emily: Today, we talk about rabbinic ideas about disability and how they may have impacted Jewish women who were negotiating married life. At the center of Jewish marriage is the ketubah. This legal, binding marriage contract has been a central part of Jewish weddings for millennia. It’s a bit like a modern prenup. (By the way, if you need a luxury ketubah one of these days, jeweler from The Bachelor franchise Neil Lane is starting up a business![13])

  Rebekah: Our earliest surviving Jewish marriage contract dates to August 9th, 449 BCE (TAD B3.3/Kraeling 2).[14] It recorded the marriage of an enslaved Egyptian woman named Tapamet [or Tamet] to a Jewish man, Ananiah [or Anani] son of Azariah, and details her meager belongings. Because she was a slave, the marriage contract stipulated that her enslaver would inherit any property and children [correction: half of the property and children] in the event of Ananiah’s death.[15] In the ideal, marriage contacts were meant to protect women’s finances and their children, but Tapamet’s status as an enslaved woman redirected those protections to her enslaver. Jewish marriage contracts got more elaborate and beautiful over time. We find examples of these ketubot from the Cairo Genizah collection and illuminated ones across medieval Europe.[16]

  Emily: The rabbis dedicated whole tractates of the Mishnah and Talmud to discussing ketubot. Each ketubah would list the mohar or bride price, given by the groom to the bride or her family. According to the Talmud, the mohar was 200 zuzim for virgins but only 100 zuzim for non-virgins, like widows (m.ketub 1:1-4; b. Ketub 82b). The ketubah also confirmed the dowry (nedunyah) that the bride would bring into the marriage and detailed the husband’s obligations to his wife (m. Ketubot 6:5). For instance, the Talmud says a husband is supposed to provide her sustenance, redeem her if she’s taken captive, and provide for her burial (Ketubot 46b).

  Rebekah: In theory, a woman’s ketubah safeguarded her material well-being in the event of a divorce or her husband’s death. A man’s present and future property were essentially surety for the woman’s ketubah. But, as Deborah Greniman points out, rabbinic law empowered men with control of a woman’s property and prerogatives around divorce.[17] There were lots of reasons a man might divorce his wife beyond infidelity, like having sex with him while on her period or leaving her house with her hair unveiled (m.ketubot 7.6).[18] And, as we’ll talk about today, blemishes and disabilities.

  Emily: On that note, our guest today, Dr. Julia Watts Belser is Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown, and a core faculty member in their Disabilities Studies Program. She is also a rabbi, a wheelchair user, and queer feminist advocate for disability and gender justice. Her research interests include ethics and theology, as well as gender, sexuality, and disability in Rabbinic literature. Julia has authored several books including Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem (2018), Power, Ethics, and Ecology: Rabbinic Responses to Drought and Disaster (2015), and most recently Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole (2023). Join us for our rich conversation!

  [music interlude]

  Emily: Before we can get into the gendered elements of Rabbinic thought around embodiment and blemishes, I think it would be helpful to start with understanding the norm. Because Rabbinic Jews (as did the Hebrew Bible before them) thought about embodiment differently than we do, and both bodies and physical defects were tied to the worship of God and sanctuary rituals. At least for men. According to the Torah, God commanded that any priest who had a physical defect visible to the eye should not approach the sanctuary (e.g., Lev 21:16–23; 2 Sam 5:6–8). And a number of scholars have suggested that the issue is that the deity might be “offended by deviations from the expected body.”[19] So this kind of troubling prohibition belongs to a cultural framework  foreign to our own. How did the rabbis think about embodiment, and what was their framework for bodily perfection or imperfection?

  Julia Watts Belser: Such a great question! And it's a complicated one. When we think about rabbinic culture it's always important, first, to be thinking about the ways the rabbis are in conversation with biblical texts. So the Torah or the Hebrew Bible. In this case the Leviticus 21 passage that you mention is crucial. So the rabbis often ground or anchor their thinking in biblical categories and concepts, but they're also at times extraordinarily creative in their interpretations and reworkings of biblical material. So we're really seeing a kind of combination of fidelity and creativity.

  So first, a word about Leviticus 21, because that's a really important anchor for some of the ways that the rabbis are thinking about disability. The rabbis don't actually have a single term that matches what we moderns today use, right? The term that we use for disability today doesn't have an exact precise analog, either in biblical Hebrew or in rabbinic culture.

  When we're looking at Leviticus 21, the term that the rabbis use is mum. It's best translated I think as “blemish.” It's really focusing particularly on visible alterations or deviations in the physical body. It misses a lot of things that moderns assume are a really essential part of disability. So, for example, it doesn't include intellectual disability. Leviticus 21 doesn't care if a priest is deaf, right? Neither of those things which are really central to the way that many, at least contemporary Americans— You know, ask ‘em on the street, “What do you think is included in the category of disability?” You see already how culturally contingent these categories are.

  So it's important to note that elsewhere, biblical texts do both recognize and stigmatize intellectual disabilities and deafness. So I don't want to suggest that because they aren't included in the category of mum, they’re somehow not seen as disabling conditions. But I think we are looking here very specifically at this particular concept of the blemish.

  When we're looking at the blemish, there's a strong focus on aesthetics, on visual appearance. This leads Leviticus 21 actually into some really fascinating territory. For example, one of the categories that's mentioned is a priest with crushed testicles is not allowed to offer sacrifice at the altar. [She and Rebekah chuckle] Now I would go out on a limb and say, if other people are seeing a priest’s crushed testicles while he's offering sacrifice, we already have a much bigger problem, right? [Rebekah laughs] So it raises the question visible to whom? This is what leads scholars Jeremy Schipper and Jeffrey Stackert to conclude that the biblical writer—the Priestly writer—is especially concerned about bodies that might provoke revulsion in God's sight.

  Now what I think is so interesting when we think about these ideal notions of “perfect bodies,” though, is that the rabbis, both the biblical writers and the later rabbis, inhabit a world where bodies frequently experience harm and damage. So they know that the ideal notion of the “unblemished body”—  There's a kind of fantasy that's going on. There's a recognition that there will always be tensions between the idealized, imaginary, fantastical body and the fleshy, actual body. And so much of what is going on with rabbinic law, as the rabbis begin grappling with bodily difference and mental difference as well, moving out of that realm of ideal into a question of bodies as they meet world.

  Rebekah: In Leviticus, where they're very detailed about what you wear, you don't know what's under the skirt, right? How would you know? [chuckles]

  Julia: How would you know!

  Rebekah: How would you know! It’s just so fascinating.

  Julia: That question about, you don't know what's undercover is going to be a huge question for the rabbis when they start thinking specifically about women's disability. When we're looking at the Leviticus 21 passages we're only talking about men, because it's only male priests who are performing the sacrifice. So a bat cohen, the daughter of a priest, is not in this picture at all.

  But once the rabbis begin to think about and take and translate some of these paradigms into their own—and kind of flesh them out—in their own legal thinking in a very different cultural context, that question about what can you see at a glance and what might be hidden or veiled from the eye becomes a very central question for their own anxieties about what their own wives, right, or prospective wives might look like.

  Rebekah: We’ve started talking about this already, but what constitutes disability for the rabbis? And is disability a straightforward, permanent category? Certain rabbis bring up bad breath and sweat as faults for wives, stained hands as disqualifying rabbis, and you’ve written (in Tales of Destruction) about famine disfiguring bodies and causing a woman’s hair to fall out.[20] Although categories of disability are diverse, both visible and invisible, even in today’s world, these things the rabbis labeled “blemishes” don’t read as things we would typically interpret as disabilities. Given that they were working with a different language and a completely different world and framework, what was the rabbis’ concept of disabledness?

  Julia: Okay, so we want to zoom out for a moment to think a little bit about disability as a broad and complex category. It is absolutely not a straightforward category, and it's often not permanent. People can often– While there are certain static, relatively stable disability experiences, we can very easily see bodies and minds moving into and out of disability categories. Whether that's in the ancient world or in the contemporary moment today. I think when we trace the way the rabbis are thinking about disability, we have to really look at that from a number of different perspectives.

  So experiences of disability and bodily difference come up in a lot of different Rabbinic stories. And one of the things I trace out in my book Rabbinic Tales of Destruction is the way that disability surfaces often in stories about war and conquest and devastation. So I'm really interested in the way that language about or stories about bodily change—fasting is a great example—how fasting as a kind of exercise of trying to stave off catastrophe—can actually bring its own kind of micro-catastrophe to the body, right? Really changes. Long term fasting can really change the experience of a body. Though it's a really interesting moment of seeing how a rabbinic man who's fasting is exercising some control over his own body, potentially even over his own eventual disablement. In contrast to things like starvation, which come upon a body, are done to a body.

  One of the things that really fascinates me about the ways that the rabbis are playing with or thinking with these kind of evocations of disability and disablement is the way they often try to wrest some element of control or agency for themselves, in part through narrating their own kind of experiences of bodily change, impairment, disability, in ways that center emphasize their ability to kind of flip the script on the usual assumptions that disability or impairment are negative things.

  Now from a gender perspective, it's very disappointing to me personally, right [she chuckles— It's very frustrating to me that they don't tend to flip the script when they think about women's disability. Then they just think about, like, it in negative terms. They don't want a disabled wife! Or when they tell stories about famous rabbis who experience kind of bodily trouble, they often recognize that there can be something provocative, even subversive, about disability. That it goes against the dominant norms of male warrior culture, for example, in Imperial Rome. And they kind of like the way in which their weaker but provocative Jewish rabbinic bodies don't exemplify that ideal of the glorious Roman strongman. That's one sphere.

  Let's turn, though, to another really important sphere for rabbinic notions of disability: that's their legal paradigm for thinking about, does disability disqualify a person from performing certain religious obligations or others? In some ways, we're now back much more in the territory of Leviticus 21, right? Can a blemished priest bring a sacrifice? Now we're less thinking about, like, rabbinic stories and thinking about these questions of like, “Who can do what? Who's allowed to do what?” Here, disability is also a really important way that the rabbis think about limit cases, test cases, working out intricacies about law and practice.

  When we look at the way the rabbis transform that notion of the blemish in Leviticus 21, they do something fascinating! They really limit the force of the biblical prohibition in two ways. First of all, they really focus it now primarily on the hands and a few other very specific kinds of blemishes that might disqualify a priest. Partly that's because priests are no longer offering sacrifice. The temple is no more. The temple has been destroyed. And so the rabbis are now imagining priests in synagogues raising their hands to bless the community. So the focus of the problem now centers on the physicality of a priest's hands.

  They also are really limiting the force of that biblical prohibition. By articulating new legal concepts like the concept of “familiarity.” They argue, for example, that a priest who has an impairment that might technically disqualify him from raising his hands to bless in the congregation, is actually allowed to do so if he is familiar in his place, right. If he's known to the rest of the community. So it's a really interesting case where we see the rabbis actually exercising a lot of kind of creative legal agency in order to say, this, what in the biblical context looks like a very sweeping prohibition, is actually less broad in their own context, in their own reading. In many ways, they've defanged a lot of the prohibition’s original state.

  Emily: Your description of the rabbis’ kind of restriction of the Levitical code sounds a bit like the concern is distraction. You don't wanna distract the audience. Which feels very different from the concern within the Torah, within Leviticus, about not bringing an imperfect body before God.

  Julia [talking at once]: Yeah, that's right.

  Emily [talking at once]: Do the rabbi see that, like see that as a distinction? Or is this just what I'm hearing?

  Julia: Explicitly, there's a passage in the Mishnah that, in an early rabbinic text, that explains why the concern with the hands—why the concern with the hands. And the passage there emphasizes that the problem is actually the gaze, that the people might stare at the priest’s hands.

  Rebekah: Hmm.

  Julia: Now I just want to pause here as a disability critical reader, [laughs] as a gender critical reader as well; this is kind of familiar territory. One response to the problem of distraction is to say, “let's remove bodies that are distracting.” Another response, a response that I personally find a lot more ethical, is to say, “let's make sure everyone manages their own distraction, right?”

  Rebekah: Mmhm. Yep.

  Julia: The Mishnah is, I think, really interesting in recognizing that the problem is not actually inherent in the body. The problem is a kind of social relationship. “Oh those people might be distracted in this moment of extraordinary—what's supposed to be extraordinary religious devotion and connection—they're receiving the blessing. Ooh it's a peak moment! And instead some guy there is like, ‘Oh did you see So-and-So's hands? Ohh my gosh.’” Right. So they're like, “look, don't do that. If you have hands that might provoke comment, you don't get to bless.”

  Emily: Yeah.

  Julia: Okay so in historical terms, this is a really interesting moment for allowing us to see behind the curtain, see what the rabbis are thinking about in terms of why they're constructing this blessing this way or this prohibition this way.

  But again, I just, I want to emphasize the fact that this is not an inevitable response to distraction.

  And I do that in part because as a gender sensitive reader, as a gender critical reader, I'm so aware of the way that a lot of rabbinic discourse about women and women's bodies as inherently distracting, right, is motivated by a similar concern. So women are often, there's often limits and constraints placed on women's access to sacred space or women's entry into male spaces because women's bodies might be distracting. And that of course, right— There's other ways to solve the problem of distraction is what I'm saying! The rabbis didn't go there. They went the route of saying, “let's remove potential distraction from this scene.”

  And that explains, though, I think, why the familiarity principle actually works for the rabbis. Because once a priest becomes familiar, then there's a sense that those blemished hands are just part and parcel of the ordinary experience, right? Not worthy of comment, and thus not a problem.

  Emily: Not to take us on a side tangent, but I'm hearing so many resonances with today's world of, especially in churches, this controversy over “can women wear yoga pants? We have to put them in skirts because it will be distracting to the men, right?” These kind of concerns recur throughout.

  Julia: Absolutely! This question about distraction is, I think, a perennial religious problem. And I think that's why I'm so interested in attending to different cultural strategies for addressing that problem.

  It's striking to me that so often the choice to solve that problem ends up falling hardest, right— The question really is, who is going to carry the burden of distraction? Is that going to be internalized, everyone is responsible for managing their own distraction, right. In the case of rabbinic Judaism, men could in fact be tasked with the obligation of managing their sexual urges. Or you could, you know, a different strategy is to say, “let's just radically limit the access that women have to these spaces in order to avoid the risk of that distraction.” Same questions, I think, apply.

  I think there's also really interesting questions in both ancient and contemporary contexts about thinking about norms and space, so giving honor to a space. Some medieval Torah commentators are particularly interested in understanding and unpacking why the Leviticus 21 prohibitions are in place. And the medieval commentator Maimonides, for example, says that it's not because God dislikes certain bodies. That's repugnant to him, as it is to me as well. But that there is a concern that the honor, the kavod, the honor of the temple, be well and truly respected and apparent to all. And humans make mistakes, right? Humans misjudge bodies and assume that a space is only honored if the best of the best are representing in a space.

  So I think it's a really interesting parallel here, this kind of thinking about the way that norms and expectations about bodies, about distractions, play out in a variety of different [spaces].

  Emily: If exceptional men could be rabbis, pretty much every woman was expected to be a wife, whether or not that happened or not. And in the Talmud, rabbis list some of these impairments that they ideally prefer their wives should not have.[21] You talk in both of your books about this debate in the Babylonian Talmud that occurs between the students of Hillel and Shammai about brides with blemishes. Which, it’s spurred by a student’s question, “How does one dance with a bride?” And in the course of the debate Shammai asks, “[What] if she is lame or blind? … Do you still say to her, ‘a beautiful and graceful bride?’ Does not the Torah say: Keep far from a lie?” (Ketubot 16b–17a)[22] What fantasy of an idealized woman does this story represent – and sort of the other bridal negotiation stories that we find?  How do the rabbis gender disability?  

  Julia: It's such an awful text, right! It’s such a terrible text. We see in the text the way that that very assumption, “If she is lame or blind, do you still say to her, ‘a beautiful and graceful bride?’” Two poor assumptions. First, that beauty and grace are essential characteristics for wifehood, right, womanhood. And that a lame or a blind woman is obviously not fitting into those categories, right. I just, you know, again wanna flag that I'm not cosigning either of these principles.

  Emily [talking over]: Yes. A hundred percent.

  Julia: But I think it's such a striking moment of seeing how this idealized notion of womanhood comes crashing into the complexity of actual bodies and minds.

  One of the striking things I think to start, is that we see women's disability surface so significantly in the context of marriage. Men's disability is all over the place. We can see, for example, questions about intellectual disability crop up with regard to a whole lot of different legal questions and considerations. There are debates and discussions about blindness, for example. Is a blind man allowed to serve as a witness? Is a blind man allowed to recite a specific blessing that requires seeing the son? Is a deaf person able to learn and consent in a particular way, right? So these are all quite masculinely gendered questions because so much of rabbinic law focuses on male religious obligations.

  In order to really talk about women's disability, we have to go into the space of the kind of the marriage chamber, right. The rabbinic bedroom is I think already a really significant observation about the gendering of disability. Men and women are experiencing disability in their lives in a whole bunch of different contexts, but when do these things become religiously or legally salient? For the rabbis we really see the women's disability become an open question in the context of marriage.

  Now, you mentioned the way in which, right, the questions about bridal negotiation. Because this is the big place where there's a lot of discussion, kind of technical discussion about women's disability. So to go into this, we need a first, a quick primer on how rabbinic Jewish marriage works.

  So, a couple of kind of core concepts. A rabbinic husband is obligated to support his wife and to provide for her. Now it's worth noting that in practice, women in rabbinic culture also often worked, and many of them were materially supporting their husbands as well, especially if their husbands are spending a whole lot of years studying Torah and not working a trade. But the idealized concept is he's responsible for providing her with a whole host of things, including sexual fulfillment and material sustenance. So he comes into the marriage with this obligation and she is also assured of certain economic protections if he dies first or if he divorces her. These protections are all laid out in a document called the ketubah. It's interesting rabbinic sources often describe it as her ketubah right, like it's her insurance policy. Only the husband can initiate divorce. But in practice he is limited in his ability to do so because the ketubah makes it expensive, right? If he wants to initiate a divorce, he's got to come up with the money to pay out the ketubah.

  So. Disability enters into the mix because the rabbis are concerned about situations where there might be a kind of marital fraud.

  And the fraud is specific here to appearance-related factors. Like, this is the moment where like, “what's under the skirt,” right? “What's happening with her body?!” He can't check her out before they're married, right? So this is a moment where rabbinic norms about modesty collide with rabbinic anxieties about women's disability. He's not allowed to look closely at her body until after they're married, but once they're married, the fear is it's too late!

  So the situation here is, if the prospective husband has entered into a marriage contract thinking he's getting a non-disabled woman and then it turns out that she has an undisclosed disability and he's been defrauded, rabbinic law says if he's been deceived—if her disability was concealed from him—then he is allowed to dissolve the betrothal or divorce his wife without paying her the ketubah payment. So it massively raises the stakes around women's disability in this particular context.

  So this is, of course, a really difficult text to navigate from a feminist perspective and from a disability-affirming perspective. I mentioned earlier that when we're looking at these amazing stories of rabbis experiencing bodily and physical distress and using their disability in culturally provocative ways, I kept waiting for them to do that here with these stories. It's like a parade moment for them to say, “So-and-So, you know, that guy was judging poorly.” They often just really miss the boat on it.  What they can see about the kind of provocative potential of disability when it's embodied by culturally valorized, elite male rabbi—they don't seem to be able to do the same when they're thinking about women's disability in the context of marriage. It's just clear that they want a non-disabled ideal, right, beautiful bride.

  Of course we have no idea how these legal paradigms actually played out in practice. We're looking at legal paradigms—so what the law allows. Whatever actually played out in this way, we really don't know and can't know.

  Rebekah: I think there's really something interesting in this idea of embodied experience at play there, right? It's obvious men cannot imagine what it's like to be a woman. They can't put themselves in a woman's shoes, which is something this plays out over and over again in so many ways in our podcast. Maybe you could imagine what your life might be like if your hands weren't perfect and you were unable to pray before the synagogue, but it's somehow harder to imagine what it might be like to be a woman. These negotiations of how far our imagination can take us and where we choose to imagine and choose to empathize, is just really interesting.

  Julia: I think it's also the case sometimes that our imagination gets us into trouble. My experience often is that especially non-disabled folks thinking about disability often imagine disability to be a horror show or a tragedy or like impossible to live with. And sometimes this can be the case also for disabled folks imagining a disability experience that is not our own. Sometimes empathy can be a resource, right? Allowing us a kind of more generous way of thinking about another's experience. But sometimes it can really lead us off the cliff of misjudging another person's life.

  And the rabbis know that at a wedding you have an obligation to say something nice to the bride. There's a moment where Hillel and Shamai are debating, and one of the rabbis says, “Praise her as she is.” Another rabbi says, “Use a stock phrase. Just say to everyone”—this is Hillel's response. Hillel says, “Describe every woman as beautiful and graceful brie.” Shammai, of course, uses disability as a limit case to say, “Hillel, I think you're gettin’ into trouble. You shouldn’t do that. You know, that's gonna make you into a liar if it turns out that she's blind or lame.”

  Later Jewish thought takes this debate as an example of whether or not it's permissible to tell a pious lie. What's sometimes called a “white lie,” a lie that is designed to spare another person's pain. So Hillel says, “Look, if a man buys inferior goods in the marketplace…” (I'm thinking, “Ooh, you're going into a bad place with this metaphor! Watch out, friend, watch out!” [all laugh]) But anyway, that's where he goes. “Do you critique it, or do you just praise it in his eyes? Do you just say, ‘Aww, it was a nice thing you bought’?” Right. So Hillel has a kind of reputation as a rabbinic nice guy.

  But one of the things that's so troubling to me is that I think neither Hillel nor Shammai—in my own estimation as a disabled woman myself, right, in my own estimation—neither of them know the truth of my own experience, right? It's like that saccharine praise of like, “Oh you're so wonderful. Oh you’re so beautiful.” Like, just get out of here! Get out of here!

  One of the things, when I think about the kind of longing that I have, is actually for a very different kind of grappling with other ways of thinking about beauty, magnificence, presence, that actually center disability. That don't look past disability but center it in its own right as a kind of interesting dimension of human experience. An ordinary, even if sometimes rare or unusual, part of what it means to be human. Not something that needs to be ignored or silenced, but also not something that needs to be treated with this overly sweet false praise.

  There's a fascinating kind of moment of sort of incipient queerness in the text. One rabbi suggests that, “Look, you shouldn't be able to use this escape clause for the marriage because any man would know– If there's a bathhouse in town he should send his sisters, his female kin, to go check her out in the bathhouse before he seals the deal.” It's a really fascinating moment of getting to see the ways in which there's a lot of like creativity in terms of figuring out how to get around these particular notions of— navigate these particular notions about gender difference and modesty, etcetera.

  So the Babylonian Talmud says a woman's consent is required for marriage. But the full weight of the emphasis in terms of who's allowed to be dissatisfied with the way the other marital partner looks, that's for men only.

  But there's a fascinating gender difference here. They do discuss men's disability in the context of marriage. But it turns out they're convinced that women are turned off by bad smells. It's like, men are obsessed with the eye, right, with visual appearance. And women are totally led by the nose. And if he's stinky or smelly, that is potentially grounds for a forced divorce! It's shocking actually, because this is a very rare option in rabbinic sources. The Babylonian Talmud says that if a man is discovered to have a major disability—boils, polyps, a really bad smell, not a small bad smell but like a really bad smell—if she's repulsed by that, the court can actually force divorce. So it's interesting I think that it's especially stinky and stigmatized work—tanning hides, collecting dung—so there's a class dimension going on here, too–that might potentially disqualify him as a husband.

  Emily: To pick up on this, Talmudic stories reveal these tensions in thought over marital intimacy and what husbands should know or not know, see or not see in their wives. Bavli Shabbat tells the story that “There was a certain man who married a woman whose hand was a stump, but he was not aware of it until the day that she died. [Now] Rav said, ‘Come and see how modest a woman this was, for her husband was not aware of it.’ [Where] Rabbi Hiyya said to him, “Such is her [customary] way. Instead, come and see how modest a man this was that he was not aware of this [blemish] in his wife” (Bavli Shabbat 53b). So How does Jewish law construct marital intimacy, and what does that have to do with disablement and desire? What are the competing values at play in this story and others like it?

  Julia: Such an interesting story, because we've actually moved now out of the realm of law and into a much more complex space that is giving us a little window into the— It's at least a story about the subjectivity of two people, right? We don't know of course—these stories are shaped by many hands, we shouldn't imagine this as like a snapshot of an ancient Jewish marriage. But we are kind of getting to move here in a very different space that's not about what the law requires or allows, but what virtue might hope for or long for.

  But I need to tell you that actually this is a story that's really a heartbreaking story to me. I write about this in my most recent book, Loving Our Own Bones, which is thinking about a lot of these biblical and rabbinic stories also in conversation with contemporary conversations about disability and my own experience as a disabled woman. And I find this story to be such a heartbreak. There are, objectively speaking, a lot more difficult, unfortunate, troubling stories in Jewish tradition. But this one hits me hard, I think, because it so mirrors a kind of convention that I think is very powerful in contemporary American discourse about disability as well. Which is, “Don't look, don’t stare, disregard disability.”

  Our rabbinic husband in this story is imagined as supremely virtuous, in large part because he doesn't look so closely, right. He doesn't pay attention to the details of her body. This guy is like everyone who has ever said to me, “Oh, I don't think of you as disabled.” It's meant as a compliment, but it feels kind of like a slap. Like, “Oh you really don't know me.” I think of my own disability as such a crucial part of my own experience. It is bound up with, in the same way gender, queerness, Jewishness; it's so bound up with the fabric of who I am— To have that imagined as first, something that is like, undesirable, and also erasable feels like a real affront to intimacy.

  And so even though as a historian I read this text as a moment when the Talmud is kind of imagining a possibility that marriage doesn't have to be framed solely on this paradigm of like, “I look and I like” or “I look and I'm repulsed and so I get rid of her,” there's also a way in which I find myself as a reader longing for these two people—these imaginary two people—to have a very different kind of encounter. One in each the knowledge of each other's disability experience becomes a kind of invitation to intimacy, to like, really knowing her. Think about all of the things that he missed because he never knew. And I think all of the burden that she might have carried if she had felt for years that she always had to hide.

  Rebekah: We've kind of talked about this earlier, but there is this idea in the Torah that disabled men are limited in their access to the divine. But what does religious space and disability have to do with gender? So, are disabled women also distanced in some way from the sacred?

  Julia: The discussion that we had before was really about disabled priests, who are a particular kind of man who have the most intimate access to the sacred. So a non-priestly man wouldn't have the same kind of closeness that even a disabled priest would have. So and the priesthood in biblical concepts is a hereditary thing, so it's not all men, right. It's a particular kind of priestly man who has a special access. And then disability can limit or circumscribe some of what that access looks like.

  When we turn to the question of women, it's a really tricky question. I think we actually have to ask the question, “What does women's religiosity and piety look like?” I confront, regularly, the fact that the sources that I work with primarily are deeply androcentric texts. They’re focused really firmly on male concerns and questions, and they center male perspectives. So there's so much we don't know here about what women's piety was like from the inside. So as a scholar, I’m always hesitant. I can talk about the way that these texts imagine or construct that, but I always want to emphasize that if we had access to late antique Jewish rabbinic women, we would hear a whole range of dimensions of what their piety and religiosity looked like that are barely even conceived of by these texts.

  So my biggest question is, I think we really don't know because the sources so rarely let us in to the textures of women's lives. And that's one of the questions that animates my thinking in Loving Our Own Bones, is thinking about in contemporary terms, how do I make space for working with, imagining myself in conversation with these sacred texts in a way that recognizes my own disability as inseparable from the way I understand and experience my own spirituality and my own sense of connection to the sacred.

  But I think that's barely a question that the Talmud… It seems to be largely unequipped for thinking about those questions about women's religiosity and women's access to the sacred in general. And the idea that there's a particular kind of link here about this kind of nexus of disability, gender, and the sacred—that's something that I think I myself have become really interested in exploring. But I'm finding that being articulated more by contemporary Jewish disabled feminists rather than by ancient sources.

  Rebekah: As longtime listeners will know, we also care about how these stories and scripts echo, reoccur, and morph in our present. Your most recent book takes a theological and now-centered lens, looking at what the sacred literature might have to say for our present. Given how so many of these stories include concerning or even outright harmful depictions of disability, how do you read them for the present as a rabbi and queer disabled Jewish feminist, as you've named yourself, where do you find moments of recognition, hope, or creative inspiration?

  Julia: Thanks for that question.

  There are definitely moments where I feel little glimmers of recognition and kinship. For example, there's a way in which the Hebrew Bible describes Moses as a disabled prophet whose speech disability might in fact actually be essential to his mission. There's a moment where God describes Godself as making a human being's mouth. This is when Moses is like, “Uh don't send me, I don't want to go. You know, I don't want to have to speak to Pharaoh. I'm not a good, I'm not a good talker!” And God says, “No actually, it's you. You're the one I want.”

  And then there's also an extraordinary moment when God partners Moses with Aaron, his brother. It's like the first reasonable accommodation in the Torah! [Rebekah chuckles] Aaron becomes Moses's re-voicer, which is a practice that many people with speech disabilities today still use. Having a trusted intimate serve—you know, someone who knows their speech really well—to repeat, revoice their words in situations where listeners might not have gotten it the first time.

  I think even more important to me is a moment where God equips Moses with a set of visual signs. Right? Saying, “Okay, so if you're not a talker do revelation in your own gestural language.” An extraordinary moment, kind of disability-sensitive affinity.

  So there are definitely moments of recognition, moments of beauty.

  But as we've named today, as we've looked at today, there are also so many places of deep estrangement and real harm. Places where I find myself coming up again and again against experiences of violence and sometimes even a sense of violation from texts.

  So I find myself often reading against the grain. I often, rather than trying to apologize for the texts or make them, like sort of twist them until they work, I am more interested I think often, in recognizing the way that sacred texts often bear witness to ableism, right, to disability stigma. They give us—and I think here you're hearing my historian’s voice too, right. They give us insight into the ways that these kinds of—whether it's in gender terms or in disability terms—that this kind of, the power dynamics that have often kept women from the center, kept disabled people from the center, and pulled disabled women, you know, quite far from the speaking center of these traditions. Right. It feels really important to name that, to really parse some of those poisons.

  And then try and alchemize them. Also to think about what might be different, what might be possible.

  As a feminist, I think I ground myself in a reading practice that critique can be an act of love. It is worth doing the historical work. It's worth doing the inner work to say, “This text doesn't name truly the truth of my own soul.”

  But I think one of the things that I have learned from immersing myself so deeply in rabbinic paradigms of reading Torah, is that they also thought of Torah as a living text. It is a text that invites readers to stay in conversation. And so I find myself also drawing a kind of audacity from that ancient paradigm as well, even though our reading practices differ, we are nonetheless in some ways linked by a certain kind of hermeneutics of fidelity and creativity that I see actually as part of what I have inherited from them.

  [music interlude]

  Emily: It’s the responsibility of more typically-abled people to make the world a fully inclusive space and to see people as they are. In Roman antiquity perhaps the most extreme version of not seeing disability was a paterfamilias who literally did not want to see disability in his children and set them outside on a dung heap to die. But our contemporary way of not looking at disability—of ignoring a person’s crutches or their wheelchair—is also harmful. As Julia explains, it’s part of what makes her who she is. She says, “Disability is an ordinary fact of life and an essential part of my being.”[23]

  Rebekah: One of the things that’s so compelling about Seianti’s story is how well-cared-for she was. Her community looked after her and gave her a loving burial.[24] Seemingly, they didn’t isolate her. They didn’t label her a “prodigy” or “monstrous” like Augustine and Pseudo-Clement would have. How much more inclusive could the world be if, like Seianti, we lived in a community that made sure everyone was well-fed, even those who can’t open their mouths to chew?

  Emily: The biblical story of Jacob and Leah is another example of a Jewish marriage that may have involved a disability. Jacob worked seven years to marry his cousin Rachel. But at the wedding, her father Laban switched Rachel with her older sister Leah, hiding Leah under a veil throughout the ceremony. Jacob was understandably upset to find the wrong woman the morning after. He worked another seven years to marry the sister he loved. The Torah provides an intriguing detail about Leah. She has “weak” eyes (Gen 29:17), a word that translators and rabbis alike struggled to pin down. Were they the wrong color? Weepy? Or was something more seriously wrong with her vision? The straightforward reading of this narrative is that Jacob loved Rachel because he met her first. But could it also have had something to do with Leah’s eyes? We’ll never know.[25] Leah is remembered as a matriarch of Israel. Little girls the world over are blessed on Shabbat with the words, “May God make you like Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah.” And the Torah names her weakness as part of her story too. It was also part of the unsung experiences of many women from the past.

  Rebekah: To live as a woman in the ancient world, as today, was not just to grapple with things like menstruation or veiling or childbirth. It was also to grapple with the body in all its fragility and power. Even when we don’t have the witness of their bones as with Seianti, or when it doesn’t show up in the literary and artistic record, we know that many women lived with disabilities. Be it arthritis, hearing loss, cataracts, or one of the rabbis’ “blemishes.” 

  To mis-quote Ever After, “The point, ladies, is that they lived.”

  [Podcast theme music plays over outro]

  Emily: If you enjoyed our show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our website, womenwhowentbefore.com, or find us on Twitter @womenbefore.

  This podcast is written, produced, and edited by us, Emily Chesley and Rebekah Haigh. Our music is composed and produced by Moses Sun. The podcast is sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, all at Princeton University.

  Rebekah: Thanks for listening to Women Who Went Before! And don't forget:

  Both: Women were there!

  [music ends]

  [1] For a summary of Seianti Hanunia’s tomb, life, and historical context, see Judith Swaddling, “Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa: An Etruscan aristocrat,” in Women in Antiquity: Real Women across the Ancient World, eds. Stephanie Lynn Budin and Jean Macintosh Turfa (London: Routledge, 2016), 769–780.

  [2] Here and following: Bob Stoddart, “Remains from the Sarcophagus: Pathological Evidence and its Implications,” in Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa: the story of an Etruscan noblewoman, eds. Judith Swaddling, John Prag, and British Museum, British Museum occasional paper, no. 100 (London: British Museum, 2002), 29–38. For an introduction to disability in antiquity, with reference to Seiani, see Katrina Hayes in “Disabilities in Women and Children in the Mediterranean Antiquity,” Women in Antiquity: An Online Resource for the Study of Women in the Ancient World, March 27, 2023, accessed December 3, 2024.

  [3]  Christian Laes, “How and Whether to Say ‘Disability’ in Latin and Ancient Greek,” in A Cultural History of Disability, vol. 1, ed. Christian Laes (London/New York: Bloomsbury, 20202), 355.

  [4] Researchers found that within heterosexual couples, when the female partner became seriously ill the rate of divorce was 20%, whereas when the man was the sick partner the divorce rate fell to 2.9 %. Couples who were married longer were generally more likely to stay together, but the older the woman was at time of illness, the more likely she was to be divorced by her husband. “Men more likely than women to leave partner with cancer,” Reuters, November 11, 2009, accessed May 21, 2024.

  [5] W. V. Harris, “Child-Exposure in the Roman Empire,” The Journal of Roman Studies 84 (1994), 1. The practice seems to have been common (Harris, “Child-Exposure,” 4–8). Dionysius of Halicarnassus claimed that Romulus, the co-founder of Rome, only permitted exposure of infants under three years of age when “they were maimed or monstrous from their very birth” (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities II.15, in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, Volume I: Books 1-2., trans. Earnest Cary, Loeb Classical Library 319 [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937]).  According to Annie Allély, infants viewed as being more seriously disfigured such as hermaphrodites were exposed in Republican Rome for religious reasons: the children were seen as signs of the gods’ anger (“Les enfants handicapés, infirmes et malformés à Rome et dans l’Empire romain pendant l’Antiquité tardive,” Pallas: Revue d’Études Antiques 106 [2018], online version, para. 4).

  [6] Harris, “Child-Exposure,” 11–12.

  [7] Philipparchus, Fr. 11 Kock = 12 Kassel Austin, trans. Harris, “Child-Exposure in the Roman Empire,” 4.

  [8] Heba Mahran and Samar Mostafa Kamal, “Physical Disability in Old Kingdom Tomb Scenes,” Athens Journal of History 2, no. 3 (2016): 169–192; and Doaa Ragab Fadel, “Physical Disabilities in Greco Roman Egypt and Measuring the Role of Archaeological Museums in The Innovation of Smart Technology to Serve the Physically Handicapped Tourists: Applying on Museums in Alexandria, Cairo,” Journal of Association of Arab Universities for Tourism and Hospitality 24, no. 2 (2023): 488–554. 

  [9] Analyzed by Allély, “Les enfants handicapés,” para. 16–25. She cites Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XI.3, 1; Augustine, Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Love (the Enchiridion), 87; and Augustine’s City of God 16.8 and 21.8.

  [10] Augustine, Enchiridion 87. “The Handbook on Faith, Hope and Love,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 3, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. J.F. Shaw (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887), rev. and ed. for New Advent by Kevin Knight.

  [11] Allély, “Les enfants handicapés,” para. 26–31 analyzing Irenaus of Lyons, Against Heresies 5, and Pseudo-Clement, Homilies 19–22.

  [12]  Allély, “Les enfants handicapés, infirmes et malformés.”

  [13]  Sarah Rosen,  “Neil Lane, the official jeweler of ‘The Bachelor,’ is designing luxury ketubahs,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 23, 2022, accessed November 27, 2024.

  [14] The marriage contract is translated in Bezalel Porten, The Elephantine Papyri in English: Three Millennia of Cross-Cultural Continuity and Change, with J. Joel Farber et al. [Leiden/New York: Brill, 1996], 208–211). Other papyri from the same family—including Tapamet’s manumission document at the death of her enslaver (TAD B3.6/Kraeling 5)—are included in pp. 202–207 and 212–254.

  [15] The contract was amended at a later date, changing the clause about death of a husband to “should Ananiah die, it is Tamet (who) has right to all goods which will be between Anani and Tamet” (TAD B3.3, trans. Porten, Elephantine Papyri, 210). These revisions, and the changes they record in Tapamet’s enslaved status, are analyzed in Bezalel Porten and Henri Zvi Szubin, “The Status of the Handmaiden Tamet: A New Interpretation of Kraeling 2 (TAD B3.3),” Israel Law Review 29, nos. 1–2 (1995), 57–64. The family history and the ketubah of Tapamet’s daughter Jehoishma are analyzed by Christopher Jones, “Jehoishma Daughter of Ananiah: The Life of a Totally Normal Ancient Person,” Gates of Ninevah, January 8, 2015, accessed December 3, 2024.  For more on the women at Elephantine, see Bezalel Porten, “Elephantine,” Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, Jewish Women’s Archive, February 27, 2009, accessed December 3, 2024.

  [16] Zsófia Buda, “From Calcutta to Tarcento: Jewish marriage contracts from the collections,” Rylands Blog [blog of the University of Manchester John Rylands Research Institute and Library], December 17, 2021, accessed December 3, 2024.

  [17] Deborah Greniman, “The Origins of the Ketubah: Deferred Payment or Cash up Front?” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues 4, Fall 5762/2001, pp. 84-118 (84).

  [18] m.ketubot 7.6 reads, in part: “And these are examples of women who may be divorced without payment of their marriage contract: A woman who violates the precepts of Moses, i.e., halakha, or the precepts of Jewish women, i.e., custom. The Mishna explains: And who is categorized as a woman who violates the precepts of Moses? This includes cases such as when she feeds him food that has not been tithed, or she engages in sexual intercourse with him while she has the legal status of a menstruating woman, or she does not separate a portion of dough to be given to a priest [ḥalla], or she vows and does not fulfill her vows. And who is considered a woman who violates the precepts of Jewish women? One who, for example, goes out of her house, and her head, i.e., her hair, is uncovered; or she spins wool in the public marketplace; or she speaks with every man she encounters. Abba Shaul says: Also one who curses his, i.e., her husband’s, parents in his presence. Rabbi Tarfon says: Also a loud woman. And who is defined as a loud woman? When she speaks inside her house and her neighbors hear her voice.” (Sefaria, WIlliam Davidson edition, Koren-Steinsaltz)

  [19] Jeffrey Stackert and Jeremy Schipper, “Blemishes, Camouflage, and Sanctuary Service: The Priestly Deity and His Attendants,” Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel. 2, no. 4 (2013).

  [20] Julia Watts Belser, Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 85–96. See also Lamentations Rabbah 1:31 and 4:11, commented upon by Belser.

  [21] Some blemishes include moles, facial marks, scares from dog-bites, unpleasant voices, and breasts that were unappealing or too large (Bavli Ketubot 75a).

  [22] Ketubot 16b–17a, trans. Belser, Loving Our Own Bones, 20. Julia Watts Belser draws out the ethical implications of this text for our time and challenges its worldview through the lens of modern disabled dancers and their art in “Drawing Torah from Troubling Texts: Gender, Disability, and Jewish Feminist Ethics,” Journal of Jewish Ethics 6, no. 2 (2020): 140–152.

  [23] Belser, Loving Our Own Bones, 6–8 (online version).

  [24] Her beautifully painted portrait on her tomb strikingly matches archaeologists’ reconstruction of her face (Swaddling, “Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa,” 776–777).

  [25] Belser, Loving Our Own Bones, 185–188. Belser urges us to turn from seeking culturally conventional ideas of “beauty” and pursue instead “magnificence,” to look with tenderness and wonder.

• Episode Sources

  • Allély, Annie. “Les enfants handicapés, infirmes et malformés à Rome et dans l’Empire romain pendant l’Antiquité tardive.” Pallas: Revue d’Études Antiques 106 (2018): 197–22, online version.

  • Augustine. “The Handbook on Faith, Hope and Love [Enchiridion].” In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series. Volume 3. Edited by Philip Schaff. Translated by J.F. Shaw. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887. Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight.

  • Belser, Julia Watts. “Drawing Torah from Troubling Texts: Gender, Disability, and Jewish Feminist Ethics.” Journal of Jewish Ethics 6, no. 2 (2020): 140–152.

  • ———. Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole. Beacon Press, 2023.

  • ———. Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem. Oxford University Press, 2018.

  • Buda, Zsófia. “From Calcutta to Tarcento: Jewish marriage contracts from the collections.” Rylands Blog [blog of the University of Manchester John Rylands Research Institute and Library]. December 17, 2021. Accessed December 3, 2024.

  • Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Roman Antiquities, Volume I: Books 1-2. Translated by Earnest Cary. Loeb Classical Library 319. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937.

  • Fadel, Doaa Ragab. “Physical Disabilities in Greco Roman Egypt and Measuring the Role of Archaeological Museums in The Innovation of Smart Technology to Serve the Physically Handicapped Tourists: Applying on Museums in Alexandria, Cairo,” Journal of Association of Arab Universities for Tourism and Hospitality 24, no. 2 (2023): 488–554. 

  • Greniman, Deborah. “The Origins of the Ketubah: Deferred Payment or Cash up Front?” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues 4 (Fall 5762/2001): 84–118.

  • Harris, W. V. “Child-Exposure in the Roman Empire.” The Journal of Roman Studies 84 (1994): 1–22.

  • Hayes, Katrina. “Disabilities in Women and Children in the Mediterranean Antiquity.” Women in Antiquity: An Online Resource for the Study of Women in the Ancient World. March 27, 2023. Accessed December 3, 2024.

  • Jones, Christopher. “Jehoishma Daughter of Ananiah: The Life of a Totally Normal Ancient Person.” Gates of Ninevah. January 8, 2015. Accessed December 3, 2024.

  • Laes, Christian. “How and Whether to Say ‘Disability’ in Latin and Ancient Greek.” Pp. 1–14 in A Cultural History of Disability. Volume 1. Edited by Christian Laes. London/New York: Bloomsbury, 20202.

  • Mahran, Heba, and Samar Mostafa Kamal. “Physical Disability in Old Kingdom Tomb Scenes.” Athens Journal of History 2, no. 3 (2016): 169–192.

  • Porten, Bezalel. “Elephantine.” Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. Jewish Women’s Archive. February 27, 2009. Accessed December 3, 2024.

  • ———. The Elephantine Papyri in English: Three Millennia of Cross-Cultural Continuity and Change. With J. Joel Farber, Cary J. Martin, Günter Vittmann, Leslie S.B. MacCoull, Sarah Clackson, and contributions by Simon Hopkins and Ramon Katzoff. Leiden/New York: Brill, 1996.

  • Porten, Bezalel, and Henri Zvi Szubin. “The Status of the Handmaiden Tamet: A New Interpretation of Kraeling 2 (TAD B3.3).” Israel Law Review 29, nos. 1–2 (1995): 43–64.

  • [Reuters Staff]. “Men more likely than women to leave partner with cancer.” Reuters. November 11, 2009. Accessed December 3, 2024.

  • Rosen, Sarah. “Neil Lane, the official jeweler of ‘The Bachelor,’ is designing luxury ketubahs.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency. May 23, 2022. Accessed November 27, 2024.

  • Stoddart, Bob. “Remains from the Sarcophagus: Pathological Evidence and its Implications.” Pp. 29–38 in Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa : the story of an Etruscan noblewoman. Edited by Judith Swaddling, John Prag, and British Museum. British Museum occasional paper, no. 100. London: British Museum, 2002.

Cover Image:

Depicted reclining on top of her sarcophagus, Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa appears at ease with her body.  Her physical remains tell a different story of a life lived in pain and with limited mobility. Her tomb and her physical remains serve as poignant reminders that, much like today, people in the ancient world lived with diverse physical experiences.

Image Credit: Sarcophagus of Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa. Poggio Cantarelllo, Italy. Ca. 250–150 BCE. Painted terracotta sarcophagus. The British Museum, accession number 1887,0402.1. Image from Wikimedia Commons, by Gryffindor - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Women Who Went Before is written, produced, and edited by Emily Chesley and Rebekah Haigh. Podcast music is composed and produced by Moses Sun.

Sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity at Princeton University

Views expressed on the podcast are solely those of the individuals, and do not represent Princeton University.