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On Carnal Israel and the Consequences:Talmudic Studies since Foucault Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Assistant Professor Ten years ago, Naomi Seidman published a rather provocative review essay about a number of works that had appeared in the early nineties and that were all devoted to the Jewish body in one form or another, albeit in most cases the male Jewish body.1 The essay, "Carnal Knowledge: Sex and the Body in Jewish Studies,"2 opened by observing that the "newly forming field"—consisting of five books at that point in time3 —reflected a larger trend in the humanities and the social sciences, attributed by Seidman (and many others) to the enormous influence of Michel Foucault's work, especially on the U.S. academic scene—to which we may add the influence of the feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s and the ensuing interest in gender studies. Concern with the body had reasserted itself in the humanities, in a turn against the Western intellectual tradition and its mind/body problem, according to which, as Peter Brooks put it, "the body is the other of soul or mind, and its place in life, while highly important, is not the same as that of the self."4 As has so [End Page 462] often been the case, Jewish studies lagged behind in the conversation, although in this instance with only a relatively minor delay.5 At the same time, Seidman contended, the books under review had to be placed in the context of a specifically Jewish conversation, one "as old as Jewish Studies itself," that dealt with, for example, the meanings of circumcision, the Jewish nose, and the age-old association of Judaism with carnality. The topics of this conversation have often been determined by non-Jews, thereby lending it a rather apologetic tone. For example, the agenda of Wissenschaft des Judentums was to legitimate its place in the (German) academy by being hyperphilological and privileging philosophical and theological discourses in Jewish culture and history, thus "spiritualizing" or "intellectualizing" Judaism.6 But perhaps, Seidman mused, the emerging rehabilitation of the "erotic" or "carnal" Jew might be considered "yet another apologetic framing of Jewish experience, directed this time to a different audience, but one perhaps no less dogmatic."7 She does not spell out who this audience might be—the humanities in the United States at large, those scholars who engage cultural or critical theory, the Modern Language Association? Instead, her essay proceeds to question at great the "political agenda"8 of at least three of the works under review in terms of their goal of changing Jewish culture and its gender issues, interrogating as well their plea of relevance, directed at the nonacademic Jewish community. Ten years after Seidman's essay, the question is whether we can indeed speak of "a field of body studies" in Jewish studies, a "corporeal turn" no less, that has changed the field of Jewish studies, its focus, practices, and methods. Some anecdotal evidence: A brief survey of the dissertations currently registered at the AJS/AAJR Web site certainly does not reveal an onslaught of interest in body studies. Of the thirty-nine dissertations listed there, only a few deal with body-related issues, such as food practices; some (certainly not a majority) employ gender as an analytic [End Page 463] category, but not necessarily with a corporeal twist, and only one mentions "body" as a hermeneutic category in its abstract.9 Similarly, when one glances through the program booklets of the last two or three AJS meetings, one does not discern an immense interest in the body either as a subject of discussion or as a hermeneutic category. Without establishing a more sound statistical assessment, I venture to guess from a quick glance at the programs that the overwhelming majority of papers presented at the AJS are devoted to topics in modern Jewish thought, more or less traditional historiography of Jews, halakhic principles in the responsa literature, and so forth. The publication market is perhaps more diversified and has more to offer. Here, next to the kind of work that foregrounds the body as a hermeneutic category, a number of recent books deal with corporeal matters...
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