Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (65 page)

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Authors: Daniel Boyarin

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BOOK: Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture
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In other words, these translations seemed to endorse too smoothly the notion that patriarchy is a monolithic, transhistorical social form. As a consequence, they suggest that patriarchy is unavoidable; they blame ancient Judaism for our being saddled with it; they even obscure the "otherness within," that is the pluralities of modern society in relation, precisely, to patriarchy. Specifically, modern translations of the ancient text are comparable to Western narratives about Eastern behavior, of which Geertz's account is an example. In both cases, our source of knowledge is a narrative, which by definition imperialistically filters the utterances of the other.
(1990, 734)
There are two important points being made in this brief quotation. The first point is that there is the same obligation to the ancient text and people that there is to the "Eastern" people, to avoid as much as possible an imperialist filtering of the utterances of the other. In the past decade a trenchant critique of "Orientalism" in anthropology has been leveled, beginning with Edward Said's paradigm-making workOrientalism being the descriptive reification of the ''Other" (Said 1979). It is vitally important that the same critique of Orientalism now be transferred to the study of our own past. When we are describing an ancient culture, it is important to maintain the same ethical standards that anthropologists have been working so hard to develop in their work with living culturesthat is, to avoid assuming a position of cultural superiority from which to judge or blame the ''Other."
3
Yet when that ancient culture is powerfully (and painfully) effective in producing aspects of our current social practice, an important part of our descriptive work must be to criticize the culture. To pretend to an objectivity in describing biblical or talmudic gender practices, for example, is, in effect, to further bolster the effects that those practices still have (Boyarin 1990d). Cultural critique involves then, in my view, precisely the ability to contextually and historically understand practices of the past "Other"who is ourselvesin such a way that that culture can serve us well in constructing our own social practices, providing the richness of belonging to the past without constricting us in forming more liberatory and egalitarian practices in the present. By generous critique, I mean, then, a mode of analysis that is not apologetic and yet maximizes our understanding of the needs and drives
3. After writing this paragraph I discovered that Page duBois has made nearly the same point in almost the same language (duBois 1988, 2526).
 
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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" midrashimrabbinic 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
 
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that motivated a certain group of people to make the cultural "decisions" they made. My goals are both redemptive and cultural-critical, and in some ways the talmudic culture that I hope to partly describe is both my own and not my own. It is thus imperative for me to do two things: to facilitate a feminist critique of the rabbinic formation, but also to exculpate that same formation from charges of a founding misogyny that would render it irredeemable. Once again, I would like to reiterate the point I made in the introduction, that while I am obviously invested in the results of my readings and that while expectations inevitably affect results, the project will have been successful only to the extent that the readings of the texts carry conviction for others as at least a possible, or plausible, way to make sense of themand this is, of course, something I cannot, by myself, judge.
The second postulate I derive from Bal is that a practice of cultural studies that seeks to make a difference in the present must be able to see and describe difference in the past. If the past culture is portrayed as a monolith, then its claims to a natural trans-historical status seem strongly buttressed. Accordingly, cultures that base themselves on the interpretation of the Bible have sought to reduce or eliminate (rather, suppress) the textual evidence for difference within the biblical text itself, in the interests of precisely that naturalization of dominance and gender asymmetry. This is true of Hellenistic Judaism, of much of Christianity, and of Judaism from the Middle Ages and until the modern period. It is, however, considerably less true of rabbinic Judaism, where the heterogeneity of the biblical text is represented in the canonized dialogue and dialectic of mid-rash. When Bal's compelling point that the reduction of internal "otherness" serves the interests of the monolithic male-dominant system is taken seriously, then we can see that even explicitly feminist research that cannot see difference within the texts and the culture is self-defeating. Acordingly, it is vitally important that trained talmudists turn to cultural criticism and that cultural critics interested in making effective use of talmudic materials take the trouble to learn the specific discursive practices that mark off this particular kind of textuality.
Cultural Dialectic and the Mind-Body Split
Rabbinic Judaism is a particular Jewish formation of late antiquity. Although this is the type of Judaism that became the historical ancestor
 
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