Rafael Neis, “Visual Eros,” chapter 4, [proofs]

Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      April ,  : c ha pt e r fo u r Visual eros Eyes are the most delicate, most powerful hands, imponderably touching the other over-there. Hélène Cixous Perhaps nowhere are the effects of the eye as vivid as in the realm of the erotic. The slipperiness of vision, its potency, its adjacency to and confusion with touch, its effects on both seer and seen, aroused fear and excitement in ancient people. By the time we can speak of the early rabbis, somewhere in the first or second century ce, a panoply of cultural traditions and practices circulated in the Near East whereby sight, desire, and sexuality were precariously entangled. Across ancient sources, from Mesopotamia to Israel to Greece, we find nearly all looking, whether setting one’s eyes upon a person’s form or body or the exchange of a glance, could both express and arouse desire, lust, or love. Such notions and a variety of practices built thereon persisted into late antiquity and well beyond, including in the writings of those such as Cixous and Merleau-Ponty and in everyday notions of “love at first sight.” Greek-speaking novelists and Latin poets capitalized on them; Jewish and Christian sources attempted to police and regulate them.    Cixous, “Writing blind,” . E.g. Shamhat’s seduction of Enkidu, which is very explicit about how Shamhat’s display of her body arouses Enkidu in Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet I, Column ; on visual eros in the epic, see Walls, Desire, Discord, and Death, –. For further discussions of visual arousal, see Winter, “Sex”; Bahrani, Women of Babylon. The literature on visual eroticism in ancient Greek culture is enormous (e.g. Frontisi-Ducroux, “Eros, desire and the gaze”; Plato, Cratylus b for an account of how eros flows through the eyes). While vision and sexuality is a persistent theme in biblical narrative and law (e.g. Genesis :,  Samuel :, Ezekiel :–), the Song of Songs exemplifies its use in poetry. On gender and eroticism in the Bible, see Brenner, Intercourse. Rosen Zvi, “Bilhah the temptress”; Glancy, “The accused.”  Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros Consider this rabbinic example: A story about Rabban Gamaliel who was standing on temple steps when he saw [ra’ah] a certain idolater [female] who was exceedingly beautiful [na’ah beyoter]. He said, “Lord, how great are your works.” The rabbinic story puts this Tannaitic law to the test: One who sees beautiful human beings or beautiful trees says, “Blessed is the one who has created such beautiful creatures.” On the one hand, this law mandates the recognition of human (along with arboreal) beauty by reciting a blessing; on the other hand, what is a venerable rabbi doing gazing at a woman, and a gentile woman at that? The Palestinian version of this story puts it this way: “was it the habit of Rabban Gamaliel to gaze (lehistakkel ) at women”? The story exonerates Rabban Gamaliel, stating that “even if he had seen a beautiful camel, a beautiful horse, or a beautiful donkey,” he would have made a blessing, but regardless, the rabbi was caught along “a winding road, like a curved path into a town, and gazed against her against his will.” By the time the narrative reaches Babylonia, the unease, laced with irreverence, becomes full-fledged consternation. The Babylonian rabbis raise the stakes, challenging the rabbi’s behavior by citing prohibitions against blessing the beauty of idolaters, as well as laws against gazing at beautiful women (even if unmarried), married women (even if ugly), women’s colorful clothing, or mating animals. They eventually rescue the rabbi with the same excuse: poor urban planning. This narrative, and its framing in Palestinian and Babylonian sources, brings to life many of the late-antique rabbinic anxieties about, and preoccupations with, vision and sex. These worries were not unique to the rabbis – late-antique Christians, for instance, also shared them. The sense that looking, particularly at sexual matters, is somehow more than “just” looking, is still alive today. We see this in a range of phenomena: from moral arguments and scientific studies about the effects of these sights on the viewer, to debates about      B. ‘Avodah Zarah a (y. Berakhot :, b–c; y. ‘Avodah Zarah :, a–b). T. Berakhot :. See the blessing in b. Berakhot b for “one who goes about in Nisan and sees trees (veh.aze ilane) sprouting”; cf. m. Avot :. Both y. Berakhot :, b–c and y. ‘Avodah Zarah :, a–b cite a teaching of R. Yoh.anan in which “do not show mercy (teh.annem)” Deuteronomy : is read as “do not grant (titten) them grace (h.en).” The Bavli also cites a teaching of Rav, “a person is not allowed to say, ‘How beautiful is this [female] idolater.’” Y. Berakhot :, b–c; y. ‘Avodah Zarah :, a–b. In the Bavli’s terms, “but is looking (le’istakkule) even permitted?” Sokoloff, Dictionary of Palestinian Aramaic, , s.v. prosdos. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Visual eros April ,  :  pornography, censorship, and childhood, to the strong responses to the visibility of women by ultra-orthodox Jews in contemporary Israel. Our concern here is to investigate the landscape of the ancient world, rife with objects of and ideas about visual desire. As we have already noted, for the ancients, and for rabbis among them, seeing was intertwined with, and often inseparable from, the sense of touch; as a result, seeing sexually was experienced as an even more physical, embodied, and affective phenomenon than we may think of it today. While Palestinian Amoraic tradition teaches that one ought to enjoy all that one sees, Palestinian rabbis, and their Babylonian brethren, also expressed much ambivalence about what it meant to navigate the dangerous and delightful world of vision and desire. As we will see, the rabbis loved to look, even if only (and somewhat paradoxically) in order to better legislate prohibition. The story about Rabban Gamaliel captures many of the themes that arise in rabbinic reflections on visual eros, or the desiring gaze. There is the pleasure and delight in vision, with the designation of “beauty” expressing the visual pleasure an object gives to its viewer(s). The story makes a woman beautiful, following a longstanding trope that associates beauty with the feminine and that sees feminine beauty as both asset and liability. We will turn to this notion of beauty as a feminine characteristic in section  of this chapter. This story also underscores rabbinic concern about the appropriateness of rabbis looking at women. Packed into this concern are assumptions about the inevitability of certain gendered divisions of visual labor, in terms of who sees and who is seen. This brings us to the central concern of this chapter: the gendering of vision in the realm of desire. If our guiding question concerns how the rabbis understood and dealt with erotic vision, then our answer quickly   Contemporary discussions, whether posed in moral or scientific terms, about the effects of viewing pornography (or violence), reveal that we, too, remain concerned about whether certain kinds of seeing are “merely” looking. Research on the brain activity of various kinds of spectators has shown that engaged viewers’ brains light up as if they were actually partaking in the activity being watched, suggesting the existence of “mirror neurons” that break down binary conceptions of subject/object and activity/passivity in the perceptual and visual realm (Dill, Fantasy; Barker and Petley (eds.), Ill Effects). Examples of religious discussions about censorship and self-preservation include the following: Struthers, Wired for Intimacy, aimed at Christian men, “married and single alike,” which uses psychological concepts; www.guardureyes.com, an ultra-orthodox Jewish website aimed at overcoming visual temptation on the Web and in the everyday environment, which has the endorsement of several prominent ultra-orthodox rabbis, blends rabbinic and addiction therapy discourse. For various haredi responses to female visibility, see Moshe-David, “Tiberias”; MakoverBalikov, “Women of the veil”; Rotem, “Mother Taliban”; Nagler-Cohen, “Taliban Rabbis”; Novick, “Sight unseen.” Y. Qiddushin :, d: “In the world to come every person will have to give an account for what his eye saw but he did not eat.” Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros makes apparent the extent to which visual eros was gendered. The most obvious visual paradigm is gendered in binary terms: Vision is a predominantly masculine act with a feminine visual object. This division of visual labor, or separation between viewing subject and visual object, fits within a heterovisual frame. In the most simplified versions of this paradigm, gender is aligned with sex so that the gaze is not only masculine but also male, and the visual object is not only feminized but female, thus overlapping with a heterosexual paradigm of desire. As John Berger put it, “According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome – men act and women appear. Men look at women.” However, as we saw in Chapter , and as our investigation here will uncover, the rabbis imagined a more complex variety of gender configurations. As discussed in the previous chapter, Laura Mulvey and others generated the paradigm of the male gaze / female visual object in order to analyze viewing and visual culture. With all its noted insufficiencies, like many paradigms it provides a useful starting point for thinking that may eventually transcend it. Our investigation in these pages will move outward from this binary paradigm of visual eros to explore how visuality served as a site for both the production and the troubling of gender in rabbinic literature. I thus begin in the next section (“Genitalia and the gender of the gaze”) by examining an instance of rabbinic erotic visuality that, on the surface, corresponds with this simplest binary formulation. Here, later Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis construct hypothetical cases exploring whether a man can recite the Shema prayer while looking at female body parts, including genitalia. However, the rabbis also consider scenarios in which male genitalia come into view, whether of self or others. Here, a simple gendered binary of male viewer / female visual object begins to break down. The gaze, and the ways it renders the world and its objects visible, becomes a means by which the rabbis understand gender and subjectivity. The following section, “Visual asceticism,” treats some of the varieties of visual prohibition, which border on forms of visual asceticism. I argue   Berger, Ways of Seeing, , . See Mulvey, “Visual pleasure,” and Chapter , n. . Mulvey analyzed Hollywood cinema which frames its female subjects as objects of a male, scopophiliac gaze. Freud used the notion of scopophilia to think about the love of looking as connected to the sex drive and knowledge. Mulvey describes how scopophilia “arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight” (Mulvey, “Visual pleasure,” –). For examples of the usage of psychoanalytical notions of the gaze and scopophilia in classical literature, see Fredrick, Roman Gaze, –; Sutherland, “How (not) to look at a woman.” Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Genitalia and the gender of the gaze April ,  :  that an expansive conception of prohibited visually erotic objects has a paradoxically stimulating effect on visual eros and examine the implications for gender of the rabbinic refusal to look at potential objects of desire. At first sight, just as in the first section, the notion of men not looking might seem to conform to a simple gender binary of visual labor. However, as in the first section, I show how, particularly in the Bavli, extreme visual abstention, results in a subversion and even reversal of expected gender roles. The third section, “Beautiful men,” considers the vicissitudes of gaze and gender in the context of rabbinic discourse on beautiful men, exploitative imperial gazing, and intra-rabbinic visual eros. A central argument in this chapter is that the erotic eye was crucial to the rabbis both for the production of and for the troubling of gender. That is to say, while visual eros was bound up with the production and regulation of rabbinic gender, this gender paradigm did not maintain a rigid masculinity, nor was the rabbi necessarily the possessor of an active male gaze, with females as the only visual objects. The work of perfecting gender was unstable in its efficacy and thus was in need of ongoing iteration. Genitalia and the gender of the gaze In biblical writings, vision and sex are often bound together in the context of prohibition. Illicit sexual acts are described in visual terms as uncovering, revealing, or looking at genital nakedness (‘ervah); such acts are always, whether implicitly or explicitly, performed by a male actor. In addition to prohibited sexual acts, the sight of ‘ervah was also forbidden in the realm of the sacred, that is, on the altar or in the tabernacle. These concerns make their way into Tannaitic sources, though rarely in the language of vision and ‘ervah per se. In the Mishnah and the Tosefta, we find laws restricting the recitation of prayers in situations where genital nakedness might be encountered, as in certain areas in the bathhouse, or while one is naked oneself. While these usually concern male ritual actors, one such  hypothetical scenario, in m. H . allah, features a woman:    Exodus :, :– (priests covering ‘ervah); cf. t. Yoma :. For ‘ervah in sexual contexts, see, e.g., Leviticus  and Levine, Leviticus, –; Ezekiel :–, :. Preparations for mystical experiences include not looking at women; see Schäfer (ed.), Synopse, §, §. Cf. Leviticus Rabbah : (ed. Margaliot, ii:). E.g. t. Berakhot :, –; Sifre Deuteronomy  (ed. Finkelstein, ). See Satlow, “Constructions of nakedness.” H . allah concerns the obligation to put aside a portion of bread dough for priestly donation. A blessing is to be uttered upon so doing. The rabbis derive this obligation from Numbers :–. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros A woman may sit and separate her h.allah naked (‘arummah), because she can cover herself (lekhassot et ‘atsmah), but a man cannot. While the neutral term ‘arummah (naked) is used, rather than the loaded ‘ervah (genitalia), what needs to be covered is clear from the context. The distinction between men and women here implicitly follows differences in genital anatomy. The Mishnah’s concern here is exposure, but to no one’s eye in particular, and it treats the body of the ritual actor itself (male or female). The transformation of the Mishnah’s concerns in the later sources is quite stark. In the Talmuds, what was a question of nakedness becomes a discussion of ‘ervah, and crucially, both Talmuds introduce the language of vision in terms of the male gaze (see Table ). The Yerushalmi and Bavli refer to m. H . allah : but while that earlier tradition dealt with the permissibility of a woman or man reciting a blessing while naked – in other words, with a person’s status as ritual actor regarding his or her own body – here, the mishnah is read for a scenario in which a male ritual actor looks at a female visual object. Specifically m. H . allah : is seen to support a teaching that a woman’s rear is not ‘ervah; presumably the Talmuds understand the Mishnah to be saying that blessings may be uttered as long as female genitalia are covered but that it is permissible for the rear to remain exposed. The Yerushalmi’s discussion relates directly to m. H . allah :, whereas the Bavli cites our mishnah and related set of traditions in the context of ‘ervah and the recitation of the Shema. The Bavli’s discussion is part of a larger passage about the permissibility of reciting the Shema while in bed with one’s wife among other hypothetical bedmates. Both the Palestinian      M. H . allah :. On gendered postures and labor in halakhah, see Peskowitz, Spinning Fantasies, –,  n. . Cf. b. Ketubot b which compares the mored and the moredet in terms in the external (male, and in context more urgent) and internal (female, and in context less urgent) manifestations of their yetser, and b. Berakhot a “she can cover her face [i.e. genitalia] in the earth, but not the man.” For a feminist critique of visuality based on the apparent invisibility of women’s genitals and the visibility of men’s genitals, see Irigaray, Sex, . See the excellent analysis of y. H . allah :, c and b. Berakhot a (and parallels) in Brodsky, Bride, –, , –. It is possible that the Yerushalmi restricts the teaching that the rear is not ‘ervah not just to the case of “blessing” but also, implicitly, to the scenario described by in the Mishnah. The Bavli seems to be drawing from a similar (but not identical) set of traditions as that found in the Yerushalmi. This set of teachings comes from one context – a discussion of m. H . allah : and the general permissibility of gazing at portions of a woman, i.e. what constitutes forbidden ‘ervah – but is less than seamlessly integrated into another – saying Shema in bed. Thus, the line “his wife while reciting Shema” while paralleling the Yerushalmi’s distinction between general gazing and the case of blessing awkwardly interrupts the preceding debate about tefah versus finger and the subsequent discussion of thigh, voice, and hair. For the argument that the Yerushalmi draws from Babylonia, see Brodsky, Bride. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Genitalia and the gender of the gaze April ,  :  Table  y. H . allah :, c This (m. H . allah :) means that the rear is in no way ‘ervah. That which you say refers to blessing, but any gazing (lehabbit) whatsoever is forbidden. As it is taught [in a baraita]: He who gazes (hamistakkel ) at a woman’s heel (ba‘aqevah shel ishah), it is as if he gazes at her vagina (bet hareh.em). And he who gazes at a vagina, it is as if he had intercourse with her. Samuel said: “A woman’s voice is ‘ervah. What is the reason? “Indeed, by the voice of her promiscuity (mikkol zenutah) the land was defiled (Jeremiah :).” b. Berakhot a Rav Huna said: “The rear is in no way ‘ervah.” Say that this supports Rav Huna: “A woman may sit and separate her h.allah naked, because she can cover her nakedness in the ground, but a man cannot”. Rav Nah.man b. Isaac explained it: “For example, if her face [i.e. genitalia] were covered in the earth” . . . R. Isaac said: “A handbreadth in a woman constitutes ‘ervah.” How? If we were to say when gazing (le’istakkule) at it, has not Rav Sheshet said: “Why did scripture enumerate the external jewelry together with the internal? To tell you that he who gazes (hamistakkel ) at the little finger of a woman, it is as if he looked at her genitalia (maqom hatoref). Rather, [here] it is regarding his own wife, and when he recites the Shema. Rav H . isda said: “A woman’s thigh is ‘ervah, as it says, ‘Uncover your leg, pass through rivers’ (Isaiah :), and it says, ‘Your nakedness shall be uncovered, and your shame shall be seen’ (Isaiah :).” Samuel said: “A woman’s voice is ‘ervah, as it says, ‘For your voice is sweet and your face is lovely’ (Song of Songs :).” Rav Sheshet said: “A woman’s hair is ‘ervah, as it says, ‘Your hair is like a flock of goats’ (Song of Songs :).” and Babylonian Talmuds consider the question of whether a woman’s rear is ‘ervah. The Yerushalmi seems to allow that in specific circumstances the rear is not ‘ervah but that in general circumstances “any gazing whatsoever” constitutes (forbidden) ‘ervah. The Bavli (implicitly) sets Rav Huna’s teaching that a woman’s rear is not ‘ervah in the specific scenario of a man reciting Shema in bed with his wife against R. Isaac’s teaching that a tefah. constitutes ‘ervah – the editor then narrows R. Isaac’s teaching to  Both Talmuds distinguish looking at body parts of a woman in specific contexts (the Yerushalmi: “for a blessing”; the Bavli: “his wife while reciting Shema”) and a more general “gazing” (the Yerushalmi: lehabbit; the Bavli: le’istakkule). In the latter case, the Yerushalmi forbids any amount; the Bavli seems to distinguish a tefah. in the case of “his wife while reciting Shema” versus a finger in other circumstances (non-wife, at least according to the midrash cited). Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros the scenario of “his wife and when he recites the Shema.” Outside of this scenario, in other words, when “gazing” (at a non-wife according to the cited midrash), even a finger (less than a tefah. ) is forbidden. The Bavli then proceeds to thigh, voice, and hair. It is only forbidden to look at ‘ervah belonging to one’s wife while reciting the Shema, but with women who are not one’s wife, ‘ervah is always forbidden and the definition of ‘ervah is more expansive. Besides quite drastically changing the terms of m. H . allah : by inserting an explicit male gaze at a female visual object, let us note other significant visual features of the Yerushalmi and the Bavli. The Yerushalmi sexualizes the gaze itself in genital terms by staging it as a phallus. This logic supports the possibility that areas other than the vagina can be considered to be ‘ervah. The Yerushalmi bolsters the phallic potency of the male gaze by constructing a set of similes that operate by a kind of refracting transfer and increasing intensity of vision: He who gazes (hamistakkel ) at a woman’s heel (ba‘aqevah shel ishah), it is as if he gazes at her vagina (bet hareh.em). And he who gazes at a vagina is as if he has intercourse with her. Gazing at the heel (or “rump”) is like gazing at the vagina (a parallel in the Bavli explains that this is because it is opposite the vagina), which in turn is like having sex. It is precisely the tactility of the gaze that makes this logic legible. Seeing is no cerebral, transcendent act; it is a form of touch. In its association of vision and phallus, however, the Yerushalmi goes further than the kind of manual vision envisaged in Cixous’ description. This Palestinian tradition crystallizes earlier Jewish traditions, such as those found in Matthew : and Leviticus Rabbah :, which emphasize the sinfulness of the illicit sexual gaze. So, too, Tertullian warns that a virgin is “endangered by the public exhibition of herself, while she is penetrated     For the suggestion that ‘aqevah here means rear or “rump,” see Brodsky, Bride, . On the haptic versus optic gazes see Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry. Both Talmuds use language of gazing (lehabbit, lehistakkel ), rather than looking (lir’ot). Leviticus Rabbah : (ed. Margaliot, ii:) transmits a similar teaching of Resh Laqish, “You should not say that [only] one who commits adultery with his body is called an adulterer, but rather [even] one who commits adultery with his eyes is called an adulterer.” Expanding adultery this way makes it potentially more prevalent (even as it functions preventatively). See also Mekhilta Derabbi Shim‘on bar Yoh.ai to Exodus : (ed. Epstein-Melamed, ); Sifre Deuteronomy  (ed. Finkelstein, ; parallel in b. Berakhot b). On Matthew : and visual theories, see Duff, “Theories of vision.” Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Genitalia and the gender of the gaze April ,  :  by the gaze of untrustworthy and multitudinous eyes.” Tertullian and the Yerushalmi both highlight vision’s phallic and extramissive potency. While the Bavli does not explicitly make the graphic equation of eye and phallus, it does go further than the Yerushalmi in other ways. It sees ‘ervah in a handbreadth of exposed flesh, the little finger (or a little finger’s worth), the thigh, the hair, and the voice. This synaesthetic collapse between voice, vision, and touch is made by both Talmuds, and while both Talmuds emphasize the mutability and tactility of the gaze, and transfer ‘ervah beyond genitalia, the Bavli effectively genitalizes a woman’s entire body, when it is under the male gaze. The logic of substitution in b. Berakhot draws on an exegesis of Numbers , in which Israelite warriors take the jewelry of Moabite women as spoil. The Bible describes the jewelry using various terms, which Rav Sheshet interprets as adorning both “exterior” areas of the body, such as fingers and necks, as well as “interior” areas, such as breasts and the pubic area. In b. Shabbat a–b, a baraita explains that the Israelite warriors sinned (for which they required “atonement,” kapparah, in Numbers :) by “feasting their eyes (zanu ‘enehem)” upon the Moabite women’s bodies while removing their jewels. The Bavli (or Rav Sheshet) reads the biblical      Tertullian, De Verginibus Velandis, . (trans. Thelwall in Roberts and Donaldson [eds.], AnteNicene Fathers, vol. iv, ). Notice how Tertullian mixes his metaphors such that looking becomes penetration, pointing becomes touching, and gazing in general becomes kissing and embracing. This is, of course, more than the mixing of metaphors, as it is underpinned by late-antique notions of vision as intertwined with touch. While the usage of etsba‘ seems to play off its usage as a standard measurement and as an actual body part (especially given its modifier qatan, “little”), it is uncertain whether tefah. plays with this double sense of literal body-part or metaphorical measure, as well (“palm” and “handbreadth”). It is not inconceivable that both usages (tefah. and etsba‘) convey play between measurements derived from the human body and actual body parts. If that is the case, what a clever way of highlighting the objectification of the body – to play on the way it is used metaphorically for measures of distance and then to close the circle by bringing it back to measure the human body as visual object. Thanks to Adam Parker for this wonderful suggestion. The two Talmudic passages share several traditions, both named Babylonian Amoraic traditions and anonymous ones; however, even setting aside the rhetorical and editorial differences, the two passages arrange these parallel traditions to quite different effect. For example, b. Berakhot focuses on the little finger as equivalent to the vagina, which is curious given its phallic connotations. In addition, the euphemism for the vagina in b. Berakhot (bet hatoref, lit. “the place of filth, decay”) conveys disgust, whereas y. H . allah uses the more neutral bet hareh.em (“house” or “seat of the womb”). On fingers and phalluses, see  Kings :: “My little finger is thicker than my father’s loins”; b. Shabbat b: “He did not touch me even with his little finger”; b. Ketubot a; b. Niddah a. See also Brodsky, Bride, –. Numbers :. B. Shabbat a–b. The Israelites tell Moses, “Even if we escaped from sinning, we did not escape from meditating (hirhur).” The Palestinian Targum on the biblical passage makes the opposite argument, i.e. it praises the virtue of the Israelite men who managed to remove all these precious jewels from the bodies of the Moabite women without even looking at them. Both the Targum and Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros passage as equating all these body parts under the male gaze such that looking at a finger is tantamount to looking at a vagina. The equivalence between “interior” (vagina) and “exterior” (parts of the body usually exposed) is echoed in Tertullian, who suggests: Impose a veil externally on her who has a covering internally. Let her whose lower parts are not bare have her upper likewise covered. Tertullian’s logic is slightly different, of course; it equates the exposure of interior/lower and exterior/upper. Both rabbis and Tertullian share a willingness to associate “external” body parts of women with genitalia. This logic regarding hair is found in the teaching that “the hair of a woman is ‘ervah.” The Bavli traces a gaze from a woman’s rear to palm to finger to thigh to voice to hair. If a little finger can be a vagina according to the Rav Sheshet, then the Bavli’s gaze roams across a woman’s body, fragmenting it and pausing to focus on particular zones. Laura Mulvey’s insights, though from the very different domain of cinema studies, might illuminate some of these moves. Mulvey noted a series of common cinematographic strategies used to represent women in Hollywood film, including close-ups, makeup, and lighting, and found that they serve to fragment and flatten the female protagonist, particularly her face. Working with the ideas of Freud, Mulvey saw such strategies of objectification and fetishization as a way for (male) filmmakers to disavow their castration anxieties. Without suggesting that the rabbis were indebted to Freud, it is noteworthy that not only does the Bavli perform something of this fragmentation of the female figure, but it also deploys a rhetoric of disgust for female genitalia. While the Yerushalmi and Bavli may share a common core of teachings, they clearly make their cases in different ways. The Yerushalmi’s statement of the phallic gaze is the bolder, whereas the effect of the gaze across the female body is more far-reaching and fragmenting in the Bavli. Rabbis in both Babylonia and Palestine understand visual pleasure as tantamount to,    the Bavli were clearly stimulated by this passage to think about the problem of the gaze, even if they came to opposite conclusions about its exercise. Tertullian, De verginibus velandis . (trans. Thelwall in Roberts and Donaldson [eds.], Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. iv, ). See D’Angelo, “Veils,” . However, Rav Sheshet’s interpretation is specifically about women who are not one’s wife, i.e. the Moabite women. The anonymous editor in b. Berakhot a then concludes that R. Isaac’s measurement of a handbreadth suffices when it is one’s own wife and when one is praying, restricting Rav Sheshet’s dictum to non-wives and presumably, although not necessarily, non-prayer conditions. “Maqom hatoref.” B. Berakhot a asks why God chose to place a woman’s breasts close to her heart: “Rav Judah said: ‘So that he should not look upon the place of ‘ervah.’ Rav Mattena said: ‘So that he should not suck from a place that is foul (tinofet; referring to genitalia).’” Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Genitalia and the gender of the gaze April ,  :  or superior to, actual physical satiation. Indeed, the Bavli, after a series of Amoraic statements about how one actually has to see what one eats in order to be satisfied, records the following teaching of Resh Laqish: “More pleasurable is the sight of a woman than the deed itself.” Both the Bavli and the Yerushalmi present a male gaze and scrutinize and sexualize the sex and bodies of females. At first blush, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Talmuds force bodies and eyes into a gender binary along clearly circumscribed lines. As much as the gaze is gendered in the masculine, the body is made female (“a woman’s thigh is ‘ervah . . . a woman’s hair is ‘ervah”). All the active verbs apply to the man; women, and their body parts, by contrast, are all grammatical and conceptual objects. Gone is the female ritual actor of the Mishnah: a woman sitting, covering herself, and saying a blessing. Instead, a woman is rendered in terms of body parts that ultimately refer to her sex organ, and a man in terms of his penetrative gaze and his ability to recite Shema. What allows such gendered and sexed stratification to take hold? The potency of the male, phallic gaze is such that it can genitalize the female body beyond the location of genitalia. The insistence on a clearly sexed, gendered, and seer/seen binary may be, in Mulvey’s terms, a disavowal of the fact that these binaries themselves threaten to dissolve in the domain of late antiquity’s tactile vision. In other words, on a strongly tactile, extramissive understanding of vision, cast as masculine, the viewer is by his phallic eye implicated by the visual object; this is not the Cartesian transcendent eye which preserves the difference between subject and object: This after all is the basic logic of visual arousal – the phallic eye must be stimulated by its visual object in order to extend toward it (the object of its gaze).    B. Yoma b, on Ecclesiastes :. The Hebrew conveys the wordplay more clearly, “More pleasurable is the sight of the eyes (mar’eh ‘enayyim) in a woman than the deed itself (gufo shel ma‘aseh, lit. ‘the body of the deed’).” Cf. Leucippe and Clitophon ..– for an account of the mechanics of reciprocal gazing as sexual activity. A more cautious and attenuated way of putting this idea, in the context of a discussion about whether the exposure of the adulterous woman’s breast (part of her trial by ordeal) will inflame the desire of the priestly onlookers, is the tradition cited by Rava: “The evil inclination only rules over what its eyes see (‘enav ro’ot)” (b. Sotah a; paralleled in b. Sanhedrin a). Visibility, however, could draw both the evil inclination and the evil eye. See b. Ta‘anit b and b. Bava Metsi’a a for the inverse tradition that “Blessing is only found in that which is hidden from the eye (hasamuy min ha‘ayin).” In contrast to this visual economy, see that between the first two humans in the Zoroastrian Bundahišn :, “Mashı̂ said to Mashyânı̂: When I look at your belly this thing of mine grows and rises up. Then Mashyânı̂ said: Brother, when I see that member of yours, my belly flutters” (trans. Skjærvo, Spirit of Zoroastrianism, ). On the merging of gendered polarities of the gaze in Sappho’s poetry as opposed to Anacreon and other male love poets, see Williamson, “Sappho”; Stehle, “Sappho’s gaze,” esp. –. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros Thus far, we find that vision both has a gender and helps to produce gender. The gaze is masculine and phallic; the visual object is not only gendered as feminine, but sexed as female. Arousal and desire are thus problems of gender as much as vision. Such a paradigm serves to construct what we called heterovisuality in the previous chapter; that is, a visual mode that operates along lines of difference, in which the viewer constructs itself by oppositional reference to an other. In this case, heterovisuality serves to reinforce heterosexuality, even if it attempts to circumscribe it through prohibition. If it was masculine to gaze at women, the rabbi became the right kind of man through the inverse of that expectation, as much by not looking as by looking. He was to understand himself as a rabbinic man partly through the contrast of liturgical actions (reciting a blessing, saying Shema) with female visual objects. This all conforms to a naturalized, even if far from normalized, idea about the gendered division of visual labor that maps heterosexuality onto heterovisuality. In other words, in this case the paradigm of viewing that we have described as creating difference between viewer and visual object coincides with sexualized masculine–feminine difference. However, as we will see, the rabbis also consider the problem of men looking at ‘ervah of men. In b. Berakhot these deliberations occur in the context of a broader discussion about circumstances in which it is appropriate to recite the Shema. The Bavli considers the ways in which a man is the object of his own gaze, an instance of what we might call “autovisuality.” It uses different visual language when considering male–male vision as opposed to male–female vision. When talking about a man looking at a woman’s ‘ervah, the terms used are gazing or looking (mistakkel, mebbit), as opposed to seeing (ro’eh) used with respect to men.    Before it treats female ‘ervah, b. Berakhot a thinks about various combinations of men, women, boys, and girls, family members and otherwise, in bed with the praying male subject; compare t. Berakhot :–, ,  for similar concerns. But besides the sections examined in this chapter, it does not articulate this specifically in terms of visuality. Rather the language is of co-presence. The Babylonian Talmud in those cases proposes solutions such as barriers and clothing, but this could again speak to co-presence or proximity, rather than visuality per se. I only treat here those instances where vision is explicitly invoked rather than those in which it could, arguably, be implied. Both b. and y. Berakhot use the language of re’iyah to think about excrement, but the latter does not consider the problem of male ‘ervah. In b. Berakhot b, Genesis : is used to prove that gentile genitalia count as ‘ervah in the same ways as Jewish ‘ervah. This verse includes the terms ‘ervah and ra’u (they saw). The same terms are used to express the problems of a man’s own genitalia. Besides this, the problem of male genitalia in the context of shema is expressed in terms of co-presence (b. Berakhot a) rather than vision per se. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Genitalia and the gender of the gaze April ,  :  The Bavli imagines a curious scenario. Given that a man is forbidden to look at his own ‘ervah while praying, the concern is whether it is permissible for “his heart to see (ro’eh) his ‘ervah.” This arises in hypothetical scenarios, like being in bed with the covers pulled up to one’s chin or being immersed in muddy water. One’s eyes are guarded from the sight of ‘ervah, but the penis is visible to other parts of the body. The rabbis are not only concerned with “his heart seeing his ‘ervah,” but also with “his heel seeing his ‘ervah.” There are two notable distinctions between the ways that the Bavli imagines looking (rather than gazing) at male and female ‘ervah. One is that ‘ervah, when applied to the male body, is restricted to the genitalia proper. It is not transferred to other areas of the male body. The other is that the male body is “ocularized,” that is, the rabbis attribute vision to body parts other than the eyes. To put this somewhat reductively, we might say that the male body can become all eyes and the female body all genitalia. Or, put differently, the male body becomes an instrument for seeing, whereas the woman’s body becomes the quintessential visual object. If the masculine gaze, or ritual masculinity, is constituted by eyes trained on, or directed away from, female anatomy, it can also involve a selfsurveying and eyeless gaze under which the male body becomes visible to itself, albeit without necessarily being sexualized. In this sense we might say that the (male, Babylonian) gaze fragments both male and female bodies, though under different visual, anatomical, and sexual regimes. B. Berakhot b goes on to consider the question of whether looking at gentile (male) genitalia while reciting the Shema is forbidden. The Talmud understands this question, posed by Rav Judah, as resting on      B. Berakhot b, commenting on m. Berakhot :: “One who has gone down to immerse himself [in a miqve, and the hour of the morning Shema arrives], if he is able to come out, cover himself and recite before the sun is risen, he should cover himself and recite; if not, he should cover himself with water and recite.” One should also consider a specifically Zoroastrian context for the preoccupation with parts of the body seeing one another. Zoroastrians forbade the exposure of genitalia and failure to separate upper and lower body, describing walking around without a belt (kustig) and shirt (sabig) as going about unclothed (wisad-dwarisnih). See Sayest-ne-Sayest .–; Malandra, “Avestan Zānu. Drāȷ̂ah”; Elman, “Middle Persian culture”; Shaked, “No talking.” B. Berakhot b. Note b. ‘Avodah Zarah b refers to various feminine and sexual sights as strictly forbidden, “even if he is full of eyes (male’ ‘enayyim).” Vision is thematized in this pericope (b. Berakhot b). The discussion goes on to discuss whether looking at ‘ervah or excrement through a transparent substance is to be avoided while praying. (It is to be avoided in the former case, but not in the latter.) This is in marked contrast to y. Berakhot on this Mishnah and the continuation of the parallel pericope in y. H . allah :, c, which discusses praying near excrement with no reference to the visual question. We see this particularly in the Babylonian Talmud, which moves from a gaze that genitalizes the female body to a gaze that fragments the male body when looking at male genitalia (whether one’s own or a gentile’s). Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros the possibility that gentile genitalia is not considered human genitalia, based on an interpretation of Ezekiel :: “She lusted after concubinage with them, whose penises (besaram) were the penises of asses and whose issue (zirmatam) was the issue of horses.” In other words seeing gentile genitalia becomes a question of species. This possibility is rejected, based on Genesis :, which praises Shem and Japheth for covering up their father Noah’s nakedness after their brother Ham’s incestuous and homoerotic “looking” at his father’s penis. The latter text not only uses visually emphatic language but also, as crucially for the problem at hand, uses the term ‘ervah for Noah’s genitalia. Thus, under the rabbinic gaze, the gentile becomes hypersexualized and eroticized – transgressively, grotesquely, possibly even animalistically – which helps to construct a rabbinic sexuality that is, by contrast, restrained and modest. A rather different sensibility colors the Bavli’s consideration of an intraJewish gaze. The Bavli’s use of the more neutral language of seeing (ro’eh) versus gazing (mistakkel, mebbit) does not contemplate the (homo)erotic possiblities of the male–male gaze in this context. But this kind of gazing is not entirely absent, as we will see in the next chapter when we examine a more explicitly homoerotic rabbinic gaze amidst a discussion of rabbinic genitalia. While there is no Palestinian parallel to these precise scenarios in the Bavli, the Yerushalmi does consider the autovisual in other contexts that juxtapose the sight of genitalia with ritual and, in our first example, with eroticism. Tannaitic and Amoraic sources talk of King David who goes to the bathhouse and, “seeing (ra’ah) himself naked,” laments that he is “bare of commandments (‘arom min hamitsvot ).” However, when he “gazed (hibbit) at the mark of his circumcision,” he rejoiced. In Sifre Deuteronomy’s version of this tradition, a remarkably visually eroticized and gendered parable follows this: A king of flesh and blood [stands in for God] who said to his wife [stands in for David, who stands in for all Jewish males], “Adorn yourself with all your jewelry so that you are desirable to me.” Thus also the Holy One said to Israel, “My children, be marked by my commandments so you are desirable to me.” Thus it says, “You are beautiful, my darling, as Tirzah” (Song of Songs :) – you are beautiful when you are desirable (retsuyah) to me.   The phrase is part of an extended parable, which describes two sisters, representing Samaria and Jerusalem, engaged in promiscuous sex with various gentile nations. Sifre Deuteronomy  (ed. Finkelstein, ); paralleled in t. Berakhot :; y. Berakhot :, d; b. Menah.ot b. Cf. y. Sanhedrin :, b which uses mebittin for looking at women and ra’u for the exposure of male genitalia. The former clearly relates to female modesty and visual eros, whereas the latter relates to male modesty but does not seem to have erotic connotations. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Genitalia and the gender of the gaze April ,  :  The visuality of David’s circumcision and, by extension, that of all Jewish males, is eroticized when seen through God’s eyes, and gendered in feminine terms (wife, jewelry, beauty, etc.). In David’s eyes, his circumcised genitalia inspire a Psalm of praise. Unlike b. Berakhot male genitalia is not opposed to ritual or sanctity; on the contrary, it becomes a marker thereof. Just when David thinks he is stripped of all contact with ritual, he looks down and is reminded of circumcision. This brings us to another distinction between this source and that of the Bavli – the same body part referred to as ‘ervah by the Bavli is dubbed milah in the Palestinian sources, pointing to two views (literally and conceptually) of the same organ. As significant here, is the way that David’s gaze channels the gaze of God. In looking at his genitalia, David imagines God looking at it (or at the genitalia/jewelry of his wife/Israel). Not only is the circumcised organ feminized, but David’s gaze upon it becomes a place-holder for the divine masculine gaze. Through David’s eyes divine–human vision is a heterovisual (and heteroerotic) affair. The penis becomes a visual object that does not look back (in other words, there is no homovisuality) and is explicitly feminized in the parable; and it seems significant in this context that the gaze is heteroerotic (with the transformation of the gender of David’s genitalia) rather than homoerotic. Contrast this positive autovisuality and its heterovisual overtones with another Palestinian anecdote in which Rabbi Judah the Patriarch, dubbed “our holy rabbi” for never having gazed (hibbit) at his own penis, refuses to look at the emperor Antoninus’ circumcision, declaring, “I have never in my life gazed at my own [circumcision] (bedidi la istakkelit), so [would I gaze] at yours?” Rabbi is characterized as an ascetic, and the language of holiness is used here to describe ocular asceticism in particular; but the story of his perhaps superhuman visual abstinence expresses an ideal that was surely underpinned by a certain degree of anxiety about male-on-male,    On these themes, see Wolfson, “Circumcision.” The gendered visual dynamics are far from straightforward here: David sees his own penis as feminine through the eyes of a masculine God. Autovisuality here does not result in homoeroticism, as some claim is the anxiety underlying the tale of Narcissus (Bruhm, Reflecting Narcissus). See Stein, “Maidservant,” –. Y. Megillah :, b (paralleled in y. Megillah :, a; y. Sanhedrin :, c). Cf. b. ‘Avodah Zarah b. See Cohen, “Conversion,” who notes the absence of this story in the Bavli. On the relationship between y. Megillah :, b and b. ‘Avodah Zarah b, see Gray, “Power.” While the anecdote is absent, the related tradition, which also circulates separately in the Yerushalmi (in addition to parallels above it is found in y. ‘Avodah Zarah :, c), concerning the relationship of Rabbi’s title “our holy rabbi” and his abstention from looking at his own penis does surface in the Bavli (b. Shabbat b). B. Shabbat b is more explicit about the link between gazing at the penis and touching it, adding that Rabbi’s hand also never slipped into his undergarment. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros eye-on-‘ervah looking. Furthermore, the story provides the link between looking at oneself and looking at another. We might say that Rabbi and David provide two Palestinian models for seeing milah and holiness, the first in contrastive terms and the second in complementary terms. A Palestinian example of the former sensibility promises that “whoever sees (ro’eh) an ‘ervah and does not feast his eyes (zan ‘enav) upon it, he merits to receive the face of the shekhinah.” Giving up feasting upon forbidden visual objects in this world guarantees the far more delicious sight of God in the world to come. Even as the contrastive sensibility is clearly related, it is noteworthy that the context is about adultery and that ‘ervah, therefore, clearly relates to women. Concerns about a homoerotic and autoerotic gaze also motivated Christian monastic rules, for men and women, which are reminiscent of the exchange between Rabbi and Antoninus in the Palestinian Talmud and of Babylonian rabbinic modesty regulations. Pachomius, a fourth-century Egyptian abbot, instructs monks to take care not to exhibit their flesh, and Shenoute, a fifth-century Egyptian abbot, warns monks to guard their gazes from each other and from themselves: He shall sit with all modesty and meekness, tucking under his buttocks the lower edge of the goatskin which hangs over his shoulder by his side, and carefully girding up his garment [ . . . ] in such a way that it covers his knees. Cursed are men and women who will peer or look with lust upon the nakedness of their neighbors in their bedrooms, or stare at them in any other place, either when they are on a wall or up a tree, or when they urinate or walk in mud or bathe, or while they are sitting down and uncover themselves (inadvertently), or when they are dragging up a log to a high spot, or when they are working with one another or washing their clothing . . . or when the brothers who make the bread reach into the ovens or [are busy] at any other task which some would be doing in our domain and in your domain too and unwittingly bare (themselves). And those who will gaze at them in lust    In y. ‘Avodah Zarah :, c, Rabbi’s title, “our holy rabbi,” is juxtaposed with R. Nah.um bar Simai’s title, “holy of holies,” with the explanation that the latter never looked at the image on a coin his entire life. Note the language of holiness and the similar formulae about never looking at particular visual objects. On these sources and the language of holiness for abstinence, see Visotzky, “Three Syriac cruxes.” Leviticus Rabbah : (ed. Margaliot, ii:). This is based exegetically on the proximity of “Shut your eyes from looking at evil” (Isaiah :) and “Your eyes shall see the king in his beauty” (Isaiah :). The larger context is about adultery, so ‘ervah in this case may refer to women but the general contrastive message of restraint and holiness still applies. Pachomius, Praecepta  (Boon, Pachomiana Latina, ; Pachomian Koinonia, trans. Veilleux, vol. ii, , cited in Schroeder, Monastic Bodies, ). Cf. QS .–, on the penalty for making one’s penis (yad) and ‘ervah “visible”; Precepts, . Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Visual asceticism April ,  :  with a shameless eye shall be cursed. And also those who look passionately upon their own nakedness shall be cursed. This juxtaposition of concerns about exposure, the gaze, and the everyday occurs in the Bavli, as well. In b. Makkot a and b. ‘Eruvin b, the Talmud moves from restrictions on “looking” at women doing laundry to rules about the lengths of the rabbinic scholar’s tunics to ensure that his calves will not be “visible.” These sources invite further consideration about monastic and rabbinic communities. While rabbis married women, they thought the sacred into existence partly by excluding the female sex from their field of vision. The ideal rabbinic visual field was one populated by rabbis; rabbis were, in Daniel Boyarin’s terms, married monks. Thus the curious gendering envisaged in the passages just mentioned, which juxtapose the restriction of the (rabbinic) male gaze with the restriction of rabbinic male visibility. Notice, also, that unlike with women at their work, doing laundry, the visibility of rabbinic calves is left uncontextualized and absent a particular viewer. In the Bavli, the rabbis work out their own status via the gaze, by (not) looking at women or female ‘ervah (as in the Yerushalmi), but also by (not) looking at men or male ‘ervah, both Jewish and gentile. In the Palestinian sources, we have some of this as it concerns female ‘ervah but a different way of conceiving of the problem of male genitalia which concerns milah as it impinges upon the sacred (kedushah). The gaze then becomes no less than a way for the rabbis to come to terms with their masculinity and, in turn, to shape their Jewishness. Visual asceticism While the Babylonian Talmud is arguably not as graphic or explicit as the Palestinian Talmud in equating looking at ‘ervah with sex, it does go much further in lighting up the female body and its parts, under the potentially licentious male gaze. The visual eroticization (and genitalization) of the female body stimulates and provokes pleasure even as it is immediately subsumed under the banner of prohibition and sin. The passages we have     Shenoute, Canon , Codex YA – (cited according to the standard White Monastery library codex sigla, text and trans. Young, “Five leaves,” –, cited in Schroeder, Monastic Bodies, –). See Bar Asher Siegal, “Literary analogies.” Boyarin, Carnal Israel, . The y. Megillah :, b story probes a borderline case of gentile/Jewish ‘ervah/milah. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros examined in the first part of this chapter come dangerously close to stimulating or enacting the very things under prohibition. This productive power of prohibition is particularly well developed in Babylonian sources. Spousal nudity in the context of reciting the Shema is just one liminal expression of a more general problem of looking at women (or female ‘ervah). The close connection between gazing and touching means that looking at someone else’s wife lustfully is a kind of adultery, a proprietary trespass. Hence, the expression “set his eyes upon” can be used in contexts in which the gaze is illicitly coveting, as in adultery. In the passages on ‘ervah and prayer, in both the Yerushalmi and Bavli, there is an apparent distinction between legitimate gazing at one’s own wife (except when one is reciting Shema) and gazing at other women’s ‘ervah, even though there is ambiguity as to where the boundaries lie. According to the tradition laid out in b. Berakhot a, even a little finger’s worth of lascivious looking is forbidden, if a woman is not one’s own wife. This is echoed in b. Berakhot a, which warns that lingering while counting out coins into a woman’s hand in order to gaze (lehistakkel ) at her will result in punishment, regardless of one’s learning and merit. The same passage enjoins a man to refrain from walking behind women on a narrow bridge, even his own wife, and advises that it would be preferable to walk behind a lion than a woman (though better to walk behind a woman than an idol). Here again, the boundaries between the clearly forbidden and the ostensibly permitted are elided. Unlike the Palestinian sources, the Bavli’s tendency is to make prohibition ubiquitous when women enter the visual field. The Babylonian version of the story of Rabban Gamaliel and the beautiful Roman woman, discussed in the introduction to this chapter, interrogates his looking at her on account of a set of (ostensibly Tannaitic) traditions: “You shall keep yourself from every evil thing” (Deuteronomy :) – one should not look (lo yistakkel) at a beautiful woman, even if she is unmarried, or at a married woman, even if she is ugly, or at a woman’s colored clothes,    Matthew :; Leviticus Rabbah : (ed. Margaliot, ii:); Mekhilta Derabbi Shim‘on bar Yoh.ai to Exodus : (ed. Epstein-Melamed, ). E.g. t. Sotah :; b. Sotah a–b (note the wide range of those “who set their eyes on what was not theirs”); b. Sanhedrin b; b. Sanhedrin a; b. Bava Batra b; b. Gittin a. Although cf. t. Sotah :–. In other cases the expression natan ‘enav is used to designate the dangerous gaze of the sages, e.g. b. Berakhot a; b. Shabbat b; b. Bava Batra a; or the direction of the eyes in prayer: b. Yevamot b. On some interpretations it seems as though the Babylonian editors distinguish between gazing at a handbreadth of one’s wife’s body during prayer versus gazing at (any other) woman’s little finger (outside of prayer). Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Visual asceticism April ,  :  or at a male or female ass, or at a pig or a sow, or at birds when they are mating. The net of prohibition is spread very wide here, going well beyond the adulterous and even the human. The rabbis’ prohibitory gaze blurred the boundaries between the domestic and public spheres. An example of this slippage can be found in b. Nedarim a–b, where the rabbis draw on popular and medical theories of conception in order to support a visual eugenics: () It was taught . . . And do not converse much with women, as this will ultimately lead you to adultery. () R. Ah.a b. R. Josiah said: “One who gazes (tsofe) at a woman eventually comes to sin; and one who looks (mistakkel ) at a woman’s heel will father disabled children.” Rav Joseph said: “[This applies even to] one’s own wife, when she is menstruating.” R. Shim‘on b. Laqish said: “‘Heel,’ in the Tannaitic teaching, means the place of filth [i.e. genitalia], which is directly opposite the heel.” . . . () R. Yoh.anan b. Dahabay said: “The ministering angels told me four things: Why are people born lame? Because they overturn their table.       B. ‘Avodah Zarah a–b (cf. b. Shabbat b on colored garments for menstruants). M. Zavim : (partial parallel in m. Nazir :) considers the purity status of a man who has had a genital flux, caused by something he has seen, ingested, or fantasized about. All these sights (women’s colored clothes, animals mating) are actually a cause for leniency, i.e. to disqualify someone from being considered a zav. In b. ‘Avodah Zarah b, however, it is taken for granted that the Tannaitic teachings actually forbid these sights. On phantasia (mental images) and seminal emissions in monastic culture, see Brakke, “Problematization.” On the feminization of “colored clothes,” see Sifre Deuteronomy  (ed. Finkelstein, ), which reads the prohibition against cross-dressing in Detueronomy : as mandating a gendered color-code: “A woman shall not wear white clothes (kele levanim) and a man shall not cover himself with colored clothes (tsiv‘onim).” On avoiding women and women’s colored garments among other sights (e.g. women) as part of the preparation for mystical ascent in Hekhalot texts, see Schäfer (ed.), Synopse, §, §, §. See also (not to look at men, women, children or any creatures) in Schäfer (ed.), Geniza-Fragmente, fr. , lines –. Adultery in biblical and rabbinic law only applies in a case where the woman is married. A married man who has sex with or gazes covetously at an unmarried woman is not technically an adulterer. Compare b. Ketubot a: “R. Samuel b. Nah.mani said, R. Jonathan said: ‘It is permitted to gaze (lehistakkel ) at the face of the bride all seven [days, i.e. following her wedding] in order to make her beloved to her husband; but the law does not follow him.” See Tigay, “‘He begot a son.” Hindu and Zoroastrian religious law emphasizes the gaze of the menstruating woman as contaminating and proscribing its objects, rather than the sight of the menstruating women, or of her sex, as forbidden or dangerous. See Manusmriti :; :, , , ; Venidad, :; VaikhanasaGrhyasutra :. See also the possibly sixth- or seventh-century Baraita Deniddah :. Babylonian rabbinic sources emphasize the male gaze, except for b. Bava Metsi’a a, which allows for a female gaze. Cf. b. Ketubot a. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros Why are people born dumb? Because they kiss ‘that place.’ Why are people born deaf? Because they converse during intercourse. Why are peope born blind? Because they look at ‘that place.’” () And we challenged [R. Yoh.anan b. Dahabay]: They asked Imma Shalom [mss.: the wife of R. Eli‘ezer]: “Why are your children exceptionally beautiful?” She replied: “He ‘converses’ [Rashi: has intercourse] with me neither at the beginning nor at the end of the night, but at midnight; and when he ‘converses,’ he uncovers a handbreadth and covers a handbreadth, and he resembles one driven by a demon. And when I asked him why, he answered, ‘So that I may not set my eyes (etten et ‘enay) on another woman and my children come to be like bastards.’” There is no difficulty: this [Imma Shalom] refers to [conversing about] conjugal matters; the other [R. Yoh.anah d. Dahabay] refers to [conversing about] other matters . . . () “So that you do not follow your heart [and your eyes, after which you used to go astray]” (Numbers :) – from this [verse], Rabbi [mss.: R. Natan] taught: “One may not drink out of one cup and set his eyes on (yitten ‘enav) another.” Ravina said: “This [prohibition] is necessary only when both are his wives.” In this pericope, the Babylonian editor stitches together a host of prohibitions, connected by the tendency to circumscribe male gazing at women (in terms of concerns about adultery) and genitalia (one’s own wife, in certain ritual circumstances). These concerns are married to visual eugenics – visual techniques designed to affect the fetus – weaving together a net of traditions, Tannaitic and Amoraic, Palestinian and Babylonian. The effect is yet another way of legislating the male gaze, even within the realm of ostensibly permitted sexual relations. Concerns about gazing in the domestic sphere and in the extra-marital (adulterous) sphere shift and intersect in this passage. The passage begins in () above with the suggestion, in an unattributed baraita, that habitual conversation with a woman will eventually result in adultery. In (), we move from conversation to gaze, with R. Ah.a’s warning that gazing at a woman will lead to sin and that gazing at a woman’s heel will result in disabled offspring. Rav Joseph, a Babylonian Amora, then extends this prohibition to one’s own wife, while she is menstruating. During a woman’s menstrual flow intercourse was forbidden between spouses, and    See Bullough, “Attitudes.” See Boustan, “Rabbi Ishmael’s miraculous conception,” and below pp. xxx–xx. Cf. b. Sanhedrin a, “R. Ele‘azar says, ‘Whoever looks (mistakkel ) at ‘ervah, his bow quivers,’” based on Habakkuk :, which Rashi understands to refer to infertility. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Visual asceticism April ,  :  here again we are reminded that looking is indeed a form of touch and that it can have deleterious effects. Menstruation is a dangerous time, and the “heel,” which the Babylonian Talmud (through the statement of Resh Laqish) translates as female genitalia, is a dangerous object for the male gaze. This introduces and comports with what follows in (), R. Yoh.anan b. Dahabay’s “angelic” reports – that men who look at “that place” (oto maqom, a euphemism for female genitalia) will have blind children. This is a measure-for-measure punishment in more ways than one: first, because looking at women’s genitalia is a visual crime, so the eyes that transgressed are punished by transference in the offspring. Secondly, if a man’s eyes are conceived of as phallic, then gazing at female genitalia results in the transferred castration of his progeny by the blinding of their eyes/phallus, an ancient castration-anxiety fantasy of sorts. The Babylonian editor challenges R. Yoh.anan b. Dahabay’s stringent sexual restrictions with the anecdote that follows in []. But it does so only partially. Imma Shalom’s explanation for her physically unblemished and “beautiful” progeny contradicts only R. Yoh.anan b. Dahabay’s warning that talking during sex results in muteness. However, the explanation not only upholds but also expands the warning about gazing at one’s wife during sex. Imma Shalom’s spouse uncovers only minimal areas of his wife’s body, has sex in the dark and in great haste, resulting in unblemished and gorgeous children, the positive converse of R. Yoh.anan b. Dahabay’s warning that gazing will result in blind offspring. Not only are R. Eli‘ezer’s children not blind; they are “exceptionally beautiful” to viewers. R. Eli‘ezer’s explanation for his behavior is truly striking; he claims that he minimizes his sight of his own wife because otherwise he might “set eyes on another woman” and so taint his offspring with illegitimacy. This thinking, together with the ideas that looking at various visual objects will cause physical damage to offspring, draws from ideas about      Here the logic of substitution operates at the semantic as well as visual level, i.e. it is not that looking at the heel is tantamount to look at the vagina, but rather “heel” is a term for vagina (because it “sees” the vagina). The logic of equivalence that we saw in y. H . allah :, c (looking at the heel is like looking at the vagina, which is like intercourse) is here one of identity (“heel,” in fact, is “vagina”). The relationship between male gazing at the vulva and fetal blindness plays off of Greco-Roman mythology in which errant male eyes are punished with blindness upon seeing female (especially divine) nudity. The association of blindness with castration is obvious when we think of the phallic qualities attributed to male gazing, and all the more so when we note that Sasanian physiology understood semen as fiery and composed of the same substance in the brain that explained vision. See Daryaee, “Sight, semen and the brain,” and Soudavar, “Significance.” This is noted in Boyarin, Carnal Israel, –. The Babylonian editor resolves the contradiction by declaring that conversation during sex that is about sex itself is legitimate. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros visual eugenics prevalent in ancient and late-antique Near Eastern sources. These range from the Bible, to Mesopotamian omens, and from GrecoRoman medical tracts to the writings of the church fathers and Palestinian rabbis and extend into Indian texts. Quite simply, the logic dictates that what people see before, during, and even after conception shapes the visible appearance of the fetus and eventual offspring. This notion itself, which we will discuss in more detail below, builds on the mutability, slipperiness, and tactility of sight, and particularly of erotic vision. Whether one operates from the assumption that the female’s gaze is receptive of visual objects (intromission) or that either parent transmits what she or he has seen onto the form of the fetus (extramission), it was vision’s concrete, physical, haptic impact on the body that fueled ancient concerns about what was seen sexually and what was seen before, during, and after sex itself. While most of the ancient sources that we know focus on the role of the female gaze in visual reproductive technology, whether prospectively (as in the case of the “ugly Cyprian” who encourages his wife to look at beautiful statues in Soranus’ Gynecology), or retroactively (as in the case of ostensible adultery in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica), Pliny declares that it was a commonplace that both parents’ perceptions (sight, hearing, memory, images, and even thoughts) influence the appearance of the fetus. The Bavli here works within this commonplace. What is striking about Rabbi Eli‘ezer’s statement to Imma Shalom is that the sight of his own wife may cause him to “set his eyes” on another woman. Rabbi Eli‘ezer is so hypervisual, or women are so hypervisible, that the sight of one woman stimulates the sight of another, and he must effectively blind himself or make all women invisible, including his wife during sex, in order not to fantasize. Heightened susceptibility to visual eroticism is the underside of his extreme visual abstinence. But the rewards (beautiful, legitimate children) are visible proof of his success in conquering his impulses.    Galen (second century ce) was one of the few to make explicit the visual theory underpinning visual reproductive technology in De Theriaca ad Pisonem . On Persian absorption of Galenic thought, see Russell, “Greek medicine.” In most accounts philosophical, medical, and narrative, women are especially vulnerable and impressionable (hence the oft-named theory of “maternal impression”). See Soranus, Gynaeciorum .; Heliodorus, Aethiopica .. From Aristotle onward, most agreed that both man and woman influence the fetus with respect to matters like sex – we are here dealing with the child’s appearance. Pliny, however, took both parents’ input into consideration including in the case of vision: “Resemblances offer considerable food for thought. They are believed to be influenced by many chance occurrences, including sight, hearing, memory, and images absorbed at the very moment of conception. Even a chance thought which briefly crosses the mind of one or other parent may form or confuse the resemblance”; Pliny, Naturalis Historia, . (The Elder Pliny, trans. Beagon, ). See Baker, Rebuilding, –. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Visual asceticism April ,  :  In a further example of the Babylonian Talmud’s tendency to pursue prohibition, the editor reinforces R. Eli‘ezer’s worries about fantasized visual adultery by appending part (), a Palestinian Tannaitic tradition that prohibits “drinking out of one cup and setting eyes on another.” On its own, the Tannaitic teaching simply bans mental visual adultery, but Ravina’s statement expands it to prohibit even sleeping with one wife while visualizing a second wife. This pericope makes a marvelous case for vision’s potency, its productive and reproductive possibilities, which then must be controlled and legislated by anxious, hyper-vigilant, and hypersexual rabbinic eyes. The specter of illicit sight is ubiquitous both inside and outside the domestic sphere, blurring the boundaries within which adultery can take place, particularly given that adulterous vision itself blurs these very boundaries. Vision’s power plays out most concretely when sex meets reproduction, when vision and sex result in a direct, physical outcome. Once all looking is potentially fraught, a hyper-vigilant gaze is produced, one that continually polices itself, even while inciting itself. Having conceived of visual eroticism as ubiquitous, how did the rabbis, particularly the expansively prohibitive Babylonian rabbis, navigate such a dangerous world? Covering up Even if Palestinian sources do not cast the same web of visual prohibition in terms of men looking at women, they still consider the sight of women to be a potential problem. One can imagine several ways of approaching the problem of living in a world pulsing with potential visual eros (in the form of women). The first involves concealing visual objects that pose a threat to the viewer. The second is for viewing subjects to cease looking. In Chapter  we will explore this last strategy at greater length as it pertains to idols. A related option is for the viewer to secrete himself away from visual temptation. At present, let us briefly consider the first strategy, in which the visual object itself is concealed. Greco-Roman ideas about clothing, architecture, gender, and respectability governed a series of strategies by which people would minimize certain types of exposure for fear of endangering their honor and engendering pudicitia, a Latin term for shame that, like ‘ervah, derives  Cf. Mekhilta Derabbi Shim‘on bar Yoh.ai to Exodus : (ed. Epstein-Melamed, ). See t. Sotah : (b. Gittin a–b) for the metaphor of a man having sex with his wife as drinking from a cup. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros from the pudenda. As Kate Cooper and others have argued, there was a direct relationship between one’s status and the ability to limit one’s visibility. The advent and spread of Christian values brought with it a shift in attitudes toward the exposure of the body, in which notions of sin and desire fueled greater care and emphasis on concealment, exemplified, but not exhausted by, the monastic instances discussed above. In rabbinic culture, a woman’s body was, at least theoretically, governed from head to hem by a thick web of laws prescribing the extent to which visibility was permissible. In Tannaitic law, for example, a woman could be divorced (without compensation) for going about with her head uncovered, among other breaches of propriety and modesty. Similarly, a woman could be compensated for boshet, a tort which included the indignity of exposure. Such laws echo similar Roman laws designed to protect female (and male) dignity and honor. However, even as these laws implicitly deal with vision and exposure, they are rarely explicitly thematized as such. An exception to this comes in the Tannaitic ritual for the adulterous wife (sotah) that imagines a series of humiliations for the accused woman, which serve to invert common standards of propriety. In its stated measure-formeasure logic, m. Sotah highlights how the vision and visibility involved in adulterous seduction are mirrored in the humiliating exposures of the adulteress’s punishment. The sotah promiscuously exhibited herself to her lover’s gaze – for this her punishment is a spectacle. Thus, because she put on eye makeup, the poisonous potion she is forced to drink makes her eyes bulge; because she girded her breasts, her dress is ripped to expose them to the viewing public; because she coiffed her hair, it is stripped of its customary covering; and so forth. Not only do the Tannaim perpetuate ancient traditions in which promiscuous women work their magic partly by seducing male eyes, but they slip from condemning the adultery to condemning an array of behaviors deemed immodest (regardless of         See Cooper, “Closely watched households,” and Laglands, Sexual Morality, esp. –, on the visibility of pudicitia. See Brown, Body and Society; Rousselle, Porneia; Clark, Women, –; Glancy, Corporal Knowledge. On women and head coverings, see m. Shabbat :–. M. Ketubot :–; t. Ketubot :–; b. Gittin a–b. M. Bava Qamma :,  (includes the removal of a woman’s head covering and a man’s cloak among its list of indignities). E.g. shame (iniuria), violation (stuprum), and sexual indecency (impudicitia). On these terms see Lagland, Sexual Morality, –, and Williams, “Pudicitia and pueri.” She also transgressed as a viewer as she seductively “set her eyes” upon her lover. See Lev, “Sotah.” On the use of kohl, i.e. cosmetic eye paint, see m. Shabbat : and t. Sotah :. For painting just one eye and covering the rest of the face with a veil, see y. Shabbat :, b (b. Shabbat a) and Tertullian, De Verginibus Velandis, . Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Visual asceticism April ,  :  adulterous consequence). Women who cultivate the male eye are already suspect. If the norms of respectable visibility imposed upon women by male authority are inferable from their transgression or reversal in the Tannaitic sotah ritual, another interesting, if rare, instance in which female visibility is explicitly thematized concerns female-initiated stringency and is found in later Palestinian and Babylonian sources. This is the story of the Qimh.it, a woman whose children all became high priests. In a baraita in the Bavli, the sages ask her what she did to obtain such singular merit; she explains that, “The beams of my house never saw the plaits of my hair.” The Palestinian version of this anecdote adds, “the hem of my undergarment.” Two things are noteworthy. First, the question and answer supply a version of the visual eugenics that recalls the back and forth of Imma Shalom and the sages. Secondly, here, the Qimh.it’s very home has eyes: In the one place women were imagined to escape the public eye, a voyeuristic gaze persists. In the Palestinian version, the sages respond with enthusiastic praise. However, in the Babylonian version of the story they express skepticism, responding: “Many have done this but have not merited a reward.” Cynthia Baker sees this remark as an expression of ambivalence toward women taking control of their own visibility. By escaping the gaze of her own house (even as a man’s wife is often referred to in rabbinic literature as “his house”) the Qimh.it refuses not only the eroticizing gaze, but also the epistemic and disciplining eye of rabbinic law. The Qimh.it unsettles the Babylonian rabbinic eye by revealing nothing – she never reveals ‘ervah (broadly construed, including even hair and underclothing) – and consequently disrupts the male gaze that scrutinizes sex in order to constitute gender. In this regard her invisibility becomes conspicuous.      The idea that the promiscuous woman makes herself hypervisible is a trope found in Ben Sira and in the Testaments of the Patriarchs. E.g. Ben Sira :: “Turn your eyes from a beautiful woman and do not gaze upon beauty that is not for you; by a woman have many been ruined . . . ” See also Ben Sira :–; Testament of Reuben :, :, :; Testament of Issachar :–; Testament of Judah :, :, :, :; Testament of Benjamin :–. The female role in actively cultivating visibility, in terms of beauty and also by gazing suggestively at men, is particularly emphasized in Testament of Reuben :–. On the other hand, male vision is attended to in Testament of Reuben :–:. B. Yoma a. This is another example of the type of abstinent visual eugenics that R. Elie‘ezer deployed in the Imma Shalom passage, discussed above. Y. Yoma :, d. Baker, Rebuilding, –. On rabbinic resistance to woman-initiated piety, see Cohen, “Purity, piety, and polemic.” Note that in b. Shabbat b, R. Yose not only declares that he never looked at his penis, but also that the walls of his house never saw the hem of his undershirt (using the same language as y. Yoma :, d). It is unclear whether this passage is lauding or mocking of R. Yose’s boasts. R. Yose also mentions that he refers to his wife as his house in the same passage. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros While there are Babylonian stories that express wariness about those taking such radical steps to refuse vision, the opposite is true in monastic literature. There we find many accounts of women and men who voluntarily guard themselves from others’ eyes. The Lausiac History tells of Alexandra, who left the city of Alexandria and shut herself up, getting food and drink through a window; for years did not look at the face of men or women, or allow hers to be seen. She explains that she undertook this practice because a man had gone crazy from desire for her, and so she chose to bury herself alive rather than “cause a soul made in the image of God to stumble.” Male ascetics sought to not only protect their eyes but also to make themselves invisible. John of Lycopolis spent forty years as a recluse, “never beholding a woman’s face or the sight of money.” Seclusion not only allowed him to control his vision but also his visibility. There are many accounts of monks who locked themselves up or became recluses, so as “not to be seen by people,” and whose project seemed to have been as much to restrict their visibility as to withdraw from their own sense of vision. The tactic of protecting male eyes from problematic sights seems to stem from, and even support, expected gender roles of viewing and visibility. Yet, the practice of male self-isolation as a response to the everyday dangers of visual stimuli is not one we find in rabbinic sources. There, we find a greater focus on generating restraints on the rabbinic eye than on taking the rabbi himself out of social circulation. Perhaps this difference between rabbis and Christian monastics makes sense: rabbis were not eremitic monks; they        For example, b. Yoma a and arguably b. Shabbat b, as well as b. Pesah.im a-b. Palladius, Lausiac History  (ed. Butler, ). Cf. b. Sotah a where R. Yoh.anan overhears a virgin praying that she not cause anyone to sin. Ibid. (ed. Butler, ; Palladius, Lausiac History, –, ed. and trans. Meyer). Compare b. Ta‘anit a, where a father curses his beautiful (ba‘alat yofi) daughter to “return to ashes,” so that she may not cause men to sin by seeing her, after a man peers at her through a hole in the fence.  Ibid. Palladius, Lausiac History, : (ed. Butler, ; ed. and trans. Meyer, –). Zacharias of Sakha, The Syriac Life of Abba John the Little  (Holy Workshop, ed. Mikhail and Vivian, trans. Greer, ) – here Abba John makes a cave for these purposes. On this phenomenon see the numerous examples gathered in MacDermot, Cult of the Seer, esp. –. The sugya in y. Sanhedrin :, b (partial parallel in y. Sukkah :, c; b. Berakhot b) juxtaposes a statement that women must follow men in funeral processions, “because of the honor of the daughters of Israel, so that they do not gaze at the women (mippene kevod benot yisra’el shelo yehu mebbitin benashim),” with Michal’s criticism of David’s genital exposure while dancing ( Samuel :), and which then follows with a paean to the modesty of Saul’s household: “Their heel and big toe never saw [their genitals; or: They never saw their heel or big toe].” Exegetical and associative connective logics aside, it suggests a conceptual link between the male gaze onto women and a rabbinic model for male visibility and modesty, which demands spatial reconfiguration rather than permanent removal of the visual object. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Visual asceticism April ,  :  did not self-seclude in the same way, either from each other, or from the urban environment. Averting the eye Faced with the two choices of policing his own gaze or policing visual objects within his daily environment (whether female or other problematic sights), it would have been far easier for a Palestinian or Babylonian rabbi to opt for the former. The inverse relationship between visual pleasure and prohibition could lead to the logical extreme of complete visual abstinence. We now turn to this visual strategy. We find visual ascetics in both Palestinian and Babylonian sources. Palestinian sources go out of their way to associate such visual abstinence with “holiness.” They exalt Elisha who was called “holy” by the Shunamite woman, because “he never gazed at her his entire life.” They contrast Elisha’s ocular restraint with his disciple Geh.azi, who is midrashically read to have actually grasped the woman’s breasts. The thin boundary between looking and acting, looking and touching, is vividly illustrated here. Palestinian sources favor the language of holiness when describing visual asceticism. We note that Rabbi Judah the Patriarch is called “our holy rabbi” because he “never in his life gazed at his circumcision,” and, in one instance, to R. Nah.um bar Simay, who never gazed at figures on a coin and is called “holy of holies.” Leviticus Rabbah also makes the connection explicit in the passage regarding Elisha: “Wherever one finds guarding against ‘ervah, one finds holiness.” Such language is also found in the Bavli, but only, it will be observed, in reference to Palestinian rabbis. We will examine one such instance shortly.      The story of R. Shim‘on b. Yoh.ai’s isolation (b. Shabbat b) stands out in this regard. On its relationship to monastic sources see Bar Asher Siegal, “Making of a monk-rabbi.” Although, see again b. Ta‘anit a, which narrativizes the dream of annihilating women’s visibility by eliminating beautiful women. See also y. ‘Avodah Zarah :, c, which imagines rabbis covering Roman statues so that Nah.um bar Simay would not see them in death. Y. Sanhedrin :, b (paralleled in y. Yevamot :, d), Leviticus Rabbah : (ed. Margaliot, ii:– ). Contrast the Palestinian sources with b. Berakhot b, which omits mention of Elisha’s looking and focuses exclusively on what was (not) seen of him: The Shunamite woman “never saw a fly pass over his table or . . . a seminal emission on his sheets.” Cf. b. Shabbat b’s recommendations for proper behaviors for the talmid h.akham (or bar be rav), including the warning that it is not proper behavior (orakh ar‘a) to send one’s clothing to one’s host for cleaning, “lest he see something (i.e. a seminal emission) and come to despise him.” Y. ‘Avodah Zarah :, c (paralleled in b. Shabbat b). See Diamond, Holy Men, –. For the juxtaposition of illicit sexuality and idolatry see b. ‘Avodah Zarah a–b, where R. H . anina and R. Yonatan debate whether it is better to take a route that passes by an idolatrous temple or one that passes by a brothel. Leviticus Rabbah : (ed. Margaliot, ii:). Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros Even without the language of holiness, the Bavli valorizes Abraham over Job on account of his visual abstinence. According to Rava, Abraham never looked upon his spouse, Sarah, until their arrival in Egypt; thus Abraham’s exclamation: “Behold, I know what a beautiful woman you are” (Genesis :). Job, however, merely abstained from looking at virgins; that is, women who would not be adulterous visual objects anyway, because of their unmarried status. This partakes in the tendency we have noted in Babylonian traditions to contemplate and extend prohibition inside the sphere of the apparently permitted. The Babylonian Talmud also supplies its own rabbinic-era visual heroes. We find a Babylonian blood-letter who only uncovered medically necessary areas, so that he would not look at the bodies of his clients, and a man who only discovered that his wife had no hand after her death. While the latter is perhaps more shocking and is probably a better example of visual asceticism, the former speaks more to the everyday practices of propriety, particularly in situations that challenged such norms. We also find many stories in the Bavli of rabbis who succumb to temptation. However, the heroic anecdotes and figures raise other questions: If, as we noted, there is some ambivalence in Babylonian sources about women who radically refuse the eroticizing masculine gaze, is there corresponding concern about men who give up the gaze? In both Palestinian and Babylonian sources, to differing degrees, we see that the rabbis imagined the gaze as a phallus. We have noted how prohibition, therefore, served to uphold a binary division of visual labor, based on the premise of an active, penetrative masculine (and male) gaze and a feminine (and female) visual object. What then might be the consequences of taking prohibition to its logical conclusion and giving up the gaze completely? We end up, as we shall see, with the somewhat paradoxical result that total visual asceticism can destabilize the traditional      B. Bava Batra a (paralleled in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Genesis :). Relatedly, see b. Qiddushin b for the anecdote about R. H . iyya b. Abba, whose wife disguised herself as a prostitute, recounting his shame at responding to her overtures after discovering the truth. See b. Ta‘anit b, regarding the bloodletter (a contemporary of Abbaye) Abba who covered his female clients in order to avoid looking at her (dela nistakkel bah). See b. Shabbat b, about the man who only discovered upon the death of his wife that she had been missing a hand. Rav praises the woman for her modesty, while R. H . iyya directs his praise towards the husband, arguing that such modesty is expected of women. On not looking at women, even one’s own wife, see b. Berakhot a and b. ‘Eruvin b. See, e.g., b. Qiddushin a, where various Tannaim fall prey to Satan, manifested as a woman. We have also seen occasional discomfort with a male-on-male gaze (even when a man gazes upon himself ), which destabilizes this gendered division of visual labor. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Visual asceticism April ,  :  binary, gendered division of visual labor. Here is a remarkable example of this: R. Yoh.anan said: “Concerning three does the Holy One, Blessed be He, make proclamation every day: a bachelor who lives in a large town without sinning, a poor person who returns a lost object to its owner, and a rich person who tithes his produce in secret.” Rav Safra was a bachelor living in a large town. Now a tanna recited [this teaching] before Rava and Rav Safra. Rav Safra’s face colored (tsahavu panav). Rava said to him: “It does not mean those like you, but rather those like R. H . anina and R. Osha’yah, who were shoemakers in the land of Israel. They dwelt on a street of prostitutes and made shoes for prostitutes. When they went in to them (‘ayyele lehu), they [the prostitutes] looked at them (mistakkele behu), but they [the rabbis] would not lift their eyes to look at them (la medallan ‘enayhu le’istakkule behu). And they would swear by them thus: ‘By the life of the holy rabbis of the land of Israel.’” In this Babylonian narrative, the Palestinian setting of the embedded narrative is ostentatiously marked. “The land of Israel” is mentioned once in Rava’s introduction of the story, and then the prostitutes refer to their rabbinic shoemakers as “the holy rabbis of the land of Israel.” This narrative is embedded within a Babylonian study session, and is cited by Rava in order to humble Rav Safra, who assumes the initial praise refers to him. The device of the nested story marks this holy asceticism as a particularly Palestinian piety. Much as the writers and consumers of monastic and hagiographic literature viewed and used holy persons, ascetics, and monks of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine as models, Babylonian rabbis held up earlier Palestinian figures as models of holiness. Certainly, as we have noted, the conjoining of visual asceticism and holiness seems to originate in Palestinian sources. However, we will see that even if the story is held up by       The example highlights, among other things, the ways in which even rabbinic visual vigilantes did not seclude themselves in order to preserve their visual integrity, in contrast with the visual ascetisicm and seclusion of Christian monastics. For this usage in the context of emotion, see b. Sanhedrin a; b. Menah.ot a, b. See Sperber, City, –. Cf. Ms. JTSA , which reads umesamme lehu, as does Ms. Columbia. See Ms. Oxford: ve‘ayyele umesayyeme lehu bikhra‘ayhu vela medallu ‘enayhu le’istakkule behi and Ms. Vatican: ‘ayyelel umesayyeme lehu vela medalle ‘enayhu le’istakkule behu. The non-figurative “blind” works best here given the story’s emphasis on eyes (cf. “to ignore”; see Sokoloff, Dictionary of Palestinian Aramaic, , s.v. s-m-y ()). In Galilean Aramaic, Palestinian Talmudic Aramaic, and Syriac, the verb ‘-l-l can refer to having sexual relations; see Sokoloff, Dictionary of Palestinian Aramaic, , s.v. ‘-l-l (). B. Pesah.im a–b. For example, Richard Kalmin views b. Bava Metsi’a a as a Babylonian critique of Palestinian rabbis; see Kalmin, Sage, . Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros Rava and the Babylonian editors of the pericope as a model of piety, it is not without a certain satirical distance or perhaps even critique. The anecdote sharply juxtaposes great piety with extreme licentiousness. Two saintly sages set up shop and home in a red-light district, making their resistance to temptation a great feat of restraint. Prostitutes visit the rabbi-shoemakers to have their shoes fitted. They “went in to them,” a phrase with clear sexual connotations, and “gazed at them,” in an attempt to ply their trade. In a curious gender reversal, the prostitutes bear the phallic gaze, intent on penetrating the rabbis’ chastity, apparently by soliciting a reciprocal gaze. The rabbis, however, “would not lift their eyes to look at them,” greatly impressing their would-be seducers, who subsequently swear by them and their holiness. What is at stake in this refusal to look? For one thing, the prostitutes not only transgress normative feminine visual gender roles by gazing so assertively at the rabbis; as is the case with the sotah and elsewhere, the notion of gazing, or “setting one’s eyes upon,” is applied to those who gaze illicitly or covetously, seeking an answering gaze. The prostitutes are seeking a reciprocal gaze, a homovisuality that, when realized, becomes ocular intercourse. In the previous chapter, homovisuality when involving God and humans did not expressly involve a sexualized element. The latter was, however, strongly apparent in the Babylonian heterovisual conception of re’iyah. Certainly the notion of ocular desire was not new or unique to the rabbis. As Blake Leyerle puts it, “[T]he ancient Greeks had understood eros to be a pathology of the eyes.” This notion finds its cautionary equivalent in the reprimands of various Jewish and Christian sources from Ben Sira to John Chrysostom. Xenophon of Ephesus’ mid-second-century ce Ephesian Tale places it in the positive context of love, when the heroine Anthia kisses the eyes of Habrocomes and describes them as having “first planted the goad     On the motif of rabbis and prostitutes, see Fishbane, “Go and enjoy your acquisition.” See b. Berakhot a, which compares Israelite idolatry in Egypt to someone who sets his son up as a perfume-seller in the red-light district and then rebukes him for consorting with prostitutes. See McGinn, Economy of Prostitution, . On the term “innkeeper” for prostitute or madam in the Roman world, see Sperber, City, . Sperber points out that in the Palestinian Targumim, zonah is often translated as pundeqa’it, mistress of the pandoxeion, the tavern (brothels being rendered as bate pundaqta). On rabbinic and Christian ambivalence about inns, for this reason, see Dauphin, “Brothels, baths and babes.” While the expression “raising the eyes to look” is not an unusual phrase, it works particularly well in this scenario. The rabbi-shoemakers lower their eyes not only to avoid the prostitutes’ gaze, but also to do their job of measuring their clients’ feet. Leyerle, “John Chrysostom.” Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Visual asceticism April ,  :  in my heart.” Such novels also express the intensity that results when two sets of desiring eyes meet. This is the moment of homovisuality, that is, when eye strikes eye, and vision is reciprocal. As discussed in Chapter , we see the desire for this moment of ocular reciprocity in Leucippe and Clitophon: So when Leucippe heard the doors opening (there was already a light inside), she raised her head a moment and then cast her eyes down again. Thersandros glimpsed her loveliness for a fleeting second, like a lightning flash (for beauty resides especially in the eyes), and his soul went out to her. He stood fixed by the sight, waiting for the moment when she would look up again to him. As she kept her head lowered, he said: “Why do you look downwards, woman? Why let the loveliness of your eyes spill onto the earth? Let it flow rather into these eyes of mine.” Thersandros’ eyes wait eagerly to receive the flow emitted from Leucippe’s. A complex of intro- and extramission allows vision to make its way from one lover to the other. Here, Thesandros beholds Leucippe’s loveliness, but she withholds her ocular response and with it the intercourse that he so desires. It is thus that Leucippe and Clitophon describes the pleasure of looking at the beloved as “greater than that of consummation” and as a kind of “copulation at a distance” and “intimate embrace.” These examples gives us more of a clue as to what is at stake in the lowered gaze of the rabbis who refuse the aggressive, transgressive, and, in the rabbinic visual economy, penetrative gaze of the prostitutes. The rabbis must lower their eyes; if not, (ocular) intercourse will occur. Carlin Barton has shown how the lowered gaze in Roman culture could serve to preserve the subject’s bodily integrity and also to manifest a certain honorable shame. We see a similar deployment of the lowered gaze in Syriac writings, for example, in the narrative of the Christian martyr Anahid: On reaching the nobles gathered in Adurfrazgard’s presence, Tahmin entered and announced the arrival of the chaste girl. Adurfrazgard and the notables who were with him were overjoyed when they heard this, and most of the    We get closer to the sort of exchange of gazes that the rabbis deny when Anthia dubs Habrocomes’ eyes “ministers” for guiding him to loving her, referring to her own eyes as “ministers of Habrocomes” (Xenophon, Ephesiaca, ..–, trans. Anderson, ). On eyes as “ambassadors of love,” see Leuccipe and Clitophon ... See also “Ephesian tale,” trans. Anderson, , n. . For a Zoroastrian example, see the description of Ohrmazd and Spandarmad gazing at each other (Pahlavi Rivayat ). Leuccipe and Clitophon  (Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon, trans. Winkler, ).  Barton, “Being in the eyes.” Leucippe and Clitophon ..– (trans. Winkler, ). Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros people present pushed their way outside to take a look at Anahid. “This is indeed Anahid the mistress,” they shouted; “more beautiful and desirable than any other woman!” The chaste girl did not raise her eyes in the slightest to look at them. Here, Anahid quite deliberately refuses to look back, even as she is being visually objectified. The text makes clear that this redounds to her credit. Both of these two non-rabbinic examples affirm the expected gendered order of things, in which the modest woman preserves her honor by casting her eyes downward. This, as we know, has to do with the expected gendering of penetration and reception, upheld also in rabbinic culture. Writings such as the Testament of Reuben specifically warn that “by their glance they [women] sow the poison.” The sentiments expressed there, and in sources like m. Sotah, move along all points of the illicit visual erotic economy: the female visual object (who attempts to seduce with her appearance), the male viewer (who must curb his eye), and, perhaps most transgressive of all, the desiring female eye. The dangers that female eyes, in particular, held for men were highlighted in Song of Songs, Proverbs, Ben Sira, and the Testaments of the Patriarchs and church fathers; authors from Tertullian to Jerome warned against the power of women’s eyes. As John Chrysostom put it, “The eye not only of the wanton but even of the modest woman pierces and disturbs the soul.” Madeline Caviness’s understanding of such warnings is helpful here: She sees them as gynephobia that is based in a fear “of being entered.” If we take seriously the rabbinic idea that seeing is equivalent to intercourse, then refusing to answer the women’s gaze ensures male integrity, as Barton puts it. However, the lowering of the rabbis’ gaze also accomplishes another curious effect. The male rabbis are objects of a female gaze; this is compounded when they do not look back. A curious reversal of normative        The Acts of Anāhı̄d, in Bedjan (ed.), Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum, vol. ii,  (trans. Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, ). See also Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum, – (trans. Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, ). The Persian Martyr Acts were composed around the fifth century. See Asmussen, “Acts of Ādur-Hormizd and of Anāhı̄d.” Testament of Reuben . (trans. Hollander and de Jonge, Twelve Patriarchs, ; ed. de Jonge, Twelve Patriarchs, ). Notably the male visual object is missing here. See, e.g., Song of Songs :, “You have wounded my heart by one of your eyes.” John Chrysostom, De Sacerdotio . (Sources Chrétiennes .) (trans. Leyerle, “John Chrysostom,” ). See Caviness, Visualizing Women, . Another interesting possibility is that the rabbis are acknowledging and suppressing their own desire to look lustfully, so that their lowered eyes become a badge of shame. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Visual asceticism April ,  :  gender and gaze dynamics ensues, not only in terms of eros, but also in the related terms of power. Here, we might think back to the dynamics at play between the blind rabbi and his rabbinic visitors, discussed in Chapter , and indeed to the basic imbalance that underlies a post-temple, postreciprocal visual economy, in which Jews are viewed by God, the unseen seer. The objectification of these rabbis is further enhanced when the prostitutes invoke them and their sanctity in their oath taking, surely the epitome of a mixed compliment. The rabbis come by this honor at the price of an objectified passivity. Indeed, one might wonder whether the Babylonian Talmud itself takes a certain ironic pleasure in the sight of eye-averting rabbis, who are, after all, in the employ of these transgressive women and who come by their exalted title while equipping prostitutes for their illicit trade. Something of this combination of idealization and satire may also be at play in a fascinating story that Sozomen relates about Ephrem, who is said to have guarded against looking (theān) at women. In this story, a prostitute “contrived to meet him face to face in a narrow passage and stared at him (blepousan).” As with the Palestinian and Babylonian storytellers who wove their tale about Rabban Gamaliel and the beautiful gentile woman and who then ask “but was it his practice to gaze at women,” here too the holy man is redeemed by the urban landscape. He was compelled, we are told, by circumstance or devious design, to look against his will. Like the prostitutes in b. Pesah.im b, Sozomen’s prostitute stares at her object of seduction; unlike Thersandros’ supplication to Leucippe, in this narrative Ephrem rebukes the woman and orders her to turn her gaze earthwards. Here the narrative twist lies in the woman’s reply. She tells      Even as it troubles gender, our rabbinic narrative also upholds it. The very fact that it takes prostitutes, whose trade is transgressive promiscuity, to figure the female gaze tells us much about rabbinic ideas about women’s eyes. It is interesting to note that the language R. Yose uses in b. Shabbat b, following the Qimh.it’s usage in y. Yoma :, d, is in the passive voice, perhaps bespeaking feminization. This contrasts with the active use of s-k-l by R. Judah in y. Megillah :, b. The rabbis thus become bound up in a heterovisual economy, even if it is one that does not correspond to a normative heterosexual paradigm. See Judith :: “Her sandal ravished his eye, her beauty took his soul captive.” The prostitute’s shoes and feet were a recognized part of her advertisements in the Greco-Roman world; see Montserrat, Sex and Society. For the use of shoes by prostitutes to lure clients, see Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus .; by Jewish women to attract Roman soldiers, see Leviticus Rabbah : (ed. Margaliot, i:–); paralleled in b. Yoma b). For the historical unreliability of Sozomen’s account, see Ephrem, Hymns on Paradise, . I am less interested in the historical Ephrem than in how holiness is signaled by abstention from looking at women. The excuses of the urban setting, with its narrow paths and passages, and the forcible entry by promiscuous women, also serve to reverse more traditionally gendered images. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros Ephrem that given that he (as a man) is born of the earth, he is the one who should lower his gaze, whereas she (a woman born of man) should be looking at him. Ephrem is so impressed that, as Sozomen tells it, he records this in his writings. What does this fifth-century Palestinian account about a Mesopotamian figure share with the Mesopotamian rabbis’ anecdote about their Palestinian forebears? A preoccupation with gaze, gender, sexuality, and transgression. In both instances, a prostitute, the embodiment of the ultimate gendergaze transgression, aggressively confronts the holy man with her gaze; and in both cases, there is a reversal of sorts. The prostitute’s teaching merits inclusion in Ephrem’s writings: he learns from her; and the prostitutes crown the rabbis as holy men. Both narratives uphold men as visual objects who do not look back, whether as a strategy against seduction or as an acknowledgment of the prostitute’s wisdom. In the Ephrem story, the prostitute makes the case that visual objectification is specifically bound up with being a man. Ultimately, this is what visual asceticism at its most radical accomplishes: In giving up the male gaze, men become vulnerable to vision. The rabbinic narrative also gestures toward the reversals that come with the holy man’s vulnerability. Palestinian literature, like Christian writings, valorizes visual asceticism as holy. It does not, however, expand halakhic restrictions (or admonitions) on looking in the manner of the Bavli. While the Bavli seems to also valorize visual asceticism, some of its stories (the Qimh.it and the shoemaker rabbis) question and critique certain forms of ostentatious asceticism. Babylonian sources suggest that in giving up the gaze there is the possibility of gender trouble. Beautiful men In the stories of prostitutes and holy men, men who choose not to look turn into visual objects under a female gaze. This ascetic impulse upsets     On the implications of this for sex positions, see b. Niddah b (men who are created from the earth turn toward it, while women who were created from man’s rib turn toward him). For a similar argument about males born looking downwards and females looking upwards, see Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, i:–). See the Syriac Life of Pelagia – (ed. Bedjan, Acta Martrum et Sanctorum, vol. vi, –; trans. Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, –) for an example of a beautiful prostitute who draws all eyes toward herself. Ephrem is told that his gaze should be downcast, that he should be an unseeing visual object. See Theodoret, Historia Religiosa ., in which James of Nisibis rebukes girls for immodesty and staring. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Beautiful men April ,  :  the basic binary principle of male (and masculine) gaze and female (and feminine) visual object. As a result, these male visual objects run the risk of feminization. Visibility itself tended to be gendered as feminine in late-antique sensibilities. As we noted in the story of Rabban Gamaliel and the beautiful gentile woman, the gendering of visibility and visual pleasure is often put in the language of beauty. Beauty, that visual quality that summons the eye, also stimulates the senses and the emotions, producing desire. This section of our chapter looks at the problem of beautiful men. It begins by looking at rabbinic readings of the biblical Joseph. The treatment of Joseph sets up the two strands of rabbinic conceptions of beautiful men, which we then follow: the “feminization” of Jews vis-à-vis their gentile rulers via a dominating imperial gaze, and the feminizing, homoerotic implications of male beauty and the male visual object. As a beautiful male who is the object of a female gaze and an “imperial” gentile gaze, Joseph embodies both of these modes of troubling a binary gendered gaze. Christian and Jewish sources alike invoke beauty as both praiseworthy gift and tempting trap and typically they associate it, along with its deliberate cultivation, with femininity. Thus, men who were deemed overly beautiful, or who sought to enhance their beauty, were often considered unmanly and feminine. We find such mixed messages about beauty and gender, men and women, masculinity and femininity, in Jewish and Christian writings from Ben Sirah to Paul, Clement, Tertullian, and the rabbis. A few examples will have to suffice. The fourth-century ce Apostolic Constitutions warns men against “adorning” themselves “in a manner that may entice another woman to you.” The worry is that a woman will be “upon sight of you . . . smitten in her mind . . . wounded in her heart     We might think about the tendency of monks and nuns, noted before, to refuse to be seen by women or men as a measure designed to protect their masculine or feminine integrity. See also the Zoroastrian text Arda Wiraz  (ed. Vahman, , ) for the gruesome sight of the souls of women who beautified themselves and sought to catch the eyes of pious men. Contrast this with the vision of the righteous soul whose body is described as that of a beautiful woman (Arda Wiraz  (ed. Vahman, –,–). See Cobb, Dying to be Men, , , , , who notes how the narrative gaze tends to focus on the beauty of female rather than male martyrs, seeing beauty along with modesty and fertility as “quintessentially ‘womanly’ qualities.” In Joseph and Aseneth, the narrative gaze extols both Joseph’s and Aseneth’s beauty, the former through the eyes of Aseneth, the latter through the eyes of Pharoah’s son. For description and praise of Sarai’s beauty, see Genesis Apocryphon (Qap Genar ; description of Sarai’s beauty, column ). Apostolic Constitutions . (trans. in Roberts and Donaldson [eds.], Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. vii, ). This was considered to cause adultery, even if the man did not reciprocate or act on the woman’s desire for him. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros by your beauty, and youth, and adorning.” Specifically, a man is told, “that beauty which God and nature has bestowed on you, do not further beautify.” He is instructed not to grow his hair long or to anoint it, but rather to cut it short. He is ordered to wear simple garments rather than elaborate ones, and neither fine stockings nor shoes. He is enjoined not to wear jewelry or to style his hair or to shave. Such instructions are quite explicitly framed in terms of gender: “For God the Creator has made this decent for women, but has determined that it is unsuitable for men.” Similarly, Clement of Alexandria, in the early third century ce, encourages men not to shave their beards (“an ample beard is appropriate for men”), but to shave the hair on their heads. He adds, “His hair should not be braided, nor should it hang down, flowing luxuriantly like a woman’s.” One need not posit uniformity across the varieties of Christian, Jewish, GrecoRoman, and Mesopotamian practices of viewing and displaying gender to acknowledge how such ideas were also funded by the ancient Greek and Babylonian sciences of physiognomy, which besides being methods for reading faces and bodies, also funded prescriptive techniques of selfcultivation. Christian, Greco-Roman, and Jewish sources specifically decry or mock unmanly beauty in men, which is often characterized as such in men who cultivate their own looks, and therefore their own visibility. The biblical Joseph becomes a challenging figure for the rabbis in this regard. The Bible describes his great beauty as the premise for his attempted seduction by his master’s wife. Joseph, of course, resists her efforts and suffers as a result. On the one hand, Joseph’s beauty cannot be disputed – it is, after all, explicit in the Bible (Genesis :); on the other hand, neither can Mrs. Potiphar’s desire for him. On account of the former, Joseph becomes the ultimate emblem of male beauty for the rabbis. Because of the attempted seduction,       Apostolic Constitutions .. Note the tactile and sensory language of pain. Apostolic Constitutions .. This is also put in terms of gendered image theology, for men, following a particular reading of the Genesis account, are made in God’s own image, unlike women who hail from Adam’s rib. Women are the subject of rules including covering the head to avoid being looked at, not putting on makeup, and looking downward (Apostolic Constitutions ; Roberts and Donaldson (eds.), Anti-Nicene Fathers, vol. vii, ). Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus . (Clement of Alexandria, trans. Wood, ). See also . for more of the many characterizations of the habits of men who take care with their appearances as feminine, including coiffing and shaving. For a Syriac source, see Didascalia Apostolorum . See Jensen, “Femininity,” esp. . On traditions of physiognomy, see Bottéro, “Symptômes, signes, écritures”; Gleason, “Semiotics of gender”; William, Roman Homosexuality. The library at Qumran also included physiognomical texts. On these and their Greco-Mesopotamian sources, see Popović, Reading the Human Body. For the prohibition against looking in a mirror (and exceptions), see t. ‘Avodah Zarah :; y. Shabbat :, d; y. ‘Avodah Zarah :, a; b. ‘Avodah Zarah a. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Beautiful men April ,  :  the rabbis view Joseph as a man of heroic virtue, while also implicating him. The fifth-century Palestinian midrashic collection Genesis Rabbah and the Bavli both contain several traditions characterizing Joseph as “immune to the evil eye.” In the former case, the lasciviously gazing Mrs. Potiphar personifies the evil eye. In the Bavli, Joseph’s immunity from the evil eye, which is provoked by his great beauty, is due to his refusal “to feast his eye on what did not belong to him.” The Palestinian sources bring both ends of the visual economy – Joseph’s eyes and those who gaze at him – together, explaining that when he walked the streets of Egypt, princesses would peer at him through lattices and throw jewelry at him so that he would “lift up his eyes and look at them; nonetheless, he would not look at them.” Even as they announce his virtue, Palestinian sources state that Joseph had every intention of sleeping with Potiphar’s wife but was only stopped from consummating his desire when his upright “bow” was felled by the sight of his father’s or his mother’s image (ikonin, from the Greek eikonion). Most interesting for our purposes, is how the Palestinian midrash blames Joseph for luring Mrs. Potiphar’s eyes: [“His master’s wife cast her eyes at Joseph” (Genesis :).] What precedes this passage? “And Joseph was of beautiful form, and fair to look upon” (Genesis :). [And this is immediately followed by] “His master’s wife cast her eyes [at Joseph].” [It may be compared] to a man who sat in the street, making up (or fluttering) his eyes, curling his hair, and lifting his heel, while he exclaimed, “I am indeed a man. [Some mss. I am beautiful (ya’ey) I am a mighty man (gibbor).]”      Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, iii:). For other accounts of Joseph’s vulnerability and immunity to the evil eye, see Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, ii:), : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, iii:, ). See Kugel, In Potiphar’s House. The notion that the beautiful courted the evil eye was widespread in antiquity and is attested in Jewish sources. See b. Berakhot b; Ulmer, Evil Eye; Harari, “Sages and the occult”; Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic; Turan, “‘Wherever the sages set their eyes’”; Ross, “Notes”; Thomson, “Evil eye.” B. Berakhot a; see also b. Berakhot b; b. Sotah b; b. Bava Metsi’a a; b. Bava Batra b; b. Zevah.im b. Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, iii:–). Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, iii:–), : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, iii:); y. Horayot :, d; b. Sotah b. The midrashim of Joseph’s near-sinning also inject a virile masculinity to an otherwise troubling gender. Joseph himself is described as Jacob’s spitting image (ziv ikonin) in Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, ii:), and as resembling his mother Rachel in Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, ii:). Thanks to Adam Parker for his wonderful suggestion that Joseph is looking in a mirror when he sees his father’s image. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros They said to him, “If you are a man, here is a bear; get up and fight it!” While the rabbis cannot dispute Joseph’s beauty, they can implicate him in its cultivation through their parabolic figure. They play with his complicity in pointedly gender-troubled terms: Joseph’s ways of dressing and moving around are described in language most often reserved for female promiscuity, and this is juxtaposed with his declaration of manliness. Joseph attends too much to his hair, eyes, and deportment. While the Bible does not present Joseph’s beauty in anything but neutral or even positive terms, the rabbis express ambivalence about it and read it as purposeful gender transgression. However, to reiterate, even as the rabbis suggest that Joseph’s erotic visibility may have been related to his troubled gender, they emphasize that he never meets the gaze of those women attempting to entice him. In one midrash, Ms. Potiphar puts an iron fork to Joseph’s neck to force him to look at her, but still he resists. In this line of midrashic exegesis, he is, like the cobbler-rabbis, a visual object but not a seeing subject. At most, he is a gorgeous object, apparently guilty of taking a certain pleasure in his own beauty. Both his virtue and his vanity are described by the rabbis in terms of visual eros: its cultivation and its suppression.      Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, iii:). Cf. Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, i:–), “When he [the evil inclination] sees a man dressed up, making up (Sokoloff suggests ‘rubbing’) his eyes, curling his hair, and lifting his heel, he says, ‘This one is mine.’” See also Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, ii:) on Genesis :, which describes Joseph as a seventeen-year-old youth (na‘ar): “He was seventeen years old, but you say he was a boy? Rather, [it means] that he was engaged in childish behavior (ma‘aseh na‘arut, or girlish behavior), making up his eyes, curling his hair, and lifting his heel.” On this and other rabbinic and ancient Jewish traditions that queer Joseph’s gender, see Boustan, “Eunuchs.” Cf. Kugel, In Potiphar’s House, , on Joseph as a dandy. Note that these traditions focus on Joseph’s eyes whether as part of his seductive sexuality or as an emblem of his virtue. On Joseph’s beauty, see Testament of Simon : and Testament of Joseph :. For more examples of the feminization of seduction and appearances (eye makeup, shoes, tinkling, mincing, etc.), see Leviticus Rabbah : (ed. Margaliot, i:–); Lamentations Rabbah : (ed. Buber, b–a); b. Shabbat b; b. Yoma b. Curled hair signifies for a certain type of male beauty, as is evident in the emphatically visual story in t. Nazir :. Its deliberate cultivation through coiffing is taken as a sign of transgressive sexuality in both men and women. We may even read the Palestinian tradition that Joseph almost succumbed to temptation as an effort to redeem his masculinity. Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, iii:–). To the extent that Joseph is presented as a seeing subject, he sees an icon of his father (or mother), which stops him from sleeping with Potiphar’s wife; see above, n. . See also Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, iii:). On Jacob’s face, see Joseph and Aseneth :–: “Joseph said: ‘I will not sin before the Lord God of my father Israel nor in the face of my father Jacob.’ And the face of his father Jacob, Joseph always kept before his eyes, and he remembered his father’s commandments.” Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Beautiful men April ,  :  This last feature, Joseph’s self-awareness, reveals one of the ways in which male beauty troubles the rabbis. As scholars have argued for the tale of Narcissus, the story of a man’s discovery of his own beauty does not just thematize the dangers of vanity and the feminizing of gender, but also arouses (anxieties about) the homoerotic gaze. Another significant aspect of Joseph’s refusal to return the gaze of Ms. Potiphar is the context of his Egyptian captivity and enslavement. Joseph’s beauty can serve as a useful paradigm not only for the feminizing effect of a rapacious gentile and imperial gaze, but also for the homoerotic dangers of male beauty. We turn first to how the rabbis depicted the imperial gaze before returning to an intra-rabbinic visual eros toward the figure of R. Yoh.anan, a self-proclaimed beauty and rabbinic “descendant” of Joseph. Jewsploitation and the imperial gaze Thus far we have seen how Palestinian and Babylonian sources eroticize the gaze in gendered terms: first, in the most bluntly gendered terms aligned with visible sex; then in terms of rabbinic masculinity (vis-à-vis other men and gentiles); thirdly, in terms of prohibition, with the extreme logical outcome of visual abstinence, which in turn upset gender and elicits ambivalent rabbinic reactions; and, finally, in terms of male visual objects, particularly those possessed of the quintessential visual aphrodisiac of beauty. Here we examine rabbinic meditations on gentiles and their visual-sexual exploitation of beautiful male Jews. In the seventies of the first century ce, the Romans minted a set of coins to mark their defeat of the Jewish Revolt. While a variety of iconographical motifs appear on these Judea capta coins, many depict an armed Roman soldier towering over a mournful, seated woman who leans on her arm, head downcast, as the soldier looks down at her. The woman represents the territory and populace of Judea; that is, she stands for the Jews who are rendered passive, feminized visual objects by their defeat. The soldier not    See Bruhm, Reflecting Narcissus. Cf. t. Nazir : (paralleled in Sifre Numbers  [ed. Horowitz, ]; y. Nazir :, c; y. Nedarim :, d; b. Nazir b; b. Nedarim b) which recounts how a beautiful, gorgeous-eyed, curly-haired (description presented as the visual testimony of Simon the Righteous) shepherd boy gazed (nistakkalti) at his reflection and confronted his own potentially annihilating gaze of desire. On “Jewsploitation” and its derivation from and relationship to “Blaxploitation,” see Jackson and Moshin, “Scripting Jewishness.” Some depict a trophy of arms over the woman, others show bound males. Many show a seated woman under a palm tree (with or without a Roman soldier). For a study of Judea capta coinage and bibliography, see Vermeule, Jewish Relations. Compare the iconography of gender and gaze on other Roman capta coinage, e.g. Aegypto, Germania, Dacia, and Armenia capta coins. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros only represents the military power of Rome but is a symbol of masculinity, in stark contrast to the subjugated Judea. Here the imperial iconography distributes power across sex, gender, body language, and gaze. The visual economy has a lofty masculine gaze versus downcast feminine gaze. We also find coins depicting a male (meant to be Judea), often bound and sometimes nude. These figurations and configurations of sex undergird a basic gendering of Roman masculinity and Jewish femininity. As Virginia Burrus puts it, “Roman imperialism aggressively imposed itself as a triumph of masculinity, dominating conquered nations as women or feminine males.” Rabbinic storytellers also employed the image of the exploited, feminized Jew, albeit to different ends from those of the Roman state. In some of these rabbinic narratives, the gendered nature of Jewish subjugation is expressed through accounts of Jewish women who are sexually humiliated, sometimes as part of a measure-for-measure punishment for having courted gentile eyes. Leviticus Rabbah, for example, has a lengthy explication of Isaiah :: “Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with necks stretched forth and ogling eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet; therefore, God will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion.” Amoraic rabbis read the verse to refer to the seductive behavior of Jewish women, who “adorned themselves and went out like prostitutes”; they give a blow-by-blow account of the various devices these women used to lure the eyes of Roman governors and soldiers, each of which is punished in kind with a corresponding type of sexual humiliation at the hands of the Roman conquerors. The violent,      See Lopez, Apostle, –. For a nuanced and textured account of alternative and resistant masculinities that reconfigure the self-mastery associated with masculinity into a kind of “passive resistance,” see Shaw, “Body/power/identity,” . Burrus, “Mapping,” . Thus, in Leviticus Rabbah : (ed. Margaliot, i:–) and b. Shabbat b, Isaiah : (“Because the daughters of Zion are haughty . . . with wanton eyes, walking and mincing, making a tinkling with their feet”) is read not only as a description of the promiscuous behavior of Jewish women, but as part of a measure-for-measure account of their eventual punishment. For each way the women “adorned themselves” and made themselves “beautiful” for Roman eyes (e.g. by “filling their eyes with kohl and beckoning”; cf. Isaiah’s “wanton eyes”), they endure violent sexual assault. The measure-for-measure symmetry recalls the m. Sotah’s explicit rationale for the sotah‘s ordeal. We saw something akin to this feminization and sexualization of imperial conquest in the previous chapter’s discussion of the shameful, sexualized exposure of the holy of holies. Leviticus Rabbah : (ed. Margaliot, i:–); cf. b. Shabbat b. The language is emphatically visual. The women “show off their neck . . . to appear tall,” so that the soldier or governor will “see me and take me.” This hope is violently realized during the capture of Jerusalem when “they came out like prostitutes and a general saw them and took them, a governor saw them and took them, a commander saw them and took them.” Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Beautiful men April ,  :  tit-for-tat punishment of this female, but improperly feminine, sexualized spectacle recalls the punishment of the adulterous woman in m. Sotah. A similar logic runs through b. ‘Avodah Zarah a, where R. H . anina b. Teradyon’s daughter, overhearing Roman nobles walking behind her and complimenting “the beauty of her steps,” measures her steps even more. She ends up being forced into prostitution. On one level, such tropes incriminate these victims of sexual exploitation for their transgression of scopic and gendered roles, and on another level they have the effect of implicating Jews in general in their domination by Rome. This has its echoes in the Joseph midrashim. An opposite and inverse logic underpins martyrological stories, imagining exploitation in heroic and virtuous terms. There are a cluster of tragic tales of imperial exploitation of Jews (men and women), redounding with visual motifs, in the Palestinian midrashic collection Lamentations Rabbah and in b. Gittin a. These anecdotes feature the juxtaposition of beautiful Jewish looks and a rapacious Roman gaze, though the gaze is explicitly emphasized only in the Bavli. The anecdote to which we now turn, however, appears only in the Bavli:       Recall the foot (and eye) motif in the Joseph midrashim, as well as the link between prostitution and feet below, n. . B. ‘Avodah Zarah a. However, the story continues to show that her virtue remained intact. Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, ii:) employs a similar logic, reading, “Now Dinah went out . . . and Shekhem son of H . amor . . . saw her” (Genesis :), to mean that “Her arm became exposed.” (Cf. b. Ketubot a, where Rava reacts with great lust upon seeing Homa’s exposed arm.) Targum Neofiti reads Dinah’s going out “to see” the local women as going out “to be seen” by the local men. For treatments of Christian martyrdom narratives that deploy an analytic of visuality, see Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory, and Burrus, Saving Shame, –. See, again Shaw, “Body/power/identity,” and Burrus, Saving Shame, on the complex gendering that ensues (in Burrus, particularly along scopic lines). See also Campbell, “Sacrificial spectacle.” For example, the story of the four hundred boys and girls brought to Rome for sexual purposes who jumped into the sea rather than submit to their fate (b. Gittin b; Lamentations Rabbah : [ed. Buber, a–b]). On the Greco-Roman novelistic motifs that appear in these stories, see Stern, “Captive woman.” See also Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life, –, esp. , , and Levinson, “Tragedy of romance.” Daniel Boyarin looks at the Babylonian versions of these stories in terms of emasculation and the gaze, but not in terms of the more literal, physical sense of sight. See Boyarin, Dying for God, –, esp. . It does not appear in the parallel collection in Lamentations Rabbah; it does, however, surface in a late Aramaic translation of the Bible (Targum Lamentations to Lamentations :). The other three anecdotes are also replete with the theme of visual-sexual exploitation of Jews. They include () the story of the young R. Yishma’el b. Elisha, a boy with “beautiful eyes, face, and curly hair” who is rescued from a prison (in b. Gittin a, or brothel in the Palestinian versions); () the beautiful son and daughter of R. Yishma’el b. Elisha, who are captured by two different Romans who wish to have them reproduce; they embrace and weep until they die rather than fulfill their masters’ wishes (paralleled in Lamentations Rabbah); () the gruesome story of Tsaphanat (so called “because all gazed, tsafu, at her beauty”), who is raped by a battalion of Roman soldiers and then stripped in the Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros [It is written]: “The precious sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold” (Lamentations :). What is meant by “comparable to fine gold”? . . . It means that they put fine gold to shame with their beauty. Previously, the Roman nobility used to attach the seal of a ring in front of them and have intercourse in their bed. From now onwards they brought the sons of Israel, tied them to the foot of their beds, and had intercourse. Before moving to the political implications of this anecdote, let us recall why it made sense for the rabbis to imagine the Romans putting images (or Jewish men) in front of them while having sex. As we noted in the case of Imma Shalom’s visually abstinent spouse, R. Eli‘ezer, in b. Nedarim a, the logic undergirding this practice of visual eugenics is found in an abundance of sources: biblical, Mesopotamian, Indian, Jewish, Christian, and Greco-Roman. In his Gynaeciorum, Soranus explains: The tyrant of the Cyprians, who was misshapen, compelled his wife to look (blepein) at beautiful statues (agalmata perikalla) during intercourse and became the father of well-shaped children; and horse-breeders, during covering, place noble horses in front of the mares. In their telling, the rabbis mark gazing during sex as a practice of Roman nobility, and, as we saw earlier, its inverse (not looking) is marked as rabbinic. Both Roman and rabbinic sources also make clear that it was not just what was seen at the moment of intercourse, but also desirous looking in other contexts (for example, in accounts of women falling in love with statues), that could affect the fetus. As Genesis Rabbah puts it:     marketplace for a prospective buyer who wishes to see her beauty. In the first story, R. Yishma’el’s beauty is expressed in the conventional terms of a certain type of youthful, feminine male beauty. The motif of youth, aside from pointing to the Roman practice of homosexual relations between an older and a younger man, also seems to signify a vulnerability related to gender and power configurations. On R. Yishma’el’s beauty, see Boustan, “Rabbi Ishmael’s miraculous conception.” See also t. Horayot :–; y. Horayot :, b. For Mesopotamian evidence, see the recommendation that a woman who is pregnant adulterously “constantly pray to Ishtar while looking at her husband all the time” while reciting “I shall what is inside my belly make look like my husband,” in Clay and Keiser, Babylonian Records, vol. iv, :– (trans. Stol, Birth in Babylonia, ). Soranus, Gynaeciorum .. For an excellent account of “maternal impressions” and gynecological visual theory in rabbinic, Hekhalot, and Greco-Roman materials, see Boustan, “Rabbi Ishmael’s miraculous conception.” E.g. b. Nedarim b and b. Bava Mets’ia a. E.g. the first-century Aetius reports in the name of Empedocles: “How do offspring come to resemble others rather than their parents? [Empedocles says that] fetuses are shaped by the imagination (phantasia) of the woman around the time of conception. For, often women have fallen in love with statues of men and with images and have produced offspring which resemble them,” Aetius .. (Diels, Doxographi Graeci ; Empedocles, Poem, trans. Inwood, ). Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Beautiful men April ,  :  “And afterwards, when the sons of God came to the daughters of men [and they bore them children]” (Genesis :). R. Berekhyah said: “A woman would go out into the marketplace, and she would see (hayetah ro’ah) a young man and lust after him (umit’avvah lo). She would go and have intercourse and bring forth a young man resembling him.” This comports with the reversed practice in b. Nedarim a, where R. Eli‘ezer avoids adulterous and spousal sights in order to ensure his offspring’s status, looks, and health. All three sources (b. Nedarim a, Genesis Rabbah :, and b. Gittin a) imagine different variations of the gendering of the scopic regime: in b. Nedarim, a man attempts (not to) look at or visualize a woman; in Genesis Rabbah, we find a lusty and transgressive female gaze at males; and in b. Gittin, we have heterosexual Roman couples gazing at Jewish men, with homoerotic overtones. As discussed in section , most Greco-Roman sources focus on the female gaze, but Pliny, like b. Nedarim a, allows for the impact of the male gaze. A similar lack of distinction between male and female progenitors is found in b. Gittin a. Whether presuming an intromissive theory of vision, in which the woman (and ultimately the fetus) is “impressed” by what she sees, or an extramissive theory, in which “sight (opsis) transmitted the features (tupoi)” onto the fetus, the rabbinic and Roman scenarios share a tactile understanding of vision and its effects. We must also note an extremely interesting Zoroastrian source in which gazing during conception is supposed to give rise to black-skinned people. B. Gittin a turns the beautiful Jewish youths into more than just eugenic visual objects; they also function as erotic visual stimuli. The Babylonian rabbis make these Jewish men into living substitutes for the      Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, i:). For gentiles having sex in front of slaves as opposed to rabbis who drive away even mice and insects, see b. Niddah b–a. For the Zoroastrian context for Babylonian rabbinic sexual practices, including eugenic concerns coupled with demonology, see Elman, “He in his cloak.” Galen, De Theriaca ad Pisonem  (in Claudii Galeni, ed. Kuhn, vol. xiv, ; trans. Stol, Birth in Babylonia, ). Note, though, that in most of the discussions about using images or visual objects for reproduction – whether human, equine, or ovine – e.g. Genesis :–; Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, II:), substitutes are brought for the purposes of female eyes and arousal. This lack of distinction between male and female progenitors also goes for Bundahišn b (text and trans. in Lincoln, “Human unity,” ; ed. and trans. Anklesaria, –). Bundahišn b, on which see Lincoln, “Physiological speculation”; Lincoln, “Center of the world”; Shapira, “Zoroastrian sources.” My thanks to Moulie Vidas for his help in thinking through this puzzling source. It is striking that in the concatenation of tales in the Bavli, women are imagined actually to be abused, whereas the narratives involving males stop short of physical abuse. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros material images that Romans would gaze at during sex. That the production of beautiful offspring was a likely motive for the Romans’ behavior is implied from the biblical prooftext (“comparable to fine gold”), although it is possible that the “sons of Israel” were thought to have been used as much for aphrodisiac purposes as for image reproduction. The use of visual stimuli is attested in another remarkable tradition in the Babylonian Talmud, in which Jezebel is said to have arranged to have images of prostitutes placed in front of Ahab in order to “heat” the usually “frigid” king. The underlying analogy between the Jewish men and plastic art also brings home the heterovisuality of the gaze, in which Jewish men become quintessential visual objects. At the same time, the hope of producing children in the image of these Jews points to the slipperiness of the gaze in blurring subject and object and in confounding an essentially heterovisual gaze with the mimetic effects of a homovisual one. On a number of levels, this is a far cry from the first-century Roman depictions of nude, bound Jewish males. This vignette of the beautiful Jewish men is not just a lament about the Roman colonization of Jewish bodies; it is also a paean to the pornographic effect of Jewish masculinity. Even more intriguing are the reproductive effects thereof, beneath which lies a rabbinic fantasy about Romans giving birth to what are, in fact, (copies of ) Jews. What seems at first glance to be a story about Jewish sexual shame is actually a rather explicit fantasy about the Jewish origins of Rome, one that turns the gender and visual regime on its head. We find motifs similar to b. Gittin a in another Babylonian story, which also trades in the imperial visual-sexual exploitation of Jewish men. This anecdote, in b. Sanhedrin b, also challenges a straightforward application of a binary gender and scopic regime. The story highlights the violence of the imperial gaze, rather than its exploitation: R. Yoh.anan said: . . . When Nebuchadnezzar the wicked drove Israel into exile, there were among them young men whose beauty shamed the sun     As interesting is the question of how and why the Babylonian rabbis thought of the imperial gaze in the ways that they did. Were they thinking of the Roman empire, or did this stand in for the Persian imperium? If the former, how did the greater distance from Rome affect their relationship to its imperialism? See the later parallel in Targum ad Lamentations :. B. Sanhedrin b. Compare the reverse scenario of Joseph seeing his father’s image and cooling his passions in y. Horayot :, d (b. Sotah b). The overlaps between b. Gittin a and Bundahišn b are particularly salient not only for their use of visual reproduction but also for their ethnogenetic motifs (of Africans as demonic, and of Romans as Jewish). Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Beautiful men April ,  :  (megannin et hah.ammah beyofyan). The Chaldean women would look (ro’ot) at them and emit [vaginal] fluid. They told their husbands, who told the king, who ordered they be killed; but they still emitted fluid. The king ordered that they be crushed. The model of beauty here is linked not only to radiance but also to youth, highlighting the vulnerability of these young men under the imperial gaze. The youths here are described in a similar manner to the Jewish men in b. Gittin a; here, the boys’ beauty shames the sun, whereas there, they shame gold. Beauty strikes the eye in a physicalized fashion, akin to light and radiance. In this case, the beauty of these male youths inflames their female observers to the point of sexual arousal, which persists beyond their death. The king must trample them beyond recognition to stop the flow of desire elicited by their sight. Here, the rapacious imperial gaze is attributed to women, who melt with passion. Jewish male beauty upsets the local, imperial, masculine sense of pride and proprietary interest. The beauty of the boys must be physically crushed in order for it to release its hold over the Chaldean women. The impotence of the Chaldean men is ironically signaled by their recourse to murderous violence as the only solution to “controlling” their wives again. Like b. Gittin a, the colonized visual objects here exert a certain kind of power over empire. In both of these narratives, b. Gittin a and b. Sanhedrin b, Jewish men are dominated, exploited, and visually objectified, yet they subvert and resist a straightforward account of imperial domination. Even if these men do not fare well, when we compare their fates to the explicit violence and humiliation that the storyteller in b. Gittin a imagines for women, we find that even if the rabbis concede that a man’s gender can be unsettled     B. Sanhedrin b. See Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, ii:); Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, iii:). See also Bartman, “Eros’s flame,” , on “sexy boys” and what I would call their “agequeerness,” a feature we will see highlighted in R. Yoh.anan, a “descendant of Joseph,” in b. Bava Metsi’a a. On a crisis of Roman masculinity that led to the formation of a gender-ambiguous Christian masculinity, see Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch. The problem of viewing God is compared to the problem of looking at the sun. Adam’s heel is compared to the sun for its radiance in Leviticus Rabbah : (ed. Margaliot, i:); b. Bava Batra a. Apocalyptic, pseudepigraphic, and Hekhalot literature refer to angels and divine beings in terms of their luminosity. Wisdom, too, is supposed to be expressed visibly as light, and we will touch on this motif in Chapter , “Seeing sages.” Ancients, Aristotle among many others, understood vision to be a process enabled by the transmission of light. Radiance was not only a common way to describe beauty but it was also a way to understand vision itself. Compare the spectacular and sexualized undoing of Christian women in martyrologies. See Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, –; Burrus, Sex Lives of Saints. Brock and Harvey note that sexual mutilation happens to women but not men. Here, albeit in a less drawn out fashion, spectacularly beautiful men have their beauty violently, and equally spectacularly, erased. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros by domination, a far more graphic and abject outcome can be imagined for a woman. In this subsection, we have treated narratives of imperial visual exploitation. While such stories about men and women appear in both Palestinian and Babylonian collections, it is only in the Babylonian Talmud that we find a fully developed sexualization of Israelite or Jewish “beautiful” men, along with a somewhat subversive effect on the imperial-colonized power dynamic. The Bavli’s vignettes consider both Roman and Babylonian eyes (it seems feasible to read Nebuchadnezzar as a figure for either imperium). Rabbinic ambivalence about gentile eyes fetishizing Jewish men is found in Palestinian and Babylonian sources, as we have seen, particularly centering on the biblical figure of Joseph. However, these sources are far more explicitly about the imperial gaze and do not depict Jewish male beauty as a questionable product of feminine self-cultivation (as with Joseph) or as seduction (as in some of the stories about women, and, to some degree, Joseph), but rather as something that potentially confounds imperial domination. This very confounding is related to the prominence of vision in these stories, which relates back to how the tactility of vision itself undermines a clean distinction between viewing subject and visual object. Visual homoeros In this subsection, we encounter a Jewish male and rabbinic visual object, one whose beauty employs some of the motifs we have seen in the rabbinic depiction of Joseph and other Israelite males under the imperial gaze, but who is, himself, the object of an ambivalent rabbinic erotic gaze. While this    Thus, the rabbis tell of the violent sexual abasement of Tsafanat, so called “because all gazed (tsafu) at her beauty.” The stories in b. Gittin a about the Jewish men tied to Roman beds and about Tsafanat, are emphatic about the beauty of their protagonists. The Tsafanat story is far more developed and recalls some of the blow-by-blow humiliations of the sotah ritual. Having been raped by a Roman battalion and then put up for sale, Tsafanat writhes in the dust and imprecates and implicates God in her suffering. For a different meditation on the misrecognizing gaze of empire, see b. Ta‘anit a, where the emperor’s daughter is taught to understand why wisdom is stored in such an “ugly vessel” as R. Joshua b. H . anina. He informs her that beautiful scholars would know more if they were ugly. Compare this self-aestheticization to Andrew Jacobs’ notion of the Christian “aestheticization” of Jews in Jacobs, Remains, –. Also consider the versions of the story of Rabban Gamaliel’s encounter with the beautiful gentile woman in y. ‘Avodah Zarah and b. ‘Avodah Zarah. These versions specify that Rabban Gamaliel met the woman on the Temple Mount, enhancing the sense that what we are dealing with here, in part, is the gaze of the “colonized” turned back at the imperium (albeit very ambivalently). Consider, further, that the version of this story in b. ‘Avodah Zarah is followed by the story of R. Akiva’s reaction to the beauty of Tinnaeus Rufus’ wife: he laughs because, in the future, she will convert and he will marry her. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Beautiful men April ,  :  is a particularly Babylonian rabbinic phenomenon, the rabbi in question, R. Yoh.anan, also figures as a visual object in the Palestinian sources: When R. Yoh.anan died, the icons bent over; they said it was because no icon was [as beautiful] as he [was]. We have seen tales, in both Palestinian and Babylonian sources, in which Jewish beauty is devastated by the imperial gaze; here, we find a startling reversal: R. Yoh.anan’s looks actually topple icons of imperial domination, and with them, a certain kind of masculinity. R. Yoh.anan’s beauty receives a fuller treatment in the Babylonian Talmud, in which it not only elicits strong responses – of admiration, desire, and ambivalence – but also upsets gender. The locus classicus for the effects of R. Yoh.anan’s beauty is b. Bava Metsi’a a–b. Scholars have read this multivalent narrative for, among other things, what it has to say about Babylonian attitudes toward Palestinian rabbis and its ample treatment of gender, sexuality, and rabbinic scholasticism, whether in relation to Greco-Roman notions of gender, masculinity, and homoeroticism or in terms of erotic transference and the life of study. To these rich readings of this pericope, I bring the added perspective of visuality. I suggest that vision and, more specifically, visual eros, is a prominent trope that runs through the narratives and allows us to read and contextualize this story in new ways. Here is the narrative: () (a) R. Yoh.anan said: “R. Yishma’el son of R. Yose’s penis was like a bottle of nine qav [capacity].” Rav Papa said: “R. Yoh.anan’s penis was like a bottle of five qav”; others say, three kav. That of R. Papa himself was as [large as] the jugs of Harpania. (b) R. Yoh.anan said: “I am the [last] remnant of Jerusalem’s men of outstanding beauty.” (c) Let one who desires to see R. Yoh.anan’s beauty take a silver cup as it emerges from the crucible, fill it with the seeds of a red pomegranate, encircle its brim with a wreath of red roses, and set it between the sun and the shade. Its lustrous glow is akin to R. Yoh.anan’s beauty. (d) But that is not so! For did not a master say: “Rav Kahana’s beauty was akin to R. Abbahu’s; R. Abbahu’s beauty was akin to Jacob our ancestor’s; and our ancestor Jacob’s beauty was akin to Adam’s,”      Y. ‘Avodah Zarah :, c (partial parallel in b. Mo‘ed Qatan b). This hagiographic vignette comes amidst a series of other rabbinic deaths that result in symbols of Roman power being adversely affected. Kalmin, Sage, –; Boyarin, Carnal Israel, –, and, recently, Boyarin, “Rabbi Yoh.anan,” –  and –; Fraenkel, Studies, –. Following Ms. Hamburg unless otherwise noted. See parallel in b. Bava Batra a, which concludes: “And Adam’s beauty was akin to God’s.” Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      April ,  : Visual eros  () (a) (b) () (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f ) (g) and R. Yoh.anan is not mentioned! R. Yoh.anan is different [and thus not included here], because he lacked splendor of face [i.e. a beard]. R. Yoh.anan used to go and sit at the gates of the miqve [ritual bath]. He said, “When the daughters of Israel ascend from ritual immersion they will look (mistakkelin) at me, that they may bear sons as beautiful and as learned in Torah as I am.” The rabbis said to him: “Do you not fear the evil eye?” He replied, “I come from the seed of Joseph our patriarch, over whom the evil eye does not rule, of whom it is written, ‘Joseph is a fruitful bough, a fruitful bough by a spring’” (Genesis :). R. Abbahu said [of this verse]: “Do not read, ‘By a spring (‘ale ‘ayin)’ but, ‘Beyond the power of the eye (‘ole ‘ayin).’” R. Yose b. R. H . anina deduced it from the following: “‘Let them multiply abundantly (veyiddegu larov) in the midst of the earth’ (Genesis :) – just as fish in the seas (dagim shebayam) are covered by water and the eye has no power over them; so also are the seed of Joseph – the eye has no power over them.” One day R. Yoh.anan was bathing in the Jordan. Resh Laqish saw him and thought he was a woman, and he stuck his lance in the Jordan and jumped to the other side. When R. Yoh.anan saw Resh Laqish, he said to him, “Your strength for the Torah.” He [Resh Laqish] said, “Your beauty of (or, for) women.” He [R. Yoh.anan] said, “If you repent, I will give you my sister, who is more beautiful than I [am].” He [Resh Laqish] consented. He sought to return and collect his things, but he could not. He [R. Yoh.anan] taught him Bible and Mishnah and made him into a great man. One can divide this passage into three narrative segments (as enumerated). The first is a comparative account of rabbinic masculinity and beauty, from which R. Yoh.anan emerges in a (relatively) feminine light. The second depicts R. Yoh.anan’s self-presentation to women at the miqve and treats the dangers posed to the beautiful by the evil eye. The third follows R. Yoh.anan from miqve to river and his initial encounter with Resh Laqish. As a whole, this narrative set brings together many of the themes we have    See parallel in b. Berakhot a. See also Targum Yerushalmi’s on this verse. Munich, Vatican, and Florence have variations of “he resembled a woman (idme ke’ittetah).” Note the similar form in the narratives in b. Qiddushin a in which Satan appears as a woman (idme leh satan ke’ittetah) tempting rabbis, in one case, across a river. See b. ‘Avodah Zarah a, where Beruriah’s sister tries to excuse herself from sex work with Rabbi Me’ir by claiming that she is menstruating and that, “there are many here who are far more beautiful than I.” Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Beautiful men April ,  :  encountered so far: a treatment of gender in terms of genitalia and other physical markers (a; b; d); Joseph’s beauty (b) and its visually seductive (a; a–d) and gender-troubling effects (d; a–d); visual eugenics (a); and the subversion of expected power and gender dynamics, including a potentially exploitative visual homoerotics (a–g). The Babylonian Talmud introduces R. Yoh.anan amidst its comparison of rabbinic genitalia (a), according to which he falls shortest (with the still not inconsiderable five, or three, qav). This reduction of maleness and masculinity to visible sex or genital anatomy is something we saw earlier with respect to ‘ervah and the recitation of the Shema. Furthermore, a forensic rabbinic gaze scrutinizes bodies for visible signs (simmanim) – genitalia, hair (facial and pubic), and, for women, breasts – in order to determine sex. However, the storyteller here is at pains to upset an easy reduction of gender to sex. R. Yoh.anan’s looks are troubling for he has no “facial glory,” no beard. The inability to produce hair on the face throws into doubt his ability to produce pubic hair, a determining factor in the legal status of manhood. This visible challenge to gender is expressed quite clearly when (in b) Resh Laqish sees him and thinks he is a woman (as per Hamburg), or (as per other mss.) R. Yoh.anan appears to him as a woman, and also by the symbolism of pomegranates, cups, and roses in the ekphrasis of R. Yoh.anan’s beauty (c). In light of all this, it is also no coincidence that R. Yoh.anan casts himself as a descendant of Joseph, with whom rabbinic tradition also associates feminine beauty. Both R. Yoh.anan and Joseph are feminine men and feminize themselves partly by making themselves into visual objects.       One qav is a liquid measure of approximately two quarts. In absolute terms, this is considerable; in relative terms, and comparison is rather the point of this rabbinic exercise, R. Yoh.anan’s three (or five) qav, versus seven or nine, is the least. See, e.g., m. Niddah :–; :, . See b. Niddah b, where Resh Laqish defines the “outer house” (bayit hah.itson) of the genitalia as “all that is seen when a little girl sits.” On this attempt to asexualize while visualizing the forbidden sight of female genitalia, see Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, –. On beardless men, eunuchs, and boys being banned from monasteries, see Cyril of Scythopolis, Vita Euthymii , ; Vita Sabae , , ; Vita Kyriaki . For the view that ban is related to antipathy toward women, see Harvey, Asceticism, . Such a ban could just as possibly relate to gender ambiguity in men. See m. Niddah :, which talks in terms of “lower and upper hair.” See the play on gender, appearance, and scholarship in a midrash attributed to R. Berakhiah which takes Proverbs : to apply to “disciples of sages who appear (domin) like women but who act mightily (‘osin gevurah) like men” (b. Yoma a). They are both self-aware of their beauty: Not only is R. Yoh.anan self-aware () but he also sets himself up, albeit more deliberately, to be gazed at (). Similar to Joseph, R. Yoh.anan does not look at women, and he even refuses to look at his own sister when she entreats him to heal her husband Resh Laqish. However, he does see Resh Laqish’s strength. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros Despite the non-trivial absolute measure of R. Yoh.anan’s genitalia, gender in this pericope is decidedly not reduced to anatomical sex. The pericope differentiates between maleness and masculinity, or, in other words, sex and gender. The warrior-like figure of Resh Laqish confirms this: His masculine gaze and manhood turn out to be ineffectual. The contrast of masculine and feminine beauty is reinforced in the exchange of looks between Resh Laqish and R. Yoh.anan (recalling Proverbs :, “Do not give your strength to women -al titten lanashim h.elekha”). Resh Laqish saw him and thought he was a woman, and he stuck his lance in the Jordan and jumped to the other side. When R. Yoh.anan saw Resh Laqish, he said to him, “Your strength for the Torah.” He [Resh Laqish] said, “Your beauty of (or, for) women.” The text describes a visual exchange: Resh Laqish sees R. Yoh.anan as a woman and his beauty as feminine, while R. Yoh.anan sees Resh Laqish’s mighty lance, his “strength.” Here is a story in which the visual object (R. Yoh.anan) looks back, openly assessing its viewer and challenging what might be the expected order of things. In the expected order of things in classical Greco-Roman and Persian homoerotic economies of gender and power, the beardless, feminine rabbi would be vanquished by the masculine bearer of weapons. However, the mutual visual exchange between the two announces a different, perhaps sublimated transaction, in which Torah study and a beautiful female double (R. Yoh.anan’s sister) become transferential objects of desire. As initial visual object, R. Yoh.anan returns the gaze; the literary crafting suggests that he     See Boyarin’s reading of Resh Laqish’s spear as a phallus, which later loses its virility when he cannot retrieve it; Boyarin, Carnal Israel, –. Resh Laqish’s masculinity is not completely quelled; it surfaces during the final episode, in which he and R. Yoh.anan have a fiery disagreement about the purity of weaponry. Resh Laqish’s inability to retrieve his lance echoes the story that follows in b. Bava Metzi’a b about the patriarch Rabbi’s marriage proposal to R. Eli‘ezer b. Shim‘on’s widow, to which she replies: “Shall a vessel (keli) that has been used by holy (qodesh) be used by the profane (h.ol )? There, [in Palestine] they say, ‘In the place that the master of the house has hung up his weapons (zeneh), there the shepherd hung up his wallet.’” Recall that R. Yoh.anan is compared to a cup. Vessel (keli), cup, and scabbard were vaginal terms in antiquity (see t. Sotah :; Mekhilta Derabbi Shim‘on bar Yoh.ai to Exodus : [ed. Epstein-Melamed, ]), whereas bow, lance, and weapons were either metaphors or designations for phalluses. This is not quite a reciprocal or homovisual encounter, given that each objectifies the other (lance/woman). See Boyarin, Carnal Israel. The poetry of Abu Nuwas (eighth century ce; born in Iran, died in Baghdad; wrote in Arabic) extols the virtues of androgynous beauties, particularly beardless young boys (ghilman). See Sharma and Hilsdon, “Love: pre-modern discourses,” –, on gazing, love, and eros in heteroerotic and homoerotic contexts in Persian poetry and novels, and Sprachman, “Le beau garcon”; Rowson, “Categorization of gender.” Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Beautiful men April ,  :  looks at Resh Laqish’s lance or “might.” Even more than this, in the exchange that follows he also succeeds in sapping Resh Laqish of his manly power and rebuilding him into a “great man” on his own terms, those of Torah. Put differently, not only does R. Yoh.anan escape Resh Laqish’s rapacious gaze, but the feminine rabbi actually appears to topple, or at least top, the masculine bandit, and, as Daniel Boyarin has argued, (re)produce him (as he tried to do with women, by other means, outside the miqve) as a rabbinic scholar. Aside from this relatively unusual, and likely late, Babylonian narrative instance of reciprocal gazing between two male (but not masculine) figures, other gazes redound in this passage, including the gazes of the women at the miqve, the evil eye, and the gaze of the storyteller himself. R. Yoh.anan skirts the edge of the permissible by courting the female gaze (adulterously), albeit in the name of scholarly and aesthetic reproduction. Through his visibility and the desire that it excites, he inserts himself quite purposefully into conjugal beds, reproducing his image using the ancient visual reproductive technologies discussed above. The storyteller expresses unease through the device of the back-and-forth between R. Yoh.anan and other rabbis about the evil eye, which, as scholars have noted, redeploys Palestinian midrashic traditions. Specifically the excerpt of Genesis :, “Joseph is a fruitful bough, a fruitful bough by a spring,” is read to mean that the evil eye has no power over the descendants of Joseph. Palestinian midrash explicitly links this to the continuation of the       As per n. , R. Yoh.anan embodies the refusal to look at women, even as he deliberately courts their gaze in what seems to be an adulterous intrusion into marital intercourse. This is a different female gaze from the adulterous gentile or the prostitute. It is a gaze precisely in the context of ritual piety. He also refuses to look at his sister when she asks him to look at her and her children, who will suffer if he allows Resh Laqish to die. The language, “She is more beautiful than me,” echoes that used by the daughter of R. H . anina b. Teradyon when she seeks to protect her virtue in the brothel (b. ‘Avodah Zarah a). Boyarin, Carnal Israel, –. Here is the homovisual effect at work: the two exchange looks, and one becomes a reflection of the other. Strikingly, the third-century Indian Vaikhanasa-Grhyasutra : proposes that “a woman who has bathed after menstruation will have such offspring as the man is whom she looks at” (cited and trans. in Gonda, Vedic Ritual, ). See Rubenstein, Culture, ; Friedman, “Historical aggadah.” Friedman, Sperber, and Schremer note the relationship between this narrative and b. Bava Qamma a–b. See Friedman, “Further adventures”; Sperber, “Unfortunate adventures”; Schremer, “He posed him a difficulty.” As noted, Palestinian sources and b. Niddah a seem to imply that an adulterous gaze of this sort might impact the legitimacy of ensuing progeny. In this case, the effect is mimetic and homovisual (boys as beautiful and scholarly as R. Yoh.anan), even if the women’s eyes, through which it is channeled, are not. Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, iii:) has Joshua inquire of the children of Joseph, “Are you not fearful of the [evil] eye?” Their reply invokes Genesis :, “Let them multiply abundantly (veyiddegu larov) [like fish in the sea],” the blessing Jacob gave to the descendants of Joseph, as the source of their protection, i.e. that the “eye has no power over them.” Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros verse, “The branches [or, daughters] step [or, look] over a wall,” which it rereads as “the Egyptian women, daughters of kings, wished to gaze at Joseph’s face, but he would set his eyes upon any of them.” This relationship between “Josephan” immunity from the evil eye and a refusal to look at women is made explicit in a Talmudic parallel (b. Berakhot a) to part of this pericope (a–b). At least two important additional features make this clear. First, the parallel adds the following to the midrashic explanations that follows R. Yoh.anan’s invocation of Joseph’s protection from the evil eye, “The eye that did not wish to feast upon that which did not belong to it [i.e. to Joseph, referring to the Egyptian women, cited above], the evil eye does not rule over it.” Secondly, b. Berakhot a contrasts R. Yoh.anan with another rabbi, Rav Gidol, who frequented the miqve in order to instruct women about proper immersion, but who did look at them. He, too, is questioned by the rabbis, but he is asked whether he does not fear the evil inclination, rather than the evil eye. In this literary context, it seems that both rabbis were right near the bath itself, one looking and the other appearing but refraining from looking. R. Yoh.anan is protected from the ostentatious display of his beauty, which would normally be a cause for concern, because of his merit in not engaging in a mutual gaze. There is no ocular interchange and thus he, like Joseph (and like the Jewish men subjugated by Rome), can trigger visual eros (relatively) blamelessly. The ambivalence of the storyteller about this technically correct yet questionable behavior is apparent in the swift comeuppance that follows the midrashic justification. No sooner do we hear that Joseph’s “descendants” are immune from the evil eye, than the narrative shifts to Resh Laqish looking at R. Yoh.anan in the waters of the Jordan river (), the very waters that supposedly protect Joseph’s descendants; R. Yoh.anan’s immunity is       Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, iii:) and see Targum Yerushalmi s.v. Genesis :: “And when [the Egyptian sages] praised you, the daughters of the rulers [of Egypt] would walk along the walls and cast down in front of you bracelets and golden ornaments so that you might look at them.” Joseph’s immunity to the evil eye is rooted in a midrashic reading of Genesis : (Boyarin, Carnal Israel, ; Kugel, In Potiphar’s House, –) but appears in various narrative exegeses. B. Berakhot a (paralleled in b. Zevah.im b). B. Berakhot a. Rav Gidol claims that his evil inclination is not aroused; that these women look like so many white geese to him. The contrast between R. Yoh.anan’s willingness to look at Resh Laqish and his refusal to look at women is starkly drawn in the later request of his sister to look at her and her children (Mss. Hamburg and Florence) – a request that he ignores. Cf. y. ‘Avodah Zarah :, a–b, which contrasts Rabban Gamliel’s blessing over a beautiful animal with the utterance of “abaskanta.” Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Beautiful men April ,  :  thereby challenged. This ironic editorial juxtaposition and those that follow bring us to the gaze of the storyteller himself. We can trace the storyteller’s gaze by observing his heavy hand. R. Yoh.anan’s self-proclamation of beauty (b) is evoked by the anonymous narrative voice by means of a recipe by which to elicit comparable radiance (c). It then undermines this astonishing beauty by questioning whether R. Yoh.anan really belongs among the most beautiful male (rabbinic) specimens (d), concluding that R. Yoh.anan, indeed, does not possess this visible, masculine beauty because he lacks a beard (d), referring back to R. Yoh.anan’s relative lack of masculinity (a). The storyteller’s delight is evident in his invitation for the reader to “see R. Yoh.anan’s beauty” via a vivid instructional ekphrasis that radiates with silver, red, and golden hues. This is no realist portrait, however. The motifs invoked in this nonrepresentational description focus on the physical properties of color and light that R. Yoh.anan emits, rather than on the contours of his features. The motifs are also recognizably feminine – cup, roses, and pomegranate seeds. This vivid image that the storyteller encourages us “to see” is a crucial manifestation of his own idolizing gaze at his protagonist. The question and answers that follow (d) make explicit what is already implied (a): that compared to paradigmatic Jewish males, R. Yoh.anan in decidedly feminine. The succession of masculine beauties runs from a Babylonian-born Amora to a Palestinian Amora, through to biblical Jacob and Adam, and ultimately to God, in whose image Adam was created. R. Yoh.anan is presented by the Babylonian storyteller as a rabbinic figure who subverts the normative, rabbinic, gendered regime of visual eros, partly    See b. Berakhot b’s description of R. Yoh.anan’s beauty as radiance (ziharurey) emitted from his exposed skin, which lights up the room. Both Yoh.anan and Ele‘azar weep for its mortality. For the same act of revealing the arm and casting light (nafal nehora) as an incitement to desire, see b. Ketubot a. Zoroastrian sources emphasize a particular quality of radiance (xwarrah) as an aspect of a deity, king, or priest’s glory. See Soudavar, “Significance”; Gnoli, “Farr(ah),” –. Compare the genealogy of š-p-r in b. Bava Metsi’a a that goes all the way back to God to the Naqsh-e Rustam inscriptions in which Sasanian monarchs are said to have inherited their “face/appearance (čihr)” from the gods (see Chapter , p. xxx). Relatedly, on the light and xwarrah created by Ohrmazd, and attributed to Iranians, priests, and Ohrmazd himself, see Bundahišn .– (ed. and trans. Anklesaria, –); Kreyenbroek, “Cosmogony”; Bundahišn : (ed. and trans. Anklesaria, –; cf. trans. Zaehner, Zurvan, ). On xwarrah as produced by Ohrmazd, see DkM. .– (text and trans. in Zaehner, Zurvan, –). B. Sotah b describes the biblical Joseph as having a rose-colored face; this could refer to skin color or radiance. See Asclepiades, who talks of dark skin or coals shining as bright as roses (Asclepiades ). On roses as feminine imagery, see Irwin, “Roses.” On the rose as a symbol of beauty in Persian literature, see Diba, “Gol o bolbol.” In Ben Sira :, the high priest is compared to a rose in springtime. On a pomegranate-colored complexion as a mark of feminine beauty, see Kosrow and ¯ his page,  (Pahlavi Text, ed. Unvala, ). See Friedman, “Anthropomorphism.” Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros by eliciting desire on the part of all who see him: the women at the miqve, Resh Laqish, and the storyteller himself. At this point in his biography, Resh Laqish is a useful figure: not yet a rabbinic insider, nor exactly an outsider (he is Jewish and conventionally gendered, more like the illustrious rabbis and biblical figures listed in d). He is close enough for the rabbinic storyteller to express a certain homoerotic desire while being sufficiently “other” or distant to displace it. And yet, the (ultimately uneasy) incorporation of Resh Laqish into rabbinic scholasticism “under the wings of the shekhinah,” or (arguably) the sublimation of desire thereby, does not quite resolve or dissolve the erotic tension. The ambivalence of the storyteller toward his beautiful protagonist persists, as is evident from the plot twists that follow, including the denouement, in which Resh Laqish and R. Yoh.anan quarrel to fatal effect. Retribution occurs at the very end of the story: when Resh Laqish and R. Yoh.anan argue, Resh Laqish becomes ill and dies as a result of R. Yoh.anan’s anger, and R. Yoh.anan goes out of his mind from grief at the loss of his friend and dies, as well. We might ask whether the storyteller is punishing R. Yoh.anan for his flagrant exhibitionism, a trope familiar from Joseph and from other contexts involving seductive women; or, having ogled R. Yoh.anan’s beauty, through the figures of the women at the miqve, Resh Laqish, and otherwise, is the storyteller enacting and then disciplining his own desire? It is true that the story idolizes, and perhaps exoticizes, R. Yoh.anan’s brand of radiant, feminine beauty, but it also annihilates him through a dramatic account of love and angry emotion between men. As we have seen, the feminizing effect of being a visual object desired by women is thought in terms of gender trouble and transgression or imperialism, in other words, in terms of a feminization that can carry homoerotic desire, and sometimes violence, in its tow. However, the deliberate deployment   While the male homoerotics of this narrative have been well explored, it is worth drawing attention to the possibility of homoerotic vision on the part of females, who do, after all, “gaze” at the rabbi. Indeed, the passage goes to much effort to convince us that R. Yoh.anan was ambiguously gendered, that he was a very feminine man who passed as a woman. This leaves various possibilities open as to what precisely those women whose eyes caught him and brought his vision home to bed with them thought that they saw and desired, including the possibility that they, like Resh Laqish, saw him as a woman. So too, Genesis Rabbah : (ed. Theodor-Albeck, ii:–) has Joseph as a slave who is desired not only by his adulterous Egyptian mistress, but also by his master, who is consequently castrated. B. ‘Avodah Zarah a, where Rabban Gamaliel’s pronouncement upon the beauty of the beautiful, female “idol-worshipper” articulates the same power dynamic in reverse. The story’s concern is not just about gazing at beautiful women but about appreciating gentile beauty; it follows a baraita and halakhic discussion about granting h.en (favor, grace, or beauty) to gentiles. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Beautiful men April ,  :  of the many visual motifs we have identified – the female gaze, male resistance to looking at women, seductive hypervisibility, all culminating in a male–male gaze – in the context of rabbinic gender, reproduction, and scholasticism, makes for more than a tale of forbidden pleasure followed by punishment. What still remains, I would suggest, is a critique of rabbinic masculinity and visuality, from the inside and at its core. From human–divine to human–human visuality In the previous chapters we suggested homovisual and heterovisual paradigms in order to analyze divine–human visualities. The former was characterized as a reciprocal, mirroring mode of seeing in which two seeing subjects exchange a gaze in a mirroring fashion. In the case of re’iyah, it turned out that rabbinic halakhah and narrative promoted such a shared gaze between an idealized, able-bodied, male pilgrim and a divine equivalent. Heterovisuality, on the other hand, was characterized as a mode of looking which separates seeing subject and visual object. In the case of re’iyah, this could involve a pilgrim looking at cultic objects such as the leh.em hapanim. In a more complex version, it could involve pilgrims being directed to look at a material representation of themselves engaged sexually with God, or (implicitly) at feminized manifestations of God (e.g. the poles of the ark, or “temple furniture” analogized to a modest woman). Furthermore, gentile conquest and penetration into the holy of holies is depicted along the lines of an aggressive heterovisuality. Homovisuality and heterovisuality can be usefully applied to rabbinic conceptions of visual eros, as well, which inevitably but not exclusively focus on the male gaze. At times, it seems as if the rabbis elide heterovisuality with heterosexuality, at others it is clear that this is not the case. However, in both scenarios, the gendering of gazing and being seen does not necessarily fall along predictable lines. The rabbis seem to promote a refusal of homovisuality, and a restraint of heterovisuality. One could argue that this underpins a fundamental conception of normative heterovisuality, and even of heterosexuality, but, as I hope to have shown, rabbinic visual eros resists such easy categorization.  I hope to have brought another lens to the analysis of this rich Talmudic passage by drawing out how much work the eye does in channeling desire. In presenting this narrative of R. Yoh.anan, I do not mean to suggest that it stands for all rabbinic visuality, or for a consistent ambivalence about the homoerotic and homo-rabbinic gaze. Neither do I mean to imply that this gaze is only a later Babylonian phenomenon. In Chapter , we will see a visual eroticism in the Palestinian Talmud, which surfaces in the context of learning, but which has a rather different character. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:       April ,  : Visual eros Given the temporality of God gazing, the loss of both divine–human homo- and heterovisuality and the substitutional logic of seeing sages and (not) seeing idols needs no special explanation. What, though, is the relationship between God gazing and visual eros? I suggest that the closest we come to answering this question is by taking seriously the inverse relationship that we find in Tannatic and later sources between the sacred (whether conceived of as such, as the shekhinah, or as liturgical acts such as prayer or blessing) and ‘ervah. Put most explicitly in Leviticus Rabbah’s promise that one who “closes his eyes” to ‘ervah will receive the face of the shekhinah is the juxtaposition of the restoration of divine–human homovisuality and self-denial of humanhuman heterovisuality. Conclusion In these pages, we have traced a number of instances in which the Palestinian and Babylonian rabbis treated the erotic gaze. We began by looking at how the gaze was gendered when directed at genitalia and have ended with the scrutiny of rabbinic genitalia. Along the way, we have seen how readily the rabbis, like many ancients, understood vision to be capable of both arousing desire and transmitting lust. In other words, merely looking could produce desire. And, conversely, looking with desire was dangerous because vision, with its implicit connection to touch, was no casual form of contact. The effects of desirous looking could range from adultery to visually imprinting the fetus. Its suppression, on the other hand, could shape and have unintended consequences on the dynamics of gender and subjectivity. In other words, the guiding of the erotic gaze served to temper and shape rabbinic masculinity and sexuality, and to direct men toward the sacred. The rabbis engaged in considerations about sexuality through the sense of vision in significant ways, and these considerations of visual eros were complexly gendered. We have noted how the rabbis deployed contemporaneous modes of visuality and ideas about gender, even as they sometimes did so in ostensible opposition to non-Jewish conceptions (by casting nonJews as transgressive). Rabbinic gender and sexuality is articulated by a paradoxically prohibitive gaze or by a complicatedly seductive visibility of Jewish male (and rabbinic) eros. By constructing their own masculinity in terms of a restrained gaze, and by conceiving of themselves as erotic objects   Both of these concerns are present in Palestinian and Babylonian texts and sources. This is not to suggest that there is a stable account of gender and sexuality in Greco-Roman and Persian cultures against which the rabbis staged their own conceptions of gender and sexuality. Trim: mm × mm Top: . mm Gutter: . mm CUUK- cuuk/Neis ISBN:      Conclusion April ,  :  of vision, the rabbis end up confounding a straightforward account of the male gaze or of masculinity. At the same time, prohibition itself is productive of the forbidden. Especially as visual restraint or abstinence, it serves to form an idealized, “holy” rabbinic subject. We have examined the variety of ways in which the erotic gaze was gendered, legislated, and deployed by the rabbis, even, and especially, in the guise of prohibition. Scholars of religion, law and legal theory, and psychoanalysis debate the cultural, social, and psychological effects of prohibition or self-denial. The case of rabbinic prohibitive visuality, despite our ignorance about praxis, offers a complex construction of prohibition that goes beyond an understanding of its function as either repression or inverse enactment of desire. Both those who challenged the rabbinic ideal and those who embodied it were objects of rabbinic fascination. We can recognize in the rabbis something similar to what we find in the late-antique writers of Christian hagiographies: a fascination for those who pushed the boundaries of gender, vision, and eros, for those who dived into extreme asceticism or those who transgressed. Both cases reveal how the gendering of vision, when inflected with eros or when agitated against it, was mutable. At some point, the logic of the gaze could fold in on itself, demanding withdrawal from the field of vision, and this itself could have potentially subversive effects on standard dynamics of gender. Relinquishing the gaze could easily turn one into a visual object; the rabbi or the Jewish male could easily become a thing of beauty eliciting a homoerotic gaze, particularly and most explicitly, in Babylonian sources. We glimpse such a homoerotic gaze in the eyes of the gentile, masculine other who wishes to dominate, and in the complex and sublimated visual eros among rabbis themselves. However, the effects of imperial visual domination are not straightforward in these stories and open up spaces of resistance on the part of their beautiful protagonists. In short, the rabbis were caught between the dangers (and pleasures) of looking and the very different, but equally tantalizing, dangerous pleasure of being seen; the exploration of these dangers had marked effects on their desire, their sense of desirability, and even their gender.