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12 - Sexuality in Jewish Traditions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2024

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Mathew Kuefler
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
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Summary

This chapter discusses the teachings of the rabbinic sages in Late Antiquity who worked in fundamental ways with the biblical traditions transmitted to and by them. The Hebrew Bible, whose precise shape was still under discussion in the first century CE, provided the rabbinic sages with ancient normative and legal traditions that they reinterpreted and expanded. The large archive of rabbinic traditions provides us with a tremendous wealth of representations of sexual practices, desires, and discourses, often in tension with each other, that reverberate throughout Jewish history. It further provides a framework and language for contemporary Jewish discourses of sexuality, including newly emerging identities, individual and communal, specifically for Jewish LGBTQ+ people. Three topics out of many possible have been selected for this chapter: obligations of marriage, reproduction, and same-sex and queer sexualities. They represent three topics of perennial debate in Jewish traditions around the world. For each, rabbinic texts and especially the Talmud have played a pre-eminent role in shaping the debates over the centuries.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Biale, David. Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America. New York: Harper Collins/Basic Books, 1992.Google Scholar
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Boyarin, Daniel. Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Cohen, Jeremy. Be Fertile and Increase, Fill the Earth and Master It: The Ancient and Medieval Career of a Biblical Text. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Drinkwater, Gregg, Lesser, Joshua, and Shneer, David, eds. Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. New York: New York University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Dzmura, Noach, ed. Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2009.Google Scholar
Fonrobert, Charlotte. Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fonrobert, Charlotte. ‘Regulating the Human Body: Rabbinic Legal Discourse and the Making of Jewish Gender’. In Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature, ed. Fonrobert, C. and Jaffee, M., 270–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenberg, Steven. Wrestling with God: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.Google Scholar
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Rosen-Zvi, Yishai. Demonic Desires: ‘Yetzer Hara’ and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Wegner, Judith R. Chattel or Person: The Status of Women in Mishnah. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Wheeler-Reed, David. Regulating Sex in the Roman Empire: Ideology, the Bible, and the Early Christians. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.Google Scholar

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