Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (70 page)

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Authors: Daniel Boyarin

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BOOK: Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture
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to the school of thought that regards these texts as no less (or more) authentic than any other rabbinic textsthat 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
33. For a counterview see Neusner (1990) and my review of this work to appear in the
Journal of the American Oriental Society
.
34. 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.
 
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person, a universal subjectnecessarily, it seems, disembodiedthen we are implicitly valorizing the very metaphysics that causes all of the gender trouble in the first place, and in the bargain, problematizing (hetero)sexuality beyond retrieval. If, on the other hand, we insist on the corporeality and always already sexed quality of the human being, then it appears that we trap the human race in the (necessarily?) hierarchical category of gender.
16
Is there any way to think ourselves out of this trap? It seems to me that any solution that seeks to transcend gender is doomed to failure, while those that seek to transfigure its hierarchical structure are much more likely candidates for a transformation of actual human lives lived.
Generous Critique: De-Orientalizing Cultural History
The "payoff" of this research from the critical point of view seems to me the discovery that even the androcentrism of the rabbinic social formation was not entirely successful or monolithic. (I suspect that this is true for virtually any culture.) In two central chapters, I have argued that there were significant oppositional practices to the hegemony of the dominant discourse preserved in the canonical texts. One of these involves the suggestion that at least at the margins of social practice, and maybe even in more central practice, there were important ways in which women were autonomous or participated in highly valued cultural activities, such as studying Torah. Since such participation would have been threatening to the dominant male ideology, there was a determined attempt to suppress its memory, as we have seen in the story of Beruria, the female talmudist discussed in Chapter 6 of this book. This brings my
16. I say "necessarily?" because empirically it seems that no society has yet been found in which gender is not a hierarchical category. I am holding out some hope here that that empirical fact is factitious, that is, contingent on specific historical, material conditions. The fact, then, for instance, that rabbinic Judaism, as I am arguing, does not found its gender practices on a
theory
of essential difference between female and male may hold out more hope for change in a changed material world than we realize. Once again, the question of whether hierarchy is a necessary or merely contingent consequence of "intercourse" remains (for me) open. I certainly hope that it is the latter. See also Kitch (1989, 2373) and especially her comment, "In fact, women's exclusion from cultural prestige systems is a direct result of reproductive/sexual relationships to men" (32).
 
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analysis in line with the methods of the late John Winkler, who in his work on classical Greece has constructed a somewhat less bleak situation for women than the male texts would have us believe:
The more we learn about comparable gender-segregated, pre-industrial societies, particularly in the Mediterranean area, the more it seems that most of men's observations and moral judgments about women and sex and so forth have minimal descriptive validity and are best understood as coffeehouse talk, addressed to men themselves. Women, we should emphasize, in all their separate groupings by age, neighborhood, and class, may differ widely from each other and from community to community in the degree to which they obey, resist, or even notice the existence of such palaver as men indulge in when going through their bonding rituals. To know when any such male law-giversmedical, moral, or marital, whether smart or stupidare (to put it bluntly) bluffing or spinning fantasies or justifying their 'druthers is so hard that most historians of ideasFoucault, for all that he is exceptional is no exception herenever try.
(Winkler 1989, 6)
The interests of the masculist hegemony were not served by preserving records of female autonomy. Discovery of such female autonomy, or rather, its re-construction, constitutes a point of resistance to the dominant, present hegemonies as well, in this case the ones of many segments of rabbinic orthodoxy (not all) that still wish to exclude women from full cultural participation.
Furthermore, the very discordant or antithetical memories were produced and preserved in the androcentric, male-authored texts. They represent, therefore, a voice of male struggle (however nascent and inadequate from our perspective) against the ideology of gender asymmetry, "a breaking of [cultural] context," to use Rachel Adler's evocative terms (Adler 1988). It is this very rudimentary oppositional practice in the early culture that gives us the power now to redeem and reclaim a usable past. In the other of these two chapters on opposition to dominant gender discourse (Chapter 5), I have tried to show that there was significant male opposition to the institution of extended marital separations, a practice that erases recognition of female subjectivity and desire almost entirely, and that this opposition was grounded in an empathetic thinking beyond male cultural power or even rigid gender-based hierarchy. The opposition did not succeed in dislodging the hierarchy, nor realistic-
 
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