Beauty or Beast?

Abstract

This article explores the role that emotion plays in rabbinic interpretations of the law of the captive woman. Discrete “emotional communities” establish “feeling rules” through which they broadcast their ideal emotional world and the values associated with it. Different midrashim, employing rich metaphors, agree that the feeling rule in the law of the captive seeks to elicit disgust from the captor. That emotion emphasizes the otherness of its object and thereby affects the power relations that obtain between subject and object. Midrashic sources disagree, however, over whether the captor’s disgust response will motivate him to jettison the captive. At issue is the identity of the powerful party confronting the captor: a gentile plot that disgust could help him neutralize or an evil inclination which it could not. If the captor marries his captive, he will experience hate, an emotion that will confirm the otherness that he earlier failed to recognize.