Last week's recommendation.
Week 6 recommendation.
Week 5 recommendation.
Week 4 recommendation.
Week 3 recommendation.
Week 2 recommendation.
Introduction to the series and first recommendation.
Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, by Daniel Boyarin.
Let's dip a little deeper into the world of the redactors of the Talmud. Boyarin is a Berkeley professor and the book is written from a scholarly pomo viewpoint, but don't let that put you off. The prose is accessible, and on the whole, the book is less dry and formal than this excerpt. Boyarin is interested in what we can learn about Talmudic (and therefore Jewish) attitudes toward sexuality from the Paul Bunyan-like tall tales of the shamans, miracle workers, tzaddiks, holy fools, crafty politicians, or great scholars and lovers who were the Sages.
These stories, embedded in legal arguments and spiritual teachings, have didactic functions, but many of them are also hilarious, touching, scary, sexy, and just plain weird to our 21st century minds. (Some of them remind me of nothing so much as Native American Coyote stories.) Carnal Israel imparts a sense of the Sages' intellectual playfulness, how they structured their arguments, what they valued, and how they shaped the Judaism we inherited.
This study of rabbinic constructions of the body, gender, and sexuality is one of the very few programmatically feminist readings of ancient rabbinic culture that, at the same time, is deeply learned in the sources and existentially committed to the traditions grounded in them.Although there are several books which extract rabbinic stories from their Talmudic settings and render them in narrative form, this one - in keeping with the purpose of this series - examines both the stories and the rabbis' methods of exegesis to describe an often-unrecognized yet fundamental Jewish worldview.
. . . 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.
UPDATE: Yes, Boyarin was responsible for clearing an Arab professor in his department who said that he didn't know if The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a forgery. To me this is like not being sure whether the moon is made of green cheese, but apparently Boyarin has elastic requirements for his professors. Carnal Israel is still a great book.
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