The most useful source to study wifebeating is responsa literature, which includese a variety of attitudes towards the phenomenon. While some sources declare wifebeating unlawful, others justify it under certain circumstances. Some Ashkenazi rabbis considered battering as grounds for forcing a man to give a get. In fifteenth-century Europe, more rabbis approved of wifebeating for the purpose of education. Some rabbis unconditionally condemn wifebeaters and force them to divorce their wives, but they are a minority.
Most are intimidated by the halakhic problems of mamzerut. Contemporarily, almost no rabbinic authorities justify wifebeating for the purpose of education, but many still do not allow a forced divorce to free the victim. In some societies, men have the right to beat wives who do not do their tasks or who are disrespectful to them. Analysis of sex-role and gender theories describe the patriarchal nature of society and its concomitant culture of violence. In the early s, Richard J.
Gelles and Murray R. In biblical times, it is clear that acts of sexual assault and abuse against women were of concern only because they were a violation of male property rights. The woman is property, whose ownership is transferred to the husband upon marriage. In the case of a divorce, the husband renounces his right to his sexual use of the property. He is not only the owner of his wife, he is also the owner of her pregnancy Ex.
All of this may have contributed to an attitude that there was nothing wrong with physically abusing women. When not specified, "Talmud" refers to the Babylonian Talmud. In Mishnaic and Talmudic times, there is no reference to battered women as a class. The Talmud does not overtly discuss wifebeating as a separate category of corporeal damage. There is one major allusion to wife beating in the Talmud, which is couched in a discussion about the unlearned lower class, the am ha-are z lit.
Pesa h im 49b. Tarfon said: also one who screams. And who is regarded a screamer? Ketubbot 72a. Although beating is not allowed or even suggested in the case of the screamer, the woman who curses is in later texts repeatedly used as an example where beating is seen as a justified means to an end.
