 | | They said to him, "He has no son, but he has the son of a daughter, and any prostitute who is hired for four, hires him for eight." He said to him, "If you return [to Torah], I will give you my daughter." He returned.
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This is a recapitulation of several of the themes we have seen so far. Rabbi Tarfon has no living sons, and moreover, his [only?] grandson is as far from Torah as could be. Rabbi takes him under his wing through a displaced erotic relationship, a situation which we will be meeting again and interpreting later on.
14
I read here the extraordinary tension that the rabbinic culture seems to feel between the desire on the one hand to pass on the mantle of Torah from father to son and the anxiety that, in a profound sense,
people do not reproduce each other, and reproduction is not the answer to death
.
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Once again, after Rabbi El'azar's death, his body is put to the test of impermeability. The text produces another very intense image of a grotesque birth out of the flesh of a feminized male (dying) body. This association makes perfect sense in the logic of the grotesque body, because it is precisely in the association of fertility and death that the grotesque draws its power (Bakhtin 1984, 238). Moreover, obesity itself is an issue of gender, being associated with the maternal grotesque body.
15
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| | When he was dying, he said to his wife, "I know that the rabbis are furious with me and will not take proper care of me. Let me lie in the attic and do not be afraid of me." Rabbi Shmuel the son of Rabbi Nahman said, "Rabbi Yohanan's mother told me that the wife of Rabbi El'azar the son of Rabbi Shim'on told her that 'not less than eighteen and not more than twenty-two [years] that he was in the attic, every day I went up and looked at his hair, when a hair was pulled out, blood would flow. One day I saw a worm coming out of his ear. I became very upset, and I had a dream in which he said to me that it is nothing, for one day he had heard a rabbinical student being slandered and had not protested as he should have.'"
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| | 14. The cultural analysis in Sedgwick 1985 is certainly relevant here and will be developed in another place in my work. See also the remarks of R. Howard Bloch on a very different group of scholarly men: "More than just a men's club, this exclusion [of women] imagines at its outer limit the possibility of a nearly womanless parthenogenesis working, not only to structure the scholarly community, but to guarantee its dynastic continuity as well" (Bloch 1991b, 81). These remarks could be applied
en bloch
to the rabbinic community as well.
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| | 15. In the classical world, fat men were considered effeminate. See the fascinating discussion of Nicole Loraux (1990, 3133). See also Paglia (1990, 91) and Traub (1989, 46164).
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