A Queer Genealogy of "Havruta": Study Partnership as Intimate Relationship Between Men in Jewish Literature

This dissertation traces a literary lineage in Jewish cultural imaginations that associates havruta—an educational method of long-term study partnership that has evolved in a male homosocial context of traditional Judaism as a central pedagogical method and an important religious practice—with forms of same-sex erotic and affective connections, often analogous to marriage. This dissertation argues that the trope of queer havruta, which refers to literary images of traditional Jewish study pairs that can be read as queer through a modern lens, has established its place in the canon of queer romance and contributed to the shaping of Jewish queer culture.

Traditional Jewish sources, from the rabbinic period onward, often depict male study partnerships as sites of intimacy, personal attachment, and commitment, sometimes including erotic desire or sexual practices. The homoerotic potential of these representations is rooted in cultural assumptions distinct from modern sexual categories. The images of havruta intimacy in the Mishnah, Talmudim, and Midrash, along with their interpretive traditions, draw on biblical heroic couples and construct homoerotic intellectualism as a form of masculinity within ancient homosocial and patriarchal contexts.

Jewish writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—including S. An-sky, S.Y. Agnon, I.B. Singer, Tony Kushner, Jyl Lynn Felman, Michael Lowenthal, Evan Fallenberg, and others—re-articulate this literary tradition of homoerotic scholarship and havruta intimacy in ways that both align with and challenge modern gender and sexual categories. These modern and contemporary narratives seek and resist the signification of havruta intimacy, offering new pleasures, relational models, and ways to conceptualize male-male desire through affective and eroticized readings of Jewish history and intellectual life.

Reimagining havruta through a queer literary genealogy enables the reclamation and transformation of traditional Jewish symbols, often by challenging their heteronormative, sexist, and misogynistic assumptions, while reshaping religious, gender, and sexual identities, relationships, and intimacies. It disrupts binary and totalizing definitions of normativity and queerness by representing havruta intimacy as an intersection of multiple viewpoints and sensibilities, when some forms of traditional Jewish normativity produce enabling dynamics for new queer intimacies. It allows the creation of a distinctly Jewish queer space.