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Inside the auction house driving the rare-book craze in the Orthodox world
(JTA) – Israel Mizrahi joined dozens of fellow connoisseurs of rare Jewish books last December to watch the livestream of Genazym, the hottest auction house in the market. A bookdealer by trade, Mizrahi was also on the phone being paid to advise a wealthy client who had signed up to make bids.
But as the auction proceeded, Mizrahi’s advice had little use. His trigger-happy client didn’t seem to care about established valuations: He ended up paying about $50,000 for a book estimated at half that price. “He just pressed the button and kept on bidding until the bidding was over,” Mizrahi said. “There was no convincing him out of it. He spent nearly $600,000 that day and there was no sense to it.”
Behavior that confounds veterans of the rare Jewish book market has become routine at auctions organized by Genazym.
Mizrahi recalled the sale in 2021 of a Passover Haggadah printed in the 1920s in Vienna. With attractive illustrations of a prominent 19th-century rabbi named Moses Sofer and his family, the book makes for a nice addition to a collection. It also happens to be very common.
“I sell copies for $100, and I have probably sold 150 copies in my life,” said Mizrahi, whose shop in Brooklyn is a mecca for Jewish book lovers. “It sold for about $5,500 at Genazym’s auction. I currently have it on sale still for $100.”
At the highest end of sale prices, a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, commanded $620,000 at a Genazym auction last September, while a copy of Noam Elimelech, a classic rabbinic treatise, printed in 1788, fetched $1.4 million four months later — in both cases at least doubling or tripling what experts thought the items were worth based on past sales of the same texts.
“Genazym has come on like a freight train into the world of Jewish auctions. Some of the prices realized are far beyond what this market has seen before,” said David Wachtel, the former Judaica consultant for Sotheby’s auction house.
Since Genazym’s first auction in 2017, it has sold some 1,900 books, manuscripts and other collectible documents for about $26 million plus commission, roughly $12 million above total starting prices, according to an analysis by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of auction records on Genazym’s website. Genazym has increasingly outperformed the longest-standing Judaica auction firms in New York and Jerusalem.
A page from an illustrated Passover haggadah printed in Vienna in the 1920s. (Courtesy of Genazym)
It’s hard to tell exactly what’s driving the boom because the identity of Genazym’s customers is confidential and few flaunt their collections widely. One of the auction house’s owners, in a rare public comment, ventured that Jewish buyers are craving a connection with their heritage. What’s clear is that at a time when traditional libraries are cutting back on buying Jewish texts, Genazym is tapping into an emerging luxury market among Orthodox Jews — and fueling the rise of religious texts as both a status symbol and investment vehicle in some communities.
“I know the sellers, the customers and everybody involved and there is a new wealthy class of Orthodox Jews that have a limited range of things they can splurge on,” Mizrahi said. “They don’t go to Vegas, they don’t do crazy vacations. They keep kosher. So this is a way that they can splurge and show off.”
Rabbi Pini Dunner, who collects rare Jewish books, said investing in Judaica is likely attractive for some in the Hasidic community, whose religious observance is stricter than that of congregants at his Modern Orthodox synagogue in the Los Angeles area.
“There are people I know here in Beverly Hills who’ve got car collections worth tens of millions of dollars,” Dunner said. “In the Hasidic world that has no currency, just as the wow factor of a Picasso has no currency. An original manuscript or first-edition of the Noam Elimelech has a real wow factor, particularly if you can tell people the book sold for more than a million dollars at a Genazym auction.”
The impression that the Hasidic world has grown wealthier over the last decade or two is widespread and based, at least in part, on the proliferation of luxury products and services tailored for the community in places like Lakewood, New Jersey, and Kiryas Joel, New York. Weddings have become increasingly expensive and elaborate, fine dining options are common, and high-end kosher wine and liquor are more readily available.
“It wasn’t that long ago that sit-down dining was looked down upon or not even available. Now there are a plethora of options,” said Chaim Saiman, a law professor at Villanova University who studies the intersection of commerce and Jewish law. “It’s no secret that $200 bottles of Scotch appear at kiddush clubs all the time. $50 used to be a big deal, then $100 was a big deal, now we are at $200.”
Where the new wealth is coming from is not totally clear. Limited survey and U.S. Census data suggests that Orthodox Jews feel crunched by costs associated with practicing religion and that there are large pockets of poverty among them, particularly in Hasidic communities, according to Mark Trencher, the founder of Nishma Research, a nonprofit dedicated to studying the Orthodox Jewish community. The prevalence of large families also means that generational wealth can be harder to accrue for Orthodox Jews.
But there have always been high earners whose philanthropy has buttressed their communities, Trencher noted. “There are a lot of people in that community that are very successful in their businesses and they have large amounts of wealth,” he said. “Those people generally are huge donors to charities. From a financial perspective, those communities are probably doing much better than you would expect them to.”
Many of those high earners make their money through entrepreneurship rather than professional success in the white-collar world. Many nursing home chains — an industry valued at an estimated $171 billion and where growth is expected — have Orthodox owners. Amazon has also created new opportunities for Orthodox businessmen. Orthodox landlords, meanwhile, have benefited from skyrocketing real estate prices in places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
A page from a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, which fetched $620,000 at a Genazym auction. (Courtesy of Genazym).
Recent reporting in The New York Times about the Hasidic education system has provided a window into another stream of revenue for private businesses in the community. Entrepreneurs in the community have responded to the increased availability of government funding for special education in New York in recent years by establishing companies to service Hasidic schools, with the government footing the bill. In one example highlighted by the Times, a married Hasidic couple opened such a business in 2014 when they were 21 and 19 years old; in 2022, their company received more than $38 million in government funding.
The owners of another set of companies providing services to Hasidic schools appear to have used their windfall to purchase rare books through Genazym. The owners were indicted in January for allegedly billing the government for more than $1 million in childcare services that they never provided and otherwise defrauding the government out of more than $2.8 million.
Prosecutors are seeking to have the alleged fraudsters forfeit seven books and other documents as listed in a federal indictment. They include manuscripts with a rabbinic signature and rare books of blessing and Jewish law, all of which match items listed on Genazym auctions, where they sold for a total of about $274,000.
Buying Jewish texts at auction can seem like a savvy investment for buyers seeking to safeguard or grow their wealth. Before Genazym launched, a typical Genazym buyer might have invested in U.S. Treasury bills or the stock market, according to Wachtel, the former Sotheby’s consultant.
“I think Genazym has been able to convince people that this is a good vehicle for establishing and growing wealth,” he said. “That also dovetails with your ability to, let’s face it, show off. Somebody comes to your house, you can show them a first-edition Shulchan Aruch. But you’re not going to say, hey, come look at my T-bills.”
The auction house’s tactics appear tailor-made for this growing market. Its motto is “Own your heritage,” and it’s printed on the catalogs the company distributes through popular Orthodox magazines like Ami or Mishpacha or podcasts, places where people with no prior interest in books might encounter the hype. The catalogs also appear in synagogues in heavily Hasidic areas like Brooklyn or Lakewood, but without the prices printed on them so as not to violate a Jewish prohibition against discussing financial matters on Shabbat.
The descriptions in the catalogs emphasize any links that exist between the items for sale and notable rabbis from history, especially figures who established rabbinic dynasties that continue to exist today and who are revered by yeshiva-educated Orthodox Jews. The link might be a signature of a rabbi in a ledger from an old fundraising tour that took place 200 years ago. Or it might be that an important rabbi owned the book in question or even prayed out of it. Like a pair of pants of a prominent Israeli rabbi that drew widespread attention when they briefly went up for auction last month, these texts are seen by some as conferring holiness onto those who possess them. By virtue of their pedigree, these artifacts might even be seen as a segula, or Jewish protective charm.
In its promotional materials and live auctions, Genazym also uses more colloquial and hyperbolic language to describe its items than traditional auction houses, which tend to stick to the kind of terminology used by academic scholars.
“Genazym found a formula to make books and manuscripts really exciting for the layperson, especially in the Orthodox community,” said Yoel Finkelman, a former curator of the Judaica Collection at the National Library of Israel. “They are not using the vocabulary of experts, they’re using plain ordinary language, like ‘very old’ or ‘very rare.’ No one at Sotheby’s would ever refer even to a thousand-year-old book that way.”
Genazym’s unique approach extends to the delivery of items to buyers. A traditional buyer in the rare Jewish book market, like Michelle Margolis, Columbia University’s Jewish studies librarian, might only care that the book they bought is safely delivered. But with Genazym, the books come wrapped in a proper clamshell and velvet bag. “I rolled my eyes when my delivery arrived, but at the same time that’s a lot of investment,” Margolis said, adding that many other auction houses have been cutting costs, for example, by doing away with their customary printed catalogs.
Jacob Djmal, who lives in Brooklyn, has dabbled in Judaica collecting for many years, an interest he picked up from his grandfather. He remembers suddenly seeing Genazym’s advertising everywhere. “They started reaching out to you in every way possible, finding a demographic that wasn’t aware before. Every Genazym auction I have people texting me — ‘Did you hear about this? Did you hear about that?’ — as if something is happening that had never happened before.”
Sometimes, that is true. A breakout moment came during the December auction, when Genazym cleared $4.4 million in sales, about $2.6 million above total starting prices.
“If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on Earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for at least twice [the estimated amount],” a major British book collector living in France said on his anonymous Twitter account, which has around 110,000 followers, in December.
If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for *at least* twice estimate…. 1/https://t.co/iAC4sQudIz pic.twitter.com/eeunjqWzAs
— Incunabula (@incunabula) December 13, 2022
It remains to be seen whether Genazym can challenge Sotheby’s Judaica division as the destination for sellers with the rarest and most valuable books. Last year, a medieval prayer book sold for $8.3 million at Sotheby’s and this year, the New York auction house is accepting bids for the oldest known copy of the Hebrew Bible, which is expected to fetch as much as $50 million.
But Djmal considers especially remarkable about Genazym is not just the high prices but also the way in which rare books have caught on among Orthodox youth as something cool. “My son and his friends in yeshiva are talking about these items,” Djmal said. “These books represent rabbis they have heard about from a young age.”
The team behind Genazym’s success is led by three brothers from the Stefansky family who live in Jerusalem and New York. Before starting an auction house they worked for many years as private dealers in the rare book market. Their names, Chaim, Moshe and Bezalel, rarely appear anywhere and they almost never grant interviews. Chaim Stefansky made an exception for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and requested that this article not put him in the spotlight nor portray Genazym’s success as a product of his business acumen.
Stefansky said Genazym has tapped into a universal and deep-seated desire of people to strengthen their identities by connecting with the past. The Jewish community, he said, has been poorly served by an emphasis on historical and even current persecution.
“Always, we are victimized and we cry,” Stefansky said. “What we have in common maybe is that your grandmother and my grandmother were sharing the same bed in Auschwitz. Give me something positive of my past to be proud of. Your heritage has not only sorrow but also a happy, rich, and huge intellectual tradition. So Genazym comes and tells people about their heritage. It’s yours. It belongs to you.”
He said the same thing can be done with any ethnic or religious group.
“If you go to the Irish community and press the right buttons in terms of what you know that every Irish person is extremely proud of, I think you’ll be very successful,” Stefansky said.
He rejected the impression that Genazym’s buyers come primarily from the ranks of the nouveau riche in the Hasidic world.
“It’s coming from all sections,” Stefansky said. “People will say that there’s a lot of fresh money in the market. But we also have very good old money. We have institutions. And, also, the regular man. Mostly, the regular man, who never knew he could have access to any of this.”
One of the only customers who agreed to be identified and interviewed for this article is Rick Probstein, who says he’s spent more than $100,000 at the company’s auctions. He can’t remember when he started seeing Genazym catalogs but he had never collected Judaica before, which is perhaps surprising given that he’s an Orthodox Jew who’s been working in the collectibles business since he was a child trading baseball cards.
Today, at 53, Probstein is one of the largest sellers of sports collectibles in the world, operating through a dedicated account on eBay. “I run a humongous business — I am doing something like $160 million a year,” he said of his sales volume.
Probstein, who lives in Passaic, New Jersey, had long felt a pang of guilt about the lack of Jewish content in his collection. “I collect things but what do I have of my own heritage?” he recalled thinking to himself. “So when I started getting the catalogs, I said, ‘I gotta be a good Jew.’ I started bidding on things and I got really into it.”
Once Probstein got started, the Stefansky brothers began checking in on him, providing concierge service and cultivating him as a client.
“This is a boutique run by a Jewish family with a personal touch,” Probstein said “They call me on the phone, saying, ‘Rick, did you get the catalog? What did you think? Here are some items that you could really like.’”
Bidding on Genayzm items is not purely sentimental for Probstein. “I’m putting real money into it because I think that from an investment standpoint, it has a lot of upside,” he said.
Still, the items he buys tend to have personal significance.
“I am partial to items relating to the Chofetz Chaim,” Probstein said, referring to the rabbi and Jewish scholar Yisrael Meir Kagan, who died in 1933. Probstein’s oldest son is named Yisrael Meir in his honor. The Chofetz Chaim also appeals to Probstein because of his writings about lashon hara, the prohibition in Jewish law against speaking evil of people. “I think that speech is important and he’s sort of the embodiment of that,” Probstein said.
Genazym has sold six letters and a handwritten blessing signed or written by the Chofetz Chaim at prices ranging from about $16,000 to $68,000.
Ever since Probstein started collecting Judaica, these items have served as a draw for family and friends visiting his home.
“People in my community that come over for kiddush [refreshments after Shabbat service] know that I have this stuff and they always want to see it,” Probstein said. “Nobody ever looks at my sports memorabilia collection because it’s in my office but my Judaica stuff is in my house. They look at the letters and talk about the historical context. People love it.”
The revelation that so many Jews appear fascinated with their own history and want to engage with scholarly tradition comes at a time when many Jewish libraries have been struggling.
The library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, which has the most comprehensive and significant collection of Jewish books outside of Israel, has seen its footprint downsized amid budget cuts at the Conservative movement seminary. Also under financial pressure, American Jewish University was forced to sell its Bel Air campus in Los Angeles, which housed a library. Hebrew Union College, meanwhile, opted to end its Reform rabbinical training program in Cincinnati and even though the campus library has survived the cuts, financial uncertainty remains.
Genazym’s populist approach might hold lessons for Jewish institutions and university libraries with significant Judaica collections that hope to engage the public around books.
“The lesson is to lay off the snobbery a little bit,” said Finkelman, the former Judaica curator at the National Library of Israel, which is slated to reopen in a new and more accessible space later this year. “The goal of public institutions is to enable preservation but also to enable public access and public education. There are great stories in books and archives.”
Finkleman said he has encountered sneering reactions to the way Genazym promotes books, and they are similar to the response in the United States when the pop star Lizzo played a crystal flute that belonged to James Madison on stage at the Library of Congress.
“There are echoes of the same thing here,” he said. “Get out of the snobby ivory tower and realize you are preserving history for people.”
—
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The latest victim of the culture war over Israel is a leftwing, lapsed Catholic Bible scholar
The flames of cultural boycott of all things Israeli, Zionist and/or Jewish continue to spread across the European continent.
Yesterday, leftwing Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid was prevented from serving on the jury at next month’s international film festival in Marseilles. Though Lapid has loudly denounced the “genocide” in Gaza, his crime — apart from being an Israeli who nevertheless lives and works in France — was that 10% of his most recent film Oui was financed by an Israeli source. (The irony is that the European Union, which Lapid first approached for the financing, refused on the grounds that the film was too anti-Israeli.)
Today, though, the latest victim is neither Israeli nor Jewish. Instead, he is a 76-year-old lapsed Catholic and equally lapsed leftwing extremist who also happens to be one of Italy’s most revered novelists, columnists and translators: Erri De Luca. Once again, it is not just hypocrisy that abounds in this affair, but also irony.
As a student during the anni di piombo, or “years of lead” — the grim period, stretching from the mid-1960s to late-1970s, when Italy was convulsed by political and social turmoil — De Luca became a leading figure in Lotta Continua, one of the militant ultra-leftwing groups. Upon quitting the movement, De Luca also quit the public scene, taking a series of blue-collar jobs, whether as plasterer or construction worker.
By the time De Luca reached his 40s, he also took to writing and has amassed an oeuvre of several dozen books that range across genres and have been translated into several languages; remarkably, he also taught himself ancient Hebrew in the 1980s, while working with a Catholic charity in Africa. It was there that De Luca began to read the one book he found in his room, a copy of the Bible. Fascinated, he acquired three different Hebrew-Italian dictionaries and began to translate the texts on his own. Forty years later, he continues this labor of love, recently publishing his own interpretation of Genesis.
Alessandro Carrera — a friend and colleague who is also a wildly prolific and prominent writer in Italy — told me that De Luca’s approach to the Hebrew Bible “follows Walter Benjamin’s suggestion to translate the Bible as literally as possible, yet without De Luca knowing Benjamin’s essay on translation.” (When I asked Alessandro how he knew this, he replied “I know that because I asked him.”) But why his fascination with the Bible? De Luca told an interviewer for the French newspaper Libération that he wanted to grasp “this language which had taken upon itself the weight of the first monotheistic religion.”
This attachment to the Bible, as unwavering as it is unideological, has had perverse and predictable consequences in our current era of sheer thoughtlessness. Last month, De Luca gave a long interview in Rome to Omer Lachmanovtich, the editor-in-chief of the Israeli daily Israel Hayom. The occasion was his upcoming appearance at the International Writers’ Festival in Jerusalem. Over the course of the conversation, De Luca addressed the war in Gaza and the wasteland wrought by the Israeli military. Yet he refused to describe it as genocide. “Applying it to the war in Gaza is a historical and verbal distortion,” De Luca insisted. “What took place in Gaza is a brutal, modern war, in which the number of civilian casualties is enormous and horrifying because when fighting takes place inside a dense urban space, among schools and hospitals, the population will always pay the highest price.”
Of course, genocide scholars like Omer Bartov disagree, insisting the term is historically, semantically, and legally appropriate. Other critics take issue with De Luca’s understanding of the term “Zionist.” It is difficult to argue with his observation that “in Italy, and in large parts of the West today, ‘Zionist’ is a curse and an insult thrown at you to mark the boundaries of what is beyond the pale.” But it is far easier to take exception to De Luca’s definition of Zionism as “the simplest and most basic recognition of the Jews’ right to a national home, to existential and necessary defense.” This claim, the Italian writer Cinzia Sciuto remarked, suggests that De Luca is referring “to a reality, a Zionism of the kibbutz, that disappeared decades ago.”
Nevertheless, De Luca holds fast to his conviction, declaring that “I will say it out loud, and I do not care about the price.” The price appears to be a creeping banishment from Italy’s cultural scene. Earlier this month, De Luca’s invitation to speak at a literary festival in Salerno this summer was withdrawn by its directors. My friend Alessandro, who criticized this decision, suggested the festival directors feared a boycott by other writers or disturbances in the audience. “I am quite sure that a lot of people were ready to boo him and maybe force him to leave the stage,” he added, “but I don’t think that anything worse was going to happen.”
No doubt. But perhaps something worse in a different register is happening — namely, losing sight of what De Luca insists upon seeing: the humanity of our fellow men and women. Reflecting on a recent two-week experience on a Médecins Sans Frontières ship darting from one raft to another, all sagging under the weight of refugees desperate for new lives, De Luca writes that the experience had branded him with a single image: “a rope ladder trolling in the void.”
It was on the final step of this ladder that, “one by one, I saw faces pop up, the people climbing from the edge of the abyss to their salvation. Those hundreds of faces: I don’t have the force to hold them back. I’ve simply had the absurd privilege of seeing them. From them I have left only the rope ladder they climbed, half-naked and shoeless, up its wooden rungs.” This experience taught De Luca, who is also a mountain climber, a deeper meaning of the verb “to climb,” one that no peak had ever taught him. It is this way of seeing the world that is paying an even steeper price than a writer’s banishment from a literary conference.
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Antisemitic incidents in Germany remained elevated in 2025, fueled by rise-in far-right cases
(JTA) — BERLIN — The number of annual antisemitic incidents in Germany remains at a high, with right-wing extremism surging, according to a report issued Wednesday by the country’s leading antisemitism watchdog.
An average of 24 antisemitic incidents per day were reported in Germany in 2025, totaling 8,725, about the same as in 2024, according to the report from the Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism, a nonprofit that is known by its German acronym RIAS. The total has been consistently high since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, according to the group.
“These are not statistical outliers; it is the grim reality in Germany,” Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said at a press conference in Berlin announcing the annual tally.
The numbers reflect a concrete impact on Jews in Germany, said RIAS executive director Benjamin Steinitz, who coauthored the report with researcher Bianca Loy. They urged continued funding for programs to report incidents and additional help for victims.
Many documented cases occurred in everyday settings, RIAS reported: In Kehl, four members of the Jewish community were insulted and spat on outside a Jewish prayer room. In Hesse, a rabbi was shoved in a supermarket in front of his children and had his cell phone snatched from him. According to RIAS, the victims in these incidents were blamed for Israeli actions.
But it was incidents with a right-wing extremist background that shot up most, amounting to 807, up from 562 in 2024 – the highest figure since nationwide surveys began in 2020. They outnumbered incidents of a left-wing imperialist (501) and Islamist extremist (166) background.
Right-wing incidents included conspiracy theories, glorification of the Nazi regime, and calls for a repeat of the Holocaust. The incidents also have become more openly violent, researchers said.
For example, a right-wing extremist group in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania shouted “Jews to the wall” on a bus, mocked the Holocaust and threatened refugees as well as passengers who intervened.
The release of the 2025 antisemitism tally came the same day as a new poll finding a best-ever standing among voters for the far-right party Alternative for Germany. The party’s rhetoric, which includes nativism and calling to move on from the shadow of the Holocaust, has ignited allegations of antisemitism from leading Jewish voices in Germany, even as the party and its defenders say its policies are ideal to keep Jews safe.
The RIAS report found that the internet continued to be a major platform for antisemitism: More than a quarter of all antisemitic incidents (2,314 incidents, or 27%) occurred online, including nearly 43% of documented threats, including death threats. It cited as an example messages received by a Jewish woman that included an image of a Zyklon B canister with the comment “Still in stock.” Zyklon B was the chemical the Nazis used to asphyxiate victims in gas chambers.
Four cases of extreme violence were reported, including a knife attack in February 2025 at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. The victim, who was Spanish, was saved by an emergency doctor. The perpetrator was sentenced to 13 years in prison in March.
In a recent interview with Deutsche Welle, Schuster said Jewish community members in major cities have told him they worry “about appearing in public as visibly Jewish — for instance, by wearing a kippah or a Star of David as jewelry.” He said the concern is not as acute in less populous areas.
RIAS — which subscribes to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism — attributes more than two-thirds of the incidents (68%, or 5,916 cases) last year to Israel-related antisemitism.
Anti-Israel gatherings continued to be major hubs for antisemitic incidents, though the total number of such gatherings dropped slightly to 1,210 (from 1,358 the previous year), according to the report. There was also a drop in incidents at Islamic/Islamist gatherings, to 43 in 2025, down from 58 in 2024.
On the other hand, the number of incidents at gatherings had risen within left-wing extremist circles, from 131 in 2024 to 214 last year; and in the right-wing extremist camp, 96 incidents at gatherings were reported — nearly double that of 2024.
RIAS has rejected criticism by Diaspora Alliance, an international group that addresses antisemitism from a progressive stance, that its data overemphasizes Israel-related antisemitism and underestimates far-right incidents.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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The manosphere says women owe their husbands sex — Judaism says the opposite
The poll posted by writer Emily May on X asked: “Married women, have you ever said yes to sex because you didn’t want to deal with his moodiness if you said no?”
Over 5,000 people responded. The majority — 72% — were men, despite the fact that the question was directed at married women. Manosphere influencers, including self-proclaimed misogynist and antisemite Andrew Tate, jumped in to use the post as a proof that women use sex to manipulate men, and generally denigrate any woman who turns a man down. Gendered ideas of marriage and sexual drive — that men need sex physically, that women want to “trap” men into marriage — percolate constantly in manosphere and incel circles, and May’s posts sent the internet into a predictable tizzy.
The question of sex within marriage — how often to have it, whether it requires consent, and whether women owe it to their husbands — has been a matter of debate for, arguably, centuries. Marital rape wasn’t outlawed in all 50 states until 1993. The U.S. imported British common law, in which, as 17th century English jurist Matthew Hale put it, a “husband cannot be guilty of a rape” because marriage means that “the wife hath given up herself in this kind to her husband which she cannot retract.” In short, a wife cannot turn down her husband.
Marital rape is illegal in the U.S. in the contemporary era, but the presumptions that women owe their husband sex have continued. And undergirding all of these assumptions in many of the discussions is a Christian idea of marriage and sex.
In Christian subreddits, people discuss the idea that, in marriage, the two become one flesh, and the women must submit to their husbands, concluding that this means the woman cannot refuse the man as her body belongs to him. They cite First Corinthians 7:4-5, which says a couple cannot “deprive” the other except by mutual agreement to abstain for prayer, and that the “wife’s body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband.”
It says the same of the husband’s body, though few commenters note this line. But in Judaism, this is in fact the main focus. While both religions agree that sex is a fundamental part of marriage, the emphasis in Judaism is not that the wife owes it to her husband. Instead, it’s that a husband owes it to his wife. Within limits.
The Talmud is very specific on those limits. First of all, there are the menstrual purity laws, which forbid sex during menstruation as well as for seven days after the bleeding has stopped, which means that for about two weeks out of the month, observant couples are forbidden from having sex.
More to the point of the current debate, the Talmud — in the Ketubot tractate, dealing with the laws of marriage — also speaks very explicitly to the realities of life: That people get tired, exhausted and aren’t in the mood for intimacy. Still, it says, there are limits on the excuses. And these relate to exactly how taxing one’s job and daily duties are.
The rules are as follows: A man who is unemployed must offer his wife sex every day, because there is nothing exhausting him. Workers or laborers must be available twice a week if they work in the city in which they live. Donkey drivers — e.g. those whose work requires traveling shorter distances — are obligated to offer once a week, while camel drivers, who must travel long distances, must return home and offer their wives sex at least once a month. Sailors must return home to do the same every six months. And students of the Torah may leave home to study for up to 30 days — but they must then spend a full month at home with their wife.
In each of these cases, the wife isn’t obligated to accept any offer of sex; in fact, the wife can give permission for her husband to be gone longer — perhaps to take a job in another city to support the family, which would result in less sex. But she can also demand he stay closer to home so he can fulfill his conjugal duties. Sex is her right, not her obligation.
Her pleasure is also the focus. Men are instructed to court their wives, not simply rush to sex — to learn from “the rooster, which first cajoles the hen and then mates with it.” In tractate Eruvim, a man is not only explicitly forbidden from having sex with his wife without her consent, but also from doing so in any way that causes her discomfort, emotional or physical — e.g. pushing for her consent or making her unhappy, or even having sex that isn’t pleasurable for her.
What is clear from all of the writing is that the presumption of the rabbis is that it is more likely that the man, for reasons of exhaustion or work or even another wife, might avoid having sex with a desiring woman. This isn’t to say that Jewish text is perfect in its conception of women; there are, of course, plenty of other problematic, less empowering ideas about women in Jewish text. A man has a right to divorce his wife, for example, for all kinds of reasons, including spoiling his dinner, while she cannot divorce him. Still, it’s fascinating that the Jewish approach to sex and gender turns the common gender expectations around sex in modern Western society upside-down.
Today, the dominant stereotypes presume men are horny and desirous at all times, and women are far less sexual. Those are not neutral ideas; just looking at the discourse raging online right now, it’s clear those presumptions drive a lot of misogynistic hate, like the idea that women would only use sex as a way to entrap men. People take these gendered beliefs about sex as though they’re unassailable truisms about the world.
But they’re clearly not; for millennia, Jewish culture has believed the opposite. The reality is nothing is so clearcut, and different people of any gender have different relationships to sex, and different libidos. The internet isn’t a great place for that kind of nuance, but maybe — just maybe — if people realized their conclusions aren’t as foundational, or as God-given, as they thought, they might reexamine their assumptions.
The post The manosphere says women owe their husbands sex — Judaism says the opposite appeared first on The Forward.
