A taboo subject approached openly

books:


	• Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (New Historicism-Studies in Cultural Poetics , No 25) Daniel Boyarin University of California Press, 1995 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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brilliant speculation

Boyarin manages to cover some very interesting Talmudic material on gender and sexuality in an intelligent and informed manner. He also has a deep understanding of cultural theory, and argues for a number of exceptionally striking theses regarding Talmuds' (deliberate plural: he contrasts the Babylonian Talmud with the Jerusalem or Land of Israel Talmud) relationships to sexuality, gender, and embodiment. HOWEVER, Boyarin's claims are so wide-ranging and fundamental that it would require the study of a great deal of additional primary textual material to really confirm them in a responsible fashion.

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A taboo subject approached openly

This books approaches in a very open way the issue of sex in the Talmud. Not an easy thing to do... Yet it manages to do so well, without excessively offending one view or another. Through its approach, it probably expores one of the earliest expressions of feminism in Judaism.

Beginning with a startling endorsement of the patristic view of Judaism--that it was a "carnal" religion, in contrast to the spiritual vision of the Church--Daniel Boyarin argues that rabbinic Judaism was based on a set of assumptions about the human body that were profoundly different from those of Christianity. The body--specifically, the sexualized body--could not be renounced, for the Rabbis believed as a religious principle in the generation of offspring and hence in intercourse sanctioned by marriage.
This belief bound men and women together and made impossible the various modes of gender separation practiced by early Christians. The commitment to coupling did not imply a resolution of the unequal distribution of power that characterized relations between the sexes in all late-antique societies. But Boyarin argues strenuously that the male construction and treatment of women in rabbinic Judaism did not rest on a loathing of the female body. Thus, without ignoring the currents of sexual domination that course through the Talmudic texts, Boyarin insists that the rabbinic account of human sexuality, different from that of the Hellenistic Judaisms and Pauline Christianity, has something important and empowering to teach us today.

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