As scholars from the field of disability studies have argued, the category of “disability,” like gender, presents a fundamental category of analysis for historians to examine power relations and identity formation. In this context, this talk draws on theoretical frameworks from disability studies to examine the representation of leprosy and disabling skin diseases in late antique rabbinic literature. It demonstrates how for the rabbis, the disabled body, or the “deviant other” body, functioned as a marker for the boundaries of humanness, inventing difference and drawing rabbinic communal boundaries around conceptions of ideal and transgressive bodies. The rabbinic attitudes towards individuals suffering with leprosy become tied to a rabbinic concern with communal identity and to debates regarding the communal responsibility to provide medical care.

Shulamit Shinnar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State University. She specializes in ancient Jewish history with a focus on the production of rabbinic literature in Roman Palestine and Sassanian Babylonian. Her study of Jewish culture and textual traditions is informed by methodological questions from the history of science and medicine, medical anthropology, post-colonial theory, the study of gender and sexuality, and disability studies. Currently, she is working on a monograph entitled "'The Best of Doctors Go to Hell': Rabbinic Medical Culture in Late Antiquity" that examines Jewish medical culture in Late Antiquity, focusing on medicine as a site for social encounter and cultural exchange between different ethnic, religious, and gender identities.