Sexuality in the Babylonian Talmud

Sexuality in the Babylonian Talmud PDF Author: Yishai Kiel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107155517
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This book explores sex and sexuality in the Babylonian Talmud within the context of competing cultural discourses, for students of comparative religion.

Sexuality in the Babylonian Talmud

Sexuality in the Babylonian Talmud PDF Author: Yishai Kiel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107155517
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This book explores sex and sexuality in the Babylonian Talmud within the context of competing cultural discourses, for students of comparative religion.

Torah Queeries

Torah Queeries PDF Author: Gregg Drinkwater
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814769772
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
In the Jewish tradition, reading of the Torah follows a calendar cycle, with a specific portion assigned each week. Following on this ancient tradition, Torah Queeries brings together some of the world's leading rabbis, scholars, and writers to interpret the Torah through a "bent lens." This incredibly rich collection unites the voices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and straight-allied writers, including some of the most central figures in contemporary American Judaism. All bring to the table unique methods of reading and interpreting that allow the Torah to speak to modern concerns of sexuality, identity, gender, and LGBT life. Torah Queeries offers cultural critique, social commentary, and a vision of community transformation, all done through biblical interpretation. Written to engage readers, draw them in, and at times provoke them, Torah Queeries charts a future of inclusion and social justice deeply rooted in the Jewish textual tradition. A labor of intellectual rigor, social justice, and personal passions, Torah Queeries is an exciting and important contribution to the project of democratizing Jewish communities, and an essential guide to understanding the intersection of queerness and Jewishness.

Trans Talmud

Trans Talmud PDF Author: Max K. Strassfeld
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520397398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Trans Talmud places eunuchs and androgynes at the center of rabbinic literature and asks what we can learn from them about Judaism and the project of transgender history. Rather than treating these figures as anomalies to be justified or explained away, Max K. Strassfeld argues that they profoundly shaped ideas about law, as the rabbis constructed intricate taxonomies of gender across dozens of texts to understand an array of cultural tensions. Showing how rabbis employed eunuchs and androgynes to define proper forms of masculinity, Strassfeld emphasizes the unique potential of these figures to not only establish the boundary of law but exceed and transform it. Trans Talmud challenges how we understand gender in Judaism and demonstrates that acknowledging nonbinary gender prompts a reassessment of Jewish literature and law.

The Talmud of Relationships, Volume 1

The Talmud of Relationships, Volume 1 PDF Author: Amy Scheinerman
Publisher: Jewish Publication Society
ISBN: 0827614403
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
How can I tame my ego? How might I control my anger? How might I experience the spirituality of sexual intimacy? How can I bestow appropriate honor on a difficult parent? How might I accept my own suffering and the suffering of those whom I love? Enter the Talmudic study house with innovative teacher Rabbi Amy Scheinerman and continue the Jewish values–based conversations that began two thousand years ago. The Talmud of Relationships, Volume 1 shows how the ancient Jewish texts of Talmud can facilitate modern relationship-building—with parents, children, spouses, family members, friends, and ourselves. Scheinerman devotes each chapter to a different Talmud text exploring relationships—and many of the selections are fresh, largely unknown passages. Overcoming the roadblocks of language and style that can keep even the curious from diving into Talmud, she walks readers through the logic of each passage, offering full textual translations and expanding on these richly complex conversations, so that each of us can weigh multiple perspectives and draw our own conclusions. Scheinerman provides grounding in why the selected passage matters, its historical background, a gripping narrative of the rabbis’ evolving commentary, insightful anecdotes and questions for thought and discussion, and a cogent synopsis. Through this firsthand encounter with the core text of Judaism, readers of all levels—Jews and non-Jews, newcomers and veterans, students and teachers, individuals and chevruta partners and families alike—will discover the treasure of the oral Torah.

Carnal Israel

Carnal Israel PDF Author: Daniel Boyarin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520917125
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Beginning with a startling endorsement of the patristic view of Judaism—that it was a "carnal" religion, in contrast to the spiritual vision of the Church—Daniel Boyarin argues that rabbinic Judaism was based on a set of assumptions about the human body that were profoundly different from those of Christianity. The body—specifically, the sexualized body—could not be renounced, for the Rabbis believed as a religious principle in the generation of offspring and hence in intercourse sanctioned by marriage. This belief bound men and women together and made impossible the various modes of gender separation practiced by early Christians. The commitment to coupling did not imply a resolution of the unequal distribution of power that characterized relations between the sexes in all late-antique societies. But Boyarin argues strenuously that the male construction and treatment of women in rabbinic Judaism did not rest on a loathing of the female body. Thus, without ignoring the currents of sexual domination that course through the Talmudic texts, Boyarin insists that the rabbinic account of human sexuality, different from that of the Hellenistic Judaisms and Pauline Christianity, has something important and empowering to teach us today.

Rereading The Rabbis

Rereading The Rabbis PDF Author: Judith Hauptman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429966202
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Fully acknowledging that Judaism, as described in both the Bible and the Talmud, was patriarchal, Judith Hauptman demonstrates that the rabbis of the Talmud made significant changes in key areas of Jewish law in order to benefit women. Reading the texts with feminist sensibilities, recognizing that they were written by men and for men and that the

The Newlywed's Guide to Physical Intimacy

The Newlywed's Guide to Physical Intimacy PDF Author: Jennie Rosenfeld
Publisher: Gefen Books
ISBN: 9789652295354
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Sexuality is a beautiful part of life - truly a gift from God. As a young couple about to embark on one of life's most important journeys, may you have only joy and success.

Jewish-Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity

Jewish-Christian Dialogues on Scripture in Late Antiquity PDF Author: Michal Bar-Asher Siegal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107195365
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Marshalling previously untapped Christian materials, Bar-Asher Siegal offers radically new insights into Talmudic stories about Scriptural debates with Christian heretics.

Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine

Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine PDF Author: Richard Kalmin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198041799
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The Babylonian Talmud was compiled in the third through sixth centuries CE, by rabbis living under Sasanian Persian rule in the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. What kind of society did these rabbis inhabit? What effect did that society have on important rabbinic texts? In this book Richard Kalmin offers a thorough reexamination of rabbinic culture of late antique Babylonia. He shows how this culture was shaped in part by Persia on the one hand, and by Roman Palestine on the other. The mid fourth century CE in Jewish Babylonia was a period of particularly intense "Palestinianization," at the same time that the Mesopotamian and east Persian Christian communities were undergoing a period of intense "Syrianization." Kalmin argues that these closely related processes were accelerated by third-century Persian conquests deep into Roman territory, which resulted in the resettlement of thousands of Christian and Jewish inhabitants of the eastern Roman provinces in Persian Mesopotamia, eastern Syria, and western Persia, profoundly altering the cultural landscape for centuries to come. Kalmin also offers new interpretations of several fascinating rabbinic texts of late antiquity. He shows how they have often been misunderstood by historians who lack attentiveness to the role of anonymous editors in glossing or emending earlier texts and who insist on attributing these texts to sixth century editors rather than to storytellers and editors of earlier centuries who introduced changes into the texts they learned and transmitted. He also demonstrates how Babylonian rabbis interacted with the non-rabbinic Jewish world, often in the form of the incorporation of centuries-old non-rabbinic Jewish texts into the developing Talmud, rather than via the encounter with actual non-rabbinic Jews in the streets and marketplaces of Babylonia. Most of these texts were "domesticated" prior to their inclusion in the Babylonian Talmud, which was generally accomplished by means of the rabbinization of the non-rabbinic texts. Rabbis transformed a story's protagonists into rabbis rather than kings or priests, or portrayed them studying Torah rather than engaging in other activities, since Torah study was viewed by them as the most important, perhaps the only important, human activity. Kalmin's arguments shed new light on rabbinic Judaism in late antique society. This book will be invaluable to any student or scholar of this period.

Hermeneutics of Holiness

Hermeneutics of Holiness PDF Author: Naomi Koltun-Fromm
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019988997X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
In Hermeneutics of Holiness , Naomi Koltun-Fromm examines the ancient nexus of holiness and sexuality and explores its roots in the biblical texts as well as its manifestations throughout ancient and late-ancient Judaism and early Syriac Christianity. In the process, she tells the story of how the biblical notions of "holy person" and "holy community" came to be defined by the sexual and marriage practices of various interpretive communities in late antiquity. Koltun-Fromm seeks to explain why sexuality, especially sexual restraint, became a primary demarcation of sacred community boundaries among Jews and Christians in fourth-century Persian-Mesopotamia. She charts three primary manifestations of holiness: holiness ascribed, holiness achieved, and holiness acquired through ritual purity. Hermeneutics of Holiness traces the development of these three concepts, from their origin in the biblical texts to the Second Temple literature (both Jewish and Christian) to the Syriac Christian and rabbinic literature of the fourth century. In so doing, this book establishes the importance of biblical interpretation for late ancient Jewish and Christian practices, the centrality of holiness as a category for self-definition, and the relationship of fourth-century asceticism to biblical texts and interpretive history.