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Authors: Daniel Boyarin

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Page ix

Acknowledgments

This book began with a conversation between Chana Safrai and me about Beruria and the study of Torah for women in the talmudic period. The conversation grew into a paper (now Chapter 6 of this book) and then into a book. My goals for this work, which are set out more fully in the Introduction, have several aspects. I wish to continue my overall intellectual/cultural project of inserting rabbinic textuality into critical discourse and critical discourse into the scholarship of rabbinic literature. I also wish to correct prevailing misconceptions of the ideology of sexuality, gender, and the body in rabbinic culture, which seriously distort our ability to make sense of this culture and to make use of it for the third project of this book, which is feminist restructuring of sex and gender in very late antiquitythat is, in our own time.

Earlier versions of several of the chapters have been published in the following journals or edited volumes:
Critical Inquiry, The Journal of the History of Sexuality, People of the Body
(edited by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz),
Poetics Today, Representations
, and the
Yale Journal of Criticism
. I thank the editors of all of those publications for permission to revise and reprint texts that they first published.

Grants from the following organizations helped in the research leading to this book: the Littauer Foundation, the faculty of Letters and Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, and especially the National Endowment for the Humanities, which provided for a crucial period of leave during the final stages of writing the book. The Shalom Hartman Institute for Advanced Jewish Studies has provided a safe environment for receiving sharp critical input at several stages of this research, as well as important material aid.

I wish to acknowledge here the gift of new friends (especially, but not only, David Biale and Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, who work on the same problems and the same texts, without competition among us) and the wonderful intellectual life of my new home in Berkeley. I thank the

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Dedicated to Chava,
with honor and gratitude
for twenty-five years of intimate friendship

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The second implication which R. Hanina bar Papa found [in the verse, Many . . . are Thy wonderful works . . . and Thy thoughts which are towards us (Ps. 40:5)], was this: Many are all the wonderful works and thoughts which Thou, O God, dost employ to have a man feel desire for his wife. Of this feeling it is written Adam knew his wife yet more (Gen. 4:25). What is implied by Scripture's saying yet more? That his desire had been increased by so much more desire than formerly: formerly he had not felt desire when he did not see his wife, but now he felt desire for her whether he saw her or did not see her.

It is such strong desire which compels traveling merchants and seafarersso said R. Abba bar Yudan in the name of R. Ahato be reminded of their wives and return to them.
William G. Braude and Israel J. Kapstein, trans.
,
Pesikta
*
de-Rab
*
Kahana
*
: R. Kahana's Compilation of Discourses for Sabbaths and Festal Days

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Page vii

Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on the Term
Rabbis

Introduction

1. "Behold Israel According to the Flesh": On Anthropology and Sexuality in Late-Antique Judaisms

2. Dialectics of Desire: "The Evil Instinct Is Very Good"

3. Different Eves: Myths of Female Origins and the Discourse of Married Sex

4. Engendering Desire: Husbands, Wives, and Sexual Intercourse

107

5. Lusting After Learning: The Torah as "the Other Woman"

134

6. Studying Women: Resistance from Within the Male Discourse

167

7. (Re)producing Men: Constructing the Rabbinic Male Body

197

Concluding Forward: Talmudic Study as Cultural Critique

227

Bibliography

247

General Index

265

Index of Primary Jewish Texts

271

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University and its donors for having the wisdom to found the Taubman Chair of Talmudic Culture. To Stephen Greenblatt who has encouraged my cultural studies from their very embryonic beginnings, I owe a special debt of gratitude, particularly now that he has taken this book into his series, "The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics," and to the editors of the Press: Stanley Holwitz, who charmed me, and Doris Kretschmer, who made it happen.

I firmly believe that scholarly production, like artistic work, is not the creation of an author but the production of a culture. I want to make explicit in this case my sense of dependence on a contemporary cultural discourse on the body that made this work possible, and particularly on the work of Peter Brown, which appeared six months after I began this project and had an enormous effect on it. The following friends and colleagues have read all or part of the manuscript. Their help has been enormous and in another discipline some of them would be signed on as coauthors: Robert Alter, Mieke Bal, Albert Baumgarten, David Biale, James Boon, Alice Boyarin, Jonathan Boyarin, Sidney Boyarin, Jeremy Cohen, Arnold Davidson, Carolyn Dinshaw, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, Arnold Davidson, Arnold Eisen, Steven Fraade, John Gager, Alon Goshen-Gottstein, Stephen Greenblatt, Erich Gruen, David Halperin (MIT), Sarah Hammer, Verna Harrison, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Judith Hauptmann, Christine Hayes, Marc Hirshman, Elliot Horowitz, Moshe Idel, Karen King, Ross Kraemer, Chana Kronfeld, Joshua Levinson, John Miles, Haim Milikovsky, Shlomo Naeh, Ilana Pardes, David Resnick, Amy Richlin, Chana Safrai, Dov Samet, Elissa Sampson, David Satran, Ellen Spolsky, Dina Stein, Ruth Stein, David Stern, Brian Stock, Guy Stroumsa, Deborah Weissman, Shira Wolosky, Eli Yassif, and especially Regina Schwartz and Froma Zeitlin, who read and commented on most of the book in several versions. I also thank the editors of
Critical Inquiry
, the editorial board of
Representations
, an anonymous reader for the
Yale Journal of Criticism
, several anonymous readers for the University of California Press, and the Cultural Critique Collective of Jerusalem.

My son, Jesse Boyarin, and his friend Shoham Carmi "discovered" the painting that is reproduced on the dust jacket.

Finally, I thank my students at the University of California at Berkeley for intellectual stimulation and fellowship, "from them more than from anyone."

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A Note on the Term
Rabbis

In this book the word
Rabbis
will be capitalized when it refers to the particular group of Jewish religious leaders known technically as ''the Rabbis.'' When it refers to Jewish religious functionaries in general, it will be put in lowercase. "The Rabbis" flourished from the second until approximately the end of the sixth centuries in Palestine and Babylonia. Growing out of a particular sect of first-century Judaism, their cultural hegemony over the masses of Jews steadily grew during this period, in which the major literary productions of rabbinic Judaismthe midrashim and Talmudswere produced. Their closest historical cognates are, therefore, the Fathers of the Church.

All Hebrew and Aramaic texts cited in this book have been translated by me unless otherwise noted.

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