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12 - Sexuality in Jewish Traditions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2024

By
Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert
Edited by
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks  and
Mathew Kuefler
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Mathew Kuefler
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
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Summary

This chapter discusses the teachings of the rabbinic sages in Late Antiquity who worked in fundamental ways with the biblical traditions transmitted to and by them. The Hebrew Bible, whose precise shape was still under discussion in the first century CE, provided the rabbinic sages with ancient normative and legal traditions that they reinterpreted and expanded. The large archive of rabbinic traditions provides us with a tremendous wealth of representations of sexual practices, desires, and discourses, often in tension with each other, that reverberate throughout Jewish history. It further provides a framework and language for contemporary Jewish discourses of sexuality, including newly emerging identities, individual and communal, specifically for Jewish LGBTQ+ people. Three topics out of many possible have been selected for this chapter: obligations of marriage, reproduction, and same-sex and queer sexualities. They represent three topics of perennial debate in Jewish traditions around the world. For each, rabbinic texts and especially the Talmud have played a pre-eminent role in shaping the debates over the centuries.

Keywords

desirefertilityheteronormativityhomoeroticismlawlesbianismmarriageprocreationsexual debtJudaism
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge World History of Sexualities , pp. 250 - 270
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Biale, David. Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America. New York: Harper Collins/Basic Books, 1992.Google Scholar
Biale, Rachel. Women and Jewish Law: The Essential Texts, Their History and Their Relevance for Today, 2nd ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1995.Google Scholar
Boyarin, Daniel. Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boyarin, Daniel. Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Cohen, Jeremy. Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It: The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Drinkwater, Gregg, Lesser, Joshua, and Shneer, David, eds. Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. New York: New York University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Dzmura, Noach, ed. Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2009.Google Scholar
Fonrobert, Charlotte. Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fonrobert, Charlotte. ‘Regulating the Human Body: Rabbinic Legal Discourse and the Making of Jewish Gender’. In Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, ed. Fonrobert, C. and Jaffee, M., 270–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenberg, Steven. Wrestling with God: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Grossman, Avraham. Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Hauptman, Judith. Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998.Google Scholar
Kabakov, Miryam, ed. Keep Your Wives Away from Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires – An Anthology. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010.Google Scholar
Kiel, Yishai. Sexuality in the Babylonian Talmud: Christian and Sasanian Contexts in Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nissinen, Martti. Homoeroticism in the Biblical World: A Historical Perspective. Trans. Kirsi Stjerna. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1998.Google Scholar
Rosen-Zvi, Yishai. Demonic Desires: ‘Yetzer Hara’ and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Satlow, Michael L. Tasting the Dish: Rabbinic Rhetorics of Sexuality. Atlanta, GA: Scholars, 1995.Google Scholar
Secunda, Shai. The Talmud’s Red Fence: Menstrual Impurity and Difference in Babylonian Judaism and Its Sasanian Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sienna, Noam. An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969. Philadelphia: Print-O-Craft, 2019.Google Scholar
Simcha DuBowski, Sandi, dir. Trembling before G-d. New Yorker Films, 2001. 1 hr 24 min.Google Scholar
Strassfeld, Max. Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2022.Google Scholar
Wegner, Judith R. Chattel or Person: The Status of Women in Mishnah. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Wheeler-Reed, David. Regulating Sex in the Roman Empire: Ideology, the Bible, and the Early Christians. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.Google Scholar

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