Reviewed by Jonathan Schofer Mira Balberg opens her excellent study of purity in rabbinic literature by stating boldly the challenges in conveying the compelling importance of her topic for our present day. For many, to write a book on the ways in which the rabbis of Roman Palestine in the second and third centuries C.E. reinterpreted, reshaped, and reconstructed the biblical concepts of purity and impurity is to be immersed in obsoleteness. It is to engage with an arcane body of legal themes that are not only without consequence for our time, but were, so it is often believed, even without consequence for the rabbis' own time. (p. 1)
The second century CE has long been recognized as a time of intense preoccupation with medicine and health in the Graeco-Roman world. Medicine had always been a part of the Greek paideia, and acquaintance with it was traditionally required of every aristocrat, but it was during the second Sophistic period that a new form of medical self-presentation emerged in which the knowledge of medicine was hailed not only as one of the apices of the intellectual habitus, but also as indispensable to everyday life. As Michel Foucault observed, the literature of this period placed an enormous emphasis on the body not just as a tool to be used but also as an end in itself, and the classic philosophical ideal of “caring for the Self” (epimeleia heautou) came to entail unrelenting attention to one's health and physical well-being. In this setting, the doctor—the bearer of medical knowledge and the ultimate caretaker of the Self—was seen as offering more than physical relief: The doctor was both a healer and a mentor, and functioned as a watchperson and a guide to right living. Indeed, it is in this period that we first come across the appellations iatrophilosophos (doctor-philosopher) and iatrosophistes (doctor-sophist). Medical knowledge had thus become a most esteemed form of knowledge during the Antonine period of the Roman Empire, and doctors, as its guardians, interpreters, and practitioners, were invested with substantial power and authority.
Blood for Thought delves into a relatively unexplored area of classical rabbinic literature: the vast corpus of laws, regulations, and instructions pertaining to sacrificial rituals. The book traces and analyzes the ways in which the early rabbis interpreted and conceived of biblical sacrifices, and examines sacrifice and worship in the temple as sites through which the rabbis negotiated new and old intellectual, political, and religious ideas and practices. In its focus on legal-ritual texts and in its cultural orientation, this book diverges from the prevalent approach to the cessation of sacrifice in early Judaism. Rather than viewing the rabbinic project as an attempt to transform a sacrificial religion into a non-sacrificial religion, Blood for Thought argues that the rabbis developed anewsacrificial vision. This new sacrificial vision does not seek to “substitute” obsolete sacrificial practices, but rather to rearrange, reframe, and redefine sacrifice as a critically important component of social and religious life. The book argues that through their seemingly technical legal and ritual discussions, the rabbis present remarkably innovative perspectives on sacrifices and radical interpretations of biblical cultic institutions, and that their reinvention of sacrifice gives this practice new meanings within the greater context of the rabbis’ political and religious ideology.
Chapter 3 explores the relations between age and socio-intellectual status within the rabbinic study house. It shows that alongside an attempt made in some rabbinic texts to present a harmonious picture of members of the study house as an ageless community, there are also various indications of intergenerational animosity, disharmony, and even cruelty. The first part of the chapter examines the ethos that Torah learning protects one from the predicaments of old age, and it also argues that the ethos of an ageless society of learners creates a social setting in which the young cannot be truly young. The second part of the chapter turns to sources that present ruptures and tensions in the idealized vision of intergenerational harmony in the study house and in the world of Torah learning, looking closely at one story of brutal excommunication (BT Mo‘ed Qatan 17a).
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