Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (42 page)

Read Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture Online

Authors: Daniel Boyarin

Tags: #Religion, #Judaism, #General

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ital and thus power from appropriation by women as well as a manifestation of a real anxiety that the men have about controlling the sexuality of "their" women and making sure that it is ever available. As just a single example of why this would work, we need only consider that because men had a virtual monopoly on Torah-study, the control of menstrual separation was in their hands, giving men tremendous power over the deployment of women's sexuality and reproductive powers. Let me explain this point. Even granted the existence of a practice of ritual menstrual separation from sex, this is not necessarily (or not only) an exercise of male power over women. Theoretically, in fact, it could function as a space of female autonomy or even of female power over men. But within the rabbinic community, since only they had the requisite knowledge, male authorities made all decisions as to the purity or impurity of a given woman, and even that control and power devolved to the men. For an explicit (and troubled) representation of the functioning of that power, see the story of Rabbi Shim'on ben El'azar in the next chapter. The fact that the Palestinian tradition seems to allow for at least the possibility of that power remaining in the hands of women provides a plausible (at least partial) explanation for the Babylonian efforts to deny that possibility.
It should be noted that there is not a single, ineluctable way to explain the difference between the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. The Talmuds are complexly authored works, and any given passage does not necessarily reflect social practice or even theory of any more than the redactors of that particular passage. Moreover, even if we find consistent differences between the two Talmuds, we are not necessarily justified in assuming that the difference is geo-culturally based, because the Babylonian Talmud contains a large amount of textual material that is perhaps centuries later than the Palestinian Talmud. Indeed, in accordance with generally held scholarly opinion today, the materials that we have been considering in this discussion (anonymous commentary on the Mishna) are very possibly from the later strata of the Babylonian Talmud and perhaps even from a stratum of the Talmud that was added
after
the rabbinic period in the sixth to the eighth centuries.
13
We have seen, moreover, in Chapter 3, that there was an apparent chronological development within rabbinic Judaism toward an essentialization of women and a growing fear of their
13. David Kraemer 1990 provides a good introduction to the literary history of the Talmud.
 
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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,
31. For a similar point made in another context, see Bynum (1991, 245).
 
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sexuality in the early Middle Ages, so this difference between the Palestinian and Babylonian texts might well have as much to do with chronological as with geographical difference. It is possible that further research would help to sort out this issue; for the nonce, we have to leave it open. As we will see in the next section, however, this interpretation of a difference between the two texts, whatever its cause, is consistent with other indications within the Babylonian Talmud that for that community the notion of women studying Torah was not merely unusual but anathema.
Parturients and Menstruants May Study Torah
The Tosefta, a major Palestinian text of the ritual law (redacted slightly later than the Mishna), provides us with further strong support for the suggestion that there was a fundamental difference between Palestine and Babylonia with regard to the issue of women studying Torah. The Tosefta explicitly avers that "gonnorheics, menstruants and parturients are permitted to read the Torah, to study Mishna, midrash, religious law and aggada, but men who have had a seminal emission may not" (Tosefta Berakhot, ch. 2, para. 12). R. Eliezer Waldenberg, an important living rabbinical authority, observes that this text takes it as a matter of course that women are permitted to study all of these branches of Torah, and the only issue dealt with is whether they are permitted to do so in certain physiological situations (Waldenberg, ch. 3). The question raised by Waldenberg is how it came about that the later religious law forbids the study of Torah for women; his answer is that this Palestinian source follows Ben-Azzai's view, while the Babylonian Talmud follows R. Eliezer, and it is, of course, the Babylonian Talmud that is authoritative for later Judaism.
There is, indeed, near explicit evidence that the Babylonian Talmud differed with the Palestinians on this issue. The Palestinian Talmud (Shabbat 3:4) quotes this passage from the Tosefta in its original form. The Babylonian Talmud, on the other hand reads: "Gonnorheics and lepers and
those who have had intercourse with menstruants
are permitted to study Torah, but men who have had a seminal emission may not." (Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 22a). The Palestinian source has actually been rewritten in its passage to the Babylonian Talmud:
14
"Since the
14. I say explicitly "Babylonian Talmud," and not "Babylonia" to allow for the possibility that the shift took place in Babylonia at a later time than the time in which the text arrived there.
 
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