Intercourse, by: Andrea Dworkin - Feminish

her; her uncle, a ritual slaughterer who raised her and wantedher for his bride; a husband, Reb Itche Mates, who was impotentand fanatical and thought she was the demon Lilith; alover, Reb Gedaliya, who took her from her husband and eventually,in a profane ceremony, forced her husband to divorceher, and, in a profane ceremony, married her; and the dybbuk,who took her from Reb Gedaliya. The religious community ofJews eventually exorcised the dybbuk: “The next instant thecongregation beheld a flash of fire from that same place and itflew through the window burning a round hole in the pane. ”4Rechele soon dies.This story of sexual possession takes place in Poland, in acity named Goray, “the town that lay in the midst of the hills atthe end of the world. ”5In 1648 a butcher of the Jews, BogdanChmelnicki, executed vicious pogroms, mass slaughters; heand his followers “flayed men alive, murdered small children,violated women and afterward ripped open their bellies andsewed cats inside. ”6Jews ran away; were baptized; were soldinto slavery. Goray was deserted. Still, the Jews studied holytexts, and the cabalists—the mystics of Judaism—studied themystic texts. In them, they found a promised end to this persecutionof the Jews, a time when the Messiah would come; andmany concluded that “Chmelnicki’s massacres were the birth-pangs of the Messiah. ” 7Magical thinking distorted the austere,literal religion of the Jews; laws were transgressed; false Messiahsabounded.Rechele was born in Goray just before the massacre there.Her father took her to Lublin, and left the new infant with heruncle, a ritual slaughterer; and the holy slaughter of the animalsis a wretching counterpoint to the profane slaughter of theJews. The environment is filled with the carnage of killed