Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (37 page)

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Authors: Daniel Boyarin

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BOOK: Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture
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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
30. See Chapter 1 below for discussion of the relationship of this myth to the famous Aristophanes passage in Plato.
 
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modern times. My hope is that the very dialogism and dispersal of authority within the talmudic texts (even though that authority is exclusively male) will provide not only evidence of the hegemonic discourse but also symptoms of dissident voices and realities within the society that impart to women the power of speech in Torah-learning.
Three texts will be read in search of the symptoms of the oppositional discourse in Palestinian culture and its suppression in Babylonia. Each belongs to an entirely different literary genre, but they all point in the same direction. In the first section, halakhic (ritual law) texts and their differing versions in the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds will be interpreted, and in the second section we will examine a clearly fictional narrative recounting the terrible end of a historical female scholar, the legendary Beruria.
Halakha
"A Father Should Teach His Daughter Torah"
The first ritual text is a passage in which, counter to the hegemonic view, a prominent rabbi, Ben-Azzai, holds that it is a religious obligation for a father to teach his daughter Torah. We are fortunate in having the legal-hermeneutic responses of two closely related cultures to this text, because both the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds have interpreted it. By looking at the differences between the techniques with which these two subcultures deal with Ben-Azzai's view, I believe we can learn something of the differential threat his view posed to the social practices of the two Jewish cultures. It should be emphasized that Ben-Azzai's statement, as we will immediately see, is itself ambivalent in the extreme (at best) from a feminist point of view. I do not cite it as evidence, therefore, at all. My evidence for cultural difference between Palestine and Babylonia comes rather from the way that the two Talmuds have reacted to this statement. The way that this text is nullified in the Babylonian Talmud is symptomatic of how great a threat even such an equivocal suggestion of empowerment was perceived to be in that culture. The Palestinian tradition, in contrast, seems much more sanguine about the possibility that there could be women who would be talmudic and Torah-scholars.
Interestingly enough, the context of Ben-Azzai's statement is the discussion in the Mishna of the ordeal of the "errant wife." The biblical text
 
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is found in Numbers 5:1131. The text there deals with the case of a man who has become jealous of his wife, believing that she has had sexual relations with another. An elaborate ritual ordeal is prescribed, in which the woman drinks water into which this very passage of the Torah has been literally dissolved. If she is innocent, nothing happens, and she is rewarded liberally by God. If she is guilty, however, appalling physical consequences ensue (also from God) when she drinks of these bitter waters.
The Mishna, in accordance with its general practice, goes into great detail to prescribe the conditions under which the ritual is to be performed and to describe its effects. Immediately after indicating what happens to the guilty woman upon imbibing the water, the text says:
If she had merit, her merit will mitigate [the punishment] for her.
On this basis Ben-Azzai said, "A man is obligated to teach his daughter Torah, so that if she drinks [the bitter water], she will knowfor merit mitigates."
Rabbi Eliezer says, "Anyone who teaches his daughter Torah, teaches her lasciviousness."
3
(Mishna Sota, ch. 3, para. 4)
3. For this as the correct reading, see Epstein (1964, 536). The word which I have translated here as "lasciviousness,"
tifluth
, means literally "childish things" or "foolishness," as we find in the midrash Bamidbar Rabba 4:20, where we are told of a child who speaks
tifluth
during prayer, to which his father answers, ''What shall I do? He is a child and he plays!" However, it is a frequent euphemism for lasciviousness, as we can see clearly from the following text:
To bring Vashti the Queen before the King in her royal crown
[Esther 1:12]. Rabbi Aibo said: It is the atonement of Israel that when they eat and drink and are merry, they bless and sing the praises of God; when the nations of the world eat and drink they deal in matters of
tifluth:
One says Medean women are beautiful, and the other says, Persian women are beautiful. That fool (Ahashuerosh) said to them, "the vessel that I use is neither Medean nor Persian but Chaldean! Do you wish to see her?" They said, "Yes, on condition that she is naked" [Esther Rabba 3:13].

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