Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature. DR. S Mira Balberg

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СКАЧАТЬ (note: not mixed together into one lump, but merely touching one another, noshkhot zo ba-zo) and one of them is impure, they all effectively share the impurity status of the impure piece, since they are all considered to be one piece for as long as the contact persists.²² This is the exact logic, I propose, that guides the mishnaic rulings we have seen in tractate Zavim, which consider physical contact to be a manner through which disparate bodies can share the same status of impurity.

      I do not suggest, of course, that the rabbis thought of human beings and pieces of dough in the exact same way, or that they actually conceived of contact between humans or humanlike things as generating one physical body. The fact that the logic of contact as connectivity underwrites the rabbinic depiction of the contraction of impurity in tractate Zavim does not need to be taken as an indication that the rabbis considered bodies in contact to be ontologically one body, but rather it should be taken as an indication of how conceptually flexible the human body was for the rabbis, and how they were able to utilize this flexibility in their construction and explanation of the phenomenon of impurity and of the body’s function within it. Attempting to account for the fundamental operative principle of the biblical impurity system, according to which touch generates “contagion” and an annexation of the toucher unto the source in terms of impurity, the rabbis created a paradigm of contact that rests on a particular view of the body as a fluid and malleable entity, whose boundaries temporarily “melt” whenever it touches another body, and thus created an explanatory scheme for the very phenomenon of the contraction of impurity. This explanatory paradigm is, of course, never articulated as such, but it is traceable, as I proposed, through the innovative notion that during the moment of contact two separate entities function as one and share, as it were, one body.

      The question does remain why, according to the rabbinic paradigm of contact I attempted to uncover here, the impurity force of the toucher is eventually diminished upon its separation from the source. Presumably, one could assume that once the impurity has been “shared” and the toucher becomes like the source, the toucher’s force of impurity would remain unchanged even after the separation. Here, I believe, the rabbis are bound by the logic of the biblical purity system, in which the explicit and recurring paradigm is that whatever touches the source of impurity always becomes impure in an attenuated degree. The rabbis essentially retained the biblical logic, but restricted it to the level of impurity after separation.

      How did the rabbis’ understanding of the mechanism of the contraction of impurity and their explanatory paradigm of contact as a form of “sharing” a body emerge? It is plausible that this view of contact as connectivity at least partially reflects the impact of Graeco-Roman medical and popular-medical mindsets.²³ The notion that touch, either direct body-to-body touch or the touch of bodily emanations and effluvia, can cause two people to share a condition was apparently quite prevalent in popular conceptions of disease contemporaneous with the rabbis, especially in the Latin-speaking world. Vivian Nutton traced the uses of the word contagio or contagium, literally “to touch together,” in Roman texts, and showed that it is used not only to denote the spread of disease through contact, but also to describe the detrimental moral or cultural influence brought about by physical contact with dubious people.²⁴ Interestingly, the Greek word synanachrosis, which Nutton identifies as the closest counterpart to the Latin contagio, literally means “to color/dye together,” suggesting that the source of pollution, so to speak, transforms the thing it touches so that the latter changes its qualities and becomes identical to the pollutant.²⁵ The resemblance to the rabbinic perception of impurity transmission is immediately apparent. Here it is also important to note that Greek and Roman authors considered not only direct physical contact but also mere proximity to a noxious entity to be a channel through which the body can be detrimentally affected,²⁶ a view that can help us understand why in the rabbinic paradigm it is not only touch that is seen as generating a “sharing” of impurity, but also indirect forms of touch, such as carriage and shift.

      The impact of Graeco-Roman views on the permeability of the body to its surroundings, and on the body’s fluid and malleable constitution, can perhaps be traced not only in the rabbinic notion of impurity-sharing through contact, but also in the rabbinic understanding of the effect of food on the body. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, the idea that one who eats impure food (that is, kosher food that was touched by a source of impurity) becomes as impure as this food has absolutely no biblical precedent.²⁷ Moreover, the very notion that one can ingest impurity at all is widely incongruent with the biblical view, and as both John Poirier²⁸ and Yair Furstenberg²⁹ convincingly showed, it is exactly this notion that stands at the center of Jesus’ famous controversy with the Pharisees in Mark 7:1–23.³⁰ When Jesus attacks the Pharisaic practice of hand-washing (which is geared, as Furstenberg observed, to protect the food, and thereby the eater, from the impurity of the hands), he declares “nothing outside a man can make him unclean [koinōsai] by going into him” (Mark 7:15), thus representing the traditional biblical perception in defiance of the Pharisaic (and later, rabbinic)³¹ approach.³² Here too, I believe, the notion that one becomes impure by consuming impure foods reflects the influence of Graeco-Roman views on the way food transforms one’s body. According to the prevalent humoral theory, which dominated Graeco-Roman medicine during the time of the High Empire, one’s body consists of four humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile), and the balance between these four humors is the decisive, if not the only factor, in the state of one’s physical and mental health. Since all food that one consumes either increases or decreases each of the humors, one is, quite literally, what one eats: one’s body is immediately affected by what one ingests, and one’s bodily constitution is transformed in accordance with the ingested substance.³³ It seems plausible, then, to understand the rabbinic (or protorabbinic) innovative notion that one becomes impure by digesting impurity in light of broader cultural concepts regarding the impact of food on the eater.³⁴

      Clearly, the rabbinic impurity discourse and the Graeco-Roman medical discourse are concerned with very different phenomena and establish very different conceptual tools to approach these phenomena. What these two discourses do have in common, however, is an underlying perception of the body as a fluid and mutable entity, which is constantly transformed through its contact with its human and nonhuman environment. It is a fair assessment, in my view, that the rabbis conceptualized the body and the modes in which it is affected by other things and other persons in light of popular medical ideas and doctrines on the body that prevailed in their time.³⁵ This absorption of Graeco-Roman perceptions does not indicate that the rabbis necessarily thought of impurity in terms of hygiene and health,³⁶ but rather that their understanding of the mechanisms through which one body can affect another was largely shaped by the culture that surrounded them. In this culture, the body was anything but a well-bounded or stable entity; rather, it was seen to be in ongoing flux and to be constantly transformed and changed through contact with other persons and things.³⁷ In the concise words of Dale Martin, “For most people of the Graeco-Roman culture the human body was of a piece with its environment. . . . The self was a precarious, temporary state of affairs, constituted by forces surrounding and pervading the body.”³⁸ The rabbinic “body of impurity,” that is, the human body that the rabbis constructed through their impurity discourse, was thus woven from a biblical fabric, but its seams and stitches are recognizably Graeco-Roman.

      By understanding the fluid and unstable nature of the body as construed in the rabbinic purity discourse, and especially by realizing how this body is constantly transformed through contact, we may gain further insight into the rabbinic depiction of impurity as a constant concern and daily preoccupation. For the mishnaic subject, ritual purity is by definition a temporary state, because his own bodily constitution is, in an important sense, temporary: as the body rapidly changes, so does, at least potentially, its purity status. Simply put, if the body does not have clear boundaries, it is also exceedingly difficult to protect it.

      The Body as a Modular Mechanism

      The notion that two separate bodies can become one, which according to my analysis underlies the rabbinic view of the contraction of impurity, indicates СКАЧАТЬ