Jeffrey Goldberg writes in the Forward in 1994:
If Graydon Snyder only knew that he would be convicted of sexual harassment for teaching the Talmud, he might have kept his mouth shut.
But Mr. Snyder, a Bible professor at the United Church of Christ’s Chicago Theological Seminary, could not have foreseen the dangers that lurk in talmudic discourse, and he now stands at the center of perhaps the most bizarre and troubling political-correctness case yet.
In a graduate-level Gospels class two years ago, Mr. Snyder told a story from the Talmud’s Baba Kama tractate, a book that covers tort law. Mr. Snyder says the story, which contains one of the Talmud’s more famous and challenging hypotheticals, helps his students understand the differences between Jewish and Christian notions of sin.
Accidental Sex
A man is fixing the roof of a house, the Talmud says, when he falls onto a woman below and accidentally has sexual intercourse with her. What does the roofer owe the woman, the Talmud asks. Medical expenses? Yes. Pain suffered? Yes. But does he owe her for the indignity she suffered? No, the sagacious guide answers, because the roofer’s intent was not to rape or seduce. Mr. Snyder contrasted this with a lesson found in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in which feelings of “lust in the heart” are considered as sinful as the actual act of adultery.
All this was apparently too much for one of Mr. Snyder’s students, who brought charges against him for creating a hostile sexual atmosphere. The case was heard by the seminary’s Sexual Harassment Task Force, whose members include students, professors and the seminary’s president. The task force found Mr. Snyder guilty and placed him on probation.
In effect, though, the task force also found the Talmud guilty — of being one of the world’s oldest dirty books.
“I asked the task force, ‘Are you aware that this is the Talmud I’m talking about, that I took this story from a Jewish holy book?’ ” said Mr. Snyder, who is Christian. “They indicated that they knew what they were doing.”
Ehsan Abdulaziz, a Saudi millionaire property developer, was cleared of rape charges in London this week after he claimed that he had tripped and fallen on an 18-year-old girl who was sleeping at his apartment after partying with him, penetrating her by accident.
Hm: That’s not how gravity or bodies work at all.
The Mirror reports that Abdulaziz had already had sex with the 18-year-old’s friend and he said his penis might have been poking out of his underwear when he happened upon the young woman sleeping off a night of drinking. The millionaire accounted for his DNA being found in the woman’s vagina because she had allegedly seduced him when he was offering her a T-shirt or a taxi ride home. He also said that he had semen on his hands from having sex with the woman’s friend earlier. In court, Abdulaziz maintained his innocence, saying, “I’m fragile, I fell down but nothing ever happened, between me and this girl nothing ever happened.”
A jury reportedly deliberated for only 30 minutes before acquitting Abdulaziz of one count of rape.
