Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature

Abstract

This book explores the ways in which the early rabbis reshaped and reinvented the biblical laws of ritual purity and impurity, and it argues that the purity discourse that the rabbis created generated a new and unique notion of a bodily self. Focusing on the Mishnah, a Palestinian legal codex compiled around the turn of the third century CE, Mira Balberg shows that the rabbis construct the processes of contracting, conveying, and managing ritual impurity as sites in which the relations between one's self and one's body—and, more broadly, the relations between one's self and one's human and nonhuman environment— are negotiated. Through their new form of purity discourse, with its heightened emphasis on subjectivity, consciousness, and self-reflection, the rabbis put new substance into the biblically inherited language and practices of purity and impurity, which closely resonates with central cultural concerns and intellectual commitments that prevailed in the Greco-Roman world of the first centuries of the common era. The book thus adds a new dimension to the study of practices of making the self in antiquity by suggesting that not only philosophical exercises but also legal paradigms function as sites through which the self is shaped and improved.

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