Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (66 page)

Read Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture Online

Authors: Daniel Boyarin

Tags: #Religion, #Judaism, #General

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of virtually all later groups that call themselves Jewish, in the early centuries of our era it was just one form of Judaism. Various types of Hellenistic Judaism, apocalyptic groups such as the one at Qumran, and early Christianity were all competing with the Judaism of the Rabbis and their followers for hegemony, and the discourse of the body was the major arena of contention. For most Jews of late antiquity (as well as for most non-Jews), the human being was conceived of as a spirit housed, clothed, or even trapped and imprisoned in flesh, while for the Rabbis, resisting this notion, the human being was a body animated by a spirit. This definition is what lies at the bottom of such diverse and distinctive rabbinic practices as the insistence on sex and procreation as obligations, the practice of midrashic reading as opposed to allegory, and the focus on the corporate identity of Israel as a particular ethnic unit. My claim in this book is that each of these formations presents cultural ethico-social problems that the other solves (from my political perspective) more successfully. Thus, if Hellenistic Judaisms (including, in my view, Paulinism) provide an attractive model of human equality and freedom"There is no Jew or Greek, no male or female"they do so at the cost of a severe devaluation of sexuality, procreation, and ethnicity. And if rabbinic Judaism provides a positive orientation to sexual pleasure and ethnic difference, it does so at the cost of determined stratifications of society. A dialectical reading practice puts these two formations into a relation of mutual thesis-antithesis, thus exposing the cultural problems that each answered but the other did not. Let us look at two examples of such cultural dialectics.
The Body and Difference
Plotinus, the philosopher of our times, seemed ashamed of being in the body. As a result of this state of mind he could never bear to talk about his race or his parents or his native country.
(Porphyry,
Life of Plotinus
)
Porphyry exposes with rare incandescence the intimate connection between the individual's corporeality and her "race," filiation, and place, as well as the neo-platonic revulsion from both corporeality and particular identity. This interpretation also furnishes us a key to understanding the resistance of the Rabbis to platonism. As loyal a Jew as Philo was, he could not entirely escape the consequences of his allegorizing in a devaluing of the physical practices and genealogy of Israel. Where physical history and physical ritual exist only to point to spiritual meanings, the
 
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possibility of transcending both is always there. As Ronald Williamson has put it:
It seems that for Philo, alongside traditional, orthodox Judaism, there was a philosophical outlook on life, involving the recognition of the purely spiritual nature of the Transcendent, in which one day, Philo believed, all mankind would share. In
that
Judaism the idealized Augustus, Julia Augusta and Petroniusamong, no doubt, many others had already participated.
(Williamson 1989, 13)
For Philo, such a spiritualized and philosophical Judaism, one in which a faith is substituted for works, remains only a theoretical possibility,
4
whereas for Paul, it becomes the actuality of a new religious formation that tends strongly to disembody Judaism.
5
If the body of language is its
4. According to H. A. Wolfson, Philo allowed for the possibility of uncircumcised "spiritual" proselytes (1947, 369). Borgen (1980, 87) seems to think that such uncircumcised proselytes could have been fully accepted as Jews by Philo, a proposition I find unconvincing. Nor am I convinced by Borgen's reading of the Talmud at Shabbat 51a, to the effect that for Hillel circumcision was not a prerequisite for conversion. The arguments of Neil McEleney (1974) are not convincing, since they involve faulty readings of talmudic texts, as I will show, Deo volente, in my forthcoming work on Paul. Shaye Cohen's comprehensive work on conversion in late-antique Judaism will clear up many of these doubtful issues.
5. In a recent letter to me, John Miles has made the following important comments:
The faith-vs.-works dispute which you present as Christianity-vs.-Judaism has a long history, starting well before the Reformation, as a dispute
within
Christianity. A pagan who converted even to the Pauline form of Christianity was enjoined to follow a strikingly different ethical code and to abstain from a host of usages that were incompatible with monotheism. The result did not put him in continuity with Judah as a tribal, genetic community, but it was works, nonetheless, not just faith. It is, in fact, the survival of this much of the concrete Jewish program that makes Christianity indigestible for Gnosticism. The sentence to which I allude continues "whereas for Paul it becomes the actuality of a new religious formation which disembodies Judaism entire." Christianity looks disembodied by comparison with Rabbinic Judaism, but by comparison with Gnosticism it looks pretty corporeal.
(Miles 1991)

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