(no subject)

[skygiants]

Last 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.

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

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

All of these are amazing but I think this one is my favorite.

[skygiants]

Who amongst us can say that if they had the ability to come back from the grave and possess a living soul they would not immediately use it to share every bit of scandalous gossip that their supernatural powers had allowed them to glean?

-- god I wish I had any interest in writing a Gossip Girl spinoff because Gossip Girl x Ghostwriter is an idea with SUCH legs actually

[troisoiseaux]

I was going to ask, were these secrets he had gone to the grave with, or did he discover it all postmortem and the urge to expose everyone was so great that he came back as a ghost just to do so?

[seekingferret]

I have been doing the dipping in and out thing since I got it, and I really appreciate the breadth of experiences it records.

[skygiants]

Yeah, it's really cool how much it demonstrates how much there isn't just one narrative -- every source has its own inherent contradictions. Really illustrates 'two gay Jews, three opinions --'

[lilysea]

This is fascinating! Thank you for sharing! ^_^

a love letter written from one German Jewish young man to another in 1942, Berlin

is it known if they got out of Germany safely before the Holocaust?

[skygiants]

One of them managed to evade the camps by virtue of the fact that he was only half-Jewish; he tried to rescue the other, but he wouldn't leave his family and did not make it. :( The survivor however lived a long life and wrote a memoir which I very much now want to read!

[sovay]

The survivor however lived a long life and wrote a memoir which I very much now want to read!

A few years ago, the USHMM digitized the entire chapbook that Manfred Lewin wrote for, and gave to, Gad Beck. Whose memoir I meant to read at the time and have still not gotten around to, but in my defense a lot of things happened.

[edit] There is also this tragically still relevant comic.

[troisoiseaux]

There is also this tragically still relevant comic.

Wow. I change my answer to "what historical figure do I want a movie about" to Gad Beck.

[sovay]

I change my answer to "what historical figure do I want a movie about" to Gad Beck.

Like, yesterday.

[sovay]

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

I can recommend Nathaniel Deutsch's The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World (2003) if you are interested further in that direction. Deutsch is also responsible for The Jewish Dark Continent
Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement (2011), which is mostly, invaluably, the full translation of the questions of An-sky's Jewish Ethnographic Program 1912–14. I found both, obviously, via dybbuks.

(I loved A Rainbow Thread so much.)

[skygiants]

Both of these are extremely interesting and relevant to my interests, thank you!!

(IT'S SO GOOD, I'm so glad to have finally read it!)

[sophia_sol]

what a fabulous book to exist! I can't decide which is my favourite of the example sources you mention because there's so many great ones

[skygiants]

There are so many more that are equally good, this is truly just a sampler!

[kore]

I was going to comment "This seems tailor-made for sovay," but of course they have already read it!

[skygiants]

I would have been frankly shocked if this was not the case 😂

[chestnut_pod]

Ah, I can't wait to read this myself! It's been sitting in the pile of "books I literally own in hardcopy but have not yet read" forrrrrrr uh, a long time. Thank you for the encouragement!

[skygiants]

lol, it was the same for me until I pulled it out when blotthis was visiting to be like 'you SHOULD read this I think, I, uh, can't technically recommend it because I haven't read it yet myself, okay, actually, I'm not lending it to you because I am going to read it myself, it is NEXT on the pile -'

[reconditarmonia]

Yessss I love this book so MUCH. It combines some of my favorite things, viz. gays, People Being People In History, and occasionally religious mysticism?