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Record W2041874895 · doi:10.1163/157430108x376519

Female Corporeality, Magic, and Gender in the Babylonian Talmud

2008· article· en· W2041874895 on OpenAlex
Michele Murray

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueReligion and Theology · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicMedieval and Classical Philosophy
Canadian institutionsBishop's University
FundersHebrew University of Jerusalem
KeywordsTalmudMAGIC (telescope)HierarchyJudaismPietyPhilosophyLiteratureHistoryTheologyArtLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract For the rabbis, female corporeality – and the control of the female body through rules and regulations – was the locus for (decidedly male) rabbinic piety, and a means for the rabbis to workout what constituted ideal maleness. In their constructions of what constituted "male" and "female," the rabbis created a hierarchy in which males – in particular rabbinic males – were at the top of the hierarchy, and females were at the bottom. The focus of this article is the rabbinic taxonomy of human beings as found in the Babylonian Talmud, a multi-layered and edited corpus of Jewish literature dating from the third to the sixth or seventh centuries CE, redacted in its final form in Babylonia. Using what I call a "taxonomical continuum" as a heuristic tool, I explore how the rabbis employed the label of magic in their discourse as a means of expressing gender. I suggest that "male," which for the rabbis was the form of the ideal human being, was at one end of the continuum. The further from the "male" pole a person was placed along the continuum, the less perfect and less ideal – and the more "female" – was that person. I argue that magic was employed as a mechanism for expressing rabbinic perceptions of gender, since the term "magic" has both positive and negative connotations in the Babylonian Talmud. The valence of the term depended on where the individual who performed the supra-natural action in question was found along the rabbinic taxonomic continuum.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.384
Threshold uncertainty score0.274

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.076
GPT teacher head0.253
Teacher spread0.177 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it