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Strange as it may appear, scholars of Judaica have, just in the past decade, discovered that the sexual drive has played a significant role in the history of the Jewish people and religion. Prominent among these scholars are Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (1990, 1992); Daniel Boyarin, a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship; and the author of the book under review, David Biale.
Biale is the Koret Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. His work on Jewish mysticism and other aspects of Jewish history has received academic acclaim. He continues the pursuit of scholarly excellence in his latest work, Eros and the Jews. It might seem a daunting task to follow the thread of such an important theme down through 3,000 years of Jewish history and end up with a meaningful composite of the many interweaving aspects of a particular people, their religion, and culture. But for some minor criticisms, Biale has succeeded quite well.
As Biale states, the study of eros in Jewish history is a study in ambivalence. In essence, it is a study in the historical dialectic between erotic pleasure and the need of a people to multiply, that is, to procreate.
Like [Philip] Roth, my goal is not to discover what Jewish sexual behavior actually was in the past so much as to investigate how Jews have constructed notions of sexuality, how they have thought about it and struggled with it in the texts they produced. (p. 6)
Biale's broad sweep of Jewish history and literature encompasses not only the particulars of the Jews' progression through time but also the vicissitudes of their interaction with their non-Jewish