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Disgusting Bodies: Tsara'at and the Stigmatization of Disease in Leviticus Rabbah

Sun, December 16, 12:30 to 2:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cityview 1 Ballroom

Abstract

This paper examines the stigmatization of bodies suffering with tsara’at within the late-antique midrash Leviticus Rabbah. “Stigma,” a concept popularized by the sociologist Erving Goffman in the 1960s, refers to the process by which physically different bodies, including the diseased and disabled, become associated with negative attitudes that shape the social treatment of those individuals. More recently, Harriet Deacon’s work UNDERSTANDING HIV/AIDS STIGMA, furthers Goffman’s conceptual frame, emphasizing the social construction of stigma. Certainly, she argues, specific diseases associated with visible, gruesome bodily transformations, especially diseases that manifest on the skin such as leprosy or, in the modern context, HIV/AIDS, become prime candidates for stigmatization. Yet, by looking at the history of stigma surrounding leprosy, she demonstrates that while cross-culturally leprosy has a tendency to be associated with negative beliefs, the contents of beliefs associated with leprosy vary dramatically as they are produced within particular historical and social contexts. Furthermore, studying the negative beliefs associated with leprous bodies often reveals how these bodies become associated with other cultural markers of difference, including gender, ethnicity, and race.
In this context, this paper examines Leviticus Rabbah’s discussion of the skin affliction of tsara‘at and its extensive reflection on the association between tsara‘at and sin, deviant sexual behavior - especially transgressive female sexuality, and non-Jews. Developing the existing Biblical connection between tsara‘at and sin, the rabbinic text details a physiological theory where transgressive behavior effects the internal balance of the body causing tsara‘at. Here, the transgressive behaviors of an individual are transcribed on the external surface of the body. Studying the imagined, disgusting body stricken with tsara‘at in Leviticus Rabbah, offers insight into the body politics within rabbinic literature as these texts define the righteous, healthy, “normate” body against the sinful, deviant, non-Jewish body marked by tsara‘at. Examining the rabbinic cultural beliefs surrounding tsara’at, sheds light more broadly on the rabbinic understandings of communal norms and deviancy.

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