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114 SHOFAR Winter 1994 Vol. 12, No.2 various Jewish groups. Novak argues, for example, that there is no religious justification for denying minority rights in a Jewish polity and that victims of crime, rather than suspects, should have the benefit of doubt on the part of the police and criminal justice system. The last chapter takes up the issue ofJews and Judaism in the United States. In many ways it articulates the principles that are clearly behind Novak's own intellectual career as illustrated in these essays. He concludes that Judaism and Jews have a good deal to contribute to society's ongoing debates about ethics and morality, but to be full and contributing partners Jews have to learn to engage seriously in the broader, non-Jewish conversation , and yet to do so as spiritually and intellectually mature participants in the Jewish tradition. In this collection, Novak shows us how this might be done. Peter J. Haas Department of Religious Studies Vanderbilt University Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America, by David Biale. New York: Basic Books, 1992. 319 pp. $24.00. Although study ofJewish sexuality is a relatively new discipline, David Biale has ambitiously set out "not to discover what Jewish sexual behavior actually was in the past so much as to investigate howJews have constructed notions of sexuality, how they have thought about it and struggled with it in the texts they produced" (p. 6). Using several different methodologies , Biale has attempted to write a history of how the Jews have constructed , or perceived, sexuality from their beginnings to modern times. According to Biale, this history is "about the dilemmas of desire, the struggle between contradictory attractions, rather than the history or a monolithic dogma" (p. 5). Jewish constructions of sexuality, he suggests, are chara~terized by a dialectical dualism through which opposing strains of thought are engaged in constant struggle. The "contradictory attractions" that Biale focuses on are desire and control (asceticism); procreation and pleasure; communal and individual needs. Biale attempts to show that the discourses on Eros of a range of Jewish communities--;-the Bible, the authors of the Talmud, the Jewish communities of Medieval Ashkenaz and their philosophers and mystics, eighteenth-century Hasidim, the maskilim, the early Zionists, and modern American Jew~-all center around these tensions. Ultimately, Jewish Book Reviews 115 attitudes toward sexuality in all of these communities must be categorized as ambivalent: "I have argued throughout this book that the. history of Jewish sexuality cannot be reduced to a monolithic message, either liberatory or repressive" (p. 229). Eros and tbeJews is an important book. Biale not only seriously and (more or less) comprehensively investigates, for the first time, constructions ofJewish sexuality throughout history but does so while remaining acutely aware of modern biases and apologetics. Although few will have the grasp ofJewish history possessed by Biale, the writing and argumentation is always lucid and informative, making the material widely accessible. Biale both sensitizes his readers to the potential contributions to Jewish cultural history of many different methodologies and establishes Jewish sexuality as a subject for serious scholarly study. Biale offers many intriguing, localized readings. I found his comments on sexual subversion in the Bible and on the Iggeret ba-Kodesb (pp. 102-109) particularly interesting. His discussions of the treatment of Eros during the Haskalab and in early Zionism, which integrate literary analyses with their historical backgrounds, were compelling. Although the documentation is often too sparse for the scholar, the notes and the up-to-date bibliography can lead the interested reader to further sources. Unfortunately, like many pioneering studies, Eros and tbe Jews contains many flaws. Biale never adequately answers the question as to whether it is possible to write a history of Jewish sexuality. Study and comparison of discrete sexual discourses with only passing references to their broader contexts is ultimately self-defeating. For example, while Biale frankly acknowledges that Jewish sexual mores are deeply influenced by surrounding cultures, he never asks what the ramifications of these influences are for his study. If "Jewish" sexual constructions resemble those of their neighbors more than those of their descendants-as an increasing body of evidence suggests-then what...

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