Review of Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature
Max K. Strassfeld
University of California Press, 2022
Bereshit 1:27 could hardly be clearer: “Male and female he created them.”
Except that Eve hadn’t yet been created, which means that Adam, like God, was androgynous? Such matters understandably occupied the rabbis, then and now.
There are dozens of references to eunuchs and androgynes in the Talmud, all of which productively challenge the very idea of clarity when it comes to Jewish thinking about gender, and not just in antiquity. Paying attention to these moments means destabilizing the very foundations of Judaism, a project that could result in its destruction or guarantee its future.
Since the 1970s, we have seen Judaism, whatever that means, transformed by feminism and gay rights, though of course female rabbis, for example, much less queer rabbis, and trans rabbis, are not, obviously, recognized by the mainstream orthodox movements.
Inspired by Foucault and Boyarin
Inspired by the translation into English of Foucault’s histories of sexuality and then Daniel Boyarin’s pioneering work on the Jewish body, scholarly attention to sex and gender in Jewish Studies, especially in antiquity’s primary texts, experienced an astonishing explosion.
At first it was a matter of Jewish approaches to feminism and homosexuality, led by Jacob Neusser, Rachel Biale, Judith Plaskow, Ilana Pardes, and Judith Hauptman, and then Cynthis Baker, Judith Baskin, and Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert. Jewish academics then turned to trans issues, which got their own scholarly journal, Trans Studies Quarterly, starting in 2014.
Now we have Max K. Strassfeld’s Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature, an enormously learned and humane, an all-too-rare combination, study of how the rabbis in Judea and Babylon in late antiquity, more or less from the destruction of the Second Temple until the rise of Islam, understood and confronted questions related to sex and gender diversity.
The title may seem restrictive in terms of the types of bodies Strassfeld is interested in, but it should come as no surprise that the Talmud fearlessly confronts Jewish legal attitudes towards a variety of embodiments.
Saris, androginos, ayolonit, tumtum
From the saris (who is essentially what we know as a eunuch, a male without a penis and/or testicles), to the androginos (the Hebrew word comes from the Greek for a body with both male and female body parts), to the aylonit (an infertile woman who often has body characteristics associated with males) to the tumtum (a non-binary person whose genitalia is either hidden or missing).
And this doesn’t even consider the ways in which one body might belong to more than one category over the course of a lifetime. Such categories do not of course easily harmonize with the ways in which we talk about sex and gender diversity today, but that becomes for Strassfeld an opportunity as opposed to an obstacle.
Re-reading the Talmud
‘Transing the Talmud’ is not so much an effort to turn the text – which is of course not even one text – into one that is acceptable to current sensibilities, as an attempt to recognize the ways in which re-reading what the Talmud has to say about sex and gender, and the way in which it says it, creates new possibilities for understanding those sensibilities.
Readers invested in orthodoxy might be put off by references to queer yeshivot in the first few pages, but stopping there would be a mistake, especially for a book about the Talmud, which so boldly questions everything, and which remains so relevant.
Strassfeld productively explains, for example, what the rabbinic corpus teaches us about a recent Mississippi law that addresses issues of access to public bathrooms by defining ‘male’ and ‘female’ as determined at birth by both anatomy and genetics.
Some of this does feel like inside baseball. When Strassfeld addresses the complex relations between the terms ‘transsexual’ and ‘transgender’ and explains how the latter might be seen as dangerously heteronormative, it seems we are very deep into a world where few but academic specialists dare to go, and with reason.
It is difficult enough for a woman to study Talmud in the major Jewish institutions without insisting on a discussion about what we mean by ‘woman’.
Strassfeld, himself a trans person who teaches Religious Studies at the University of Southern California, makes the dubious claim that androgynes and eunuchs were central to the way the rabbis discussed sex and gender.
But it is still worth asking why they were so interested in what was then, as now, a relatively unusual phenomenon. The obvious answer is that so much of Jewish law, itself a dubious formulation, addresses the most complicated and exceptional legal consequences of defining sex and gender.
Curious and open-minded
This happens most prominently when it comes to the different obligations and privileges of men and women in matters of ritual purity, priestly service, and levirate marriage (the situation in which the brother of a married man who dies without having had children must marry his sister-in-law, in order to ensure the continuity of the family line). The rabbis were surprisingly curious and open-minded when it came to these issues, so much so that we might think twice before assuming that Judaism, however we understand it, must be characterized as always and only heteronormative. Indeed, the Talmud grants the androgyne a place in the natural order that contemporary religious and civil law in most of the world today does not. Mixtures and hybrids may be objectionable, but they exist, and recognizing that existence is a start, albeit a late one.
Androcentric and heterobinary approach
Strassfeld, sensitive to the ways in which the rabbinic taxonomies were shaped by their racial and colonial contexts – Roman and then Persian – begins by focussing on a few lines in the Babylonian Talmud that ask whether sex between a man and an androgyne must be considered as a violation of the Biblical prohibition in Vayikra 18:22 against men “lying with a man as they would with a woman.”
It should come as no shock to find that the rabbis disagree. After all, a more accurate translation of the passage reads: “With a male, do not lie the lyings of a woman.” It is a conversation that Strassfeld analyzes with a powerful subtlety, one that challenges the supposedly androcentric and heterobinary approach of the Jewish tradition, beginning with remembering that the word that the rabbis use for ‘anus’ elsewhere means ‘penis’!
Strassfeld does indulge in some orthodoxy of his own. Trendy references to the prison abolition movement, efforts to connect trans issues with Black Lives Matter, and the insistence on characterizing words and attitudes as forms of violence are unworthy of the honesty and subtlety of this book.
The attention to recent thinking about disability, on the other hand, is far more effective. But Strassfeld is deeply read, both in the primary texts of Jewish antiquity as well as Greek and Roman sources, not to mention recent gender theory, and it shows on every page.
Progressive politics and orthodox religious law
Harmonizing progressive politics and orthodox religious law is a project with built-in restrictions and limitations. Strassfeld’s subject belongs to the literature of social justice, where the biggest questions and the answers are suspiciously predictable, hence the tone of this book: bold and ambitious and yet also somehow passively conventional.
It seems to be the curse of working in the shadow of Foucault, whose interest in power relations resulted in always-interesting, if recondite, academic work, but highly formulaic conclusions, when it comes to politics and social change.
Acknowledging the historicity of nonbinary embodiment in the Talmud
That was of course also true when it came to race, feminism, disability, and gay studies, which have had such an important impact, so why should the same not be true of trans issues?
Trans rabbis might not be welcome in normative orthodox circles, but in acknowledging the historicity of nonbinary embodiment in the Talmud, with its rejection of fixed binary gender, and its supple vision of gender diversity as something other than a monstrous, unnatural deformity, Strassfeld helps us remember: Never say never.
cover: Trans Talmud, art My Jewish Learning
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