Talmudic Torment: Late Antique Jewish Texts on Pain and Suffering Between Medicine, Martyrdom, and Askesis

Abstract According to recent studies, pain can be conceptualised both as a bodily sensation and as a complex sociocultural phenomenon shaped by experience, expectations, and presumptions. This article analyses descriptions of agonising intestinal and inflammatory ailments with their various sensual and socio-religious implications as specific rabbinic expressions of and reactions to broader ancient understandings of pain. The study of two talmudic narratives explores a complex network of late antique Jewish ideas about pain, especially connected to bodily swellings and bowel disease, in which religious, legal, ethical, cognitive, and medical aspects intertwine. I submit that the depiction of eminent rabbinic scholars as “suffering selves” fits well into the broader cultures of pain in the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean and the ancient Near East. In these traditions, the always mediated (re)presentations of pain and experiences of suffering were often torn between fascination and aversion. Up to a certain point, the rabbis shared a cultural matrix and ideas on illness and agony with their contemporaries, especially religious experts like Christian authors, monastics, and ascetics. Therefore, these stories about self-afflicted pain and suffering were possibly formed as alternative Jewish answers reacting to and interacting with Graeco-Roman “cultures of pain” as well as emerging Jewish and Christian conceptions of martyrdom, asceticism, and the suffering self in late antiquity. Through a comparison with earlier texts, this article examines how this rabbinic counter-discourse feeds on and appropriates but also rejects Graeco-Roman and early Christian traditions about the punitive, refining, ascetic, and sanctifying purposes of bodily suffering and abdominal agony.