Eros and the Jews

...In rediscovering the sources of Judaism's sexual latitude, Biale meanders into what is basically an establishment view...

...but the Zionists would culminate their efforts, a century later, in a communal philosophy based on the reclamation of the Holy Land...

...We have greatly occupied ourselves with the soul and have forsaken the holiness of the body...

...In so doing, he finds a class struggle in every rabbinic pronouncement: The rabbis saw themselves as an elite, distinct caste, preserving a higher state of holiness than other Jews...

...Since the rabbinate lacked enforcement powers comparable to, say, the Roman Catholic clerisy, none of the trends in Jewish sexual relations ever hardened into doctrine...

...I n broad outline, Eros and the Jews is a fascinating survey, but Biale stumbles in interpreting ancient sources through contemporary politics...

...Biale looks not only at Biblical sources but also at "alternative discourses," in which "patriarchal and antipatriarchal voices compete...

...But Jewish attitudes have never been prudish...

...or that a man who urged his wife to have intercourse at a time when rabbinic law prohibited it was "evidently a simple Jew who explicitly rejected rabbinic norms...

...Marriage has always been part of the rabbinic solution to problems of sex, but attitudes toward it have never been monolithic...

...Nonetheless, the forces of modernity—specifically the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment—caused some general commonalities to emerge...

...These distinctions are important ones: when the rabbis "warn[ed] against marrying their daughters to the ammei ha'aretz," or "struggled against the alternative voices of popular culture," they may well have been seeking only to preserve their communities through religion—which, after all, has been essential to Jewish survival in every age...

...Biale's post-Marxist rubric is an anachronism that casts little light on a subject that has its own logic...

...the sexual ethic [they propounded] was only really prescriptive for this narrow elite...

...Rabbinic attitudes towards sex have historically walked the middle ground between celibacy and permissiveness...

...Why does he dispense soquickly with Freud and then use Philip Roth and Woody Allen as exemplars of contemporary Jewish attitudes...

...The rabbinate was a meritocracy that anyone was free to join, provided he engage in Torah study...

...our own generation is not the first to have violated the no-ehuppe-nostuppe rule...

...He would have us accept that medieval literary genres "were not mere deviations from universally accepted norms, [but represented] a wider range of possibilities than the official literature of the legal codes was prepared to admit...

...We require a healthy body...

...This story, Biale explains, "challenges Biblical norms" of marriage and chastity, as well as the Jewish prohibition against marriage with Moabites (of which Ruth was one...

...It was quite another for the Hasidim of the Enlightenment, who considered early marriage an antidote to passion, which could then be redirected toward the divine...

...Rabbinic scholars were no strangers to poverty, and even if they considered themselves an elite, they certainly did not consider themselves a caste...

...But Biale's Manichean dialectic between the rabbinate and the "poorer, ignorant classes" doesn't wash...

...The scholars of the Haskalah...

...The Haskalah carried the predictable Enlightenment freight of throwing off old strictures of sexual repression and guilt...

...Examples of liberality abound: the medieval acquiescence of medieval rabbis in adolescent love matches against the wishes of parents...

...Are these two on a level with the rabbis...

...the rabbis warn[ed] against marrying their daughters to the ammei ha'aretz...

...That such an influential rabbi could attribute to a political movement an explicitly carnal dimension hints at how central and complex Jewish attitudes about sexuality have been, and that is David Biale's subject in Eros and the Jews...

...Or that the story of Ruth "at once reinforces and subverts patriarchy...

...But is it possible for this or any other Biblical story to "challenge Biblical norms...

...Biale's reading stems in part from his definition of the term am ha'aretz (literally "people of the land"), which he takes to mean the poor and uneducated...

...Biale thus fails to explain how the immense volume and variety of ancient thought resonates in our own culture, which would seem to be the book's culmination...

...S oon after the creation of the state of Israel, chief Ashkenazic rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook described the relationship of body and soul in a way that was as much a departure from orthodox tradition as it was an echo of secular Zionism: The claim of our flesh is great...

...He aims "not to discover what Jewish sexual behavior actually was in the past so much as to investigate how Jews have constructed notions of sexuality . . . in the texts they produced...

...Some Zionists considered the Zionist project an attempt to regain national sexual potency, often in a frankly literal sense...

...He proposes to examine rabbinic writings as texts produced by a cultural elite as part of an effort to "exert control over those outside the elite," i.e., "the poorer, ignorant classes and, perhaps most significantly for a study of sexuality, women...

...the onah laws, which "guarantee every married woman [but not man] the right to regular sexual relations...

...As elsewhere in eighteenth-century Europe, radical ideas threatened old authority, but the upheaval among Jews was particularly thoroughgoing...

...and the rejection of abstinence by all but a few mystical or extremely pietistic movements—even though the God of Israel was the first deity in history to be imagined as without a sexual nature...

...He sees the history of Jewish sexuality as a history of power struggles, and imagines a Jewish world relentlessly divided along class lines from as far back as Talmudic times...

...and political subversion, not lust, to the irreligious...

...We have neglected health and physical prowess, forgetting that our flesh is as sacred as our spirit...

...Biale consistently ascribes motives, not reasons, to rabbinic leadership...

...Marriage was one thing for the rabbis of the Talmud, some of whom advised postponing marriage and even toyed with the idea of celibacy, reasoning that, since God had given one only so much desire to expend, one should expend what one could in study...

...For one, the imposture and conversion to Islam of Shabbetai Zevi, the seventeenth-century false messiah, had thrown the Jewish world into ferment—and the rabbinic authorities who supported him into disrepute...

...The early Zionists...

...In his quest for "subversive" attitudes in the Bible, Biale offers as an example the Book of Ruth, which interests him mainly for Ruth's sexual aggressiveness toward Boaz (she gets him drunk and seduces him on the threshing floor), and for the divine sanction bestowed on her for it (the line of descent leads to King David...

...Our return [to Zion] will only succeed if it will be marked, along with its spiritual glory, by a physical return which will create healthy flesh and blood, strong and well-formed bodies, and a fiery spirit encased in powerful muscles...