Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (68 page)

Read Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture Online

Authors: Daniel Boyarin

Tags: #Religion, #Judaism, #General

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become part of our family of the spirit, with all of the horrifying practices against Jews and other Others that Christian Europe produced (Shell 1991). From the retrospective position of a world that has, at the end of the second Christian millennium, become thoroughly interdependent, each one of the options leaves something to be desired. To the extent that, on the one hand, the insistence on corporeal genealogy and practice of tribal rites and customs produces an ethnocentric discourse, a discourse of separation and exclusiveness, then, on the other hand, the allegorization, the disembodiment of those very practices produces the discourse of conversion, colonialism, the White Man's BurdenUniversal Brotherhood
in
"the body . . ." of
Christ
(Shell 1991).
The Rabbis insisted on the corporeality of human essence and on the centrality of physical filiation and concrete historical memory as supreme values. Consistent with their rejection of dualism in anthropology, they also rejected dualist theories of language. They thus insisted on a literal interpretation of scripture, its histories and practices. Wild as midrash may seem to us sometimes in its reconstruction of events, it is always hypothetically concrete events that it reconstructs. The Rabbis could resist being allegorized out of existence, thus maintaining the possibility of cultural specificity, at the cost, however, of an ethnocentrism that has had its unfortunate effects in history, particularly as Jews have recovered political power in the world. The disembodied universalism of Hellenistic Judaism (and ultimately of Christianity) has had its own unfortunate effects in history, as it led to such practices as forced conversion and worse. The notion of cultural dialectic allows us to put both of these formations into a situation in which they criticize each other and perhaps will help us find more adequate solutions to the problems of cultural particularity in a context of human solidarity.
8
A similar dialectical structure can be discovered with respect to the issue of gender.
Gender Trouble and the First Century
The human body is always normatively given as already divided anatomically into two kinds, which we call sexes.
9
If human beings are defined as
8. In my work on Paul in progress, I take up these issues in much greater detail.
9. This is an admittedly positivistic notion that I cannot seem to shake. Reading Judith Butler has, to be sure, gone a way toward shaking it (Butler 1990, 2526, 92106, and especially 110). See also Wittig (1992, 18).
 
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being their bodies, as I claim was the case for rabbinic Judaism, then sex ineluctably becomes a (if not the) central category for social practice. This has its promises as well as its problems. On the "positive" side of the ledger, sexuality was affirmed in rabbinic Judaism as an enduring aspect of the personality and as a God-given benefice to humanity both for their pleasure and well-being and for the propagation of the species, itself understood as an unmitigated good. Moreover, I claim that this affirmation largely precluded a gynecophobic abhorrence of women as "the flesh," which developed in the context of Hellenistic, dualist Judaisms. But on the negative side, this construction defined sex roles absolutely and rigidly. Women were daughters, wives, and mothers, nearly exclusively. Although the activities of study of Torah and prayer were not opposed to procreation as spirit to flesh, and although, to the best of my knowledge, there were no representations of procreation in which the male contribution was spirit and the female, matter,
10
there can be no doubt that the ''upper body" was more valued than the "lower'' in the culture, and upper-body activities were nearly entirely a male preserve (Eilberg-Schwartz 1991). Moreover, such women as had intellectual ability were nearly always denied access to the satisfactions afforded by intellectual lifealthough, as we have seen, there were some counter-voices to this exclusionary practice. hellenistic Judaisms (including once more several forms of Christianity) reversed this socio-cultural situation. The body, sex, and procreation were seriously devalued with respect to "the spirit"with, I would claim, some serious deformations of lifebut on the other hand, women were granted access to precisely those unbodied pursuits that were defined as the province of the spirit. In particular, by choosing celibacy, women could achieve in those formations a high degree of intellectual, spiritual satisfaction and expression, at the cost of their sexuality and maternity, a cost often (but not always) figured as becoming male or sexless (Meyer 1985; Harrison 1990a and 1990b; Aspegren 1990; Castelli 1991). As Clement of Alexandria expressed it, "As then there is sameness [with men and women] with respect to the soul, she will attain to the same virtue; but as there is difference with respect to the peculiar construction of the body, she is destined for childbearing and house-keeping" (Clement 1989b, 420; quoted in Ford 1989, 20). The implication is clear; no soul, no sameness.
10. One of my current research projects is to answer just such questions more definitively.
 
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Recent gender theory has provided us with extraordinarily subtle analyses of the ways that the mind-body split is inextricably bound up with the Western discourse of gender. The work of Judith Butler is of particular importance. She argues that the critique of dualism is in fact at the heart of the founding text of modern feminist theory, Simone de Beauvoir's
The Second Sex:
Although Beauvoir is often understood to be calling for the right of women, in effect, to become existential subjects and hence, for inclusion within the terms of an abstract universality, her position also implies a fundamental critique of the very disembodiment of the abstract masculine epistemological subject. That subject is abstract to the extent that it disavows its socially marked embodiment and, further, projects that disavowed and disparaged embodiment on to the feminine sphere, effectively renaming the body as female. This association of the body with the female works along magical relations of reciprocity whereby the female sex becomes restricted to its body, and the male body, fully disavowed, becomes, paradoxically, the incorporeal instrument of an ostensibly radical freedom. Beauvoir's analysis implicitly poses the question: Through what act of negation and disavowal does the masculine pose as a disembodied universality and the feminine get constructed as a disavowed corporeality?
(Butler 1990, 12)
What Butler has shown here is that the Western discourse of gender cannot be separated from Western metaphysics in general, a point also made definitively by Genevieve Lloyd (1984, 7 and, on de Beauvoir, 99). Thus, Philo says, "To begin with, the helper is a created one, for it says 'Let us make a helper for him': and in the next place, is subsequent to him who is to be helped, for He had formed the mind before and is about to form its helper." It is quite clear that "Man = Adam" is interpreted by Philo as "mind,'' while ''Woman = Eve" is "body," the helper of mind. We can see quite clearly the origins of the act of negation and disavowal that Butler speaks of and its necessary complicity with a platonic dualist anthropology, adopted by Plato from earlier Greek thought (Lloyd 1984, 6), which identifies the human being as his or her (universal) mind and not his or her gendered, socially marked body. Lloyd has shown how this dualism became rewritten historically so that the universal mind came to be identified as male, while the gendered body became female (26). This dichotomy or opposition inscribes the opposition man ~ woman in a whole series of culturally charged binary oppositions, already in Pythagoras, although the actual list has changed (3). Thus, man is to woman as:
 
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