Read Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture Online

Authors: Daniel Boyarin

Tags: #Religion, #Judaism, #General

Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (50 page)

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is thus historical in just the same way as the story of Rachel considered in the last chapter, and as such, we have the possibility even to rewrite future history by reading the story differently.
25
On my hypothesis, the main motivating force for the confinement of women to the sexual and procreative role in rabbinic culture was fear that were they not so confined, that vitally important role would not be fulfilledthat what concerned the Rabbis was not so much the contamination by a fearful and defiling force so much as the loss of control of a very valued resource. In addition to this, as we have amply seen in the last two chapters, the Torah-study situation was structured as a male homosocial community, the life of which was conducted around an erotic attachment to the female Torah. The Torah and the wife are structural allomorphs and separated realms in the cultureboth normatively to be highly valued but also to be kept separate. In the next chapter we will see that neither of these two poles was quite settled in the culture; both were indeed highly troubled sites of meaning.
25. It may be fairly charged that to a certain extent I am bursting through an open door here, as in many (if not most) Orthodox circles today it has been fully accepted that women study Torah. Indeed, I heard a sociologist describe this as the greatest social change that modern Orthodoxy has undergone, namely that this is the first generation in Jewish history in which young women sitting around a Sabbath table are likely to be as learned as the men in Talmud. In Stern College, the Orthodox college for women of Yeshiva University, women may now study Talmud for several years, and the same is true of Bar-Ilan, the Orthodox university in Israel, an institution that is otherwise hardly progressive. I would hope that my historical/literary analysis would further underpin this turn in the culture, which seems to me exemplary for the way that even a very traditional culture can reform itself in a healthy way and retain its integrity.
 
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7
(Re)producing Men
Constructing the Rabbinic Male Body
Said Rabbi Yohanan, ''Rabbi Ishma'el the son of Yose's member was like a wineskin of nine kav; Rabbi El'azar the son of Rabbi Shim'on's member was like a wineskin of seven kav.'' Rav Papa said, "Rabbi Yohanan's member was like a wineskin of three kav." And there are those who say: like a wineskin of five kav. Rav Papa himself had a member which was like the baskets of Hipparenum.
(
Babylonian Talmud
Baba Metsia 84a)
1
A learned discussion of traditions comparing the size of the penis of our hero with that of others of the Holy Rabbis is not something we expect to find in the Talmud.
2
In this chapter, we will be reading an extended narrative text that is entirely focused on the construction of maleness, and an anxious construction it is. Enormous phalli, particularly on clerics, inevitably remind one of Rabelais,
3
suggesting that our text is part of the grotesque tradition, associated so strongly by Bakhtin with cultural issues centering on procreation (Bakhtin 1984)and indeed, investigation of the text shows that the thematics of the material body, the body
1. This passage, as well as all of the text here, is translated from the best manuscript of this section of the Talmud, Hamburg 19.
2. It is so unexpected that nearly all commentators quite "interpret" it out of existence. The Aramaic word '
evreh
means exactly "member" and can refer, just as in English, to various parts of the body. Accordingly, some interpreters claim that the reference here is to the innards, while others say it is to arms or legs. However, as in English, the word when unqualified otherwise commonly means
membrum virile
. As we shall see, this interpretation is the one strongly suggested by the context. As a hedge, however, let me say that even should my interpretation of this word be less certain than I think it to be, my argument in this chapter would not be appreciably weakened, because there is enough left in the text to support the overall reading.
3. Apparently not so inevitably, since an anonymous reader remarked that he or she found nothing of the grotesque in this text at all!
 
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