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15-05-2003, 08:56 PM

In article ,
wrote:

Interestingly (and disgustingly) enough, I was doing some research in
a book by a British scholar named, I think, Judith Morgan (not sure)
called "Women in the Mishnah" (Mishnah = compendium of commentaries by
the Sages on the Five Books of Moses).

Mishnah is a body of legal commentary by rabbis of the "mishnaic age" that
are a part of the Talmud, & in a broader sense it is all Oral Torah that
is shared during talmudic studies, none of it written down. You seem to
lack even the most rudimentary preschool knowledge of judaism, let alone
talmudic law. The book you misrepresent below you clearly never read. It
is by Judith Ropmney Wegner (who is an old hand on UseNet by the way), &
her approach is sometimes archly feminist, but her commentary on Jewish
attitudes toward rape in the mishnaic age come nowhere near your
misrepresentation.

Sexual relations between a whole range of blood and marriage relatives
are forbidden in Leviticus, but there is no mention of *daughters*
being forbidden. Of course this doesn't mean that daughters were
routinely raped by fathers; that would have been a cardinal sin.
Anyway that's more the style of the U.S. deep Saouth and rural France
(La Jument Verte by Marcel Ayme). But I have always wondered why
daughters were not among the "thou shalt not uncover the nakedness
of.."

Also, somebody in the "Mishnah" book was quoted as opining that it's
OK to penetrate a 3-year-old, because the hymen will regrow (and then
she will presumably be saleable).

There is no "Mishna book" per se, you're clearly lost in lala land, & you
are repeating an antisemitic cannard. Whatever your source may have been,
the real origin of this unkosher load of hogswallow is a Jew-hating
Russian Catholic cleric, Father Pranaitis, who late in the 19th Century
wrote a book called CHRISTIANUS IN TALMUDE IUDAEORUM inventing all sorts
of non-existent talmudic quotations purporting Jesus was boiled in oil,
Mary was a hooker who slept with dozens of men, Jewish fathers raped
babies, & so on. The neo-nazis who keep reworking this faked information
really don't care that Pranaitis was humiliated in the Beilis blood libel
trial of 1913, when in a very public environment it turned out he could
not answer even the most rudimentary about the Talmud which he had never
read. His book, however, was translated into English in the late 1930s &
remains today a staple of neo-nazi indoctrination.

Your third- or fourth-hand antisemitic assertions I will assume were made
innocently on the basis of your knowing nothing whatsoever about anything
at all, rather than because you're consciously & intentionally an
antisemitic idiot. I give you that benefit of the doubt. But you certainly
never read Judith Wegner's book or you wouldn't've thought "The Mishnah"
was a book rather than a body of commentary in the Talmud, & you couldn't
possibly have interpretted Wegner's assessment of mishnaic-era attitudes
on rape as anywhere near the sinister thing you've changed it to.

Mishnaic commentary is a body of rabbinical opinion & includes directly
contradictory assertions -- often two or more rabbis quoted side by side
to give opposing points of view, basically sophist in nature. The issue of
whether women are men's spiritual equals, or inferior to men, is a fond
topic that recurs & recurs; the mishnaic sages are surprisingly liberal
most of the time, given that this all happened before the year 200. The
sages' commentaries on rape are not feminist commentaries, but often
surprisingly liberal for the day. It was most assuredly justice &
spiritual wholeness they were after, whether or not they invariably
achieve it. When they did "pretzel-thinking" to "prove" that the Bible
does not permit capital punishment, it is clear that two thousand years
ago, Judaism was a religion so advanced in moral excellence that other
cultures have to this day not quite caught up with even such simple &
obvious things as if murder is wrong, state-sponsored murder is wrong.

Anyway, the mishnaic commentary you so vastly misrepresent attempts to
answer the question as to whether or not a woman whose hymen was broken
through injury OR rape in childhood still qualified to marry a priest.
The short answer turns out to be "Yes." The argument occurs in the
tractate Niddah, the PURPOSE of the commentary was to insure that a woman
who may have had her hymen broken either from falling on a piece of wood
that penetrated her, or was the survivor of sexual abuse, would not, later
in life, be mistreated or restricted in Jewish society in any manner -- to
the extent that she could even marry a priest. One of the many threads of
reasoning was that the hymen can heal when torn before the age of three --
and it can, but even if that had been a medical myth, the purpose was to
establish that women whose hymen was broken whether from falling on her
crotch or from the horror of childhood rape, she would not in later life
be regarded as damaged goods.

Anyone aware of the laws governing who can marry a priest or Kohen, the
MAJORITY of Jewish women do not qualify. So what this Mishnaic commentary
is pointing out is that victims of childhood rape should in no way be
regarded as taboo in priestly marriages (threfore in any other marriages
which have fewer restrictions). I doubt many cultures before the year 200
would take such a liberal stance! To this day, of the many possible
marriage opportunities for rabbis that are forbidden among the Orthodox, a
woman who suffered sexual abuse in childhood is not forbidden.

The greater aspect the Talmudic tract's discussions actually regard a
woman's ketubah, or dowry. You speak of Jewish women's "salability" as
regards her having been molested in childhood. The ACTUAL talmudic regards
women's ketubah, or dowry. It is highly technical discussion with many
asides on sundry related topics, but is meant to formalize the rights of a
woman to has entered a marriage with a dowry & is subsequently divorced
(including possibly because childhood sexual abuse becomes known, or her
hymen was not intact). In most cases, if she is divorced, or if she issues
a divorce decree to her husband as is her right, her dowry must be
returned to her. In some cases, it would not be. Certainly nothing in all
this says infant girls are legally raped, just because a bunch of nazis &
one crazy Russian cleric say so.

Antisemites when misrepresenting the Niddah commentary generally at the
same time invent a quote pretending it is from tractate Sanhedrin, giving
further evidence that Jews fathers perform incest on their children as a
matter of course.The neo-nazi-generated on-line article I believe you read
quotes the Talmud this way: "A Jew may lay with a child below the age of
nine." Aha! Take that, dirty Jews! It is a famous quote recycled through
the last century in antisemeitic literature, but as anyone with a lick of
sense would at least suspect if not realize outright, it is not to be
found anywhere in any version of the Talmud. The ACTUAL commentary so
heavy-handedly misrepresented actually speaks of blaming both partners in
forbidden acts outside of marriage including sodomy, child rape, incest, &
so on. Amidst a whelter of commentaries & explanations of specific words
in Torah, one definitive conclusion is that a child under the age of nine
is not culpable in any act of sodomy, only the adult is culpable,
therefore the child should not be the one punished nor held at fault.

The funny thing is, in a work that is millions of words long, it WOULD be
possible for antisemites to find a random sentence here, a random sentence
there, & use it as "proof "that Jews are evil ****s. But I suppose it is
fortunate that antisemites are mental cripples in so many ways & can't
think rationally so can't frame logical hate-thoughts based on more than
their own made-up crap, & anyway, their primary audience is an even
stupider shitload of undereducated cretins, so it doesn't have to have any
facts included.

The Niddah & Sanhedrin commentaries I mention are among the most
strikingly misconstrued for antisemites' revisionism, but anyone who has
even an ounce of intellect, common sense, or decency, would check the
actual texts, I find the misrepresentations aren't even a matter of
subjective interpretation -- these goyim revisions are simply slandrous
inventions. Alas, too many goyim never set foot in a library & certainly
don't have the Talmud & its mishnaic commentaries to hand, & too many seem
to be willing to believe any old crap some neo-nazi promulgates in their
presence.

Again I reiterate, I am not inferring you personally are certainly
antisemitic. You may just be ignorant & gullible as well as a little bit
dishonest. You have repeated a bit of antisemitic mythmaking seemingly
believing it; you were rather too easily misled by fraudulant writings
that on their very face aren't particularly convincing, & which could've
been checked into without great effort. You're also to be faulted for
pretending to have read a book on women of the mishnaic age, a book you
must have at most seen misrepresented in whatever neo-nazi paraphrase of
Pranaitis you accepted as fact. You obviously cut & pasted that nonsense
from some much-removed source, given that you didn't even catch on to what
the Mishnah is. The only crimes in what you've done is in believing absurd
hate-inspired nonsense then making a fake citation pretending you read a
book you never read. I hope in the future you will be less of an "easy
mark" for antisemitic hate-mongering, & perhaps even bother to learn a
little bit about judaism if in the future you wish to opinons of it that
make any sense. If, on the other hand, you are indeed just another
cowardly anonymized neo-nazi troll, hey, I forgive you -- I'm sure
something awful happened to you to make you that way, & I'm sorry for ya.

The Anti-Defamation League has prepared a little essay "The Talmud in
Antisemitic Polemics" which anyone interested in the topic (but without
time to read a couple dozen books & the entirety of Torah & the Talmud
just now) can obtain from the League or download from the web as a PDF
file.

-paghat the ratgirl

I guess it was a man's world then, and still is in some cultures.

--

Researcher

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/