Spinning Fantasies

Spinning Fantasies offers a dramatic revision of our current understanding of early rabbinic Judaism. Miriam B. Peskowitz calls on a wide range of sources - archaeology, tools, legal texts, grave goods, technology, writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin, and artistic representations - in order to challenge the traditional assumptions regarding the historical development of Judaism.

In the aftermath of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by Roman armies in 70 C.E., new incarnations of Judaism began to emerge. Of these, rabbinic Judaism was the most successful, developing as the classical form of the religion. By researching ancient stories involving Jewish spinners and weavers, Peskowitz reexamines this critical moment in Jewish history, presenting a feminist interpretation in which gender takes center stage. While spinners and weavers performed what seemed like ordinary tasks, their craft was in fact symbolic of larger gender and sexual issues.

It is through this study of the imagery and remains of spinning that Peskowitz shows how gender and rabbinic Judaism were indeed inextricable.