The Beautiful Body as Capital

• In Event: Imagined Bodies in Rabbinic Literature

Abstract

One of the recurring tropes of rabbinic narrative is a description of a character’s physical beauty. This is most common in stories in which physical beauty is a metonymy for sexual desirability and is often accompanied by the figure of the prostitute who allows the storyteller to exchange beauty-as-capital for the more conventional currency, money. The trope is used to describe the physical beauty (and sexual desirability) of both men and women and it indicates rabbinic awareness of desirability as capital. While this trope is common in rabbinic narrative, halakhic treatment of the body in rabbinic literature doesn’t monetize beauty and sexual desirability in similar ways. Rabbinic treatment of bride prices, the market evaluations of slaves and commitments to dedicate to the temple in the value of specific persons never attach value to beauty or desirability. The metric for evaluating value in these circumstances is utility rather than aesthetics. In this paper, I will explore the genesis of this perceived difference between the legal and the narrative treatments of beauty and suggest ways in which the cultural patrimony of each genre of writing contributes to this divergence.

Author

• Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, Northwestern University