It is common to view Christian and Jewish traditions as conflicting dramatically in their attitude towards sexuality. This view is supported by the fact that Catholic traditions promote celibacy as a religious ideal, while Jewish traditions place marriage and procreation as one of the highest ethical values. More specifically, when reading the vast scholarship about Jewish Kabbalah, one gets the feeling that kabbalists celebrated eros and corporeal sexuality in a liberated manner, viewing it as reflecting and imitating sexual intercourse of the divine couple—Shekhinah and Kudsha Brich Hu.

In this paper I seek to complicate these simple assumptions and present a more nuanced assessment, stressing the negative attitude towards lust, common to Jewish philosophers, Christian theologians, and Kabbalists.  I focus on the rationales for the incest taboo as a framework for my discussion. According to this inquiry, Jewish writers and Christian theologians both offered rationales for the incest taboo in Leviticus and subsequent religious law. In contrast with ancient traditions justifying the incest taboo on social grounds, Maimonides added a religious meaning to this taboo, which was accepted in various traditions in the 13th century. According to Maimonides, incest prohibitions are the product of law and not of nature, and their end is a repression of the sexual impulse, which Maimonides regarded as a “disgrace.” In tracing the reception of Maimonides’s view, I foreground the resemblance between Maimonides and Aquinas, Nahmanides’s ambivalent stance toward Maimonides’s explanation, and the incorporation of Maimonides’s reasoning in one of the most systematic and enigmatic works of Kabbalistic rationalization of the commandments, the Castilian Kabbalist Joseph of Hamadan’s The Book of the Rationales of the Negative Commandments. R. Joseph’s acceptance of Maimonidean principles and his integration of them in the theurgic kabbalah reveal a conflict in the heart of its system and indicate that Jewish writers and Christian theologians both offered rationales for the incest taboo in Leviticus and subsequent religious law.

 My inquiry examines the inter-relations between divergent medieval religious trends in constructing the role of sexuality. Whereas common presentations of Kabbalah emphasize a divergence from the ascetic positions of Jewish philosophy and Christianity, my analysis elucidates Kabbalah’s continuity with them.

Leore Sachs-Shmueli’s full article “Maimonides’s Rationalization of the Incest Taboo, Its Reception in Thirteenth-Century Kabbalah, and Their Affinity to Aquinas” is free to access on Harvard Theological Review until 10th October 2021.