Do we humans have bodies or are we our bodies? Is the care of our bodies an end in itself or a means to a different, perhaps higher end? Is the body something to be celebrated and enjoyed, or something to be endured, disciplined, rejected, perhaps even transcended?
Jewish and Western cultures have long histories of arguing over these questions. Anthropologist and physician Melvin Konner has done us a service by providing a guided tour of Jewish thinking about the body — and of non-Jews’ thinking about Jewish bodies — in his brief book “The Jewish Body.”
This work is the 11th in the “Jewish Encounters” series, in which Schocken Books and Nextbook are collaborating to provide brief, lively and provocative books on a wide variety of Jewish topics.
Konner’s book is certainly lively and it touches the expected bases. He starts with the question of whether in the Jewish conception God has a body. (If God does not, as the medieval theologian Maimonides contends, why does so much Jewish literature from the Torah to the Kabbalists to Jewish jokes seem to say otherwise?)
From there, Konner describes such Jewish practices and issues as circumcision; the allures and dangers of women’s bodies for men (curiously, not of men’s bodies for women); the “Jewish nose” and cosmetic surgery; the relatively recent development of Jewish athletes, soldiers, criminals and other “tough Jews”; anti-Semitic caricatures of Jewish bodies; the contention of some forms of Zionism that Jews need to turn to the body and away from the mind; and the question of distinctive traits in the Jewish gene pool.
Even though there is already a book in the series about “Jews and Power” by Ruth R. Wisse, Konner rightly makes a connection between Jews’ physical or bodily power and political and economic power, and how they correlate through the highs and lows of Jewish cultural history.
The one caveat I have about the book comes from my own understanding of cultural anthropology. Konner appears to be what my favorite anthropologist Marvin Harris would call a cultural idealist, someone who believes the task of cultural anthropology is purely to describe and analyze the mental life of people in cultures.
Harris, however, is a cultural materialist, one for whom the mental life of cultures is the “superstructure” and most likely has material causes in the “infrastructure” and “structure.”
Moreover, Harris makes an important distinction between “emics” — what people of a culture say about themselves and their culture — and “etics,” what an outside, scientific observer notices — and contends that etics often demonstrate what is really going on in a culture, or what causes the emics.
This may seem like a purely technical distinction, but I feel that it causes a certain disjointedness in Konner’s book. Though it flows well, the book never felt cohesive to me, but wandered from topic to topic without attempting to probe causes.
For example, in the chapter on circumcision, he points out that other cultures and religions besides Judaism practice it, while other cultures don’t. But why?
In passing, he mentions that Jewish literature seems to suggest that the practice promotes fertility. To Harris, the production of people is part of a society’s infrastructure.
Is it not possible that a need or perceived need to maximize reproduction might be one reason that Jewish and other cultures practice circumcision, while a need to limit reproduction might be a reason why, say, the ancient Greeks didn’t?
I could wish Konner had explored more of these kinds of issues. Still, I enjoyed what he did do to, as he put it, “try to understand how Jewish bodies and Jewish thoughts about them have shaped the Jewish mind and Jewish contribution to civilization.”
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