Belz hasid Jiří Langer argued that “brotherly love,” i.e. love of a man for a man, is in fact the deepest basic urge in Judaism, at the basis of the commandment of “love thy fellow man as thyself.” In his view, in early Judaism the erotic stream of love between men prevailed, but over the generations “love of woman” prevailed.. He also argued that an erotic relationship, which not actualized in the form of intercourse, is what connects yeshiva students to one another and to their rabbi.
Ha'aretz has an interesting article written by Ofri Ilani about Judaism and homosexuality that also makes a very sad point about child sex abuse. Here's an excerpt:
…Throughout the modern period nationalist homophobes have claimed that homosexuality is nothing but a degenerative foreign cultural influence on members of their people. The English considered homosexuality a Bulgarian or French pathology. For their part, the French considered it an English phenomenon: As late as 1991, French Prime Minister Édith Cresson said that homosexuality belongs to “the Anglo-Saxon tradition” and is foreign to the French Latin culture.
Israeli President Ezer Weizmann, as is well-remembered, also said that there was homosexuality in the British army but not in the Palmach pre-state militia. Many European nations identified gays as “Turks,” while the Turks themselves call gays “Persians.” [Rabbis often blame Western society for Jewish homosexuality.]…
In our day, nationalists in Russia and various countries in Africa are claiming that homosexuality is a Western influence that must be combated. Nationalism and chauvinism always bear hatred of the other – be it a Jew, a gay or any foreigner.
In any case, the historical facts indicate that …Jews did not strictly preserve “the heterosexual principle.” Intimate relations between men existed in Jewish communities and apparently were also common. Historian Yaron Ben-Naeh has shown in his research that despite the explicit biblical prohibition, in Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire same-sex relations were rather common. This is indicated by dozens of sources. Moreover, until the modern era, grown men who had a need for the favors of youths did not have a negative image in Jewish society.…
[After WW2,] Hans-Joachim Schoeps, a Prussian Jewish historian and theologian…was a pioneer of the campaign to cancel the prohibition on homosexuality in Germany….
Since the prohibition on homosexuality often relied on the prohibition in Leviticus 18, Schoeps wanted to make clear the context in which this prohibition was promulgated. He argued that priestly male sacred prostitutes were common in biblical Israel, as in other Semitic cultures.
Schoeps concluded that such sacred prostitutes were active even in the Temple in Jerusalem, based especially on Deuteronomy 23:18, “There shall be no harlot of the daughters of Israel, neither shall there be a sodomite of the sons of Israel” – where the Jewish Publication Society translation (and others) uses “sodomite” for the word qadesh, the feminine form of which, qdesha, is a holy prostitute.…
Only in the period of [King] Josiah’s reform [circa 620 BCE], when the cults of foreign gods were uprooted, was sacred male prostitution prohibited. And since the cult was so popular among the people, it was necessary to make the prohibit[ion] in a particularly stringent way and the cult is now considered an abomination. However, Schoeps stresses that the prohibition in Deuteronomy relates to a pagan cult of this sort, not to the sexual act itself.
…Jiří Mordecai Langer…, who is mainly known as Franz Kafka’s Hebrew teacher, was born in Prague, became a yeshiva scholar in the court of the Belzer Rebbe and died in 1943…in Tel Aviv. He might have been considered a kind of messiah of the homoerotic gospel among the Jewish people had his unusual kabbalistic theory not been silenced and pushed to the margins.
In his book “The Erotics of Kabbala” published in 1923, Langer argued that “brotherly love,” i.e. love of a man for a man, is in fact the deepest basic urge in Judaism, at the basis of the commandment of “love thy fellow man as thyself.” In his view, in early Judaism the erotic stream of love between men prevailed, but over the generations “love of woman” prevailed. Like Schoeps after him, Langer concluded that the harsh prohibition of sexual relations between men constitutes proof that the tendency toward it was common among Jews. He also argued that an erotic relationship, which not actualized in the form of intercourse, is what connects yeshiva students to one another and to their rabbi.…