Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America / Edition 1

by David Biale

Overview

Contradictory stereotypes about Jewish sexuality pervade modern culture, from Lenny Bruce's hip eroticism to Woody Allen's little man with the big libido (and even bigger sexual neurosis). Does Judaism in fact liberate or repress sexual desire? David Biale does much more than answer that question as he traces Judaism's evolving position on sexuality, from the Bible and Talmud to Zionism up through American attitudes today. What he finds is a persistent conflict between asceticism and gratification, between procreation and pleasure.

From the period of the Talmud onward, Biale says, Jewish culture continually struggled with sexual abstinence, attempting to incorporate the virtues of celibacy, as it absorbed them from Greco-Roman and Christian cultures, within a theology of procreation. He explores both the canonical writings of male authorities and the alternative voices of women, drawing from a fascinating range of sources that includes the Book of Ruth, Yiddish literature, the memoirs of the founders of Zionism, and the films of Woody Allen.

Biale's historical reconstruction of Jewish sexuality sees the present through the past and the past through the present. He discovers an erotic tradition that is not dogmatic, but a record of real people struggling with questions that have challenged every human culture, and that have relevance for the dilemmas of both Jews and non-Jews today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520211346
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	10/03/1997
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

David Biale is Koret Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He is the author of Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (1979) and Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History (1986), both of which won the National Jewish Book Award.

Table of Contents

PREFACE 
INTRODUCTION: Dilemmas of Desire

Chapter 1 Sexual Subversions in the Bible 
Chapter 2 Law and Desire in the Talmud 
Chapter 3 Rabbinic Authority and Popular Culture in Medieval Europe 
Chapter 4 Sensuality, Asceticism, and Medieval Jewish Philosophy 
Chapter 5 Sexuality and Spirituality in the Kabbalah 
Chapter 6 The Displacement of Desire in Eighteenth- Century Hasidism 
Chapter 7 Eros and Enlightenment 
Chapter 8 Zionism as an Erotic Revolution 
Chapter 9 Sexual Stereotypes in American Jewish Culture 

EPILOGUE: Creating Desire 
NOTES 
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SELECTED SECONDARY  WORKS 
INDEX

Editorial Reviews

Critiquing a body of texts that runs a wide gamut from the Bible to Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint , this fine, authoritative history of Jewish sexuality may well become a standard reference. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This engaging history of Jewish sexuality from biblical times to the modern era attempts to answer this question: Is the nature of Judaism and the Jewish tradition ascetic and repressive or sensual and liberatory? Biale ( Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History , Schocken, 1986) shows that Jewish sexuality certainly is not monolithic in nature but exhibits both poles--that of asceticism and gratification--which have been in conflict with each other through the ages. The author covers the entire spectrum from the biblical period, the Talmudic era, the Rabbinic writings, the medieval philosophers, Hasidim, and the modern enlightenment to contemporary American Jewish culture exemplified by Philip Roth's notorious novel Portnoy's Complaint (1969). This volume, scholarly yet accessible to general readers, should remain a basic treatment of an intriguing subject for some time.-- Robert A. Silver, Shaker Heights P.L., Ohio

Library Journal