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Jan. 30th, 2022 12:53 pmLast week I decided the time had come for me to sit down and read A Rainbow Thread, an anthology of Jewish texts related to queerness on various axes from the Roman empire up through Stonewall.
Please note that Noam Sienna, the editor, does not necessarily suggest that this is a book to be sat down and read straight through cover to cover -- it's a very rich resource and reference text which can be used a lot of ways -- but this remains the only way I know how to read books, so that is what I did, although I certainly expect to be going back and doing some more ad-hoc dipping in the future now that I've done the initial brain-dump.
The breadth and depth of the sources included in the book is extremely impressive, including Talmudic commentary, legal accounts, newspaper reports, medical studies, memoirs, poetry and fiction. Each source is contextualized at the beginning (sometimes the contextualization is longer than the source itself) and supplemented with further reading suggestions at the end: very thoughtful and thorough work.
A couple of the sources that have stuck with me:
- a Roman poem by Martial accusing a Jewish rival of a.) plagiarizing his work and b.) banging his boyfriend
- a court case from 1561 in which the testimony of two witnesses is disqualified because of their dubious characters, one (named Yehudah Kohen!) because he is known to be an inveterate gambler, and the other because of all the different places in town he has been seen having gay sex
- a report of an encounter with a ghostly rabbi in 1609 in which the ghost rabbi extensively denounces a variety of salacious extramarital affairs, straight and queer
- the story of the 19th-century Maiden of Ludmir, who claimed to have the soul of a male tzaddik and took on the role of a Hasidic rebbe
- newspaper stories about a Jewish factory worker in 1915 who was discovered to be afab after dying of tuberculosis; last words to his wife, as reported: "We've been happy. I think I have done right. I wish it was true that 'dead men tell no tales.'"
- the reported case history of a Jewish-American woman, 1941, who left her husband to move in with a girlfriend: "When I first heard of homosexuality I condemned it. I never thought I would drift into it myself but I have no regrets"
- a love letter written from one German Jewish young man to another in 1942, Berlin
There are 120 sources in total so this is really just a very small taste of the whole (and some of the sources, in and of themselves, are only a small taste of their whole). Personally, I did find it really worthwhile to just ingest the whole thing at a go at least once, and get a full sense of the contrasts and contradictions and infinite messy human variety.
Please note that Noam Sienna, the editor, does not necessarily suggest that this is a book to be sat down and read straight through cover to cover -- it's a very rich resource and reference text which can be used a lot of ways -- but this remains the only way I know how to read books, so that is what I did, although I certainly expect to be going back and doing some more ad-hoc dipping in the future now that I've done the initial brain-dump.
The breadth and depth of the sources included in the book is extremely impressive, including Talmudic commentary, legal accounts, newspaper reports, medical studies, memoirs, poetry and fiction. Each source is contextualized at the beginning (sometimes the contextualization is longer than the source itself) and supplemented with further reading suggestions at the end: very thoughtful and thorough work.
A couple of the sources that have stuck with me:
- a Roman poem by Martial accusing a Jewish rival of a.) plagiarizing his work and b.) banging his boyfriend
- a court case from 1561 in which the testimony of two witnesses is disqualified because of their dubious characters, one (named Yehudah Kohen!) because he is known to be an inveterate gambler, and the other because of all the different places in town he has been seen having gay sex
- a report of an encounter with a ghostly rabbi in 1609 in which the ghost rabbi extensively denounces a variety of salacious extramarital affairs, straight and queer
- the story of the 19th-century Maiden of Ludmir, who claimed to have the soul of a male tzaddik and took on the role of a Hasidic rebbe
- newspaper stories about a Jewish factory worker in 1915 who was discovered to be afab after dying of tuberculosis; last words to his wife, as reported: "We've been happy. I think I have done right. I wish it was true that 'dead men tell no tales.'"
- the reported case history of a Jewish-American woman, 1941, who left her husband to move in with a girlfriend: "When I first heard of homosexuality I condemned it. I never thought I would drift into it myself but I have no regrets"
- a love letter written from one German Jewish young man to another in 1942, Berlin
There are 120 sources in total so this is really just a very small taste of the whole (and some of the sources, in and of themselves, are only a small taste of their whole). Personally, I did find it really worthwhile to just ingest the whole thing at a go at least once, and get a full sense of the contrasts and contradictions and infinite messy human variety.
