Narrating Masculine Failure: The Marital Woes of a Twelfth-Century Jewish Physician in Egypt

<i>The Jewish Doctor</i>is aimed at a general Jewish readership that would wish an entree into the specialized literature on the history of medical practice among the Jewish people. In format, it is mostly a series of fablelike stories about past Jewish physicians. The first half consists of brief biographic sketches of about 20 premodern Jewish physicians in a rough historic order, from the seventh-century writer Asaph, to early medievals Isaac Judaeus and Moses Maimonides, then to lesser knowns before the age of enlightenment. They are shown to have been physicians of fame, influence, and erudition, talented writers, polemicists, moralists, and defenders of their faith, who remained devoted to their calling under personal threat and adverse social conditions. These doctor stories are taken from Harry Friedenwald's<i>The Jews and Medicine</i>, Harry Savitz'<i>Profiles of Erudite Jewish Physicians and Scholars</i>, and others, which are slavishly abstracted, paraphrased, and quoted. The second

Modern international business has its origins in the overseas trade of the Middle Ages. Of the various communities active in trade in the Islamic countries at that time, records of only the Jewish community survive. Thousands of documents were preserved in the Cairo Geniza, a lumber room attached to the synagogue where discarded writings containing the name of God were deposited to preserve them from desecration. From them Professor Goitein has selected eighty letters that provide a fascinating glimpse into the world of the medieval Jewish traders. As the letters vividly illustrate, international trade depended on a network of personal relationships and mutual confidence. Organization was largely through partnerships, based usually on ties of common religion but often reinforced by family connections. Sometimes the partners of Jews were Christians or Muslims, and the letters show these merchants working together in greater harmony than has been thought, even in partnerships that lasted through generations. The services rendered to a friend or partner and those expected from him were great, and the book opens with an angry letter from a merchant who believed he had been let down by his friend. The life of a trader was full of dangers, as the letter describing a shipwreck illustrates, and put great strain on personal relationships. One of the most moving letters is that written to his wife by a man absent in India for many years while endeavoring to make the family's fortunes. Although never ceasing to love her and longing to be with her, he offers to divorce her if she feels she can wait for him no longer. A decisive event in the life of the great Jewish philosopher, Moses Maimonides, was the death of his brother David, who drowned in the Indian Ocean. Printed here is the last letter David wrote, describing his safe crossing of the desert and announcing his intention to go on to India, against his brother's instructions. Professor Goitein has provided an introduction and notes for each letter, and a general introduction describing the social and spiritual world of the writers, the organization of overseas trade in the Middle Ages, and the goods traded. The letters demonstrate that although it reached from Spain to India, the traders' world was a cohesive one through which these men could move freely and always feel at home. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

MUsa ibn Maymfin (Maimonides) is a well knownJewish philosopher, theologian and physician.He was born in QurPlba (Cordova) in 1153 where he was tutored in various fields of knowledge, including theology.He later moved to Pas, Morocco and then Acre, Palestine.He finally settled in Cairo, Egypt, where he became a physician in the court of Sultan $a1al:l al-Din and the leader ofthe Jewish community in Cairo.Miisi ibn Maymiin's major books of medicine and phUosophy were written in Arabic.His major theological work, the Mishneh Torah, was fourteen volumes in length and remains a major source of]ewish theology and law to this day.Miisa ibn Maymt1n is a prime example of Islam's tolerance and high respect for science and scientists.Non-Muslims were given the full opportunity to flourish, achieve and be appointed to high places in Muslim countries.This represents the true spirit ofIslam.

Moses Maimonides' contribution to the biopsychosocial approach in clinical medicine

SummaryIn this article, Moses Maimonides’interpretationof Jewish law on women and work – as reflected in hisMishneh Torah– is contrasted with the daily lives of Jewish working women as portrayed in the documents of the Cairo Geniza. Later rabbinic writings and European travel accounts are analysed to show how Jewish ethics of women and work were translated into social practice in the late medieval and early modern Arab-Islamic world, where Islamic law and the existence of separate worlds for men and women rather than the contrast between public and private spheres seem to have informed general ideas about women and work.

This study publishes a newly identified letter to Moses Maimonides reconstructed from three Geniza fragments. The letter describes an inheritance dispute over real estate in the Egyptian delta town of al-Maḥalla. Having a letter written by a litigant provides information on what took place outside of court, information that is often missing from legal records. This allows us to explore the dynamics of a dispute in which one side makes a legal move, and the other counters with a move outside of court, and vice versa. These manoeuvrings included action in Jewish and Muslim courts, appeal to a jurisconsult, social pressure and performative disregard to the boundaries of the religious communities. As a result, we can conceive of the legal arena not only as encompassing different legal institutions but also as a social space constituted by the ways litigants experienced and interacted with legal institutions.

Guest Editors’ Introduction

Phyllida Lloyd's recent award-winning film, The Lady (2012), which depicts former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her rise to power, features a montage in which Thatcher is seen dancing with U.S. president Ronald Reagan. The short sequence is an eerie yet fitting emblem of the 1980s and a fascinating (gender) image on a number of levels, not just because both political leaders are impersonated by actors in this danse macabre, but because their individual political careers have been read as masculinity performances- on the one side, the B-movie Cowboy-turned-President, and on the other the Iron Lady, whose alleged lack of femininity was constantly levelled against her and became part of her public image. A conference on British and American Masculinities since 1980 inevitably has to deal with the long shadow cast by the Thatcher and Reagan years, and many of the papers presented during the three-day conference, Masculinities Between the National & the Transnational, 1980 to the Present, held at Kent State University, August 5-7, 2011, indeed addressed the diverse cultural and political ramifications of this era. It was the second of three conferences to emerge from the ongoing research project, Towards Comparative Masculinity Studies, a transatlantic cooperation initiated by Prof. Stefan Horlacher (Dresden University of Technology) and Prof. Kevin Floyd (Kent State University), sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Kent State University. Having already welcomed scholars from three different continents in Dresden in 2010 in order to offer transnational perspectives on masculinity and the intersections between literary production and gendered identities in the post-war era up until the beginning of the Thatcher/Reagan years, this time, global developments in masculinities of the past thirty years were interrogated by scholars from the United States, the United Kingdom, Estonia, New Zealand, and Germany. In his opening address, conference co-organiser and host Kevin Floyd (Kent State) summarised the current state of research in the field of Masculinity Studies which has undergone both diversification and differentiation in recent years, moving from the groundbreaking work in the 1980s which focused on (monolithic) masculinity as a response to feminism towards post-1990s differentiation, which is dominated by a pluralised conceptualisation of masculinities. With a number of influential studies on male images, representations and embodiments of male identity having been published in recent years, Floyd stressed that there was an increased need not just to re-address traditional questions, but to interrogate masculinities from a transnational and international perspective in the political climate of the past thirty years. He argued that the emphasis of this conference would also have to include perspectives outside the strictly delineated field in order to examine how the neoliberalist movement which started with the rise of Thatcher and Reagan in the U.K. and in the U.S., respectively, has shaped male identity politics in contemporary narratives. Following a short welcoming address by Timothy S. Moerland, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Kent State University, the first conference panel (entitled Handle with Care) invested much thought into the fragility of male identity constructions, but also addressed the perception of monstrous embodiments of masculinity in popular media. Seth Friedman (DePauw University) dealt with the disguises of male movie villains in Constructing the Perfect Cover, focusing on the way contemporary misdirection films- narratives with twist endings-force the viewers not only to reinterpret the events they have been presented, but also to question their beliefs about gender. Characteristically, the protagonist of misdirection films is male and finds out that he has been living a dream or a hallucination. The villains in both Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (1995) and Shyamalan's Unbreakable (2000), on the other hand, reveal a paradoxical constellation at the heart of these narratives. …

Although gender violence was not a major public issue in 19th-century Hawai‘i, a substantial number of cases arrived at the lower courts. Offenders were typically prosecuted promptly and punished. Like contemporary legal interventions in gender violence, the punishments were minimal. But unlike contemporary practice, punishments were largely small fines designed to deter quarrelling. There was nothing like the contemporary effort to retrain offenders into more egalitarian conceptions of masculinity. Despite frequent convictions for wife battering, the courts primarily reinforced a notion of marriage as an enduring and sexually exclusive relationship. Judges urged couples to live in peace but made no further efforts to change batterers. This historical study of court records on a small town in Hawai‘i shows that 19th-century punishment focused on maintaining marriages rather than reforming batterers, leaving the patriarchal power of the batterer unchallenged. As this study demonstrates, the shape of legal intervention depended on the cultural conceptions of marriage that were being reinforced and the overarching logics of punishment in play at the time.

SUMMARY After rehearsing persisting representations of same-sex desire in the Southern Renaissance's literary production, this essay charts how novels by Truman Capote and William Goyen reveal contradictory genderings of male homosexuality. Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms collapses male gay identity with effeminacy, while Goyen's The House of Breath replicates this model but also contrasts it with a coexisting and competing one in which masculine men can physically act upon gay desire. Thus, contrary to the theo-rizations of Michel Foucault and David Halperin, these representations suggest the absence of a unified model of mid-twentieth-century male homosexuality.

This study explores changing masculine identities and gender relations in households, taking the case of men workers retrenched by a state-owned newsprint paper mill in Bangladesh. It analyzes their post-retrenchment condition characterized by considerable income loss and its wider ramifications by comparing men in stable income-earning occupations and in unstable income-earning occupations. This study argues that although men at different levels define their masculine identity differently in response to their personal crises, they are all determined to maintain that identity. Two types of masculinities are identified: public masculinity—socializing with other men and acting smart in teashops, and household masculinity—their status as family providers. In a situation with limited resources, men give up the former and uphold the latter. The men’s retrenchment does not always provide empowerment opportunities for their women partners through their participation in gainful paid work.

This chapter considers the work of self-proclaimed ‘audacious’ author Feng Tang whose writing is often said to be infused with male hormones. Focusing on his semiautobiographical Beijing Trilogy, this chapter explores how body and text intertwine in Feng’s work, and asks what a supposedly ‘masculine’ form of writing might mean both for literary subversion and literary constructions of masculinity. Feng creates a form of masculinity out of three seemingly disparate strands: rebellion, sexual desire, and literary production. At the core of Feng’s audacious project is ‘phallic creativity’: a celebration of heterosexual virility, grotesque male bodies, and exuberant transgression. The implications of this literary construction, which Feng continues in his extra-literary appearances, is that rebellion relies upon heterosexual masculinity; it not only leads to but is reliant upon silent, compliant women.

Melville’s Liminal Bachelor and the Making of Middle-Class Manhood in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine Timothy Helwig (bio) Critical studies of Herman Melville’s short stories of the mid-1850s, the infamous period at which Melville is said to have “gone underground” out of frustration with his reading public’s lack of appreciation for the more experimental writing seen in Mardi and Moby-Dick, tend to draw generalizations between his entries in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly Magazine.1 The common line of analysis holds that Melville stories like “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” and “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” both published in Harper’s, reflect that periodical’s preference for a sentimental style of writing and a capitulation to middle-class values, while his stories like “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” published in Putnam’s, demonstrate the more politically engaged and psychologically complex writing that marks his best literary productions.2 While these latter stories are especially deserving of the robust critical attention they have received in the past thirty years, neglected stories like “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” and “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” when carefully contextualized with other bachelor stories and illustrations appearing in Harper’s, offer a unique opportunity to consider the complex ways Melville’s writing meditates on residual and emergent definitions of manhood of the antebellum period. Through the bachelor figure who narrates each story, Melville challenges key tenets of entrepreneurial manhood, expresses nostalgia for less alienated forms of masculinity associated with America’s agrarian past, and builds an alliance between the bachelor and the working classes that preserves the importance of civic virtue and thereby challenges Harper’s conventional depictions of bachelors as hapless foils to the socially disengaged middle-class married man. During the three decades leading up to the Civil War, the systematic erosion of the craft system of labor and the gradual rise of industrial capitalism had profound effects on what it meant to be a man. Pride in one’s craft and the [End Page 1] exercising of civic virtue, what David Leverenz calls the “artisan paradigm” of masculinity, were challenged by the entrepreneurial spirit of the professional middle-class man.3 Instead of more communal relationships among master artisans, journeymen, and their apprentices, alienated forms of labor and the fear of becoming dominated by other men in a public sphere separated men increasingly from the world of the home and the family and from each other. Instead of lording benevolently over the self-sustaining family farm in rural climes or the artisan’s home in the city, the new middle-class man was supposed to find solace in the rejuvenating power of the private sphere, a refuge from the sordid daily competition for capital and the abstract forms of managerial power in the public sphere. With its promise of retreat from the world’s problems into the private sphere predicated upon the heteronormative institutions of marriage and the family, laissez-faire capitalism offered professional middle-class men a sanctioned alternative to the virtues of civic engagement and community. Yet, as Sean Wilentz and other labor historians have shown, the ideology of liberal capitalism did not go unchallenged during the antebellum period. Artisan republican rhetoric, with its roots in classical republican attacks of the eighteenth century against the tyranny of the British crown, was taken up by the skilled working classes to express their anxieties about the new market economy and persisted at least into the 1850s. Artisans employed republican discourse that called upon citizens to act virtuously to protect the commonwealth and to subordinate private self interest for the public good in order to condemn merchants and industrial capitalists who could set wages and exploit others’ labor for economic gain. Wilentz locates iterations of artisan republican rhetoric in “court records, ceremonial speeches, contemporary prints and drawings, and accounts of parades and festivals” among the working classes in the first half of the nineteenth century.4 In popular expressions of this class-accented conflict over ideal manhood, the bachelor proved an especially effective touchstone, enabling nostalgia for a preindustrial commitment to civic virtue, as well as...

This paper analyzes and interprets the emotionality of the main character, Philipp Perlmann, in relation to other male protagonists in the novel Perlmann’s Silence (German original 1995, Slovak translation 2023), situating it within the broader context of the crisis in the academic world and the humanities, as well as the crisis of masculinity. Through the personal narrator Philipp Perlmann, Pascal Mercier reproduces several masculine stereotypes. The protagonist embodies the image of an academic undergoing both a personal crisis (the death of his wife) and a professional one (connected to the decline of the humanities). The latter, in particular, evokes a sense of shame and fear of failure, rooted in his conviction that he does not meet others’ expectations of his professional role. This pressure is further reinforced by social norms of masculinity, which define weakness, vulnerability, or insecurity as threats to male identity. Consequently, silence emerges as a significant cognitive and symbolic motif. Mercier demonstrates a profound understanding of the crisis in the humanities, exacerbated by neoliberal pressures. However, he does not propose a systemic solution; instead, he introduces the process of translation as a means of rediscovering the protagonist’s academic identity.

The purpose of this study was to understand the synergistic relationships between conceptions of masculinity, body image, and sexual behavior in HIV-positive gay men. The data were drawn from a two-phase formative behavioral mixed methodologies investigation with the use of the Internet. Findings demonstrated that conceptions of masculinity were intimately linked to body image and sexual adventurism, such that men defined their masculinity by their physical appearance and sexual behavior. Further, the data support high levels of risk taking, including steroid use and intentional unprotected anal intercourse (barebacking), which correlated with the participants’ conception of physical masculinity. Clinical implications suggest that it is critical to examine the interaction that occurs between the individual’s gay, masculine, and HIV-positive identities as these appear to be overlapping realities that have an impact on the decisions and behaviors in which these men engage.