Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture Volume 25

Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture Volume 25

Boyarin, Daniel

Paperback

Series: New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics, Book 25

JudaismGeneral Christianity

ISBN10: 0520203364
ISBN13: 9780520203365
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: Aug 30 1995
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.85
Height: 0.72 Width: 6.01 Depth: 8.96
Language: English
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.

Also in

Judaism

View All