Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (185 page)

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goes on to list commandments that fall on men and women alike and punishments that result from laxity with regard to them. Thus, even a potential discourse positing an essential relationship between women's sexuality and death is countered by the classical culture text, the Talmud, and precisely where it could have been expected to be activated, with regard to menstruation.
²⁷

Nor was this contestation only Babylonian; the Palestinian midrash on Ecclesiastes also "emends" the text, as it were, to read "For three things women die in childbirth, and for three things men die" (Kohellet Rabba


27. At least in the classical rabbinic period, this was not understood as an essential manifestation of demonic evil associated with blood, death, birth, or sexuality and was certainly not an association of woman per se with impurity or contamination, pace Wegner (Shaye J. D. Cohen 1991, 281).

Other evidence cited by Wegner for her claim that rabbinic Judaism manifests an atavistic fear of women also seems to me to be misread, or at least to allow for another reading. Wegner's argument from the prohibition of a man from being alone with two women when a woman is not prohibited from being alone with two men simply does not establish her point that "the sages' androcentric perspective blames the dangers of private encounters between the sexes on women's moral laxity rather than on men's greater susceptibility to arousal" (Wegner 1988, 15961). The same argument can be made with reference to other rabbinic sexual "hedges," for example, the prohibition on a man hearing a woman singing if she is not his wife. Here again, there is no reason to assume that moral laxity of women rather than arousability of men is at all at issue. Indeed, this latter interpretation can be strengthened considerably when we remember that men are not supposed to look at the colored clothing of women
on the clothesline,
lest they be aroused by it, a situation in which moral laxity of women could hardly be the issue. These talmudic practices do propose some essential difference between men and women, and presuppose a social hierarchy, but they do not provide compelling or even persuasive evidence for a perception of women as dangerous and contaminating.

Similarly, I do not think that the evidence cited by Nehama Aschkenasy supports her claim that in rabbinic culture, "Woman is seen primarily as a sexual being whose moral weakness is coupled with sexual power which she puts to evil use" (1986, 40), still less for her suggestion that "woman in general is condemned by the Midrash as immodest and voluptuous, especially in connection with the story of Creation" (ibid., 74). Aschkenasy gives three references to support this claim for what ''the Midrash" holds. As for the evidence from Genesis Rabba, it is apposite but not typical. I have already cited it above and evaluated its extent there. I see nothing on Sota 19b that supports such a claim at all and assume that the reference must be misprinted. The third text cited is The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan 1. A careful reading of that entire passage supports only an argument that Eve was more susceptible to being deceived by the Serpent than Adam, no more than that. Moreover, the text explicitly blames even this on Adam, when it says, "What led to Eve's touching the tree? It was the hedge that Adam put around his words"that is, his exaggeration in reporting God's interdiction on eating from the tree caused Eve to be deceived. God had said not to eat, but Adam's report that he had said not even to touch the tree enabled the snake to fool her (Goldin 1955, 910).

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3:3). Furthermore, in the midrash on the gynecophobic verse of Ecclesiastes 7:37, "And I found the woman more bitter than death," where a commonplace theme of essential feminine evil or danger could have been expected to surface, all we find is a statement to the effect that
sometimes
a woman is so demanding of her husband that she leads him into a bitter death and an anecdote illustrating such an occurrence (Kohellet Rabba 7:37). Androcentric, to be sure; gynecophobic, no. These rabbis are not willing to consider either woman per se or sexuality a negative or threatening element in the world. But any social hierarchy, however "benign," seems to carry within itself the seeds of a potential discourse of contempt, and such discourse was likely hovering just below the surface of the rabbinic attempt to produce a discourse of female confinement that was not misogynistic in character. Indeed, as many critics have argued, and as Bloch has shown most recently, any
male
discourse that essentializes women and their roles, whether ''negatively" or "positively," ultimately leads to misogyny. But Bloch himself would formulate this differently; he argues that any predication of the form ''women are" or "woman is" is already misogynistic (Bloch 1991, 45). I am impressed by his argument. This approach has the salutary effect (in my opinion) of completely cutting out the ground from a certain kind of apologetic discourse that I am also trying to avoid, namely, a discourse that argues that rabbinic Judaism was not sexist because it often "praised" women, but it makes it harder to see and describe real cultural differences in the representation of women, body, and gender in different cultures. So I prefer to weaken the formulation somewhat by suggesting that any "positive" predication of this form easily slides into its opposite, that "putting women on a pedestal," for instance, as in the Victorian period, leads easily to violence against women, and that the rabbinic discourse of great valuation of sexuality and the female body leads just as easily and naturally into the genuine and open misogyny of much of medieval Jewish discourse, as we shall see below.

The "Other Woman": Lilith and Woman's Sexuality as Demonic

In what were almost his last words Foucault said: "My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous" (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983, 232). Virtually any cultural practice can have multiple social

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meanings.
²⁸A similar point has been made with regard to menstrual taboos by the anthropologists Buckley and Gottlieb:

In much of the literature, when women have been described as being prohibited from contact with something in the male domaina man's hunting gear, sayit has been interpreted as an indication of male dominance manifested by women's exclusion from prestigious activities. Conversely, however, when it is forbidden for men to have contact with something in the female domainsuch as menstrual bloodit has been interpreted in an opposite manner, as a sign of female inferiority. The two kinds of actions, or taboos, would seem parallel, yet the anthropological interpretation of them has been binary.


(Buckley and Gottlieb 1988, 14)

Only specific analysis of specific historical situations reveals the specific meanings of a practice within the particular formation, and, of course, even within a given cultural formation the same practice can have multiple and contradictory meanings. If I have argued, then, that within rabbinic Judaism of the talmudic period, even menstrual taboos did not constitute an essentialized fear and hatred of women as defiling, such interpretations and understandings were certainly latent and easily derived from the practices.

In another set of Jewish myths about the origin of woman we do find representation of the woman as demonic figure. I am referring, of course, to the Lilith myths, which appear in literature only
after
the rabbinic period, first being attested in the
Alpha-Beta d'ben Sirah,
a text of the eighth century (Yassif 1984). This story tells of a first wife created for Adam who wanted to "be on top" and whom he divorced. She lives on as a succubus, sleeping with men at night (her name means "Night Demon") and producing demon children from their nocturnal and masturbatory emissions. As Yassif points out, the classical midrashic texts know of a motif of a "First Eve," who ''returned to her dust'' (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 213). This may be the trace of a longer narrative that contained the entire story of a woman who was created and rebelled, demanded sexual parity, and lives on as a demon. But the evidence for such a construction is meager indeed. Genesis Rabba does, in fact, mention the sexual demons who come in the night, but in a context that completely


28. I wonder what the limits of this claim are. Instinctively, I put them at practices that cause death or grave bodily harm.

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