The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Penis: Recipes and Kabbalistic Masculinity in the Early Modern Ashkenazi World

Kabbalistic recipes to prevent unwanted seminal emissions emerged at the intersection of religious, social, ethical, bibliographical, and epistemic discourses in the early modern Ashkenazi world. This chapter focuses on recipes for the prevention of seminal emissions and argues that they explored the connections between the emotional–corporeal and divine–human continuums and that subjective agency and community identity were expressed through their standardized format. The recipes, which span the realms of natural, experimental, and revealed knowledge, thus provide a site for thinking about the contemporary ordering of bodies and bodily functions. They also reflect the structuring of normative identities and behaviours against those that were increasingly marginalized or non-normative and the social circulation of formative—but today disregarded—bodies of texts.