Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (11 page)

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Authors: Daniel Boyarin

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situations the wife indicates that she was interested in having sex, and her only objection was to the position. It seems to me that much turns on the exact meaning of the term ''turning over the tables," which as a sexual practice is unfortunately obscure. The most plausible interpretation on philological grounds is intercourse with the woman on top, in which case Rabbi's response is a relatively innocuous: The Torah allows that practice, so negotiate it with him. In support of this readingat least as the one that the Talmud's redactors fosteredstands the absence of anything in the text's rhetoric or structure that would indicate that they understood Rabbi's position to be antithetical or adversative to their own unequivocal stand against wife-rape. If one is forbidden to have intercourse with one's wife a second time without her explicit consent, and to do so is considered wife-rape by the Talmud, it hardly seems possible that it would be normative that forcing her to have, e.g., anal intercourse is permitted.
⁹Rabbi may simply have understood, therefore, that the women's concern was somehow related to the propriety of sexual intercourse with the woman on topand there might indeed have been some reason for anxiety, since according to some traditions, Lilith's sin was her desire for such sex. Note the irony: The men are demanding a sexual practice which is otherwise taken as a signifier for female insubordination, as it were; their wives are objecting, and the Rabbi indicates that it is permitted.

9. A reader of the manuscript suggested that my reasoning was faulty here, and that the reason that the Rabbis do not proscribe these acts against the will of the wife is precisely because they are non-procreative and therefore of no concern for the Rabbis. This reading makes the following assumptions: (1) that the Rabbis' only concern about sexuality was the quality of progeny; and (2) that they believed that what is wrong with rape is that it is not conducive to the conception of proper children, and not what seems to me to be the obvious interpretation, namely, that
since
rape is ethically wrong,
therefore
the punishment will be immoral children. Although neither of these assumptions is impossible, neither is suggested by anything in the talmudic text, and the question is why one would want to begin with premises that ascribe the worst possible motives to
any
group of people, thus violating the hermeneutic principle of charity. Two further arguments can be brought to bear against this interpretation. First: it violates Ockham's razor as well. Given my interpretation, we understand why rape would produce undesirable children, namely, as a punishment for the rape, but if we assume that rape is only forbidden because it produces undesirable children, then from whence comes the notion itself that rape leads to bad progeny? We would have to assume this as a further, otherwise unattested and uncontextualized notion of the culture, thus violating the principle that the simplest explanation is to be preferred. Finally, the notion that bad action leads to bad results is firmly anchored in the almost ubiquitous topos of rabbinic culture, namely: measure for measure. Unless we are prepared to posit that in general these structures of crime and punishment are a smokescreen, why would we do so here?

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Rabbi is, in effect, assuring them that such sex is permitted, and they need fear no repercussions from God. Alternatively, we might read him somewhat less charitably and assume that he (and the talmudic redactors) might have understood that once a woman has consented to sex, then her lack of consent to a particular position does not constitute rape. Note that according to this reading, "permitted you" is to be interpreted as the Torah has permitted you to engage in this practice. If, on the other hand, the practice referred to is indeed anal intercourse, then, it would seem, engaging in it without the express desire of the wife does constitute a rapenot, I hasten to add, because of the "unnaturalness" of anal intercourse but simply because penetration of a different orifice seems much greater a violation of the woman's will than the arrangement of the bodies. According to this reading, ''permitted you" would mean the Torah has permitted you to himthe Hebrew supports either construction. According to this latter reading, then, Rabbi's position is once more sharply antithetical to the rest of the text.

If we adopt the first reading, namely, that the wife desired sexas she indicates herselfand that all the husband proposed was to have her on top, then it is clear why Rabbi is not represented as referring to the very halakha which forbids a husband to have any coercive sex with his wife. If the other view is adopted, then it seems perhaps that there is a relic here of a position that did not recognize wife-rape as forbidden. I cannot claim that the more generous interpretation is a "better" or more truthful one than the first.
¹⁰There very probably was dissent within the rabbinic culture, here as in so many other situations. In any case the Talmud cites the emphatic halakha against wife-rape to its implied male audience, so that those readers, at any rate, cannot misunderstand and derive from here permission to treat their wives as objects. What can be said to be established, therefore, is that whatever the view of Rabbi or Rabbi

10. For an excellent account of decision criteria for interpretations in a feminist-critical context, see Bal (1987, 1115). My second, more generous, interpretation observes the convention of unity, a convention that I am otherwise opposed to throughout, so this cannot serve as a criterion in its favor. On the other hand, it may also serve to render the text more useful in the sense that Bal articulates: "One modest and legitimate goal has always been a fuller understanding of the text, one that is sophisticated, reproducible, and accessible to a larger audience. As long as by 'a fuller understanding' one means having found a more satisfying way of integrating the reading experience into one's life, more possibilities of doing something with this experience, such an approach is a justifiable critical practice. . . . These criteria are basically pragmatic. Far from having anything to do with standards of 'scientificity', they deal with what readers can find of use" (1213).

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This notion of literature as a process integrally connected with other social processes is a very powerful one for the study of talmudic texts. It enables us to consider how the social meanings produced in the halakhic discussions and innovations that the documents preserve are reproduced in the stories about the Rabbis that the same documents tell. If we can no longer write biographies of Rabbis, which can then be used to explain (even partially) their halakhic interventions (as, for example, the classic biography of Rabbi Akiva by Louis Finkelstein [1964]), we can, it seems, use both halakha and aggada together to write a history of discursive processes and social sites, of communal mechanisms and institutions.

How do we translate this idea into interpretation of texts? Having abandoned the notion that texts simply
reflect
the intentions of their authors or the extra-textual reality of their referents, what alternative to a purely intra-textual reading remains? The answer lies in an appropriate apprehension of the concept of intertextuality, and particularly the special form of intertextual reading pursued by a group of scholars called the "new historicists."
²¹

The research paradigm loosely known as the new historicism is more a sensibility than a theory. Indeed, certain of its practitioners have defined themselves explicitly (if somewhat ironically) as being "against theory."
²²Nevertheless, I believe that we can discover one overriding principle that both constitutes the paradigm as a significant theoretical intervention and explains the convergence of sensibility between critics of otherwise very diverse interests and methods. This principle is rejection of the view that literature and art form an autonomous, time-less realm of transcendent value and significance, and concomitantly, promulgation of the conviction that this view is itself the historical, ideological construction of a particular time and place in cultural history. Stated more positively, literature and art are one practice among many by which a culture organizes its production of meaning and values and structures itself. There follow from this hypothesis several postulates:

1. The study of a literary work cannot be pursued in isolation from other concurrent socio-cultural practices.