Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".