Yedidah Koren

Tosefta Kiddushin (5:4) records a peculiar dispute; namely, whether mamzerim and netinim will be pure in the “future to come.” This debate reflects the notion that in the present, mamzerim – the offspring of forbidden sexual relations – and their descendants, are “impure.” In this article I demonstrate how this notion developed out of the biblical belief that sexual sins impart impurity upon the sinners and the land. As an extension, some ancient Jewish sources reflect the idea that the product of this sexual sin, the mamzer, is impure as well.
I connect this notion to another impurity that developed in works found at Qumran. These works reflect a belief that all human beings, conceived in sin and confined by earthly bodies, are impure and sinful, from conception until death. The passages that describe this impurity share biblical underpinnings and prooftexts with the dispute in Tosefta Kiddushin (5:4) and can illuminate their appearance in the Tosefta. Additionally, the Qumranic concept of “constitutional” impurity can shed light on the rabbinic notion of the impurity of the mamzer. The impurity of mamzerim is also constitutional and is rooted in their sinful conception. However, in contrast to the Qumranic impurity of humankind, the impurity of the mamzer limits itself to specific bodies, and to the concrete sexual sins through which they were created. This limitation offers the possibility to release humankind at large from the sinfulness and impurity associated with the human condition and to develop a more optimistic anthropology for all – except, unfortunately, the mamzer.

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This article examines the topic of exposing Jews of tainted lineage and of maintaining genealogical knowledge in rabbinic literature. Recent scholarship on lineage in rabbinic literature focused on rabbinic attitudes towards lineage and towards revealing invalid Jews. A consensus emerged according to which Babylonian rabbis encouraged exposing Jews of invalid lineage, while Palestinian rabbis preferred to conceal this information. The first part of this article shows that in fact, Palestinian rabbinic sources offer a range of voices regarding exposing invalid Jews. The second section focuses on the issue of maintenance of genealogical knowledge. Scholars assumed that the Rabbis were the central repository of genealogical knowledge, and that they controlled its flow to the community. I show that rabbinic sources do not assume that the rabbis possessed genealogical knowledge. Rather, it is the community as a collective, and the individuals that make it up, that preserve, transmit, and reveal, genealogical information.

This paper contributes to scholarship on the Rabbinic refashioning of Judaism by analyzing the status of the “foreskinned Jew” in Tannaitic literature. The rabbis of the second century (Tannaim) considered a Jew who was never circumcised to be a normative Jew. In this paper I show that this was a Tannaitic innovation. Earlier sources in Second Temple Jewish literature and the Pauline epistles offer radically different conceptions of circumcision and the foreskin. The status of the “foreskinned Jew” offers an interpretive key to the Tannaitic reconstruction of Judaism. By neutralizing the significance that was previously ascribed to the physical foreskin, and waiving the necessity of circumcision in defining one as Jewish, the rabbis based Jewish identity on birth alone, and established a Judaism dependent solely on genealogy.

In the second section, I discuss the central place of circumcision and the foreskin in defining ethnic identity during the biblical and Second Temple periods. I trace a historical development centered around ancient interpretations of the circumcision of the people of Shechem, in which several authors from the Second Temple period understood the term "foreskin" (or the adjective "foreskinned") in a figurative sense, denoting foreigners in general; also those who did not have a physical foreskin. Paul and Mishna Nedarim both transform “circumcision” as well, into a metaphor. This radically influences the perception of the physical foreskin, the removal of which is no longer necessary in order to be considered “circumcised.” According to Mishna Nedarim, Israelite genealogy is what defines one as “circumcised,” even without physically removing the foreskin.

The third section addresses the ancient Jewish perception of circumcision as an apotropaic ritual, and the dangers of the foreskin. The Tannaim neutralized the danger associated with the physical foreskin, and presented circumcision in an “anti-apotropaic” manner. They emphasized the dangers of circumcision itself, and permitted to defer or even forego it in cases of peril. This again enabled the creation of a “foreskinned Jew.”

The final section is a discussion of the linguistic aspect of the Tannaitic move: a semantic shift of the adjective “foreskinned,” arel. Previously used as a slur toward foreigners, the majority of Tannaitic literature, however, employs the term neutrally to denote the “foreskinned Jew,” mentioned together with impure Jews. The rabbis did not perceive impurity as a pejorative either, rather as a technical disability.