narrating voice and without a programmatic introduction, as a creation of everyone and of no one at the same time.
The Mishnah’s standing as a cohesive textual unit does not obfuscate the fact that it consists of multiple layers, traditions, and sources. The Mishnah comprises different tractates, each one of them presumably a unit unto itself, with its own complex history of formation and redaction; different passages in the Mishnah are likely to have been shaped at different periods, by different people, and to have been compiled at different stages; and even within the same passage, different statements or narratives may derive from different sources. Although I am fully cognizant of the enormous complexity of the Mishnah as a text, in this book I am not concerned with investigating the formation or redaction of the mishnaic text, nor am I attempting to ascribe different mishnaic traditions to different periods. First, I am very skeptical regarding our ability to recover the different stages of the development of the text, an enterprise that is usually undertaken by identifying the particular sage or sages whose statements are included in a passage as the key to dating the passage to a particular period. Even if we take the attributions of statements as reliable, and even if we exclude the possibility that the words of a sage from one period were integrated into a passage from another period, the overwhelming majority of passages I examine in this book are anonymous. Second, and more importantly, I do not think that the question of when a specific tradition emerged is of particular importance when trying to identify certain mindsets in the Mishnah as a cohesive redacted work. The very fact that a specific tradition was introduced sometime during the period in which the Mishnah was formed and that the redactors considered this tradition to be worth preserving is an indication that the view expressed in this tradition was part of the thought-world of the rabbis who formed the Mishnah. It was not necessarily something to which they all subscribed, nor was it necessarily the only view on the matter, but it is constitutive of the mishnaic discourse as such, which is where my interest lies.
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
