Exploring ‘Fifty Shades of Talmud’

April 27, 2017 Adam Stone

"Fifty Shades of Talmud: What the First Rabbis Had to Say about You-Know-What” (Banot Press) by Maggie Anton

Sex and the Talmud. Those aren’t two things you hear mentioned in the same breath very often.

But Maggie Anton is out to change that with her new book, the slyly named “Fifty Shades of Talmud: What the First Rabbis Had to Say about You-Know-What” (Banot Press).

Anton will discuss the book — her first non-fiction endeavor – May 5-7 while serving as Beth El Congregation’s scholar-in-residence. Beth El is located at 8101 Park Heights Ave. in Pikesville. She also will speak at Beth Shalom Congregation, 8070 Harriet Tubman Lane, on May 9 at 7:45 p.m. as part of the Columbia synagogue’s Jewish author series.

Anton earned her literary stripes as the author of the award-winning trilogy “Rashi’s Daughters” (Plume), a series of novels imagining the lives of the ancient sage’s offspring. She was a 2012 National Jewish Book Award fiction finalist for “Rav Hisda’s Daughter, Book I: Apprentice: A Novel of Love, the Talmud, and Sorcery” (Plume).

Jmore recently spoke by phone with Anton, who was born Margaret Antonofsky in Los Angeles and still resides there with her husband and their two children.

So, nu, why’d you decide to write about talmudic views on sexuality?

When I first started writing “Rashi’s Daughters,” one of the rules I set for myself was to never show Rashi’s family violating Halachah [Jewish law]. That meant that for the sex scenes I was going to write, I would have to do some research about what was halachic or not in the Middle Ages.

And do tell, what did you discover?

The talmudic view is that the quality of a child is proportional to the quality of the sex act that conceived that child. The better the sex, the more pleasure for the man and the woman – especially the woman – the better the child.

Especially the woman?

Yes, there is a Torah commandment that a man should not diminish his wife’s food, clothing and conjugal rights, her sexual satisfaction. The husband can have other partners, he is not restrained to just one person, but since the wife is dependent on the husband and is only permitted to have sex with him, he is obligated to satisfy her.

The bottom line halachically is that a husband and wife may do any sex practice they please, with her consent, as long as their purpose is procreation, and as long as it does not diminish her conjugal rights.

Hmmm. So were there any big surprises for you in your research?

The biggest surprise was that the rabbis even thought about the woman’s sexual satisfaction. But another surprise is that in a very convoluted piece of talmudic logic, the rabbis take the ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ commandment and exempt women from it.

How so?

They exempt women from the mitzvah [commandment] of procreation, which then allows women to use contraceptives. The rabbis knew about lots of contraceptives and, according to the Talmud, the woman doesn’t have to ask her husband’s permission. She does not even have to tell him she is using contraception.

It was a pleasant shock for me to learn that Jewish women, according to the Talmud, have complete control over their reproductive rights.

Pretty progressive, for the time!

There’s more. A married woman must consent each time. In Christianity, and in American law until recently, there was no such thing as marital rape. Once a woman said “I do” she was saying “I will” for the rest of the marriage. In Judaism, that is not our way. Sex must always be consensual both ways.

What does all of this tell you about us today?

To think that anybody 1,500 years ago was this progressive is amazing. It is one of the reasons we should study Talmud. They have a lot of things in there that are applicable to our lives today.

And how does the medieval French rabbi and sage Rashi fit into all of this?

Without Rashi and his disciples, the Talmud would be a closed book today. In the years around the end of Rashi’s life, every other yeshiva in the world disappeared or was destroyed. They were in the wrong place in the wrong time. But Rashi’s little yeshiva in France and his commentaries made it possible for all the rest of the Jews to have Talmud today.

Until him, the Torah was oral law. He violated every custom and tradition by writing down his commentary, but he turned the Talmud into the written law as we have it today. That’s why you cannot study Talmud without Rashi. He is there in every page, on every line.

For information, visit maggieanton.com.

Adam Stone is an Annapolis-based freelance writer.