order to prove the great loss to Torah of the years that he was away from the House of Study, but the halakhic feat that he happens to perform is precisely one concerned with sexuality and reproduction. The choice of this particular halakhic matter as the example of Rabbi El'azar's great ability is a strong symptom, then, of what our text is "about":
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 | | One day he went to the study-house. They brought before him sixty kinds of blood, and he declared all of them pure. The Rabbis murmured about him, saying, Is it possible that there is not even one doubtful case among those? He said, "If I am right, let all of the children be boys, and if not, let there be one girl among them." All of them were boys. They were all named after Rabbi El'azar. Our Rabbi said, "How much procreation did that wicked woman prevent from Israel!"
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The guilt for the prevention of this procreation is displaced from the rabbis themselves who, by their undue stringency in applying their laws, prevented wives from having intercourse with their husbands and projected onto the wife of Rabbi El'azar, whose only guilt was in protecting her husband from maltreatment by those selfsame Rabbis. Moreover, the "credit," as it were, for the procreation that took place is claimed by the Rabbis for themselves in the naming of the children after the rabbi.
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This reading suggests a source for the tremendous tension manifested in our text around the male reproductive body: anxiety about the role of the rabbinic community in the reproduction and genealogy of Israel, and first and foremost about their own genealogies, their own continuation through replication in their offspring.
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Another particularly strong and disturbing connection between the grotesque body of Rabbi El'azar and the female reproductive body is evident in the description of his illness: "In the evening, they used to fold under him sixty felt mats, and in the morning they would find under him
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| | 9. I.e., what its cultural business is. Note that in the parallel text of the Palestinian tradition, the story is nearly the same, but all the themes having to do with sex and procreation are absent. For a comparison of the two texts, see Boyarin 1991. Even a theme such as the loss of strength from studying Torah, which does occur in the Palestinian text, has none of the sexual and gender-related overtones that it has in the Babylonian one. See Mandelbaum (1962, 194 ff.). That text is accordingly "about" something else.
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| | 10. Of course, I am referring here to the narrator or author of our story and not to the Rabbis in the diegesis. Compare also
The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan
, Version A, para. 12: "Moreover, how many thousands there were in Israel named Aaron! For had it not been for Aaron these children would not have come into the world [because he reconciled their quarreling parents]" (Goldin 1955, 64).
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