Customer Reviews

Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics)

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Boyarin manages to cover some very interesting Talmudic material on gender and sexuality in an intelligent and informed manner. He also has a deep understanding of cultural theory, and argues for a number of exceptionally striking theses regarding Talmuds' (deliberate plural: he contrasts the Babylonian Talmud with the Jerusalem or Land of Israel Talmud) relationships to sexuality, gender, and embodiment. HOWEVER, Boyarin's claims are so wide-ranging and fundamental that it would require the study of a great deal of additional primary textual material to really confirm them in a responsible fashion.

This books approaches in a very open way the issue of sex in the Talmud. Not an easy thing to do... Yet it manages to do so well, without excessively offending one view or another. Through its approach, it probably expores one of the earliest expressions of feminism in Judaism.

Boyarin fails miserably in this tome to make use of the critical scholarship that has been written in the past 30 years on the rabbis and on rabbinic literature. He speaks of Hellenistic Judaism and Rabbinic Judaism rather than of the individual authors and editors of texts who lived distinct lives and thought distinct thoughts. To make the error clear: what Boyarin does is equivalent to someone writing a book in the future about "Jewish" views of sex in 21st century America and citing Boyarin and Boteach (Kosher Sex) without distinguishing who they were.

you don't have to be a radical traditionalist to understand how Boyarin deliberately misinterprets the Talmud and projects onto it his own feminist, post-modernist ideas.