The simplest rationale would be that the rabbis had nothing to report. I was thinking about this curiosity in terms of nature vs. nurture. Say we identify nature with genetics and assume that homosexual inclination has strong genetic component (not really, but there is no lack of people claiming that nevertheless). Assume that this inclination is somehow penalized in a small isolated population. Then the gay "gene" can be purged out completely over so many generation so far as there is no cross-breeding. Now imagine this population starts to intermarry with a large population having the gene. What you expect is that it will come back; moreover, the frequency can be higher than in the population at large (as in some other cases of inbreeding). The corollary would be that the more open such a population becomes the higher incidence of homosexuality you will observe. Anecdotally, this appears to be true. The higher incidence of homosexuality for secular Jews may be, ironically, due to the low instance of homosexuality in the isolated
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Homosexuals are unable to produce the next generation - therefore, evolution should cause them todisappear with time. It is nurture - too much freedom that creates them in any generation and especially in the conditions of absolute freedom of today's West.
This is incorrect. If, say, there is a "gene" for male homosexuality it can be passed on by the mothers. Then you will have (statistically) male homosexuals in every generation, as the gene will be passed onwards by male homosexual's sisters. On the other hand, if for some reason there are no such females, there will be no male homosexuals. It is said that Ashkenazim could have bottlenecked through a founder population of < 70 families. It is not impossible that they simply did not have this "gene." As long as they were isolated, there were no homosexuals. When intermixing started, homosexuality resurged. I am not insisting on this particular scenario, I am just illustrating how it could happen.
>The latter was simply unheard of through the medieval period, to the degree that some rabbis were complaining that they do not understand (!) what the Torah and the Talmud are talking about
I find this hard to believe. The Jews of Medieval Europe must have been in contact with Arabic culture, whether through Radhanites or other traders or whatever, and those guys are all about recreational homosexuality ("we're not gay, because we're both married with children!" and so on.) I believe that this goes at least back to the Baghdad Califate, so the idea that homosexuality was this unheard of thing in the Medieval Jewish community is strange to me.
It relates exclusively to the Ashkenazim. With the Sephardic Jews, it was obviosly not the case, judging from the quite explicit poetry. http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/DEISENBE/encyclopedia/Sephardic_Jews.pdf http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/deisenbe/Enc_of_Medieval_Iberia/homosexuality.pdf Nothing of this sort stemmed out of Ashkenaz. It is hard for me to tell how believable it is, because various books repeat the same story. Everyone notes the paucity of Rabbinical responsa from Middle Age Ashkenazi Jews, but why was that so, no one explains. I agree with you that by our standards it is odd, but this is how it is. I wonder what this oddity is telling us.
I am afraid I can't answer that, as nobody quite knows where the Ashkenazi were from (Persia is one guess, Sicily is another) and how exactly did they end up in Germany, but we are certainly derived from a small founder population from the Middle East. All Ashkenazi can be traced to just four women who lived 2000 to 3000 years ago. There was a series of genetic bottlenecks, too. The mixing with non-Jews was low (<0.5%); the Ashkenazi are, in essence, a very small subset of Jewry that gradually grew out to be its major branch. See
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О гомосексуальности и средневековом еврействе писал р. Стивен Гринберг в седьмой и восьмой главах Wrestling with God and Men, могу выслать книжку мейлом. Среди прочего он пишет: The few responsa regarding homosexual relations that do exist will help to demonstrate that medieval Jews addressed the occurrence of same-sex sexual relations with little of the anxiety that our society associates with homosexuality. While no premodern responsa offers overt permission for homosexual relations, they are surprisingly free of the kind of panic that homosexuality has inspired in Western culture. и дальше Members known to have engaged in homosexual sexual contact might very well lose certain legal rights, might be deprived of certain sorts of work, but they were not drummed out of the community.
Среди прочего, он приводит следующие примеры: Rabbi Joseph ben Moshe, the fifteenth-century Ashkenazi author of the Leket Yosher, was asked if it is permissible to teach Torah to a boy who has violated the prohibitions against lying with a male (mishkav
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That's interesting (the middle example). The 19th century is pretty late, so it does not count. I cannot make out this Rabbi's ruling because it is not clear whether the boy was over 9. If he was not, he is not considered a male for this particular law. So your books also second the extreme rarety of homosexualism among the medieval Ashkenazi. Is there any explanation? What surprises me is that there is nothing like it for the Sephardim.
Гринберг ссылается на Leket Yosher, vol. 2, Yoreh De’ah 39:2. Но вообще же он не слишком различает сефардские и ашкеназийские традиции, хотя и указывает откуда тот или иной раввин. Книжка и не пытается ответить на вопрос "почему в ашкеназийских responsas опасность mishkav zakhar считается невысокой?".
Have you ever seen a study of the frequency of self-reported homosexualism in the Ashkenazi vs. the average European population? I've never seen any hard data, only anecdotal evidence.
The only scenario in which a trait suddenly erupts in an isolated population when the latter begins to mix with a larger one is when you have recessive silencing of a recessive gene. Human geneticists are constantly looking for just such anomalies, I am surprised that this one went unnoticed. I told about it to my wife (she is a geneticist) but she refuses to believe it, tells that the rabbis played dumb. I see no reason why would they. They faithfully reported all kinds of other trasgressions.
Medieval European Jewry was a very small society. Everyone is visible to rabbis etc. In such a situation it would be foolosh for a homosexually inclined person to try and find a partner in the community - especially as there was another, much easier option.
There was not much visible difference between a Jew and an ordinary European. So the homosexual could run away, either become a Christian or simply pose as one, and find a partner - possibly in a monastery!
So - a homosexual had a strong deterrent from activity in the Jewish community, and an easy way to leave and then engage in it. Ditto - almost no homosexuals!
(There was no "stand and fight" mentality back then. In a modern, or recent, US small conservative town, a gay can chose to come out and take the flak instead of the easy option of moving to a big city - simply because he would be, in his own view, standing up for his rights, a noble thing to do etc. but there was no such motive for a medieval Jew).
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They seem to have such an incentive nowadays. What's changed?
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I find this hard to believe. The Jews of Medieval Europe must have been in contact with Arabic culture, whether through Radhanites or other traders or whatever, and those guys are all about recreational homosexuality ("we're not gay, because we're both married with children!" and so on.) I believe that this goes at least back to the Baghdad Califate, so the idea that homosexuality was this unheard of thing in the Medieval Jewish community is strange to me.
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http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/DEISENBE/encyclopedia/Sephardic_Jews.pdf
http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/deisenbe/Enc_of_Medieval_Iberia/homosexuality.pdf
Nothing of this sort stemmed out of Ashkenaz. It is hard for me to tell how believable it is, because various books repeat the same story. Everyone notes the paucity of Rabbinical responsa from Middle Age Ashkenazi Jews, but why was that so, no one explains. I agree with you that by our standards it is odd, but this is how it is. I wonder what this oddity is telling us.
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Среди прочего, он приводит следующие примеры:
Rabbi Joseph ben Moshe, the fifteenth-century Ashkenazi author of the Leket Yosher, was asked if it is permissible to teach Torah to a boy who has violated the prohibitions against lying with a male (mishkav ( ... )
Reply
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The only scenario in which a trait suddenly erupts in an isolated population when the latter begins to mix with a larger one is when you have recessive silencing of a recessive gene. Human geneticists are constantly looking for just such anomalies, I am surprised that this one went unnoticed. I told about it to my wife (she is a geneticist) but she refuses to believe it, tells that the rabbis played dumb. I see no reason why would they. They faithfully reported all kinds of other trasgressions.
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Medieval European Jewry was a very small society. Everyone is visible to rabbis etc. In such a situation it would be foolosh for a homosexually inclined person to try and find a partner in the community - especially as there was another, much easier option.
There was not much visible difference between a Jew and an ordinary European. So the homosexual could run away, either become a Christian or simply pose as one, and find a partner - possibly in a monastery!
So - a homosexual had a strong deterrent from activity in the Jewish community, and an easy way to leave and then engage in it. Ditto - almost no homosexuals!
(There was no "stand and fight" mentality back then. In a modern, or recent, US small conservative town, a gay can chose to come out and take the flak instead of the easy option of moving to a big city - simply because he would be, in his own view, standing up for his rights, a noble thing to do etc. but there was no such motive for a medieval Jew).
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