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Authors: Daniel Boyarin

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negative Hesiodic description of woman's origin and woman's role and, even more significantly, for "the fact that the Hesiodic texts become canonical in Greek thought."
The particularities too of Hesiod's extreme negativity towards woman, while open to compromise and mitigation in other texts and other spheres of interest, still remain the touchstone of an underlying attitude concerning this intrusive and ambivalent "other" who is brought into another man's household and forever remains under suspicion as introducing a dangerous mixture into the desired purity and univocity of male identity, whether in sexual relations or in the production of children.
(Zeitlin 1990)
For our purposes here, the most significant point of contrast that she draws between the Hesiodic and biblical formations is the extreme ambivalence toward reproduction which was seemingly endemic to "the economy of scarcity, parsimony, and anxious surveillance over what man has patiently accumulated by himself and for himself" in Greece in contrast to the unqualified enthusiasm typical of the "economy of abundance, proliferation, and expansiveness" of Hebrew culture.
33
Zeitlin's argument is an important corrective to a tendency to elide the fact that while all known ancient Mediterranean societies were thoroughly androcentric, there was nevertheless a wide range of gender ideologies in them. These different ideologies do not
necessarily
indicate differences in other categories of social practice, however. I am not going to make any claim for essential differences in social practice between the represented cultures "in the background of" particular literary works, still less between entire social formations. Thus, to claim that one or the other culture's canonical texts construct woman as evil, scary, weak, gentle, nurturing, etc., while those of the other do not, teaches us very little about how women lived in the cultures. As the late John Winkler wisely remarked, such representations may be only "male palaver." Caroline Bynum has also made the point that we cannot take what texts say about women's position in society at face value (Bynum 1986, 258). Nevertheless, what the canonical texts themselves say is an important social practice in its
33. It is not completely clear from Zeitlin's text whether she considers this superstructure on an actual difference in the economic base or whether the economic terms are functioning for her as metaphors for cultural/ideological phenomena.
 
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Page i
A CENTENNIAL BOOK
One hundred books published between 1990 and 1995 bear this special imprint of the University of California Press. We have chosen each Centennial Book as an example of the Press's finest publishing and bookmaking traditions as we celebrate the beginning of our second century.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Founded in 1893
 
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Carnal Israel
Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture
Daniel Boyarin
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley · Los Angeles · London
 
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Page iv
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 1993 by
The Regents of the University of California
First Paperback Printing 1995
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Boyarin, Daniel. 
Carnal Israel : reading sex in Talmudic culture / Daniel 
Boyarin. p. cm.(The New historicism, 25) 
Includes bibliographical references and index. 
ISBN 0-520-20336-4 1. 
Sex in rabbinical literature. 2. Body, Human, in rabbinical 
literature. 3. Women in rabbinical literature. 4. Rabbinical lit-
eratureHistory and criticism. 5. SexReligious aspects
Judaism. 6. Body, HumanReligious aspectsJudiasm. 
7. Women in Judaism. 8. JudaismHistoryTalmudic period, 
10425. I. Title. 
BM496.9.S48B69   1993 
296.1´2dc20
92-9507
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard or Information Sciences
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1984.
 
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