Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (review)

Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (review) Book Reviews BOOK REVIEWS Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, by Daniel Boyarin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 283 pp. $35.00 (c). In this well argued study Boyarin sets out to correct misconceptions about rabbinic attitudes to gender differences, sexual practice, and human sexuality in general. Boyarin's underlying premise is that the rabbinic psyche was not plagued with the "fear of women" and that the rabbinic mind, unlike that of Hellenistic Judaism and Christianity, did not subscribe to the dualist notion of the body-soul dichotomy. The latter fostered the loathing of the body as filthy and as the prison of the pure, heaven-bound soul; it constructed a gender-based theological and cultural hierarchy in which the female, in her sexual and procreative functions, represented the degraded pbysis, while the male stood for the sublime life of the spirit, struggling to free itself from the trap of the sexualized body; women represented nature and men culture. Rabbinic Judaism, however, perceived the human soul and body as a unified whole, rather than a polarity, and sexuality as one of the components of being human, not a feature of existence that should be denied and renounced. An illuminating example of http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies Purdue University Press

Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (review)

Loading next page...
 
/lp/purdue-university-press/carnal-israel-reading-sex-in-talmudic-culture-review-HpycMyhToV

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Purdue University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Purdue University.
ISSN
1534-5165
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Book Reviews BOOK REVIEWS Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, by Daniel Boyarin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 283 pp. $35.00 (c). In this well argued study Boyarin sets out to correct misconceptions about rabbinic attitudes to gender differences, sexual practice, and human sexuality in general. Boyarin's underlying premise is that the rabbinic psyche was not plagued with the "fear of women" and that the rabbinic mind, unlike that of Hellenistic Judaism and Christianity, did not subscribe to the dualist notion of the body-soul dichotomy. The latter fostered the loathing of the body as filthy and as the prison of the pure, heaven-bound soul; it constructed a gender-based theological and cultural hierarchy in which the female, in her sexual and procreative functions, represented the degraded pbysis, while the male stood for the sublime life of the spirit, struggling to free itself from the trap of the sexualized body; women represented nature and men culture. Rabbinic Judaism, however, perceived the human soul and body as a unified whole, rather than a polarity, and sexuality as one of the components of being human, not a feature of existence that should be denied and renounced. An illuminating example of

Journal

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish StudiesPurdue University Press

Published: Oct 3, 1995

There are no references for this article.