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,
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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.
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 | | 10. One of my current research projects is to answer just such questions more definitively.
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