Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics) (Volume 25) - Softcover

Boyarin, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520203364 ISBN 13: 9780520203365

Publisher: University of California Press, 1995

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).

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520203364
• ISBN 13: 9780520203365
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288