Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture - Hardcover

Boyarin, Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520080122 ISBN 13: 9780520080126

Publisher: University of California Press, 1993

Synopsis

Beginning with a startling endorsement of the patristic view of Judaism―that it was a "carnal" religion, in contrast to the spiritual vision of the Church―Daniel Boyarin argues that rabbinic Judaism was based on a set of assumptions about the human body that were profoundly different from those of Christianity. The body―specifically, the sexualized body―could not be renounced, for the Rabbis believed as a religious principle in the generation of offspring and hence in intercourse sanctioned by marriage.

This belief bound men and women together and made impossible the various modes of gender separation practiced by early Christians. The commitment to coupling did not imply a resolution of the unequal distribution of power that characterized relations between the sexes in all late-antique societies. But Boyarin argues strenuously that the male construction and treatment of women in rabbinic Judaism did not rest on a loathing of the female body. Thus, without ignoring the currents of sexual domination that course through the Talmudic texts, Boyarin insists that the rabbinic account of human sexuality, different from that of the Hellenistic Judaisms and Pauline Christianity, has something important and empowering to teach us today.

About this title

About the Author

Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (California, 1994).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture

By Daniel Boyarin

University of California Press

Copyright © 1993 Daniel Boyarin
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520080122


Introduction Carnal Israel

In his Tractatus adversus Judaeos , Augustine lays the following charge against "the Jews":

Behold Israel according to the flesh (i Cor. 10:18). This we know to be the carnal Israel; but the Jews do not grasp this meaning and as a result they prove themselves indisputably carnal.

(vii, 9)

Augustine knew what he was talking about. There was a difference between Jews and Christians that had to do with the body. He begins by quoting a hermeneutic remark made by Paul in the Epistle to the Corinthians in reference to a verse of the Hebrew Bible that speaks of "Israel." Paul claims by this statement that the verse refers to Israel "according to the flesh," that is, "Israel" understood literally. Paul here is alluding to his platonizing doctrine that external realities—things in the flesh—all have spiritual signifieds. This is as true of the words of the text as it is of the things of the world. Just as there is an Israel in the flesh, there is also an "Israel according to the spirit," the Gentile (and Jewish) believers in Christ. Augustine here argues with fine paradox that Israel according to the flesh—i.e., the Jews—by its very insistence that it is the true Israel demonstrates that it does not understand that there is both a carnal and a spiritual sense to scripture, and by this demonstration, this people condemns itself to remain forever and indisputably carnal and not spiritual.1 The carnality of Israel's understanding is what consigns it forever to the realm of the flesh. That is to say, the hermeneutic practices of the rabbinic Jews,2 their corporeal existence as a people and their emphasis

For a brilliant interpretation of Augustine's hermeneutic of Judaism and Christianity, see Robbins (1991, 21–70). My reading of Robbins also supplied the title for this book.

Rabbinic Judaism is, by Augustine's time, virtually the only kind of Judaism extant, although, as Brian Stock reminds me, it is quite unlikely that Augustine refers to living Jews at all. It is important to emphasize that the term rabbinic Judaism refers not to the Judaism practiced by Rabbis but to the Judaism practiced by Rabbis and by those who considered the Rabbis their spiritual authority.

on sex and reproduction, are all stigmatized as "carnal" by the Father. This accusation against the Jews, that they are indisputably carnal, was a topos of much Christian writing in late antiquity.

I propose in this book to account for this practice of Augustine and the others who characterize the Jews as carnal, indeed to assert the essential descriptive accuracy of the recurring Patristic notion that what divides Christians from rabbinic Jews is the discourse of the body, and especially of sexuality, in the two cultural formations. I will also explore the consequences of that difference for the construction of gender and other aspects of social life in the Judaism of the Rabbis who produced the talmudic literature and their followers.3

Although in many modern accounts the difference between "Jewish" and "Christian" discourses of sexuality has been homogenized into a putative Judaeo-Christian tradition, Peter Brown, one of the leading modern interpreters of the Church Fathers, regards the fundamental difference between Christianity and "Judaism" as having to do with the body and sex in the two cultures:

The division between Christianity and Judaism was sharpest in this. As the rabbis chose to present it, sexuality was an enduring adjunct of the personality. Though potentially unruly, it was amenable to restraint—much as women were both honored as necessary for the existence of Israel, and at the same time were kept from intruding on the serious business of male wisdom. It is a model based on the control and segregation of an irritating but necessary aspect of existence. Among the Christians the exact opposite occurred. Sexuality became a highly charged symbolic marker precisely because its disappearance in the committed individual was considered possible, and because this disappearance was thought to register, more significantly than any other human transformation, the qualities necessary for leadership in the

I am well aware that this very formulation already raises serious theoretical and epistemological issues, not all of which I am able to control. Who were the followers of the Rabbis? What does it mean to speak of their social life? If we speak of the "culture" as misogynistic (or as not misogynistic), what does this mean, or rather, to whom are we referring? To the men, the women, the elites, hoi polloi? What would it mean, indeed, to call any culture misogynistic? Are we ignoring the existence of women as part of the culture, or assuming that they are victims of false consciousness and themselves have internalized misogyny? I shall try to avoid the most obvious traps of my discourse, without, however, any real confidence that this will always be possible.

religious community. The removal of sexuality—or, more humbly, removal from sexuality—stood for the state of unhesitating availability to God and one's fellows, associated with the ideal of the singlehearted person.

(Brown 1987, 266–67)

Although in this passage Brown sets up the opposition between a reified Judaism and Christianity, he himself has made us aware that this is not the relevant taxonomy, for the gran rifuto is just as Jewish in its social origins as the acceptance of sexuality (however ambivalent) by the Rabbis. Brown has made this point explicitly in a passage near the one cited:

It is claimed that a disgust for the human body was already prevalent in the pagan world. It is then assumed that when the Christian church moved away from its Jewish roots, where optimistic attitudes toward sexuality and marriage as part of God's good creation had prevailed, Christians took on the bleaker colors of their pagan environment. Such a view is lopsided. The facile contrast between pagan pessimism and Jewish optimism overlooks the importance of sexual renunciation as a means to singleness of heart in the radical Judaism from which Christianity emerged.

(Brown 1987, 266)

In this book, I will focus more intensively on the Jewish side of this equation than Brown has done, sketching the culture of the body both in that "radical Judaism" and in the rabbinic reaction to it. I suggest, however, that Brown's "radical Judaism" was not so radical at all but, in fact, rather typical of the ideologies of various Jewish subcultures around the Mediterranean.4 Further, in the first century these orientations to the body cannot yet be separated out as "Jewish" and "Christian"; Pauline religion should be understood as contiguous with other Hellenistic Judaisms, and a separation between Jewish and Christian religio-cultural formations

Brown may have been referring to apocalyptic sects, such as the one at the Dead Sea. The archaeological evidence suggests, however, that despite undergoing periods of withdrawal from sexual relations, they were not a celibate community. Whatever Paul's spiritual origins, the Christian community as it developed did not grow out of Palestinian Jewish apocalyptic. In support of my notion that the attitudes toward sexuality among the Fathers owe more to the Greek-speaking Judaism of Philo and his congeners than to Semitic-speaking apocalyptics stands the fact that both Philo and Josephus describe the Essenes as a celibate group. There may or may not have been such a group, but, in any case, these two Greek-speaking Jews have testified to their values by that declaration.

should properly be attributed only to a later period.5 Among the major supports for such a construction are the similarities between Paul and Philo—similarities that cannot easily be accounted for by assuming influence, since both were active at the same time in quite widely separated places (Chadwick 1966 and Borgen 1980). The affinities between Philo and such texts as the fourth gospel and the Letter to the Hebrews are only slightly less compelling evidence, because of the possibility that the authors of these texts already know Philo (Borgen 1965; Williamson 1970). I take these affinities as prima facie evidence for a Hellenistic Jewish cultural koine throughout the eastern Mediterranean, undoubtedly varying from place to place in many respects but sharing some common elements throughout the region.

Moreover, as Wayne Meeks (1983, 33) and others have pointed out, it is impossible to draw hard and fast lines between Hellenistic and rabbinic Jews in the first century.6 On the one hand, the rabbinic movement per se does not yet exist, and on the other hand, Greek-speaking Jews like Paul and Josephus refer to themselves as Pharisees, and Paul is allegedly a disciple of Rabban Gamaliel, the very leader of the putative proto-rabbinite party. Nonetheless, I am going to suggest that there were tendencies, which, while not sharply defined, already separated first-century Greek speakers, who were relatively acculturated to Hellenism, from Semitic speakers, who were less acculturated. These tendencies were, on my hypothesis, to become polarized as time went on, leading in the end to a sharp division between Hellenizers, who became absorbed into Christian groups, and anti-Hellenizers, who formed the nascent rabbinic movement.7 The adoption of Philo exclusively in the Church and the fact that he was ignored by the Rabbis are symptomatic of this relationship,

I am aware that I am placing myself in the middle here of a great contest in the interpretation of Paul. Suffice it to say here that I am cognizant of the different ways to read the Pauline corpus, including in particular the stimulating (but ultimately unconvincing) revisionist reading of Gaston (1987). In my work in progress, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, I will, Deo volente, detail my reasons for making these judgments.

Several of the essays edited by Neusner, Frerichs, and McCracken-Flesher (see Collins 1985) also deal with these issues, particularly those in the section entitled "Defining Difference: The First Century" (73–282).

We must not forget that there were anti-Hellenists in later Christianity as well. Tertullian is the most obvious example, and in some respects, his sensibility about the materiality or corporeity of human essence is similar to that of the Rabbis, although his ideology of sexuality is in total opposition to theirs.

through which the Christian movement became widely characterized by its connection with middle and neo-platonism. In fact, this connection (between philonic Judaism and Christianity) was recognized in antiquity as well, for popular Christian legend had Philo convert to Christianity. Even some fairly recent scholarship attributed some of his works to Christians (Bruns 1973; and see Winston 1981, xi–xii and 313–14).

The central thesis of this book is that rabbinic Judaism—the cultural formation of most of the Hebrew- and Aramaic-speaking Jews of Palestine and Babylonia—was substantially differentiated in its representations and discourses of the body and sexuality from Greek-speaking Jewish formations, including much of Christianity. My fundamental notion, which will be explored and defended throughout the book, is that rabbinic Judaism invested significance in the body which in the other formations was invested in the soul. That is, for rabbinic Jews, the human being was defined as a body—animated, to be sure, by a soul—while for Hellenistic Jews (such as Philo) and (at least many Greek-speaking) Christians (such as Paul), the essence of a human being is a soul housed in a body.8 For most of the Greco-Roman world an ontological dualism became as natural

See Boyarin 1992 for evidence and qualification of this statement. To prevent misunderstanding at this point, let me state here that such dualism does not necessarily imply contempt for the body. It would be a mistake to characterize Paul (and many early Christians, even among the dualists) simply as misomatists. Where some dualists represent the body as a grave for the soul, Paul represents it as a garment and affords it a positive role even in the eschaton. It seems, nevertheless, that the essence of humanbeing is for him the soul, whereas I am arguing that for the Rabbis it was the body.

For an analogous case in which a platonistic view is identified as common in Hellenistic culture and absent in rabbinic Judaism compare the following statement of E. P. Sanders:

I must now reaffirm, against Robinson, that I think there is some validity to discussing the general character of religion which obtained in a given geographical/cultural milieu. I think that there is some sense in speaking of "Platonism," for example, when referring to the widespread view in the Hellenistic world that the true is to be identified with the immutable. Robinson might object to this as too essentialist a category and as insufficiently dynamic, and it may be that one can give a history of the conception, but the category of Platonism as just defined does, in my view, point to something real in the ancient world. (It is, by the way, a view which is notable by its absence in most of Palestinian Judaism.)

(Sanders 1977, 24)

I will be arguing in this book that an analogous patterning obtains with regard to the platonic (or rather platonistic) idea that the soul is the essence of the human being, and it is housed in a body.

a way of thinking as the conscious and unconscious is for us, but the proto-rabbinite Jews of Palestine seem to have strongly resisted such dualist notions. I will claim that this resistance was at least partly owing to cultural politics, for, as we have seen, one consequence of at least the post-Pauline Christian adoption of dualist notions was to allegorize the reality of Israel quite out of corporeal existence. The notion that the physical is just a sign or shadow of that which is really real allows for a disavowal of sexuality and procreation, of the importance of filiation and genealogy, and of the concrete, historical sense of scripture, of, indeed, historical memory itself. The emphasis, on the other hand, on the body as the very site of human significance allows for no such devaluations.9 Sexuality is accordingly not just a subheading under ethics but situated at the core of alternate individual and collective self-understandings.10 A self and a collective that conceive of their actuality as spiritual will behave very differently from a self and a collective that see the body as the privileged site of human essence. Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianities were very different from each other in their ideologies of sexuality and thus of the self and the collective and cannot be subsumed under a rubric of Judaeo-Christianity, a term which, if it means anything at all, only takes on that meaning in modernity.11 Religious symbols such as the incarnation and the virgin birth are important signs of cultural difference that functioned at levels of social practice and not only theology (Gager 1982).12 In late antiquity itself, both Jews and Christians realized and remarked (with mutual acrimony) this difference around the body as a key area of cultural contention between them. The counter-charge of

Verna Harrison has pointed out to me that this formulation too strongly equates body with sexuality and that there are Christian writers (in particular the Cappadocian Fathers) who positively mark the role of the body while still disavowing sexuality. They simply understand sexuality as a secondary and temporary entity within the body itself. I think the point is well taken and should be kept in mind. Caroline Bynum's work on resurrection in the Western tradition (1991) also points in this direction.

I owe this brilliant formulation to John Miles.

Below I will argue that in spite of the enormous variations within both Christianities and rabbinic Judaism, the near-universal privileging of virginity, even for Christian thinkers who valorize marriage, produces an irreducible difference between that formation and rabbinic Judaism, for which sexuality and procreation are understood as acts of ultimate religious significance and for which virginity is highly problematic, as Christian writers in antiquity correctly emphasized.

In Boyarin (1992, 497) I argue that the incarnation of God constitutes not an affirmation of corporeality but rather a hypostatization of dualism.

Jews against Christians, that they were deficient because they did not marry and have children, was not unknown. The Mesopotamian Father, Aphrahat, represents this topos precisely and accurately, citing a Jewish voice, as well as his disdain for that voice:

I have written to you, my beloved, concerning virginity and holiness because I heard about a Jewish man who has reviled one of our brethren, the members of the church. He said to him, "You are impure for you don't take wives. But we are holy and more virtuous for we bear children and multiply seed in the world."

(Wright 1869, 355)13

Some of these differences persist until this day. Witness the difference between the meanings of the declarations, "I am not a Christian," and "I am not a Jew." The former says something about beliefs and commitments, while the latter says something about genealogy. This book will explore the historical roots of this difference in the formative period of rabbinic Judaism (the ancestor of virtually all later Judaism) and Christianity.

The contestation around the body between rabbinic Judaism and its Hellenistic (that is, Greek-speaking) competitors (whether forebears or contemporaries), including Paul, manifested itself in several seemingly disparate areas of socio-cultural practice, indeed in arenas as seemingly unconnected as gender and marriage practices, methods of interpretation of scripture, and ideologies of ethnicity and history. The organization of this book itself reflects to a certain degree these different areas of culture and attempts to show how they work together in the discourse of rabbinic Judaism. To be sure, the lion's share of the book (all but the last chapter) deals directly with the discourse of sexuality per se, but the argument of the book is completed in the last chapter, where an attempt is made to show how precisely the same set of differences between rabbinic Judaism and its Greek-speaking contenders works itself out with respect to the question of the literal or figurative interpretations of Jewish ethnicity. For the Jews of late antiquity, I claim, the rite of circumcision became the most contested site of this contention, precisely because of the way that it concentrates in one moment representations of the significance of sexuality, genealogy, and ethnic specificity in bodily practice. The contest between the two broadly defined types of Jewish religiosity here shifts

For further discussion of this fascinating passage, see below Chapter 5, n. 10.

from the direct discourse about sex, gender, and marriage to an indirect contest over language and the interpretation of history, scripture, and ritual practices, but it is, nevertheless, the same contest. I claim not only that I see a nexus between the interpretations of sexuality and the interpretations of ethnicity but that this connection was perceived in late antiquity.14

Thus, when Augustine consigns the Jews to eternal carnality, he draws a direct connection between anthropology and hermeneutics. Because the Jews reject reading "in the spirit," Therefore they are condemned to remain "Israel in the flesh." Allegory is thus, in his theory, a mode of relating to the body. In another part of the Christian world, Origen also described the failure of the Jews as owing to a literalist hermeneutic, one which is unwilling to go beyond or behind the material language and discover its immaterial spirit (Crouzel 1989, 107–12). This way of thinking about language had been initially stimulated in the Fathers by Paul's usage of "in the flesh" and "in the spirit" to mean, respectively, literal and figurative. romans 7:5–6 is a powerful example of this hermeneutic structure: "For when we were still in the flesh, our sinful passions, stirred up by the law, were at work on our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are fully freed from the law, dead to that in which we lay captive. We can thus serve in the new being of the Spirit and not the old one of the letter." In fact, exactly the same metaphor is used independently of Paul by Philo, albeit to make exactly the opposite point:

It is true that receiving circumcision does indeed portray the excision of pleasure and all passions, and the putting away of the impious conceit, under which the mind supposed that it was capable of begetting by its own power: but let us not on this account repeal the law laid down for circumcising. Why, we shall be ignoring the sanctity of the Temple and a thousand other things, if we are going to pay heed to nothing except what is shewn us by the inner meaning of things. Nay, we should look on all these outward observances as resembling the body,

Note that we find exactly the same nexus in the conflict of the Shakers, Koreshantists, and Sanctificationists with "mainstream" Christianity in nineteenth-century America. For these groups as well, as Kitch (1989, 67) points out, celibacy was conjoined with "the Bible as a symbolic rather than a literal history. They objected to baptism by water and to the use of bread and wine in the sacrament on the same grounds; they regarded such things as symbolic, not literal or substantive." All of these groups also believed in an androgynous God, whose image was restored in celibate, spiritual communion between men and women. The parallel is, thus, exact.

and their inner meanings as resembling the soul. It follows that, exactly as we have to take thought for the body, because it is the abode of the soul, so we must pay heed to the letter of the laws.

(Philo 1932, 185)15

For both Paul and Philo, hermeneutics becomes anthropology.

This congruence of Paul and Philo is one of the features of their thought that suggests they share a common background in the thoughtworld of the eclectic middle-platonism of first-century Greek-speaking Judaism (Chadwick 1966).16 Their allegorical reading practice and that of their intellectual descendants is founded on a binary opposition in which meaning exists as a disembodied substance prior to its incarnation in language, that is, in a dualistic system in which spirit precedes and is primary over body.17 Midrash, the hermeneutic system of rabbinic Judaism, seems precisely to refuse that dualism, eschewing the inner-outer, visible-invisible, body-soul dichotomies of allegorical reading. Midrash and platonic allegory are alternate techniques of the body.

For a good, concise description of Philo's hermeneutics, see Fraade (1991, 11–14). Philo rather compromises his argument by admitting, "If we keep and observe these, we shall gain a clearer conception of those things of which these are the symbols; and besides that we shall not incur the censure of the many and the charges they are sure to bring against us." Like Paul, it seems, he at least sometimes maintained observance of the literal commandments, in the flesh, to escape the censure of fellow Jews. It is important to note that Philo himself is just the most visible representative of an entire school that understood the Bible and indeed the philosophy of language as he did—as is suggested by his very censure of those who pay attention only to the allegorical meaning and ignore the physical observances. See Winston (1988, 211).

The notion that Paul has a background in Hellenistic Judaism has been advanced fairly often. It has generally had a pejorative tinge to it, as if only Palestinian Judaism was "authentic," and such terms as lax, and, surprisingly enough, coldly legal, are used to describe Paul's alleged Hellenistic environment. Recently, this idea has been rightly discarded on the grounds that there is no sharp dividing line between Hellenistic and Palestinian Judaism. If we abandon the ex post facto judgments of history, moreover, there is no reason to accept the previous notions of margin and center in the description of late-antique Jewish groups, and no reason why Philo should be considered less authentic than Rabban Gamaliel. The question of cultural differences between Greek- and Hebrew-speaking Jews can be reapproached on different, nonjudgmental territory. In that light, I find the similarities between Paul and Philo, who could have had no contact with each other whatsoever, very exciting evidence for first-century Greek-speaking Jews.

I have limited the scope of this claim to allow for other types of allegory, including such phenomena as Joseph's interpretations of Pharaoh's dreams, as well as for an untheorized allegorical tradition in reading Homer. When I use the term allegory, therefore, this is to be understood as shorthand for allegories of the type we know from Philo and onward.

My claim must not be misunderstood as a sort of standard modern apologetic interpretation of rabbinic Judaism (often reified into "Judaism") as unproblematically "accepting" or "affirming" of This World, the flesh and no devil. I argue that a culture adopting the ideological position that sexuality is a benefit given by God to humans, both for procreation and for other positive ends, acquired problems as well as solutions. Indeed, I am arguing that there was much social conflict within the societies which rabbinic Judaism helped form, precisely owing to the strength of this position, for the insistence on embodiment and sexuality as the foundational primitives of human essence almost ineluctably produces gender and sex-role differentiation as dominant characteristics of the social formation. Some Christians (whether Jewish or Gentile) could declare that there is no Greek or Jew, no male or female. No rabbinic Jew could do so, because people are bodies, not spirits, and precisely bodies are marked as male or female, and also marked, through bodily practices and techniques such as circumcision and food taboos, as Jew or Greek as well.

Reading Sex

Since the major form of discourse in this book will be close readings of literary texts of various types, the question arises: In what sense can I be said to be reading "sex" here? In what sense can I be said to be reading anything other than some literary texts? The question of the relation of the literary text to the rest of culture has always been a live one in the modern interpretation of rabbinic texts. In traditional positivistic historiographical approaches to the study of rabbinic literature, the biographical narratives of the Rabbis were considered to be legendary elaborations of "true" stories, that is, stories that contained a kernel of biographicalhistorical truth, which could be discovered by careful literary archaeology.18 The biographical stories about the Rabbis were treated as the "historical background" for the study of both their halakhic (ritual law) views and midrashic interpretations of the Bible. In my work, in direct contrast to that approach, these will be treated as the least transparent of texts, as fictions requiring foregrounding to explain them . Many critics have realized

One still finds such methods being employed occasionally, as in, e.g., McArthur (1987).

that these texts are essentially literary, that is, fictional, accounts about men and (occasionally) women who probably lived but functioned primarily as signifiers of values within the culture, as exempla (Fränkel 1981). But once we read the individual narratives as "fictions," it becomes increasingly difficult not only to imagine any outside to the text but even to connect the different moments of the Talmud itself one to another, that is, to read the biographical legends and the legal-ritual discourse together. Since we no longer imagine that the stories reflect the "real" events of "real" lives of the "authors" of the legal discourse, the latter seems to come from no-one and nowhere.19 Once the biographical narratives are bereft of referentiality, the legal texts have no authors and are disconnected from the stories.20

The notion, however, that rabbinic literature of any genre is autonomous (in the New Critical sense) seems counter-intuitive in the extreme. If ever there was a literature whose very form declares its embeddedment in social practice and historical reality, it is these texts. How may we, then, historicize our readings of these stories, given the historical skepticism I have outlined above? I propose that the older insight that there is connection between the genres of rabbinic textuality and also between them and a society can be preserved when we understand literature as discourse—as discourse in the Foucauldian sense, best defined by Hodge:

When literature is seen as a contingent phenomenon produced in and by discourse, then a whole set of new objects and connections becomes immediately and directly available for study: social processes that flow through and irresistibly connect "literary" texts with many other kinds of texts, and social meanings that are produced in different ways from many social sites. This concept, following Foucault's influential usage, emphasizes literature as a process rather than simply a set of products; a process which is intrinsically social, connected at every point with mechanisms and institutions that mediate and control the flow of knowledge and power in a community.

(Hodge 1990, viii)

Jacob Neusner's solution of regarding all texts as the products of their final redactors (1990) does not solve this problem either, simply because we know as little about the redactors as we do about the Rabbis quoted.

Thus even Weller (1989), who attempts to read the whole series of stories in Ketubbot as an ideological production (and does so with a fair degree of success), effectively ignores the halakhic context, seeing the stories as placed here only by "association" and not as an effort to work out the same cultural dynamic and problem encoded in the halakhic text.

This notion of literature as a process integrally connected with other social processes is a very powerful one for the study of talmudic texts. It enables us to consider how the social meanings produced in the halakhic discussions and innovations that the documents preserve are reproduced in the stories about the Rabbis that the same documents tell. If we can no longer write biographies of Rabbis, which can then be used to explain (even partially) their halakhic interventions (as, for example, the classic biography of Rabbi Akiva by Louis Finkelstein [1964]), we can, it seems, use both halakha and aggada together to write a history of discursive processes and social sites, of communal mechanisms and institutions.

How do we translate this idea into interpretation of texts? Having abandoned the notion that texts simply reflect the intentions of their authors or the extra-textual reality of their referents, what alternative to a purely intra-textual reading remains? The answer lies in an appropriate apprehension of the concept of intertextuality, and particularly the special form of intertextual reading pursued by a group of scholars called the "new historicists."21

The research paradigm loosely known as the new historicism is more a sensibility than a theory. Indeed, certain of its practitioners have defined themselves explicitly (if somewhat ironically) as being "against theory."22 Nevertheless, I believe that we can discover one overriding principle that both constitutes the paradigm as a significant theoretical intervention and explains the convergence of sensibility between critics of otherwise very diverse interests and methods. This principle is rejection of the view that literature and art form an autonomous, time-less realm of transcendent value and significance, and concomitantly, promulgation of the conviction that this view is itself the historical, ideological construction of a particular time and place in cultural history. Stated more positively, literature and art are one practice among many by which a culture organizes its production of meaning and values and structures itself. There follow from this hypothesis several postulates:

1. The study of a literary work cannot be pursued in isolation from other concurrent socio-cultural practices.

Below, however, I will propose that this appellation be abandoned.

Specifically, of course, I am referring to Walter Benn Michaels, one of the authors of the original "Against Theory" essay. See Thomas (1991).

2. So-called high culture has no essential privilege over "popular" and "mass" culture, nor do the latter more truly reflect society than the former. These very distinctions are a cultural practice and an ideological intervention that must be examined.

3. Some kind of materialism must be assumed (not necessarily Marxian).

4. Much of the rigid barrier between the current humanities and social sciences must be dismantled.

This axiom and its postulates involve a radical restructuring of our understanding of critical practice and indeed of human culture altogether. Posing them as such and basing one's work upon them is an already transgressive practice vis-à-vis the ideology underlying the current division of scholarship into "humanities" and "social sciences."

A founding assumption of the practice of new historicism, rendered heavily problematic in theory, is nevertheless that the document, proclamation, deed, diary, or private letter provides access in some sense to a less processed, more transparent version of the discursive practices of the period and can thus serve as explanatory context for the "text."23 In an essay written in the new-historicist mode, my text would open with a historical anecdote drawn from some kind of palpably documentary source—a letter, memoir, or memorandum to the king—and then proceed to reading it together with a literary text par excellence, deconstructing, as it were, the very dichotomy between the literary and the documentary, showing not that the documentary is literary but that the literary is no less documentary than the document.24 But when we study the Talmud, this sense of the documentary must be abandoned once and for all. All of the texts available are of the same epistemological status. They are all literature or all documents in precisely the same degree; indeed, they all occur within the same texts, between the same covers. There is literally (virtually) nothing outside of the text.

Stephen Greenblatt often prefers a different terminology and definition instead of new historicism, namely, cultural poetics, that is, simply a

In that sense, "new historicism" has sometimes appeared to be only a much more sophisticated version of the old historical type of literary criticism, which reduced the text to an expression of the "reality" in which it was produced.

Fineman (1989) offers an important and serious investigation of the status of the anecdote in new-historicist writing.

criticism, which can be based on different underlying theories of culture and which seeks to understand literature as social practice (Greenblatt 1990).25 Under the rubric of cultural poetics, the problem disappears entirely. Unlike an older historicistic criticism (including that of Marx) and formalist criticism of the new-critical mode, both of which assumed an essential difference between literary and other practices, such that literature either "reflected" practice in the one or was autonomous of it in the other, here the opposition between literature and other practices is simply dissolved. Literature is one practice among many, but for this as for many past cultures it is virtually the only practice to which we have access. Since no assumption is made of an essential difference between literature and other texts or between textual and other practice, we read what we have as a textual practice, co-reading many different sub-texts in search of access to the discourse of the society in which they were produced. The specific research and critical strategy deployed here is thus cultural poetics, a practice that respects the literariness of literary texts (that is, as texts that are marked by rhetorical complexity and for which that surface formal feature is significant for their interpretation), while attempting at the same time to understand how they function within a larger socio-cultural system of practices.

Because, as I have said, the culture of the Talmud is a formation for which we have virtually no evidence "outside the texts," we must substitute some other kinds of correlations for the powerful and exciting ones of document to literary text. There would seem to be no point of entry from

The major implication of this shift is that it no longer implies that a particular theory (beyond the axioms and postulates I have outlined above) is at stake here, but rather proposes a new disciplinary formation that grows out of those axioms and postulates. Practitioners of cultural poetics are not thereby committed to the philosophical doctrines of historicism, implying radical irreducible difference between historical periods. Some practitioners of cultural poetics may be historicists, while others may wish to question historicism as a doctrine. As a more generic name, as well, it separates the research paradigm from the specific work of the Berkeley school (whatever that means—Greenblatt's work is, after all, thoroughly different in style and theme from that of the late Joel Fineman, for example). This work has been largely concerned with the early modern period, where projects of domination and colonialization, as well as power-relations between genders, were particularly live issues. "New historicism" has also been characterized by a particular Foucauldian theoretical base, in which power is read as the dominating feature of nearly all cultural work. Broadening the paradigm to "cultural poetics" thus allows for that school to be conceived of as one tributary to a river of research in which theoretical issues are at question, debatable and debated.

which we can read against the grain of the texts and learn anything about ideological conflict and power relations within this culture, and indeed, most scholarship on such a culture is non-critical, at best reproducing the ideology of the dominant voices structuring the texts of the culture. My practice here will be to look at texts as (necessarily failed) attempts to propose utopian solutions to cultural tensions. The tensions are what interest me, so using the sensibilities and even techniques of the various hermeneutics of suspicion, I hope that by observing the effects of the energy expended by the culture in attempting to suppress or (put more positively) deal with the tensions, the underlying strains and pressures can be brought to light. Like astronomers who discover heavenly bodies too small for their eyes to see by observing the distorting effects of such bodies on other entities, the equivocations in the texts will be taken as evidence for tensions in the society. As a stand-in for the documentary richness that historicists of more fortunate climes have at their disposal, I will substitute a method of arguing that texts from the talmudic literature (including midrash) of very different genres share the same cultural problematics as their underlying (sometimes implicit) themes. I will refer to a complex of such texts that deal with a given cultural problematic as a discursive formation .26

Cultural poetics thus provides tools for a unitary explanation of halakha (religious law) and aggada (narrative), especially biographical legends about the Rabbis, as participating in the same discursive formations. Where previous generations of researchers in Jewish history have seen the biographical legends as preserving a "kernel" of historical truth, which may be used as explanatory "background" to explain legal opinions and innovations, and a later generation of scholars insisted on the "autonomy" of the aggada qua literature (Fränkel 1981), the method of cultural poetics recombines aggada and halakha, but in a new fashion. I assume that both the halakha and the aggada represent attempts to work out the same cultural, political, social, ideological, and religious problems. They are, therefore, connected, but not in the way that the older historicism wished to connect them. We cannot read the aggada as background for the halakha, but if anything, the opposite: the halakha can be read as background and explanation for the way that the rabbinic biographies are

It should be obvious from this statement why form-critical methods are foreign to this particular research project. I do not, of course, discount them in general.

constructed—not, I hasten to add, because the halakha represents "reality" which the aggada "reflects," but only because the halakha as a stipulated normative practice is, almost by definition, ideologically more explicit. The assumption that I make is that the very assignment of a story or a halakhic view to a named Rabbi, whether or not this assignment is "historically" true, is of semiotic significance and can be interpreted as part of the history of rabbinic discourse.27 This is not to contest the possibility that there is a kernel of "historical truth" in some or even all of the stories, only to argue that this kernel is insignificant compared to the amount of history of discursive practice that can be written using these materials. Thus, for instance, in Chapter 5, I shall be studying in detail a romantic and clearly fictional story of the marriage of Rabbi Akiva. The story will be interpreted here as having very little to do with the life and times of Rabbi Akiva himself in second-century Palestine and a great deal with Babylonian Jewish marriage and sexual practices in the fourth and fifth centuries. Nevertheless, the question of why the story is told about Rabbi Akiva is highly significant and is interpreted here.28 Similarly, the complex of texts that represent Rabbi Eliezer as variously ascetic and "misogynist" are also significant in the production of a type of rabbinic religiosity, whether or not the attributions are "authentic."29

Rabbinic Culture as Colonized Culture

Jewish culture in Roman Palestine was a colonized culture. The dominant political force was, of course, pagan (and then Christian) Rome. The dominant cultural influences were those of Hellenism in late antiquity (Bowersock 1990). The literature of the Rabbis is formed within this cultural-political matrix, and though I believe it is very difficult to discuss specific historical events to which a given rabbinic text responds (Boyarin 1989), there can be no doubt that this general historical context is of great interpretative significance. James Dunn has eloquently described the general politico-cultural situation of threatened first-century Jewry:

On the question of rabbinic biography, see Green (1978).

I have discussed a similar example at length in a paper specifically on the martyrdom stories about Rabbi Akiva (Boyarin 1989).

Hoshen (1990), an excellent example of this method applied to Rabbi Eliezer, is, however, a work that seriously contests the usual understanding of this character as misogynist.

Whatever the precise details of these various incidents the overall picture is clear enough. During the period in which the Antioch incident took place Jews had to be on their guard against what were or were seen to be repeated threats to their national and religious rights. Whenever such a threat was perceived their reaction was immediate and vigorous. In Palestine itself more and more were resorting to open violence and guerrilla warfare. The infant Christian sect was not exempt from this unrest. Indeed we generalize a fairly firm conclusion from the above review of evidence: wherever this new Jewish sect's belief or practice was perceived to be a threat to Jewish institutions and traditions its members would almost certainly come under pressure from their fellow Jews to remain loyal to their unique Jewish heritage.

(Dunn 1990, 135)

Although Dunn is accounting here for the background of controversies within the nascent Christian movement and in the first century, I believe that the same pressures also explain, mutatis mutandis , much of the development in the literature of the Rabbis in the second and following centuries, when Christianity becomes more and more the source of the threat to "Jewish institutions and traditions." While this general socio-cultural situation is assumed here, this book will not be a historical account proper, but rather an analysis of texts conducted under the sign of cultural poetics.

Among the tools that cultural poetics has at hand is the description of cultural or literary practices as forms of resistance or accommodation or accommodating resistance and resistant accommodation to the dominant practices of a colonizing culture. At several points in my discussion, I will argue that a given rabbinic textual or cultural moment represents precisely such resistance. Thus, for instance, in Chapter I, "Behold Israel According to the Flesh: On Anthropology and Sexuality in Late-Antique Judaisms," I analyze the hermeneutic strategies of Hellenistic and rabbinic Judaism vis-à-vis the first human. Within both formations we find interpretations that solved the problem of the dual creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2 by assuming that the first-created human, the male and female of Genesis 1, was an androgyne. But the Hellenistic formations, Philo, some of the Orthodox Fathers, and many gnostics understood that this primal androgyne was without a body, and that the human with a body described in Genesis 2 represents a separate act of creation.30 Many of the Rabbis

See Chapter 1 below for discussion of the relationship of this myth to the famous Aristophanes passage in Plato.

understood the Genesis 1 creation to be an actual corporeal androgynous human being, which was then split in two in the second chapter to form the two sexes. My claim is that these two versions of creation are not only literary but have an analogue or homologue in social practice, for while the first group regard the highest form of human life as a de-gendered, uncorporeal spirituality, as practiced in celibate communities, the Rabbis regard marriage and sexual intercourse as the return to the originary and ideal state of the human being. Cultural poetics allows us then to interpret the connection between the "literary" practice of biblical interpretation and the social institution of marriage, without resort either to a reductionism by which the biblical interpretation is the product of ideology or to an idealism according to which the biblical interpretation produces the ideology. Both the interpretation and the ideology are co-existing practices within a single socio-cultural field. Thus, when the Rabbis cite the myth of the primal androgyne but reverse its meaning, they are enacting a classic move by which the colonized culture undermines the hegemony of the colonizer.

Beyond "Rabbinic Thought"

Precisely this method of going beyond the reading of texts to the reading of the larger text of a culture which is made up of many texts gives me the possibility of claiming that I am indeed "reading sex"—reading, that is, the discourse of sex in talmudic culture and not merely some literary documents. My ambition is to escape the paradigm of "rabbinic thought," as if rabbinic literature were a sort of philosophy manqué, and instead study culture, as a set of complexly related practices both textual and embodied.31 We can see then that halakhic discussions and decisions as well as stories about the Rabbis, and even the reading of the Bible, are all ways in which this culture expresses its concerns and unresolved tensions and attempts to work them out. We can accordingly learn quite a bit about the culture and its problems, and even about the differences between different branches of it, from studying these discursive practices together.

In

The "in" of "Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture," the subtitle of this book, also needs to be interpreted. I am reading sex "in" talmudic culture here,

For a similar point made in another context, see Bynum (1991, 245).

and the "in" functions in two senses, accenting both the partiality and partialness of the interpretative construct of this book. These are readings that claim only to be part of the story, and they are, moreover, readings that are situated by the reader's (my) status as a self-defined inheritor of the tradition which the texts constitute. There is no pretense at objectivity and disinterest in this text. I am both a "rabbinic Jew" and a "feminist,"32 and these dual (some would claim oxymoronic) commitments motivate both my very enterprise of writing a book like this and the specific constructions and readings that I make of the texts and their interconnections. Because this may sound to some like an abandonment of any claim to historical meaningfulness for my discourse, I shall take a few lines to elaborate on this point.

Reading any cultural production, even one as relatively simple as a single lyric, involves the mobilization of large sets of assumptions before reading , including, often enough, the very assumption that the given text is autonomous and can be read in isolation from other texts. This truism is only multiplied manifold when the attempt is made, as here, to read much more complex and large-scale cultural practices, such as the discourse of sexuality. What texts to choose, which to see as context for which, how to read the individual text and how to co-read it with others, these are all choices made by the reader—some conscious and others that are not even conscious but are produced for the reader by her or his ideological window on the world. Nevertheless, reading is reading—looking through a window, not just peering into a mirror—or at any rate, it can be such. Given the concerns that I have, the background that I have, and even my unexamined notions of what is natural and possible, it is inevitable that my interpretation, particularly in its larger-scale moments, will be in part a product of all of these factors. At the same time it is, for all that, an interpretation of the text, a reading for which philological and historical knowledge have been mobilized to the best of my ability to interpret the text. I am, myself, "in" talmudic culture, at least in part, and my readings will undoubtedly reflect that identity. However, I would wish to insist that the book is not, therefore, apologetic or defensive, for it is not my intention to construct arguments that would cover over or explain away those aspects of rabbinic Judaism that I find ethically problematic or to defend it against the depredations of a rival religion, but rather, I would say, to construct from it a

For the difficulties in the notion "male feminist," see Jardine and Smith (1987) and especially Heath (1987).

"usable past," discovering and marking out those areas within the culture that can serve us today and finding ways to contextualize and historicize recalcitrant and unpalatable aspects of the culture such that we can move beyond them. For that past to be usable, it must carry conviction (at least for me) that it is a plausible reconstruction based on the data before us, and to do that I have utilized the best of whatever abilities and knowledge I have of the languages and textual and cultural history of the texts I read.

Franz Rosenzweig wrote:

Why has the word apologetics acquired such a bad reputation? The same seems to be true of the apologetic profession par excellence, that of the lawyer. A general bias against him sees his legitimate task, as it were, as lying. Perhaps a certain professional routine appears to justify this prejudice. Nevertheless, defense can be one of the noblest of human occupations—to wit, when it goes to the very bottom of issues and souls, and ignoring the petty device of lies, ex-culpates itself with the truth, the whole truth. In this broad sense, literary apologetics can also defend. In so doing it would not embellish anything, much less evade a vulnerable point. Instead, it would make the basis of defense the points of greatest jeopardy. In a word: it would defend the whole, not this or that particular. It would not be a defense in the usual sense, but an open presentation—not of some random thing, but of one's own province.

(1923, 272)

What Rosenzweig calls "apologetic," I shall call cultural critique. My work begins with the assumption that the task of criticism is "to change the world," the task that Marx assigned to philosophy. I accept the challenge of Justin Martyr, who asked an ancient interlocutor, "Are you, then, a philologian, but no lover of deeds or truth? and do you not aim at being a practical man so much as being a sophist?" I wish to contribute to the healthy transformation not of "some random thing, but one's own province." My province is rabbinic Judaism, both because I practice that religion and consider myself an heir to its traditions and memories and also because I have chosen it as my province of intellectual discourse. That is to say, I have developed a certain facility for reading its texts and a certain familiarity with their style and contents.

Both of these declarations of intent and identity obligate me, I think, to engage in a critical practice of reading these texts. The question at hand for me then is how do I pursue a critique of a past culture and especially of one that I feel identified with? Or, to put it another way, how do

I protect my culture without playing false either to the historical "truth" or to my ethical commitment to changing the present gender practices of that culture? As in so many areas of thought, Franz Rosenzweig here also suggests a way, a way that he chooses to call apologetic, which is an open and frank presentation of the culture that contextualizes its practices both structurally and historically. This will have to be a presentation that refuses the arrogance of cultural Darwinism, the idea that culture evolves from less advanced to more advanced forms. It will have to be an account that is not judgmental but critical. Rather than apologetic, I shall call this mode of cultural critique (which I attempt to put into practice in this book) generous critique , a practice that seeks to criticize practice of the Other from the perspective of the desires and needs of here and now, without reifying that Other or placing myself in judgment over him or her in his or her there and then. I will suggest that such a practice is appropriate for any presentation of a past culture, but most imperative when the past is my own. Precisely the critique of Orientalism (Said 1979) as a practice that stands in judgment of other cultures and homogenizes them can be in turn applied to much critical, historical practice vis-à-vis our own ancestors.

As I have already said, cultural phenomena can be read in several different ways; the more complex the phenomenon, the more numerous the possibilities for reading. The texts of rabbinic Judaism and the construction that we put on the whole are therefore ambiguous, necessarily so. Later stages of Judaism have chosen to read the rabbinic texts in certain fashions and have closed off other options for reading. This does not mean that their readings were wrong or inauthentic, or that I think that I have discovered the true meaning of rabbinic Judaism, but it does leave open the possibility for other understandings of the same texts. Since our cultural situation is different from that of the medieval Rabbis, it is incumbent on us, as scholars and as cultural critics, to discover other faces in the same texts—faces that can be more useful for us in re-constructing our own versions of culture and gender practices. Such discovery would constitute an apologetic, in the degraded sense, only if it insisted on having discovered an authentic truthful interpretation that was distorted, if it hid that which is inimical to the new reading, or if it did not allow other traditions the same opportunity to be reread and reconstructed.

Let me elaborate on this last point. It has become a fairly common strategy of feminist historians of religions to ascribe true feminist impulses

to their own tradition and to relegate the unfortunate sexism of the actually existing socio-cultural practices to the deleterious influence of "others." Concurrent with this practice goes a mode of writing whereby one's own tradition is described as heterogeneous, while those of others are rendered monoliths. This has often happened in Christian feminist accounts of the feminism of Jesus and even Paul, whose unfortunate lapses are laid at the door of a "Jewish" or "rabbinic" residue or even backsliding. I will not mention simple vulgar examples of such writing, but even as careful a scholar as Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza does not escape it entirely when she reproduces approvingly a student's paper that attributes Paul's backsliding between Galatians and Corinthians as "reverting to his rabbinic prejudices"! (Fiorenza 1983, 63–64). I mention this point not so much to protest, which others have done already and I believe to good effect (at least with Fiorenza), but to emphasize how great the temptation has been for me to do the same sort of thing: to paint the rabbinic tradition as non-misogynistic in essence and marginalize the evidence for woman-despising to a popular, Hellenistic residue, which moreover characterizes Christianity. I have tried assiduously to avoid this temptation, perhaps not always and entirely successfully. I am more and more convinced that reception history closes off options of reading virtually any tradition, and that an important task of criticism is to re-open the options that have been suppressed.

On the other hand, I do not wish to undermine my very project by describing each cultural formation as so heterogeneous that there are no important differences between cultures. This reading of talmudic culture does insist that rabbinic Judaism as a whole was different from the Others of this culture, Hellenistic Judaism and Pauline (and post-Pauline) Christianity, in spite of the internal heterogeneities of each formation. A major danger haunting the work from the beginning, then, has been a tendency, connected with the danger described in the last paragraph, toward a triumphalist comparison of Judaism with Christianity in which Judaism emerges as pro-body or pro-sex, and thus healthier. Indeed, such comparisons are a commonplace of recent American Jewish apologetics (David Biale 1992). Since this is not my intent, I have spent considerable time developing a method of presentation that I call cultural dialectics . By cultural dialectics, I intend a mode of analysis that compares related cultural formations by showing that they represent complementary "solutions" to given cultural "problems." Among other things, this method of

presentation allows for cultural comparison without triumphalism, for each formation provides critique of its Other.

I hope that my discourse has managed to avoid all of these ethical and intellectual pitfalls. Well aware of the ways in which expectations shape results even in the hard sciences, and even more so in the hermeneutical ones, I invite readers to recast their expectations of gender and sexual representations in one ancient tradition. The proof of the pudding being in the eating, only the plausibility of these readings to other readers (and particularly those who do not share my peculiar investments) will demonstrate the success or failure of this project.

Talmudic Culture

Since a major ambition of this entire project is to make talmudic culture accessible to students of culture who are not Hebrew scholars, I want to pause here to introduce the literature with which I will be dealing.

The Documents of Rabbinic Literature

The following are brief introductions to the actual documents of rabbinic literature:

The Mishna

The Mishna is certainly the earliest rabbinic document that has been preserved. It is a highly edited compendium of opinions on halakha from the Rabbis of the two centuries preceding its publication. Its redaction was early in the third century.

The Tosefta

The Tosefta is the earliest commentary to the Mishna. It parallels the Mishna text closely, offering other or expanded versions of the utterances contained in the earlier text. Its traditions are often antithetical to the Mishna.

The "Halakhic" Midrashim

There is a body of texts that are conventionally referred to as "halakhic" or "tannaitic" midrashim—rabbinic works of commentary on the Torah whose main interest is the discovery of or proof of the legal-ritual practices of the Rabbis in the Written Torah. Their nature and origin is much contested in recent scholarship. I belong

to the school of thought that regards these texts as no less (or more) authentic than any other rabbinic texts—that is, as highly redacted anthologies composed of earlier materials and not as pseudepigraphs. In their present form, these texts were probably redacted in the third or fourth century.33

The Aggadic Midrashim

Another type of rabbinic literature that will be important for our study is rabbinic commentaries on the Bible (not only the Torah!) that are primarily interested in elucidating the narrative of the Bible and not the halakhic implications of its legal texts. These aggadic midrashim often preserve earlier materials, though they are several centuries later than the works in the previous category, achieving their present literary state in the fifth and sixth centuries.34

The Talmuds

There are two Talmuds, one produced in Babylonia and one in Palestine, both roughly (very roughly) contemporaneous with the aggadic midrashim. These constitute far-ranging literary discussions, loosely growing out of commentary on the Mishna. They are practically encyclopedias of rabbinic culture in late antiquity. The Babylonian Talmud became definitively authoritative for all medieval rabbinic Jewish cultures.

Between Babylonian and Palestinian: Early and Late

By speaking of talmudic culture, I am emphatically not suggesting that there was one homogeneous form of this culture for the nearly six hundred years and two major geographical centers which attest to it. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, there were consistent differences between the earlier and later forms of the culture and between its western version in Palestine under Hellenistic cultural domination and its eastern version in Babylonia, where Persian culture reigned supreme. At several junctures in this

For a counterview see Neusner (1990) and my review of this work to appear in the Journal of the American Oriental Society .

Lest I be misunderstood, I am not suggesting for a moment that we have unmediated access to earlier traditions through the attributions in these, or any other, rabbinic works.

book I will point to tentative handholds on some of those differences. But the texts, particularly the later ones, such as the Talmuds, are encyclopedic anthologies of quotations, comprising all of the places and times of rabbinic culture production. We can assume with confidence neither that a given passage quoted from a particular authority represents an expression of that authority's time and place, nor that it doesn't and that it only belongs to the culture in which the text was put together (contra Neusner 1990). Indeed, even the redaction of the midrashic and talmudic texts cannot be assigned with any certainty to a particular time, place, or set of persons. Even within the individual texts, there is evidence that different sections received their final forms in very different historical moments. For these reasons, even were I capable of doing it, I think that producing a book like Peter Brown's elegant and magisterial The Body and Society is quite impossible for the rabbinic culture of the talmudic period (though it could be done for later periods); Brown's work is dependent on analyzing bodies of doctrine produced by given individuals whose biographies, life situations, social and political context, philosophical backgrounds, etc., are to some extent known to us, and we have almost no such information regarding late-antique rabbinic Jewish literature.35 By default, then, I am generally constrained to write of rabbinic culture as a whole, even knowing that such discussion represents only a gap in our knowledge. Where I believe that I have found converging evidence for difference between the subcultures I have attempted to represent that difference. Examples of such attempts may be found in Chapters 5 and 6, where I argue for different ideologies in Palestine and Babylonia with respect to certain issues of gender and sex.

Dialectic and the Description of Rabbinic Culture

There are important ways in which rabbinic culture structures its main literary expression differently from the cultural-literary patterns we are

This was recently brought home to me once more upon reading Ford (1989), who is able to make precise differentiations in Chrysostom's thinking based on different periods of his life and activity as, respectively, anchorite and bishop. Such analysis is impossible for any pre-Islamic rabbinic figures. We often do not know whether they "really" said what they are quoted as saying, and if so, when, in what circumstances, and in what literary context.

used to. These differences of form are the signs and producers of major differences in cultural meaning as well. The first is that the texts are openly intertextual (dialogical) in their structure, perhaps more so than any others in literary history. As opposed to literary systems that imply or construct authors for texts, all of the texts of the rabbinic period are authorless (see Fraade 1991, 17). They present themselves as anthologies of quotations and discussions, as if we had access to the actual raw material of rabbinic oral interactions. The second formal feature (closely related to the first) is that the texts are primarily structured as dialectic, even as arguments between rabbis, and that most often and typically the dialectic is open-ended. The text does not finally resolve the issue in one direction or the other.

While other literary cultures obviously register dissent and controversy as well, the social semiotics of controversy are different when dissent appears between single-authored tracts or as dialectic within the same text. Let us compare the situation of early Christian textuality. There is, of course, not the slightest doubt that the earliest church was full of sharp dissent on almost every issue, from Christology to the Commandments of the Torah and circumcision to the status of marriage. But the different options were not incorporated into books in which they are set into dialectical relations with each other, with the different ideologues on equal footing in terms of authority. They are rather presented to us in a series of tracts, some of which are Pauline and others of which are anti-Pauline, and ultimately it was the Pauline version that won, and the others disappeared.36 This is not the case for the talmudic culture. All of the opinions are of the same literary origin. Formally, they have the same authority. They come from the same source. There is no possibility whatsoever of rejecting or definitively accepting one. In practice, of course, later decisions were made as to halakha in order to prevent chaos, but at the same time the epistemological privilege of the established view was generally denied. It would simply be incoherent for Jews to declare themselves

For Christianity, this should be qualified in one important way. There is a sense in which the deutero-Pauline letters provide precisely the heterogeneity that talmudic dialectic provides, although not, I think, to the same degree. Since these letters are often highly revisionistic with respect to Paul's doctrines, they provided the developing Pauline church with various cultural options. I am thinking, for example, of the way that the Haustfafeln of the later letters revise the doctrine of marriage presented in Corinthians.

Akivans or Meirites, for authority resides not in the individual Rabbi but in the entire community of the Rabbis. Speaking in Bakhtinian terms, the texts are not monological but dialogical, presenting different views on most issues dialectically at nearly every turn.

This is by now familiar ground. This feature of rabbinic textuality has often been characterized as its undecidability. David Stern has made a salutary move beyond the "theory" approaches to understanding this phenomenon and begun historicizing it in terms of the social structure of the rabbinic community (Stern 1988). Stern noticed that in contrast to commonplace descriptions of rabbinic interpretation as characterized by radical doubt or indeterminacy (Handelman 1982, 75), in point of fact the Rabbis of the Talmud and midrash are very vigorous (even aggressive) in support of their particular views. They are given, indeed, to the usage of such expressions as, "How long will you pile up nonsense?" or "What do you know about aggada? Go study the minutiae of obscure halakha!" Expressions such as these and others seem hardly compatible with a notion that these were people who did not hold that their own interpretations were correct. Moreover, the Talmud tells us of several instances in which schools of Rabbis came to blows and worse over their differences of opinion on interpretation and practice. The "indeterminacy," therefore, is not to be located at the level of epistemology or theology but at the level of a social practice that does not wish to decide between competing views of a dialogical authority. Each one of the Rabbis may indeed be sure that he is correct in his views, but our finally redacted and authoritative texts encode an inability or unwillingness to decide between competing views, and it is this which becomes the dominant in this cultural moment. Indeed, matters go so far that in the course of a talmudic discussion, an argument that threatens to resolve a controversy is considered a difficulty [kushia ], while one that restores the controversy itself is called a solution [terutz ]! One elegant way of describing this formation has been provided by Gerald Bruns: "From a transcendental standpoint, this theory of authority is paradoxical because it is seen to hang on the heteroglossia of dialogue, on speaking with many voices, rather than on the logical principle of univocity, or speaking with one mind. Instead, the idea of speaking with one mind . . . is explicitly rejected; single-mindedness produces factionalism" (1990, 199). The implication of this statement is, of course, that "speaking with many voices" is an alternative to factionalism, which it is, precisely in the sense in which I have discussed it above.

There is no faction within rabbinic Judaism with which to attach oneself, because the opposing views are all incorporated into the same canonical texts. Declaring oneself, then, an adherent of either Rabbi Meir or Rabbi Akiva would involve precisely the denial of some part of the canonical text. Indeed, given the notorious difficulties of relying on the attributions of utterances to named authorities in the Talmud and midrash, we cannot even describe what it would be to be an Akivan or a Meirite, and this, itself, can be understood as a cultural practice. Ideologies are always, then, in dialogue with their others within the culture.

To take a salient example from a case which has already been mentioned above: the fundamental question about whether the first Adam was androgynous or male, with its attendant corollary of the ontological status of sex and woman, is debated within the talmudic and midrashic texts and not resolved. To be sure, the majority opinion seems to have been that when the Torah says, "male and female created He them," it means that God created an androgyne, but there is simply no mechanism within the texts for finally suppressing or dismissing the other view. Both views come from the same source and have the same authority, in a way that the same controversy debated, for hypothetical example, between Origen and Augustine would not. This latter practice bids us to try to decide which view is correct, while the rabbinic textual practice labels as almost heretical any attempt to so decide.

There is a fundamental semiotic difference between two interpretations that are presented in two separate works by named authors and the canonized dissensus of midrash and Talmud (Boyarin 1990c, 78–79). Any view or interpretation that is undercut by another in the same canonical work unsettles, almost by definition, its own use as a foundation for cultural and social practice. Accordingly, in the research on this culture it is vital always to pay very close attention to the structures built into the very texts, to the interplay of view and counter-view. I think that it is this last point that is most often ignored when history is written by non-talmudists using talmudic texts. Thus, a view will often enough be quoted as if typical of rabbinic Judaism when in fact it has been cited in the talmudic text only to be discredited or at any rate undermined by a counter-text. An example of this can be found in Chapter 4 below, where a text that has often been cited as evidence for a rabbinically repressive attitude toward sexual practice is interpreted as in fact cited in the Talmud

only in order to reject it.37 Note that the point is not that there was more or less dissent and controversy within the rabbinic culture than in the cultures of other forms of Judaism or Christianity but that in this culture, as in none of the others, it is precisely dissent that was canonized. The cultural model is one in which "these and these are the words of the Living God," in which even God is not allowed to decide whose interpretation is correct (Boyarin 1990c, 34–37). This particular structure must be taken very seriously in any attempt to describe rabbinic culture or any sub-system of it. We must be able to recognize not only that there were different views at any given time but also that the very fact of the existence of contradictory views all being asserted at the authoritative level would have had fundamental effects on the nature of social practice and ideology within the formation.

The argument of this book is, then, that while in most matters of detail precisely what marks the rabbinic culture is its heterogeneity, this very heterogeneity is founded on an underlying unity, the interpretation of human being as fundamentally, essentially corporeal. This idea, which itself grows out of its own material causes, becomes the spring that drives multifarious aspects of socio-cultural practice within the formations of rabbinic Jews in Palestine and Babylonia from the second century until the Arab conquest, when rabbinic culture is entirely transformed by a new and massive contact with Greek philosophy in Arabic translation.

Given the inextricability of ontological and hermeneutic theory from the discourse of gender, one of the major tasks of this book is going to be the examination of the discourse of gender in a culture that by and large does not operate with the system of dualistic oppositions outlined above. The point is not, of course, to argue or suggest that rabbinic social practice was more "egalitarian" than that of Hellenistic Jewish or Christian society but rather to ask what difference the different cultural configuration of its gender asymmetry made. How does a culture that does not identify man with mind and woman with body, or man with culture and woman with nature (because it does not operate with those ontological categories), nevertheless maintain a hierarchy in which men are socially dominant over women? How is this hierarchical structure different in

To be sure, once cited it is put into cultural play as well, but certainly in a much more nuanced and complex fashion than most accounts would have us believe.

theory and in practice from the hierarchical structures that determine platonized cultures (whether Jewish or Christian)? Can any useful cultural criticism be achieved by historically specifying the ways in which the rabbinic Judaism of late antiquity is different in its discourse of the body and with it of gender from the cultural formation in which we have all participated since the early Middle Ages? Specifically, can the dialectical description of these cultures as alternate solutions and failures to solve socio-cultural problems provide us with tools for a synthesis that will enable both the valorization of sexuality and the liberation of women (see also Kraemer [1992, 199–200])? Let us begin, then, to read some of the texts produced in this culture in the light of these questions.

Continues...

Excerpted from Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Cultureby Daniel Boyarin Copyright © 1993 by Daniel Boyarin. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520080122
• ISBN 13: 9780520080126
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272