One who touches the emission of a man with genital discharge, and his saliva, and his semen, and his urine, and menstrual blood—makes two impure and disqualifies one. Once he has separated himself—he makes one impure and disqualifies one. The same is the case for one who touches, and for one who shifts. R. Eliezer says: it is also the case for one who carries.18
The general purpose of these passages and those that follow them is to divide different sources of impurity into different categories according to the mode of contact through which they convey impurity. The most obvious form of contact is direct physical touch (maga), but there are also two forms of indirect contact: carriage (masa), in which one can become impure by either carrying the source of impurity or being carried by it, and shift (heset), in which one can become impure by either causing the source of impurity to move or being made to move on account of it. Those divisions notwithstanding, the same basic rule applies in all cases: at the actual moment of physical contact, whoever touches the source of impurity “makes two impure and disqualifies one.”19 This is the mishnaic manner of saying that whoever touches these sources of impurity has the same force to convey impurity as the source of impurity itself, that is, it becomes “a father of impurity” that makes whatever it touches a “first” of impurity, whatever touches the “first” a “second” of impurity, and whatever touches the “second” disqualified for use (if it is a heave-offering).20 For example, if Jill is menstruating, and Jack touches Jill, then for as long as he is touching her, Jack is impure in the same degree as Jill. If he touches a bowl at the same time that he is still touching Jill, the bowl will become impure in the once-removed degree; if the bowl contains flour, the flour will become impure in the twice-removed degree, and if the flour will then touch a heave-offering it will disqualify it. Thus Jack makes two (the bowl and the flour) impure, and disqualifies one (the heave-offering). In contrast, once the source of impurity and whatever touched it are no longer in contact, the toucher’s impurity is attenuated in such a way that it is rendered a “first of impurity” that “makes one impure and disqualifies one.” That is, if Jack touches the bowl after he separated himself from Jill, he will make the bowl “second of impurity,” and if the bowl will be used to contain a heave-offering, the heave-offering will be disqualified. Thus Jack, once separated, makes one (the bowl) impure and disqualifies one (the heave-offering).
By distinguishing the force of impurity at the moment of contact from the force of impurity after separation, a distinction that has no trace in biblical or postbiblical purity legislation, the rabbis indicate that in the realm of impurity physical contact should be understood as connectivity. The moment of contact is a moment in which the items in question are one in terms of their ritual impurity status, as though the source of impurity annexes the thing that has contact with it and makes this thing a part of itself. In other words, for the rabbis impurity is not transmitted as much as it is shared. This notion, according to which physical contact turns different objects into one in terms of impurity so that they all share the same impurity status, can be illuminated through the following passage, which concerns the way in which pieces of dough contract impurity from one another:
If a piece of dough was “first” (that is, impure in the once-removed degree), and one attached other [pieces of dough] to it, they are all “first.”
If they were separated, [the piece that was initially impure] is “first,” and all the rest are “second” (that is, impure in the twice-removed degree).
If [the initial piece] was “second,” and one attached other [pieces of dough] to it, they are all “second.”
If they were separated, [the piece that was initially impure] is “second,” and all the rest are “third.”21
As this passage clearly indicates, when several separate pieces of dough are physically connected (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