David Biale - Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Isræl to Contemporary America

EROS AND THE JEWS

In this circuitous, counterchronological fashion, the book gradually took shape over the course of more than a decade. My initial interest had been to describe the complicated, dialectical way in which Jewish culture negotiated the transition from the traditional world to modernity. But the further my research took me into the "traditional" world, the more skeptical I became that one could speak of a clean break between "traditional" and "modern." Instead, the modern period always seems to exist in dialectical relationship to its predecessors, and modern Jews define themselves in constant tension with their tradition, even if their knowledge of that tradition remains fragmentary. To do justice to the modern questions required extensive treatment of the tradition as a whole, going back to its very origins. Every attempt to discover the point of transition between tradition and modernity pushes the search further back in history, and ultimately these terms themselves dissolve and become increasingly unstable.

Yet another, even more personal quest prompted this "regressive" approach. As the son of a socialist Zionist father, I have always been curious about the personal dimensions of Zionism. From what I knew of my father's experience in the Zionist youth movement in the Poland of the 1920s, I was struck by the peculiar tension between eroticism and sublimation that characterized these idealistic young people, many of whom went on to found the State of Israel. After his death in July 1989, I chanced upon letters to and from my father, as well as a brief diary from the late 1920s and early 1930s that strikingly confirmed the ambivalence that I had found elsewhere.

But if indeed the relationship of Zionism to sexuality was one of ambivalence, how did this attitude derive from the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe out of which Zionism emerged? My attention turned to the renaissance of Hebrew literature at the end of the nineteenth century, and that, in turn, led me back to the Haskalah and then, in the fashion already described, farther and farther back into Jewish history. As I hope this study will show, there is a sense in which secular Zionism completed a grand circle with the very biblical, rabbinic, and medieval traditions against which it revolted.

Once I had completed the historical reconstruction of Jewish attitudes toward sexuality from the Bible to the early Zionist movement, Steven Fraser, my editor at Basic Books, pointed out that I had failed to close another circle: the connection between contemporary American Jewish culture and the earlier Jewish tradition. Chapter 9 is the product of that fruitful suggestion. Indeed, to close with the culture in which the author writes seems particularly appropriate to this subject and to the approach I have adopted. The very contention of historians that there is a history of sexuality is a product of contemporary culture, in which sexuality plays a central, if controversial, role. Since sexuality is a universal human experience, although one understood differently by every age and culture, it is virtually impossible to engage the past without the baggage of the present: like all modern men and women, the historian also struggles with his own sexuality. As I shall try to show in Chapter 9, to be a Jew in America today means, at least in part, to confront and attempt to understand oneself in terms of sexual relations both with other Jews and with non-Jews.

Instead of obscuring the contemporary questions that have compelled me to undertake this project, I have framed the book with them in the introduction and final chapter. Some will no doubt contend that these questions have led me tendentiously to choose certain sources and ignore others. To this charge, I plead guilty, but I believe that this is inevitable in all historical work. The story that I wish to tell is dictated to a large degree by contemporary concerns, but for author and readers alike, it cannot be otherwise. To write a history of Jewish sexuality means to place texts, many of them well known, into a radically new context, one that neither earlier historians nor the tradition itself might have anticipated. This history, like all histories, is not so much the discovery of facts or texts as it is the construction of a new way of looking at these "facts," a process that remakes them in its own image.