Free Carnal Isræl: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture by Daniel Boyarin Page A

bare facts that there was an Akiva, that he was married, and that apparently he and his wife suffered great poverty while he studied Torah. This much of the story seems so frequently told as to be established historically, though given the nature of rumor, one may even wonder at this. If we only find significance, however, in the historically "true," then, we will be left with very little to read in rabbinic literature.

 
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expressing himself in what seems to be a proverbial formulation, that the responsibilities of marriage are a millstone around the neck of the young scholar, who cannot be free, then, for the study of Torah. The Talmudthat is a later stratum thereofcomments that in fact they do not disagree with each other, but each is referring to the situation of a different community, presumably each to his own (that is, Shmuel to Babylonia and Rabbi Yohanan to Palestine). Presently I shall undertake to interpret this difference, but for the moment let us note that there is, as expected, no disagreement on the obligation to marry for Torah-students, only on its antecedence to study. Moreover, even Rabbi Yohanan, who expresses himself so strongly to the effect that Torah comes first, does not project an essential contradiction between the holiness or spirituality of Torah-study and sexuality but only a pragmatic contradiction (however caustically expressed by Rabbi Yohanan) between the responsibilities of marriage and full commitment to the study of Torah. Quite the opposite: the idea is that being married and having a sexual outlet is productive of "one who studies Torah in purity," as explicitly stated in Babylonian Talmud Yoma 72b (and see Pesachim 112b and Menahot 110b). One who is unmarried cannot study Torah purely. This concept is, moreover, well supported in other rabbinic texts, such as the requirement that only married men should be the leaders of prayer (Babylonian Talmud Taanith 16a). 10
10. This enables us to understand better a passage (already quoted above) in the Persian Church Father Aphrahat, which puzzled Gary Anderson somewhat:
Aphrahat declares that one Jew has asserted that Christians are unclean because they do not take wives. He writes:
I have written to you, my beloved, concerning virginity and holiness because I heard about a Jewish man who has reviled one of our brethren, the members of the church. He said to him, "You are impure for you don't take wives. But we are holy and more virtuous for we bear children and multiply seed in the world."
Aphrahat's understanding of holiness is significant. He correctly distinguishes the Jewish understanding of the term, as reflected in rabbinic documentation, from the Christian. Jews understood the term to refer to the state of marriage. Syriac Christians understood the term to refer to sexual continence. Aphrahat's identification of sexual abstinence with uncleanness might seem unusual. The Rabbis never placed the sexually abstinent individual in the legal category of unclean.
(Anderson 1989, 12223)
We can see, however, that Aphrahat's allusion is exactly correct. For the (Babylonian) Rabbis (the ones that Aphrahat's congregation would have been in contact
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criticism, which can be based on different underlying theories of culture and which seeks to understand literature as social practice (Greenblatt 1990). 25 Under the rubric of cultural poetics, the problem disappears entirely. Unlike an older historicistic criticism (including that of Marx) and formalist criticism of the new-critical mode, both of which assumed an essential difference between literary and other practices, such that literature either "reflected" practice in the one or was autonomous of it in the other, here the opposition between literature and other practices is simply