Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America

University of California Press

In February 1969 Philip Roth unleashed his most notorious novel, Portnoy's Complaint , the outrageous and hilarious confession of a sex-obsessed American Jew. Roth was certainly not the first Jewish writer or writer about the Jews to take up the theme of sexuality and the Jewish family, but his caricature of the American Jewish male and its attendant host of uncomfortable stereotypes brought him instant notoriety and also framed many of the questions that will preoccupy us in the chapters ahead. As a set of myths and countermyths, Portnoy is about the very discourse of Jewish sexuality and, beyond that, about what it means for Jews to live as a minority in the modern world.

Modern culture has a fascination with the sexuality of the Jews, a fascination marked by wildly conflicting beliefs. Perhaps because Judaism never embraced celibacy as a spiritual value, some hold that the Jews have a much more positive relationship to Eros than do Christians. Judaism, they claim, affirms the unity of the body and the spirit.1 Some anti-Semites, by contrast, view the sexuality of the Jews as a threat to an ordered world, a barbaric affront to civility.2 Yet others see Judaism as a chaste religion that elevates the spirit above the vulgar demands of the body; Jews, they say, know how to control their sexual impulses and are therefore the most ethical of peoples. For those less favorably disposed, however, there is a countermythology: this purported renunciation of sexuality is a sign of sexual repression, Judaism's deep hostility to eroticism and to the body.

In the wild monologue that is Portnoy's Complaint , Roth interwove these contradictory myths and touched a sensitive nerve. There were critics who saw in Roth nothing short of a Jewish self-hater who had resurrected the Nazi charge of Rassenschande , that the Jews lust after and defile pure Aryan girls.3 The scandal of the novel is that it revealed the uncomfortable proximity of the erotic imaginations of Jews and anti-

Semites. Indeed, the furor that greeted Portnoy was perhaps greater than that aroused by any other Jewish novel published in this century. Reflecting back on his novel in 1974, Roth wrote:

The man confessing to forbidden sexual acts and gross offenses against the family order and ordinary decency was a Jew. . . . Going wild in public is the last thing in the world that a Jew is expected to do. . . . He is not expected to make a spectacle of himself, either by shooting off his mouth or by shooting off his semen and certainly not by shooting off his mouth about shooting off his semen.4

This explanation for the book's notoriety is only half the story. After all, "going wild in public" in this fashion is also the last thing one might expect from, say, a New England Episcopalian.5 Portnoy was believable, because on some level there existed an expectation that the Jew was capable of violating codes of civility.6 Jews might present themselves as paragons of respectability, but below the surface, they think like Portnoy.

Portnoy appeared at that moment in American Jewish history when Jews had begun to believe that they had achieved full respectability and to relax about anti-Semitism. The end of anti-Jewish quotas and Israel's lightning victory in the 1967 War seemed to promise a utopian future. Roth's crime, in the eyes of his critics, was that he shattered this dream by flaunting Jewish sexual difference just as the sexual revolution was sweeping America and arousing profound anxieties in American culture. Perhaps, after all, the Jews were agents of cultural upheaval and degeneracy.

Portnoy's Complaint is the quintessential tale of the repression of sex and its displacement by words. Portnoy's "complaint" is precisely that the more he thinksand speaksabout sex, the less he is able to achieve satisfaction. This is a book about how words substitute for sex and how the Jews, the quintessential People of the Book, live in eternal exile from their own bodies. The historical Judaism of Portnoy is a religion devoid of the erotic: sexual repression, rants the monologist, is the product of the heritage of Jewish suffering and compulsive legalism. The novel reduces this legalism primarily to food taboos, and those, in turn, are repeatedly linked to forbidden sexuality.7 Food, like words, involves the mouth: yet again orality neutralizes Eros. Portnoy's Judaism is a religion of the mouth but decidedly not of the genitals.

The novel reduces the drama of Jewish history to a soap opera of family dynamics. Portnoy's mother has one implied purpose in life: to kill her son's sexuality by domination and intrusiveness; his passive father is the original victim of the crime now being perpetrated on the son. For Portnoy, the Jewish tradition boils down to this unholy trinity, making its way in a world of repression and secret cravings.

Since this repressive tradition has stifled Jewish sexuality, Gentiles are left with a monopoly on healthy eroticism. Indeed, the differences between Christianity and Judaism are no longer theological or historical but instead are utterly secular: "Religion . . . is [the key not] to the mysteries of the divine and the beyond, but to the mystery of the sensual and the erotic, the wonder of laying a hand on the girl down the street."8 The Jewish male has no choice but to seek out erotic fulfillment in the arms of the shiksa , the derogatory Yiddish term for the gentile woman, at once desired and despised. But since Jewish childhood and adolescence end in psychological castration, the shiksa can never fulfill her redemptive role. Repression breeds obsession but the object of obsession cannot liberate.

Curiously, it is the Monkey, Portnoy's gentile partner in sexual perversity and the culmination of his search for the perfect shiksa , who counters Portnoy's myth of the neurotic Jewish male. For the Monkey, the Jewish male is at once highly sexual and domestically responsible: "a regular domestic Messiah."9 Here, Roth shrewdly suggests that it is not only Jews who have sexual myths about Gentiles, but Gentiles who have myths about Jews, myths that correspond to how Jews would like to see themselves. Both Jews and Gentiles, Roth seems to say, are trapped in imagined archetypes of themselves and the other.

It is therefore no surprise that the Jewish woman does not exist as a sexual possibility in the novel. Although the myth of the asexual Jewish American Princess is unarticulated in Portnoy , it clearly hovers in the background. Portnoy reflects such a thoroughgoing misogynist view of the world that Jewish women cannot be potential partners, and even gentile women are little more than anonymous cardboard stereotypes. But is not this very denial of an identity and an authentic voice to women also implicitly a product of the Jewish tradition itself, as Portnoy sees it?

For Portnoy, women and Gentiles are virtually synonymous.10 Both are equally threatening. Only in the steam bath, surrounded by Jewish males, is there escape for Portnoy: "But here in a Turkish bath, why am I dancing around? There are no women here. No womenand no goyim . Can it be? There is nothing to worry about."11 For all his ostensible success in American society (he heads the New York City Human Rights Commission, a symbol, as it were, of America's promise of social integration), Portnoy remains an alien in a gentile land, his sexual maladjustment a metaphor for the Jew in exile.

If the American Jewish woman has no sexual potential and the Gentile has too much, perhaps the solution is to be found in the allegedly healthy sexuality of the Jewish state, which Portnoy visits at the end of the novel. Here, Roth cannily alludes to a subterranean theme in Zionist ideology, a theme that is the cousin of anti-Semitic fantasy: the Jews of the Diaspora are sexually emasculated and perverted (and in the Zionist version, only

a normal national life can restore erotic health). Zionism, then, is not just a political and cultural movement of liberation, it is also the sexual revolution of the Jewish people.

Yet Portnoy cannot escape his Diaspora fate: the Promised Land brings not Eros but impotence. The Israeli women, it turns out, are depressingly puritanical and Zionism offers no sexual liberation. Believing himself to have gonorrhea, Portnoy sets out to avenge himself on Zionism by infecting a healthy kibbutz woman and thereby poison "the future of the race" with a dose of Diaspora disease. And so with this bizarre twist on the anti-Semitic motif of Jewish race pollution, Portnoy comes to its crashing conclusion.

Between the covers of this novel lies more than an extended comic gig or an attempt to scandalize. With its hyperbole and nihilism, Portnoy's Complaint captures the dilemmas of modern Jewish life: Can the Jewish people perpetuate itself biologically in a culture that no longer links sex with procreation as had the old religious commandment that legitimated sexuality? Can Jews achieve sexual satisfaction with other Jews, or will they, like Portnoy, turn to the mythical Gentile? If the Diaspora proves to be a demographic dead end, is a Jewish state the solution not only to the political dilemmas of the Jews, but also to their sexual dilemmas?

Although these questions of procreation, sexual pleasure, and intermarriage are all modern, we will see that they also plagued the premodern Jewish tradition. Roth is not the first to meditate on the relationship between Jews and sexuality; on the contrary, he is heir to a long literary tradition, and, consciously or not, he reproduces many of the conflicts that thread through it. This novel of late-twentieth-century America is thus a lens through which we can view the major themes of Jewish discourse about sexuality since the Bible, as well as some of the major themes of this book itself.

Roth's Portnoy raises the fundamental question: does the Jewish tradition affirm or repress sexuality? To a certain extent, this very formulation of the question is modern, Freudian evenno surprise for a book written as a confession to a psychoanalyst and a Jewish one at that! The categories of "gratification" and "repression" can only be applied with great caution to cultures that thought of sexuality in very different ways.12 As we take up different Jewish cultures, whether biblical, talmudic, or medieval, we shall identify the central concerns of each and try to refrain from imposing our own categories. At the same time, we cannot divorce ourselves entirely from our modern ways of looking at sexuality when we travel to the past; we would probably not even take the journey were it not for Freud and all those other modern thinkers who put sexuality at the center of our identities. Although I shall try to avoid applying psychoanalytic concepts anachronistically, it would be impossible to select and interpret texts dealing with sexuality without acknowledging

some debt to modern psychology. The texts can speak for themselves only if we tell them first what we are interested in hearing!

Since psychoanalysis necessarily colors any study of sexuality, and is also explicitly Jewish in its origins, it is appropriate to reflect on what it has to say about our subject. The very lack of consensus on Freud's own Jewishness suggests that it would be a mistake to regard him primarily as a Jewish interpreter of sexuality.13 This has not, however, prevented the claims that Freud's stand on sexuality was essentially Jewish.14 In these discussions, Freud is enlisted to do battle for a "Jewish," as opposed to a "Christian," version of sexuality, the latter sometimes identified with Carl Jung.

In reality, Freud's own scattered remarks on the relationship between Judaism and sexuality are an excellent example of the very ambivalence that is one of the major themes of this book. On the side of sexual openness, he boasted of having liberated the erotic from "the condition of cultural hypocrisy" that prevents "the ventilation of the question," hinting that he was able to do so because, as a Jew, he remained outside conventional morality.15 While Freud himself never explicitly said that Jews were less sexually repressed than others, his disciple, Otto Rank, did. In an essay written shortly after his conversion to psychoanalysis, Rank defined the "essence of Judaism" as its "stress on primitive sexuality."16 Jews were forced to repress their essential sexuality as a result of exile, said Rank, but the original "essence of Judaism" might still offer a radical cure for the sexual neurosis of civilization.

Whether or not these views even partially reflected Freud's when Rank composed his essay in 1905, Freud often took quite the opposite position, especially in his later writings. He argued in numerous famous essays that civilization requires sublimation of the sexual drive. As his own life attests, Freud remained a sexual puritan, even as he gave sexuality its most systematic discourse; and after the birth of his fifth child, he seems to have become largely celibate, if not impotent.17 He argued in Moses and Monotheism that the Jews were spiritually superior because monotheism led them to renounce instinctual gratification.18 The Jews, it would seem, were the original masters of sublimation. Freud's science of sexuality therefore combined liberation and sublimation in an uneasy dialectic, with Judaism somehow straddling both antinomies.

The contradictions in Freud's view of Jewish sexuality capture the central argument of this book: the Jewish tradition cannot be characterized as either simply affirming or simply repressing the erotic. Our story is about the dilemmas of desire, the struggle between contradictory attractions, rather than the history of a monolithic dogma. As such, it is the story of a profoundly ambivalent culture.

We will follow our theme from biblical times to the modern period, that is, this tension between procreation and sexual desire in a culture

that required everyone to marry. Is sexual fulfillment an end in itself or is it to be subordinated to other goals, whether a theology of fertility in the Bible, a divine commandment in rabbinic law, a mystical theosophy in the Middle Ages, or the building of a modern Zionist nation-state?

From the period of the Talmud onward, Jewish culture always wrestled with sexual asceticism, trying to find ways to incorporate the virtues of renunciation, as it absorbed them from Greco-Roman and Christian culture, into its theology of procreation. Influenced first by philosophy and then by mysticism in the Middle Ages, this struggle took on new forms, leading to much more ascetic expressions, especially in the Hasidic movement of the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, secularized forms of sexual renunciation appeared in both the Jewish Enlightenment and the pioneering collectives of the Zionist movement. Asceticism then, as an attraction and a challenge to Jewish culture, is a persistent, if ambiguous, subtext to our story.

By attributing the Jews' ostensible renunciation of the instincts to monotheism, Freud suggested another issue that must be addressed. A God lacking any sexual biography was unique in the ancient worldwhat were the consequences of such a theology for the way Jews viewed their own sexuality?19 The answers to this question varied as much as did the Jewish cultures of different ages. Sexuality occupied a no-man's-land between theology and secularism, sometimes serving as a symbolic displacement of erotic energies onto the divine realm, as in the case of eighteenth-century Hasidism, and sometimes as an instrument of revolt against the strictures of divine commandments, as in secular Zionism. In the biblical cult of fertility or in medieval Jewish mysticism, sexuality was an integral part of theology; by contrast, one strand of rabbinic literature and also medieval philosophy relegated it to the secular world, with all the attendant ambivalence that world aroused. No study of Jewish sexuality can ignore the changing role of theology, which continues to resonate even in the secular culture of contemporary America.

Roth's method in Portnoy's Complaint points to the approach I propose to take in this book. Following the initial storm over Portnoy , the New York Times published interviews with Jewish mothers (including Roth's own mother) who unanimously rejected Roth's portrayal of the Jewish mother and the Jewish family in general.20 This approach to the novel missed the point. Portnoy is decidedly not a sociological description or a mimetic representation of reality; it is expressly a study in erotic fantasy, a Jew imagining how Jews imagine themselves.21 Like Roth, my goal is not to discover what Jewish sexual behavior actually was in the past so much as to investigate how Jews have constructed notions of sexuality, how they have thought about it and struggled with it in the texts they produced.

The question is not primarily what actually happened, but rather how

Jews wrote about sexuality. If sex is the physical act that takes place between people, sexuality or eroticism is the way a culture imagines sex, the framework in which it places it, and the meanings it assigns it.22 Thus, I understand Eros to encompass the cultural and social constructs, such as love and marriage, that define and control sex to be part of our subject. Similarly, desire may mean specifically sexual desire, but it may also signify what we would call, in modern language, romantic desire, those aspects of erotic relationships that include but also go beyond the physical. Throughout this book, Eros and desire will sometimes be understood in these broader contexts and sometimes more narrowly to refer specifically to the meaning of the physical aspect of sex itself; we will allow each period to define these concepts in its own terms.

Literary constructs of the erotic are not necessarily disconnected from the world of experience. Wherever possible we want to understand the relationship between the lives of those who created a culture and the ideas they expressed. The erotic theology of the thirteenth-century Jewish mystics must be located in the particular concerns of the culture of southern France and Spain; similarly, the texts produced by the eighteenth-century Hasidim and the nineteenth-century maskilim cannot be divorced from their life experiences. Like the modern historian of sexuality, those who wrote about sexuality in the past were themselves people with bodies possessed by erotic desire.

Texts, furthermore, do more than merely reflect experience; they also shape experience or, rather, the way people view their experience: discourse defines desire. Roth's Portnoy may have represented what some readers believed to be reality, but, much more importantly, it created a perception of reality. Texts can also have contradictory effects. The puritanical preacher who denounces sexual excess may actually arouse himself or his congregation by his very words.23 Of course, we cannot know how texts from the past were read and understood without some explicit evidence, and we must be careful not to impose our reactions upon readers from other centuries. Nevertheless, we must be attuned to the fact that the written word can be, and often is, the main vehicle by which a culture creates the erotic.

The chapters ahead present texts produced by a cultural elite: priests, rabbis, philosophers, mystics, Hasidic masters, Enlightenment literati, and Zionist ideologists, among others. The elite produced a canonical literature, some of which was read widely but large portions of which, such as medieval philosophy and mysticism, were accessible only to the elite itself. In the Jewish context, there is also a close connection between those who write and those who wield authority: knowledge and power are frequently linked. The rabbis of the talmudic period, for example, developed their singular culture in order not only to make sense of themselves but also to exert control over those outside the elite, including the

poorer, ignorant classes and, perhaps most significantly for a study of sexuality, women.

Rarely can we hear the distant voices of those not included in this elite, and only in the modern period do they emerge as equals. Yet throughout Jewish history, dissident cultures, including popular culture, challenged the canon. No cultural elite arises in a vacuum. On the contrary, the so-called normative tradition is always embedded in a social matrix, in part defining it and in part struggling against it. I see this tension not as a conflict between a normative system and its deviants but rather as a conflict between competing cultures that often differed far more than the authoritative norms themselves might suggest. Throughout this book, we shall try to capture traces of these alternative cultures through other kinds of texts, such as literature, folklore, and court documents, which often convey visions of sexuality quite different from those of the canonical texts.

As the elite that produced the vast majority of the texts we will be considering was male, we will be concerned primarily with the way these male writers viewed their own sexuality, as well as the sexuality of others, whether women, Gentiles, or the unlearned. With very few exceptions, what we know of women's sexuality was filtered through male eyes; even the tekhines , women's prayers written in Yiddish, were often composed by men, sometimes masquerading as women.24 Producing a history of the experience of Jewish women remains one of the great tasks of the new Jewish historiography, and I do not propose to offer more than fragments for such a history, primarily by suggesting some possible feminist readings of certain texts.

What does it mean for the history of sexuality to have only a one-sided, male perspective? If feminist theory is correct that men's and women's experiences of sexuality are fundamentally different, the way in which an all-male cultural elite imagines the erotic will differ from the imaginings of an elite that included women. Might it be that the struggle with asceticism which so dominated Jewish culture from Hellenistic times onward reflected a particularly male set of concerns? Would women have defined the problem in quite this way? We might compare the Jewish tradition with the Christian, which carved out an official place for female religiosity and therefore preserved women's voices, too. But Christianity placed such a high value on celibacy that women often had to renounce their sexuality in order to find a place in the religious order; in fact, since Christian asceticism sometimes defined the celibate state as "becoming male," women had to renounce their gender as well.25 Female experience in the church was therefore frequently shaped by male concerns, although male domination did not entirely erase the distinctive perspective of women from the history of Christian spirituality.

The Jewish case is more difficult because women's voices were much

less commonly preserved. Since this was a culture in which knowledge was one of the main forms of power, the exclusion of women from the creation of textsour main historical sourcesignaled their exclusion from power. The situation is not as hopeless as it might appear at first glance, however. Although folklore and court records, to take two examples, were written and transmitted primarily by men, they contain unmistakable traces of women's voices. Furthermore, the male authors of canonical texts often projected onto women points of view, sometimes subversive and radical, that they were not prepared to express as their own. At times, patriarchal and antipatriarchal voices compete in the texts and, as part of our effort to describe both the canon and alternative discourses, we will try to disentangle these voices. Although we will still be left with a predominantly male culture of sexuality, it will at least be one in which male writers, who were by no means always misogynistic, at times tried to construct sympathetic versions of female sexuality. Only in the modern period will we discover attempts by women to recover their own erotic voices.

Finally, we wish to know how specifically Jewish images of sexuality relate to the larger, non-Jewish cultures in which the Jews lived. In Portnoy's Complaint , Roth showed how entangled Jewish self-perceptions are with the attitudes of the majority culture: Portnoy's pathology reflects the anti-Semitic trope of Jewish hypersexuality. Although Jewish culture generally did not adopt anti-Jewish images, neither did the tradition evolve in some splendid isolation from the rest of the world. Too many histories of the Jews unconsciously fall back on the theology of Jewish uniqueness and assume that the development of the culture is determined by an autochthonous textual tradition. Jewish attitudes towards sexuality were certainly the product of such a tradition, but that tradition was always open to external influences from the larger societies in which Jews lived. An old Arabic proverb has it that "men resemble their own times more than those of their fathers." Whether the larger culture was Canaanite, Roman, medieval European, or modern nationalist, the Jews' construction of their sexuality reflected the issues of their times, even as their vocabulary was often inherited from their ancestors. The history of Jewish sexuality must therefore be the history of a cultural system in all its conflicts, varieties, and interactions with other cultures; it is not merely the history of norms developed by an ivory-tower elite.

That Jewish culture throughout the ages consists of actual people with bodies and not only rarified ideas may seem almost a commonplace in the waning years of this century.26 Yet the reaction that greeted Philip Roth's work suggests that the relationship between sexuality and the Jews continues to arouse enormous discomfort, as if the very subject might undermine the vexed struggle of the Jews to survive in the modern world. Some years before Roth published Portnoy , a rabbi named Selig-

son attacked him for ignorance of "the tremendous saga of Jewish history" in his portrayal of a middle-aged Jewish adulterer in the story "Epstein." Roth responded that his story was not about Judaism or Jewish history as a whole but about a Jew named Epstein:

Where the history of the Jewish people comes down in time and place to become the man whom I called Epstein, that is where my knowledge must be sound. But I get the feeling that Rabbi Seligson wants to rule Lou Epstein out of Jewish history.27

In response to the Seligsons of the Jewish world, Portnoy answers in his characteristically outrageous fashion: "LET'S PUT THE ID BACK IN YID."

This book has been written in the conviction that sexuality in all its manifestations is indeed part of Jewish history: Eros, for all its Hellenistic overtones, also belongs to the Jews. Epstein the adulterer and Seligson the moralizing rabbi, Alexander Portnoy and his criticsall are part of that history. And the ongoing dialogue between them, from biblical to contemporary culture, is the story we shall tell in the chapters ahead.