Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture by Daniel Boyarin Read Free Book Online Page B

it is unnecessary to say "the house of his fellow", one who holds his penis while urinating, one who urinates naked in front of his bed, 18 and one who has intercourse while any living creature is watching.
Rav Yehuda said to Shmuel: Even in front of mice.
He said to him: Wise-guy, 19 No, it refers to those like the household of John Doe who have intercourse in front of their male and female slaves.
17. David Biale reminded me of the importance of this material in this context.
18. The first of these regulations is apparently intended to prevent a man from catching the women of his house nude; the second is aimed at avoiding a possible temptation to masturbate; the purpose of the third is mysterious to me.
19. This is apparently a somewhat pejorative endearment that Shmuel used with this sometimes overly clever student of his. Literally, it means "toothy," which may be a reference to overly sharp scholastic teeth.

 
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And as for them, how did they justify their practice biblically? Sit here with the donkey [Gen. 22:5]with the people that is like a donkey.
Rabbah the son of Rav Huna used to ring the bells around the bed [ another reading: drive away the horse flies]. Abbaye drove the flies away. Rava drove away the mosquitoes.
Rabbi Shim'on the Palestinian holy man established an extreme rule for privacy during sex. No living creature should be present. While Shmuel (an early Babylonian authority) seemingly attempted to ameliorate this rule, the later Babylonian Rabbis endorsed it unequivocally. Shmuel regards it simply as an attack on the Roman practice of having intercourse in the presence of slaves, a practice that indeed involved the assumption that slaves are not somehow human (Veyne 1987, 7273). However, his successors understood "living creature" quite literally and vied with each other to drive away smaller and smaller living creatures before having intercourse with their wives. The first view, that of Rabbah the son of Rav Huna, is ambiguous, because of a difference of reading between different talmudic manuscripts. According to our received text, endorsed and interpreted by Rashi, he drove away the human beings by ringing a bell indicating that he was going to sleep with his wife, showing that his view was like that of Shmuel, but according to Eastern manuscript traditions, he drove away horse-flies, manifesting support for Rav Yehuda's position. In any case, two of his fellows vied with each other: Abbaye drove the flies away and Rava even the much smaller mosquitoes. We cannot know, of course, precisely what Rabbi Shim'on's position was (or indeed what he said), but it is certainly possible that the statement was made in reaction to prevailing Roman practices of treating slaves as virtual non-persons, who were often privy to their masters' sexual behavior. The interpretations of the other Rabbis would then represent a much more extreme version of that reaction. 20 Now, there may be no doubting that these regulations were understood as promoting that rabbinic ideal of "modesty"; however, the very extremes of privacy that were encoded in the practice also promoted the notions of intimacy and freedom in sexual behavior. Veyne points out that the Roman practice amounted to constant surveillance (ibid). In sharp contrast, the rabbinic reaction to that
20. It could be, however, that the Babylonian Rabbis, for whom the custom of Romans having sex with their servants present was unknown, simply misunderstood Rabbi Shim'on's dictum and took it literally to mean "any creature."

 
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practice produced (willy-nilly?) an extreme renunciation, once more, of surveillance of the conduct of the marriage bed. Rav Kahana's practice of "It is Torah" is also totally excluded by this principle.
In what follows in the talmudic passage, once more a law that seems to