One of the main challenges with which every reader of the Mishnah is faced is the fact that it is entangled in a web of textual and interpretive relations with other rabbinic compilations. The Halakhic Midrashim, which are contemporaneous with or slightly later than the Mishnah, not only present numerous textual parallels with the Mishnah but also provide important scriptural reasonings for its rulings.43 The Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, which were compiled between two hundred and four hundred years after the Mishnah, are the most immediate tools that we have when trying to interpret the mishnaic sources and to understand the way they resonate in the larger frameworks of rabbinic law and thought. However, while an examination of the topic of purity and impurity across rabbinic literature is certainly a worthwhile endeavor, since my main purpose in this study is to present a rich and coherent thematic picture of purity and impurity in the Mishnah, I choose to engage midrashic and talmudic materials only when they significantly promote our understanding of specific mishnaic passages.
Somewhat different is my approach to the Tosefta, an early rabbinic compilation that is structured in correlation with the order of the Mishnah, uses the same rhetorical forms and style, and presents an array of materials relevant to the Mishnah—alternative traditions, additional rulings, parallel texts, interpretive clauses, and so forth.44 A lively discussion has been taking place in recent scholarship on the question of whether the Tosefta is later than the Mishnah and should be seen as an early commentary on it,45 or earlier than the Mishnah and should be seen as its main source.46 (There is also a recent third suggestion, according to which the two are free renditions of the same essential text.)47 Personally I tend to adopt Shamma Friedman’s view of the Tosefta as a compilation of various materials relevant to the Mishnah: some of these materials are the sources of the Mishnah, some of them are later interpretations, and so on, but the compilation as a whole is later.48 Either way, it is my conviction that the Tosefta is complementary to the Mishnah and cannot be viewed as its own independent text. This is not to say that the redactors of the Tosefta did not have an agenda of their own, which may have been different from that of the redactors of the Mishnah, but it is to say that the Tosefta was meant to be studied alongside the Mishnah, whether the Mishnah as we know it or an earlier version of it. Therefore, whenever I find traditions in the Tosefta that are particularly illuminating vis-à-vis themes I identify in the Mishnah, I use them to broaden our scope and to suggest different angles from which to understand the mishnaic text. Thus, while the focus of this book is the Mishnah, I use the Tosefta as an important source for presenting a richer and more complete picture of the mishnaic traditions.
Naturally, the lion’s share of rabbinic traditions on purity and impurity can be found in the twelve tractates that compose the Order of Purities, which is dedicated exclusively to this topic. However, important textual units that are germane to purity and impurity can also be found in other mishnaic tractates such as Hagigah, Eduyot, and more. The particular themes with which I am concerned in this study are not concentrated in a limited number of textual units, but are dispersed and arise in very different contexts and in very different textual settings. In order to present a picture that is as broad and rich as possible, I chose to discuss a large number of individual passages as units unto themselves. While I always make a point of presenting the general context of the passages in question and not isolating them from their original textual settings, I am aware that by picking and choosing relevant texts I am emphasizing some aspects of some texts over others, and am certainly not doing justice to the corpus as a whole. However, I see no other way of analytically engaging with such a large corpus in a meaningful way, which is what this book sets out to achieve.
The book consists of six chapters, in each of which I explore a different facet of the mishnaic purity and impurity discourse from the perspective of the relations between body and self. While each of the chapters is concerned with different themes and texts, the book’s argument builds from chapter to chapter, since the argument presented in each chapter serves as a point of departure for the subsequent chapter.
The first chapter sets the stage for the chapters that follow by overviewing some of the central innovations that the rabbis introduced into the biblical system of impurity, innovations that effectively turn impurity from a concern restricted to those who function as sources of impurity or to those in their immediate vicinity to a concern pertaining to anyone and everyone at any given time. Through this transformation in the scope and impact of impurity, the rabbis of the Mishnah portray the entire lived world as infused with impurity, and depict one’s daily interactions with people and things as governed by constant attention to impurity. Thus, I argue, the rabbis posit the engagement with impurity—avoiding it, managing it, purifying oneself from it, and so on—as a critical component in one’s formation as a committed rabbinic Jewish subject.
The second chapter explores the most dominant and paradigmatic actor in the realm of purity and impurity, the human body. I attempt to decipher how the rabbis perceived of the body as a material entity and how they imagined its physical function in the contraction and transmission of impurity, and focus on their construction of the body as a fluid and modular entity whose boundaries are in constant flux. I then turn to show that the rabbis divide the body into different areas, in such a way that areas that are less consequential to the subject and that one does not strongly identify with oneself are not susceptible to impurity. Thereby, the rabbis create a unique paradigm of a bodily self in which the body is identical to the self only insofar as the body is invested with subjectivity.
The third chapter moves from the human body to inanimate objects, which, as I argue, were conceived by the rabbis as extensions of the human body and as entities in which, like in the body, one must invest subjectivity in order to introduce them into the realm of impurity. The susceptibility to impurity of inanimate objects, whether artifacts or foodstuffs, is largely determined by the consciousness of their owners, since one must care about the object in question and must actively identify it as one’s own to allow it to be rendered impure. The mishnaic subject thus not only responds to the world of impurity but also, through the force of deliberation, thought, and intention, constructs the world of impurity, in such a way that the ability of objects to contract impurity serves in the Mishnah as a marker of these objects’ consequentiality for human beings.
The fourth chapter focuses on the rabbinic reconstruction of corpse impurity. At the center of this chapter stands the unprecedented rabbinic ruling that fragments of corpses must be either significant enough in size or of a form that is distinctly and recognizably human in order fully to convey impurity. I argue that the rabbis construct the ability of corpse fragments to convey impurity as dependent upon their ability to invoke the mental picture of a whole human being, and I further argue that for the rabbis the point of reference against which all corpse fragments are assessed and measured is distinctly and paradoxically a living body. Thereby, I argue, the rabbis create a system in which the corpse loses its power to convey impurity the more it resembles lifeless and formless organic matter, that is, the more it becomes something one cannot identify with oneself.
The fifth chapter turns to discuss the role and function of non-Jews in the mishnaic system of impurity. In the mishnaic setting, the purity status of non-Jews is strangely dual: while they are considered to be entirely insusceptible to the ritual impurities to which Jews are susceptible, they are also considered to convey the same impurity as persons with abnormal genital discharges, regardless of their physical condition. Attempting to disentangle this perplexing duality, I suggest how these two seemingly contradictory notions came to be, and how they are utilized by the rabbis to construct a discourse not only about Gentiles, but also and especially about the subjectivity of Jews. Whereas the inability of Gentiles to contract impurity is presented in the Mishnah as a result of a lack of legal subjectivity, their perpetual impurity is strongly identified with effeminacy and loss of bodily control. Thus the rabbis define Gentiles through their lacking or deficient subjectivity and, by way of contrast, also construct an ideal rabbinic Jewish subject.
Finally,