Authors: David Biale
ISBN-13: 9780520211346, ISBN-10: 0520211340
Format: Paperback
Publisher: University of California Press
Date Published: October 1997
Edition: 1st Edition
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.
"This trailblazing book . . . exposes the evolving and often contradictory attitudes of Jews toward sexuality. One comes away with a fresh sense of the variegated nature of Jewish historical experience, and not only in regard to sexuality."Robert Alter, author of The World of Biblical Literature
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.)
Preface | ||
Introduction: Dilemmas of Desire | 1 | |
Ch. 1 | Sexual Subversions in the Bible | 11 |
Ch. 2 | Law and Desire in the Talmud | 33 |
Ch. 3 | Rabbinic Authority and Popular Culture in Medieval Europe | 60 |
Ch. 4 | Sensuality, Asceticism, and Medieval Jewish Philosophy | 86 |
Ch. 5 | Sexuality and Spirituality in the Kabbalah | 101 |
Ch. 6 | The Displacement of Desire in Eighteenth-Century Hasidism | 121 |
Ch. 7 | Eros and Enlightenment | 149 |
Ch. 8 | Zionism as an Erotic Revolution | 176 |
Ch. 9 | Sexual Stereotypes in American Jewish Culture | 204 |
Epilogue: Creating Desire | 228 | |
Notes | 231 | |
Bibliography of Selected Secondary Works | 295 | |
Index | 309 |