1.1 Mumbai, 25 March 2013
I joined a group of Israelis, most of them gay couples, gathered together in a festively decorated room to celebrate the Passover Seder, the ritual feast that marks the beginning of Passover. They all brought along carry-cots with sleeping babies. The youngest were only two weeks old, and they were all born to Indian surrogate mothers, whom the couples had contracted through an Israeli agency. They all stayed in the same hotel, where I accompanied them for two months through their experiences with surrogacy and parenthood.
The preparation of the Passover Seder had raised many questions and discussions. A number of gay men objected to the celebration of this religious holiday and were not sure whether they would attend the dinner at all. Others found it important to mark the holiday, but did not agree as to what extent they should follow the religious rituals. After all, official Judaism in Israel, represented by the Rabbinate, which is Orthodox, had not made their lives easy. When Orthodox rabbis comment on homosexuality or same-sex parenthood in public, they often reject their claims for family rights or condemn their relationships as a threat to the Jewish family. Rabbinic control of marriage and divorce has so far thwarted an all-encompassing legal recognition of same-sex couples. The Rabbinate and hence Judaism, some men felt, was at least partly responsible for the fact that they were forced to travel abroad in order to fulfill their wish to become parents. Furthermore, with Judaism being the public religion in Israel, the Passover Seder was also the beginning of a ten-day official holiday, during which the public authorities in Israel were shut down. My interlocutors depended on these authorities, since a long chain of bureaucratic procedures was necessary in order to have their fatherhood recognized and to have Israeli citizenship granted to their children. Every day lost to Passover was a day that prolonged their stay abroad. It is no surprise, then, that they had ambiguous feelings toward this celebration. At the end, however, everyone came.
The surrogacy agency sponsored the necessary equipment, obtained from the Israeli embassy and the local Chabad House in town: the traditional dishes of matzo1 (an unleavened bread) and dumpling soup, as well as a set of copies of the haggadah (the text that structures the Seder). They also invited a number of guests who were not familiar with the holiday, for example, the surrogacy agencyâs local driver, as well as two gay fathers from Canada and the United States, who were staying in the same hotel. Before we started dinner, my research participants found it important to explain to their guests the meaning of the event. âThis is the story of the Jews leaving Egypt, and we celebrate the Passover Seder to pass the story from generation to generation,â a man sitting next to me explained. Then we sang the songs that form part of every Passover Seder. They sounded quite dreary and caused my friend Avner2 to apologize: âThis is the first time that we are celebrating this holiday without our parents. For the first time, we are the ones who are responsible for the songs, because now we are parents ourselves.â Put this way, our gathering received a new meaning. It generated a chain of Passover celebrations that linked my research participantsâ path to parenthood to their own parents and even further, to a distant past as well as to the future of the Jewish people. While we ate dumpling soup together with chicken masala and paneer, the Rabbinateâs opposition to same-sex parenthood drifted into the background; it was not important that according to Jewish law these menâs children were not Jewish. Here we celebrated continuity and change at the same time.
Sharing this holiday was part of a long-term research on the formation of same-sex parenthood3 in Israel. Even though my stay in Mumbai constituted only a small part of the entire research, the events surrounding Passover exemplified the central concerns of this book in a nutshell. As these events brought together bureaucratic struggles, conflicting yet transforming norm systems, and aspirations for continuity, they highlighted how multifaceted the formation of same-sex parenthood is. Reproduction is understood here in Annette Weinerâs sense as a cultural achievement through which the foundational structures, relationships, material resources, and values of a society are reproduced and contested. In line with this understanding, Judaism in Motion asks how same-sex couples interact with their families and friends, legislators, state workers, and religious authorities to negotiate their own and their childrenâs place in networks of kinship as well as in the Jewish Israeli collective.
In Israel, where the Rabbinate wields historically sanctioned influence over the legal definitions of marriage and parenthood, same-sex parenthood raises important questions such as what constitutes belonging to the national collective, who has the authority to define the norms of reproduction, and where are the boundaries of Orthodox Judaism. This book addresses these questions from a transgenerational perspective that pays heed to how religiously informed rules, norms, and practices of transferring material properties, names, and societal belonging are adopted and transformed. The goal of this book is twofold: First, it presents a detailed ethnographic account of the dynamic interaction between kinship, religion, and the state that complicates the commonly held assumption according to which same-sex parenthood is a radically secular sphere that stands in stark opposition to Orthodox Judaism. Secondly, it demonstrates how negotiations over same-sex parenthood are also negotiations over religion as well as over its place in society and the state. Thus, Judaism in Motion aims at providing a theoretical approach that facilitates a better understanding of the formation of same-sex parenthood as a part of the processes through which societies negotiate the norms that guarantee their reproduction.
1.2 A Short Introduction to Homosexuality and Reproduction in Judaism and Beyond
Anthropologists have long reported on the role of same-sex practices and relationships in the reproduction of societies. In Nuer society, for example, a woman could marry a woman to the name of a dead kinsman (Evans-Pritchard 1951, 111). Likewise, infertile women were free to marry a wife to produce children for them (Hutchinson 1996, 61). As Evans-Pritchard has already argued, these marriages âmust be regarded as a form of simple legal marriage, for the woman-husband marries her wife in exactly the same way as a man marries a womanâ (1951, 108). Thus, they all paid bride-price in cattle, and as cattle rather than blood or semen were the true source of heirs, Nuer women could, through cattle exchange, become paters (Hutchinson 1996, 173, 234). In this system, just as in other African societies (see, for example, Eileen Jensen-Krige 1974), women-marriages fulfilled the same function as ghost-marriages. They reproduced the patriline of the paternal agnates who cooperated in paying the bride-price.
Godelier (2011, 238â246) observed that among the Baruya, oral sex between adolescents plays a key role in a ten-year-long initiation phase that disconnects them from their maternal world. In this phase, which the Baruya understand as the adolescentsâ âbirthâ into the menâs world, older adolescents feed young initiates with their semen and thereby transform their bodies into the bodies of men. These oral sexual acts leave room for eroticism, desire, and affection, and couples consisting of an older and a younger boy are formed. Yet, these relations are restricted to adolescence alone. Once a young man is married to a woman, his semen becomes impure, and he is forbidden to put his penis into the mouth of a boy (ibid. 240â246).
The examples of the Nuer, Baruya, and many other societies where same-sex practices and homosexual unions have been reported, illustrate quite well the social construction of gender, sexuality, and reproduction. They provide important insights to counter the arguments of some Jewish Orthodox rabbisâas well as of opponents of same-sex parenthood in other religious traditionsâwho predicate their opposition on ânature.â But the sensibility to how societal approaches are shaped by entire cosmologies also reminds us not to put such claims lightly aside as primitive or backward. As Blaser (2013, 559) has argued in his proposition for a political ontology, we need to carve out âa space to listen carefully what other worldings propose.â The worlding of these rabbis does not necessarily have to be the one with which we identify best, and careful listening does not mean that we ignore the suffering and dependencies it produces. But it is a fascinating world, and in my research, I was often intrigued by the skills and unexpected twists and stories that form part of rabbinic thinking. A detailed exploration is necessary to uncover the underlying logics of rabbinic arguments about same-sex parenthood and to uncover the contestations and flexibility that exist within these constructions.
Leviticus (Hebrew: Vayikra) has probably influenced Christian, Jewish, and Islamic attitudes toward homosexuality more than any other text (Greenberg 2004, 76). The concrete prohibition in Lev. 18:22 constitutes part of a long and detailed list of prohibited sexual relationships (see Chap. 2). It states: veâet zakhar lo tishkav mishkevei isha: toâevah hi (commonly translated as and with a male you shall not lie the lyings of a woman: it is an abomination). There is no doubt that the prohibition of the âlyings of a womanâ referred, at least originally, to an act, usually in...