From salve to weapon: Torah study, masculinity, and the Babylonian Talmud

Summary

‘Who is a [real] warrior?’ the ancient Jewish sage Ben Zoma rhetorically asked, ‘He who conquers his desire, as it is written, “Better to be forebearing than a warrior, to have self-control than to conquer a city.’” If there has been one central insight from the last two decades or so of the study of masculinity in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, this short maxim, probably dating from the third century CE, encapsulates it. Whether they were Roman philosophers, ancient rabbis, or medieval monks, cultural producers and religious specialists went to extraordinary lengths to transform the discourse of masculinity and masculine identity. These men may have rejected the wider, hegemonic understanding of what manliness meant – almost always some form of physical strength, power, and domination of others – but they by no means rejected their own sense of themselves as men. Ben Zoma, like so many others of his type, assumed that ‘conquest’ and domination were essential components of masculinity, but he directed that conquest inward. To be a man meant to control oneself rather than to control others. It was, to turn a Nietzschean phrase, a strategy of the weak, useful for powerless men who nevertheless could not stand to think of themselves as women.

The rabbis of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages shared with the better studied Roman philosophers and Christian clerics a desire to see themselves, and perhaps to be seen by others, as men, despite their rejection of the dominant cultural paradigms of masculinity.