The Other Bursts from Within

Gender, Identity and Power Structures in Halakhic and Aggadic Texts

Abstract

The article deals with legal and aggadic rabbinical sources concerning bodily processes that involve a bursting out of the body: birth, seminal emission, and more. Jewish sources demonstrate a seemingly subversive relationship, in which the aggadic materials present an opposite picture and thus challenge the legal materials. The halakhic sources discuss the boundaries of the body of the ‘other’ - i.e. converts, gentiles and women. They function as a literary site for examining the boundaries of identity and the wholeness of the self and the exercising of an imagined power over the ‘threatening other’. In contrast, the aggadic sources portray the invasion of the ‘threatening other’, specifically into the body of Jewish men. However, the aggadic inversion should not be considered a protest against the hegemony reflected in the legal discourse or as giving voice to the ‘other’, but rather as a discourse that captures the ideological, social, and perhaps even psychological background of the legal materials. The legal discourse expresses the imagined rabbinical power over the body of the ‘other’, while the aggadic discourse expresses the fear of losing control. As such, the aggadic texts are the ‘other’ that bursts out of the rabbinical corpus and discloses the hidden tensions behind the legal discourse.