Rereading the Yeṣer in Amoraic Literature. (English)

The increasing interest in Jewish carnality and sexuality in recent years has influenced many areas of research, one of which is the rabbinic concept of the 'evil yeṣer' (inclination). Studies increasingly discuss this rabbinic concept in sexual terms, and 'yeṣer' has become almost synonymous with 'sexuality'. In this paper I wish to show that this view lacks textual justification. Most rabbinic sources present the yeṣer as the enemy of humanity, constantly inducing people to sin and accounting for their difficulty in becoming and remaining servants of God. The yeṣer drives one to sexual sins just as it drags to any other sinful acts, as it is an antinomian entity, the enemy of Torah and its commandments. Nonetheless, the sexualization of the yeṣer is not simply a scholarly bias. Rather, it is a result of rabbinic, solely Babylonian and mostly post Amoraic, developments. After mapping this development, the paper further attempts to locate it in a broader Babylonian context: a process of hyper-sexualization which takes place in the Babylonian Talmud alone. The paper ends with an attempt to account for this phenomenon, which is exceptional (at least in the context of ancient Jewish literature). The paper thus wishes to show both the breadth of yeṣer discourse in rabbinic literature - including all kinds of human sinfulness - and the depth of the sexualization processes in the Babylonian Talmud - influencing the way not only the yeṣer, but reality at large, is pictured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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