Talmudic Torment: Late Antique Jewish Texts on Pain and Suffering Between Medicine, Martyrdom, and Askesis
According to recent studies, pain can be conceptualised both as a bodily sensation and as a complex sociocultural phenomenon shaped by experience, expectations, and presumptions. This article analyses descriptions of agonising intestinal and inflammatory ailments with their various sensual and socio...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
|
| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Taylor & Francis Group
2022
|
| In: |
Journal of early Christian history
Year: 2022, Volume: 12, Issue: 1, Pages: 52-79 |
| RelBib Classification: | AG Religious life; material religion BH Judaism CB Christian life; spirituality CD Christianity and Culture KAB Church history 30-500; early Christianity NCH Medical ethics TB Antiquity TF Early Middle Ages |
| Further subjects: | B
History of Medicine
B transcultural exchange B culture of pain B Judaism B Asceticism B Talmud B body studies B Rabbinic Literature |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | According to recent studies, pain can be conceptualised both as a bodily sensation and as a complex sociocultural phenomenon shaped by experience, expectations, and presumptions. This article analyses descriptions of agonising intestinal and inflammatory ailments with their various sensual and socio-religious implications as specific rabbinic expressions of and reactions to broader ancient understandings of pain. The study of two talmudic narratives explores a complex network of late antique Jewish ideas about pain, especially connected to bodily swellings and bowel disease, in which religious, legal, ethical, cognitive, and medical aspects intertwine. I submit that the depiction of eminent rabbinic scholars as “suffering selves” fits well into the broader cultures of pain in the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean and the ancient Near East. In these traditions, the always mediated (re)presentations of pain and experiences of suffering were often torn between fascination and aversion. Up to a certain point, the rabbis shared a cultural matrix and ideas on illness and agony with their contemporaries, especially religious experts like Christian authors, monastics, and ascetics. Therefore, these stories about self-afflicted pain and suffering were possibly formed as alternative Jewish answers reacting to and interacting with Graeco-Roman “cultures of pain” as well as emerging Jewish and Christian conceptions of martyrdom, asceticism, and the suffering self in late antiquity. Through a comparison with earlier texts, this article examines how this rabbinic counter-discourse feeds on and appropriates but also rejects Graeco-Roman and early Christian traditions about the punitive, refining, ascetic, and sanctifying purposes of bodily suffering and abdominal agony. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 2471-4054 |
| Reference: | Kommentar in "Contextualising Pain and Remedy in Early Judaism and Christianity: A Response (2022)"
|
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of early Christian history
|
| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1080/2222582X.2021.1983448 |