Read Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture Online

Authors: Daniel Boyarin

Tags: #Religion, #Judaism, #General

Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (53 page)

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open his stomach and were taking out baskets of fat and placing it in the July sun and it did not stink.
But no fat stinks. It does if it has red blood vessels in it, and this even though it had red blood vessels in it, did not stink
. He applied to himself the verse, "even my flesh will remain preserved" (Psalms 16:89).
The rabbi is recruited by the Roman authorities as a sort of collaborator, who turns over Jewish tax evaders to the Roman authorities. This behavior is roundly condemned by the narrative. Rabbi El'azar is called "Vinegar, son of Wine" (i.e., Wicked One Son of a Saint; see below) and asked, "How long will you persist in sending the people of our God to death?" It is a gross oversimplification of the text, however, to read it in such political terms. Indeed, the text keeps undermining such a reading. True, the rabbi is referred to as "Vinegar, son of Wine," thus seemingly supporting a reading of the text in political terms. But the successful test of his flesh and the strong testimony regarding the sinfulness of the laundry man (who several times over deserved the death penalty) undermine this reading. Moreover, at a later point in the text he is referred to as a saint (precisely when his own child is portrayed as a sinner!). We need more complex cultural models to understand such a self-contradictory text. Bakhtin provides the models. He has discussed similar ambivalences in the European grotesque tradition:
The soul of the people as a whole cannot coexist with the private, limited, greedy body. There is the same complex and contradictory character in the bodily images related to the banquet; the fat belly, the gaping mouth, the giant phallus, and the popular positive image of the "satisfied man." The fat belly of the demons of fertility and of the heroic popular gluttons (for instance, Gargantua in folklore) are transformed into the paunch of the insatiable simonist abbot. The image, split between these two extremes, leads a complex and contradictory life.
(292)
It is precisely this complex and contradictory association of the grotesque body with exploitation on the one hand and with such positive images as fertility and fecundity, on the other hand, which will provide an important clue to a richer reading of our text.
The text clearly manifests several of the elements of the grotesque that Bakhtin has identified. As Bakhtin has shown, the grotesque body is the uncontained body. The topoi of exaggerated size, detachable organs, the
 
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emphasis on the orifices, and stories of dismemberment are all representations of the body as interacting with the world, not self-enclosed as the classical body:
All these convexities and orifices have a common characteristic; it is within them that the confines between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome: there is an interchange and an interorientation. This is why the main events in the life of the grotesque body, the acts of the bodily drama, take place in this sphere. Eating, drinking, defecation and other elimination (sweating, blowing of the nose, sneezing), as well as copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment, swallowing up by another bodyall these acts are performed on the confines of the body and the outer world, or on the confines of the old and new body. In all of these events the beginning and end of life are closely linked and interwoven.
(Bakhtin 1984, 317)
Not surprisingly, the grotesque cultural tradition manifests remarkable ambivalence on this aspect of the body. The opposing principles of corporeal fecundity and corporeal degradation in illness and death are one of the sources of that ambivalence, and they are powerfully animated in the talmudic story. Images of decay, dismemberment, and bodily mortification pervade the story.
The rabbi performs a bizarre purity test on himself. In order to demonstrate that his actions with regard to the Jew that he sent to his death were righteous ones, he attempts to prove (to himself) that his body is indeed a classical, impermeable one. He begins by making the claim that since he is so certain that he is righteous, he is equally sure that his body will be impervious to the depredations of worms after his death. That is, he experiences himself as a classical body, pristine and closed off from the outside world. Ironically, the test that the rabbi devises in order to prove his self-image is precisely one that undermines it. He has the integrity of his body violated even in his lifetime in the bizarre operation of removing basketsful of fat from his stomach and having them placed in the sun to see if they will, indeed, be immune from rotting. We have, then, a fantastically sardonic moment of the very apotheosis of the grotesque being claimed as a proof for the classic!
As Bakhtin has already pointed out, the image of the body part grown out of all proportion is "actually a picture of dismemberment, of separate areas of the body enlarged to gigantic dimensions" (328). The rabbi is
 
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