#daniel boyarin

[maimonidiva]

this passage from Unheroic Conduct has been rolling around in my head for the past two days bc of how neatly it fits into and connects to just about any official german discourse on antisemitism rn, had a whole thing typed out but it's probably self explanatory

[iustuspeccator]

Seeing the tiniest bit of "are Mormons Christian?" discourse going around today and rather than sharing my opinion (which is, by the way, the correct one) I want to talk about a history book I read.

so I was reading Daniel Boyarin's essay ("Semantic Differences; or, 'Judaism'/'Christianity'") in The Ways That Never Parted, which is a 2001 book of essays on Jewish-Christian relations and development in late antiquity. He has a really fascinating argument that I would be publicly executed for stating on tumblr, and explaining it was making this post too long.

One important thing he talked about was this gradient model of grouping things. The kind of original model of this is that people generally agreed, when polled, that robins and other songbirds are the best examples of birds, and ostriches, emus and penguins are some of the worst examples. And from there you cluster birds around this prototype model of songbirds in a gradient, but they're all birds. Boyarin suggests that we could do this for Judaisms (including early Jewish Christianities) in the first centuries.

But finally, he asks, does the ostrich think the robin is the best example of the bird? And does the robin get to decide? I think it's a relevant question in a lot of areas. Who is in the center of the Christian gradient? Is it American Evangelicals? The Catholic church? Can we really say that Mormons aren't in the gradient at all? And who gets to decide? Catholics? Non-Christians? Me? And to what purpose do we argue if Mormons are or are not Christians?

This is not in any way a rebuttal of the post that I saw, otherwise I would have reblogged that post. I've just been thinking about this model of organization for the last 24 hours and wanted to talk about it and this was the first opportunity

[pempelune]

If we are for ourselves alone, what are we?

On the stairs of my synagogue, in Berkeley, on Rosh Hashanah this year, I was told that I should be praying in a mosque, and versions of this, less crude perhaps, are being hurled at Jews daily by other Jews. I don't wish to romanticize my situation. It is not I who is suffering; my only personal pain is the pain of living on the margins, and that, too, has its privileges.

More piercing to me is the pain of watching a tradition, my Judaism, to which I have dedicated my life, morally disintegrating before my eyes. It has been said by many Christians that Christianity died at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor. I fear—G-d forbid—that my Judaism may be dying at Nablus, Daheishe, Bethel, and Hebron. The violent actions taken in the name of defense may help some Jewish bodies survive (and even that only dubiously, temporarily, momentarily), but they threaten to empty Jewish existence of all meaning, to make hollow the resistance for two thousand years to being dissolved into the majority. If we are not for ourselves, other Jews say to me, who will be for us? And I answer, but if we are for ourselves alone, what are we?

[asmallcoat]

@peter-pantomime called my recent thriftbooks order p*rnographic 😔 😏

[saintmelangell]

Rather than seeing Christianity as a new invention, seeing it as one of the paths that Judaism took—a path as ancient in its sources as the one that rabbinic Jews trod—has a majesty of its own. Many Jews were expecting the divine- human Messiah, the Son of Man. Many accepted Jesus as that figure, while others did not. Although there is pre- cious little pre-Christian evidence among Jews for the suf- fering of the Messiah, there are good reasons to consider this too no stumbling block for the “Jewishness” of the ideas about the Messiah, Jesus as well. Let me make clear I am not claiming that Jesus and his followers contributed nothing new to the story of a suffering and dying Messiah; I am not, of course, denying them their own religious creativity.I am claiming that even this innovation, if indeed they innovated, was entirely within the spirit and hermeneutical method of ancient Judaism, and not a scandalous departure from it.

Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels : The Story of the Jewish Christ

[power-chords]

[maimonidiva]

Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man

[maimonidiva]

Leaving aside the line of reasoning based on the literal reading, the reading according to Shmuel gives us model of thought in which that which is societally expected of women is framed as what women want, by acting counter to which the man brings about the dissolution of the marriage. Boyarin writes on this complex structuring of biopolitics:

Discursive practices related to female desire that appear in the Talmud and Midrash constitute a structure that functions as an equivalent to the "conjugal right" of European legal discourse in terms of the ordering of sexual relations between the genders, even as the structure does so without sanctioning physical force or economic coercion. The hegemonic rabbinic discourse provides for male sex-right paradoxically through a mystifying construction of women as being needy for sex and of men as being primarily service providers to their wives. [...] In other words, through the construction of sexuality as a form of husband taking care of the wife's needs and through the construction of her needs as both compelling and in part inexpressible, virtually the same effect in terms of the differential political meanings of women's and men's bodies is achieved as that which Pateman has discussed for the Western sexual contract, with one enormous difference: it is accomplished without physical violence – indeed with a strong execration of any violence in association with sex – on one hand, and with the absolute right in principle of the wife to say no strongly encoded in law on the other.

Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man

We might, on the other hand, take a different approach entirely: the contraceptive is what separates sex for pleasure from sex for reproduction, and, following Zinger's analysis of Cairo genizah documents, we can see how physical force and economic coercion did very much occur in the marital relationship, as well as how social relationships were women's main form of capital and thus it was very much in women's interest to secure stable relationships that would last into times of potential precarity, such as divorce:

It is also important to understand what costudy meant for women, [a]s [...] the primary form of power for women was their social relationships. As a woman grew older, her supportive kin changed from her father, to her brother, and finally to her children. Thus, cementing the relationship with her children was a woman's most important investment for the future. Therefore, at divorce, it was of paramount importance to retain custody of the children, especially the boys (girls were in any case given over to their mother's custody). To signal women's love for their children as the cause of these compromises not only construes husbands' attempts to shirk their responsibility as natural and transparent but also distorts women's difficult predicament as they had to compromise their immediate economic circumstances for their future prospects.

Oded Zinger, Living with the Law: Gender and Community Among the Jews of Medieval Egypt

While both texts give us somewhat contradictory views on our sugya, keeping in mind that both refer to time periods that are not congruent with that of the Talmud, we can nontheless see how the textual system resigning women to the family, excluding them from being actors in the process of halakhah-making, creates a societal system in which the cards are stacked against them one way or another, in which women's consent is at all times a point of compromise.