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Avital Davidovich-Eshed

Senior Lecturer, Tel Aviv University

Resident at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

September 2025; November – December 2025

Research topic at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften:

»The Beautiful Captive Woman as a Hermeneutic Category: A Cultural History of an Ultimate Other«

Project outline:

The Biblical laws of war include a provision concerning the unique status of the foreign captive woman, referred to as »a beautiful woman« (אשת יפת תואר) (Deut. 21:10–14). This puzzling law outlines a ritual supposedly intended to regulate violence on the battlefield and formalize the female captive’s relationship with her captor as his lawful wife. My research introduces the beautiful and alien female captive as a novel hermeneutic category, serving as a privileged site for exploring how Jewish cultures constructed otherness and engaged with the intersections of sex, gender, ethnicity, and religious affiliation. The project’s objective is to provide a comprehensive conceptual genealogy of אשת יפת תואר as a hermeneutic category, tracing its appearances across diverse contexts of medieval European Jewish cultural discourse, including biblical and talmudic commentaries, midrashim, responsa, halakhic codes, ethical treatises, and mystical works. (Avital Davidovich-Eshed)

Research partner:

Dr. Avital Davidovich-Eshed is a fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften at the invitation of Professor Christian Wiese, Martin Buber Professor for Jewish religious philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her stay is funded by the Frankfurt–Tel Aviv Center for the Study of Religious and Interreligious Studies.

Scholarly profile of Avital Davidovich-Eshed

Dr. Avital Davidovich-Eshed is a senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish Philosophy and Talmud and the program of Women and Gender Studies at Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on the history of women, gender, and sexuality in medieval Jewish culture; the evolution of gendered categories in Jewish mythology, law, and ritual; Jewish-Christian encounters in medieval Europe; and the cultural mechanisms of knowledge production and the migration of knowledge.
She is a founding member of the Jewish Studies Professors’ Forum for Israel's Democracy, which highlights the interrelations between democratic erosion and the shaping of Judaism in Israel. She was a visiting lecturer on Women’s Studies and Judaism at Harvard Divinity School WSRP (2018). and a Research Fellow at the Kogod Research Center at Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem (2009–2020).

Website:
Please find more information about Avital Davidovich-Eshed hier.

Selected publications:

»Cut Through the Middle: The Virgin Body and the Body Politic in Medieval Ashkenaz«, Medieval Encounters [forthcoming 2026]
On Virginity: Body, Sexuality and Identity in Medieval Jewish Culture, Jerusalem: Carmel Press [forthcoming 2025]
»From Hermeneutical Jew to Intersectional Jewess: Gender, Identity and Scopic Ambivalence in Medieval Europe«, in: Yossi Israeli and Ram Ben Shalom (Hg.) The Hermeneutical Jew. Essays on Inter-Religious Encounters in Honor of Jeremy Cohen (= Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 42), Turnhout: Brepols 2025, p. 109–125.
»The Rite of BeJiat Mitzvah (Commanded Intercourse): Sex, Gender, and Emotions in Medieval Ashkenaz«, in: Zion 90, 1-2 (2024), p. 53–84.
»From Raw Material to Vessel: BeJiat Mitsvah (Religiously Sanctioned Intercourse) as Transformation«, Quintus: Studies in Talmudic and Rabbinic Literature 7 (2020), pp. 1–20.

Avital Davidovich-Eshed

Scholarly profile of Avital Davidovich-Eshed

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