Material culture created by, for and about Jews
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Download (.pdf) The Archaeology of Purity: Archaeological Evidence for the Observance of Ritual Purity in Ereẓ-Israel from the Hasmonean Period until the End of the Talmudic Era (164 BCE – 400 CE)
PhD Dissertation (in Hebrew), supervised by Prof. Ze’ev Safrai, and submitted to Bar-Ilan University in May 2011. English abstract and table of contents appear at the end.
Abstract
The ancient literary sources indicate that the laws of ritual purity played a crucial role in... more
Abstract
The ancient literary sources indicate that the laws of ritual purity played a crucial role in the halakhic discourse of the late Second Temple period. Intensive discussion of this issue is found in the books of the Apocrypha, in the works of Philo and Josephus Flavius, in the documents from the Judean desert, in the books of the New Testament and in the early strata of the Tannaitic literature. The laws of purity continued to remain in the center of halakhic debates even after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 C.E., at least within the circles of the sages from whom we have inherited the early rabbinic literature.
These literary sources present us with a number of fundamental questions: To what extent were the laws of ritual purity observed amongst the greater Jewish population of Ereẓ-Israel? What place did these laws occupy in the daily lives of those who observed them? Were there differences in the level of observance of these laws between various segments within contemporary Jewish society? Were there regional differences with regard to the observance of these laws? What kind of developments and changes occurred over time in the field of ritual purity observance? These research questions, which are of utmost importance in any attempt to understand the religious and social histories of Jewish society in Ereẓ-Israel during the late Second Temple era and during the period of the Mishnah and Talmud, are the focus of the present study.
There are three major types of archaeological finds that reflect on the scope and the nature of ritual purity observance during the historical periods under discussion. The first is stepped water installations, which should be identified as the “miqwa’ot” mentioned in early rabbinic sources, ritual baths that were used for ablutions. Another type of archaeological find that evidences the observance of purity laws is chalk-stone vessels, used especially by those who kept the purity laws due to the insusceptibility of these vessels to ritual impurity. Important additional data may be culled from a study of the distribution of imported pottery as these vessels were considered inherently impure, and as such we may learn about the observance of purity law by examining the extent to which these vessels were either used or avoided.
In the present study, I have collected data on 850 miqwa’ot that have been discovered in the framework of excavations and archaeological surveys throughout Israel. The miqweh first appeared during the Hasmonean period, apparently as a result of changes in the exegetical treatment of the scriptural injunction to “wash” in order to obtain ritual purification. By the end of the Second Temple period, the miqweh had become an integral component in both rural and urban settlements alike. During this period, it is common to find numerous miqwa’ot at any one settlement site, a phenomenon which provides evidence for the frequent use made of these installations as well as for the central position that the observance of purity laws had taken in daily life. Miqwa’ot were installed not only in residential areas, but also next to winepresses and oil presses, near tombs, adjacent to the gates leading into the Temple Mount, near synagogues, in road stations, in bathhouses and in pottery production sites. During this period miqwa’ot are found mostly in Judea, and less frequently in Galilee, the coastal plain, Idumea and other peripheral areas. Miqwa’ot remained common even after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., and it was only after the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 C.E. that a significant decrease in the number of miqwa’ot may be discerned, as well as changes in the ways that these installations were used.
Chalk-stone vessels have been discovered at over 250 sites throughout Israel. These vessels first appeared in Ereẓ-Israel in the second half of the first century B.C.E., and are found almost exclusively in Jewish settlements. Unlike vessels made of other materials (such as clay, wood or metal), stone vessels are impervious to ritual impurity, and as such their use helped facilitate the observance of the purity laws. Chalk-stone vessels continued to be widespread until the Bar Kokhba revolt, after which time they disappeared almost completely.
Imported pottery, particularly Eastern Terra Sigillata and transport amphorae, are quite common in non-Jewish settlements in Ereẓ-Israel during the late Second Temple period, while they are almost completely absent from contemporary Jewish sites. The avoidance of these vessels amongst Jews points to a tendency isolation from contact with the pagan surroundings, a tendency which received halakhic expression in the attribution of ritual impurity to gentiles and to foreign lands. The stark dichotomy in the distribution of imported pottery between Jewish and pagan settlements continued until the middle of the second century C.E., at which point the importation of Eastern Terra Sigillata and other imported ceramic families ceased almost completely. For more than one hundred years, imported fine tableware was almost completely absent throughout the country, in both Jewish and pagan settlements alike. Imported pottery began to reappear in Ereẓ-Israel only during the Late Roman period (Late Roman Red Ware), and from its first appearance in the fourth century C.E. and throughout the entire Byzantine period, this pottery is common in Jewish settlements throughout the country. These finds indicate that, as opposed to the late Second Temple period and the early Tannaitic period, the Amoraitic period lacks archaeological evidence for a widespread avoidance of gentile impurity and impurity of foreign lands.
A study of the entirety of these data indicates that the observance of ritual purity in daily life was widespread throughout Jewish society at large in Judea during the late Second Temple period and during the period leading up to the Bar Kokhba revolt, and was not confined to minority groups such as the priests or the Pharisees. The general picture of the state of affairs in the Galilee and in other areas outside of Judea proper is less clear, however it appears that purity observance was relatively less prevalent in these outlying areas during this period. A dramatic decline in the observance of ritual purity on a daily level occurred after the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 C.E., after which time only a minority of the population continued to observe these laws.
Thinking Digitally About the Dead Sea Scrolls: Book History Before and Beyond the Book
by Eva Mroczek
Published in Book History 14 (2011): 241-269.
See link to Project Muse below, where you can access the article in HTML or PDF. See link to Project Muse below, where you can access the article in HTML or PDF.
Cities of the Dead: Architectural Motifs and Burial Practices in Curaçao’s Religious and Ethnic Communities
Co-authored with Kent Coupé . Published in Markers: Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies. XXVII, pp. 56-87.
In this study we analyze the cemeteries of Curaçao, a small desert island in the Dutch West Indies near the coast of... more In this study we analyze the cemeteries of Curaçao, a small desert island in the Dutch West Indies near the coast of Venezuela that was once a crucial player in colonial smuggling and the slave trade. Our study compares the island’s Jewish (Spanish-Portuguese), Protestant (primarily Dutch), and Catholic (Afro-Curaçaoan) cemeteries. Following the work of Dickran and Ann Tashijian, Keith Cunningham, Lynn Gosnell, Suzanna Gott and others, we interpret these stones within the religio-cultural context of the people who used them. We argue that whereas ethnic cemeteries in the United States often emphasize the distinctiveness of the communities, Curaçao’s cemeteries emphasize both ethnic distinction and ethnic elision. The permeability of racial and religious boundaries in the cemeteries reflects the island’s complicated racial history and is an important reminder of how race is often constructed differently outside of the United States. This permeability should not be confused with social equality: indeed, as racial categories became more fluid following emancipation, islanders used other categories such as wealth and status displays to reinforce social privilege within (as opposed to between) ethnic groups.
Holocaust and Holocaust-er: Gauging Evil, Comparing Notes.
by Mihai Mindra
Our America: People, Places, Times. Eds. Rodica Mihaila and Irina Pana. Bucuresti: Univers Enciclopedic, 2005: 282 - 291
A comparative reading of literary representations of two different versions of the Holocaust: Auschwitz and... more A comparative reading of literary representations of two different versions of the Holocaust: Auschwitz and Transnistria; corpus: Ruth Glassberg - Gold, Timpul lacrimilor secate (Eng. Ruth's Journey) and Ruth Kluger, Still Alive.
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“Narrative Constructs and Border Transgressions in Jewish-American Holocaust Fiction”
by Mihai Mindra
Studies in Jewish American Literature, 28 (2009): 46 - 54.
My paper consists in a Foucauldian New Historicist investigation of the narrative technique specifics of the Holocaust... more
My paper consists in a Foucauldian New Historicist investigation of the narrative technique specifics of the Holocaust novel. I analyze the relations between this subgenre’s social and ethnic implications and their aesthetic representation. I focus on the narrative technique used in order to render the Holocaust story, i.e. the subjective version of the historical event, as a direct result of the authors’ process of assimilation and/or integration into the mainstream (American). I tackle personal/historical memory, ethical and ethnic responsibility manifested through artistic narration and leading to the acknowledgement of hyphenated cultural (Jewish-American) identity.
My paper discusses stages of narrative transformation of the Holocaust novel narrative paradigm beginning with the first generation traditional memoir framework (e.g. Elie Wiesel’s Night) to the second generation postmodernist demythologizing anti-novel structure (Melvin Jules Bukiets’ After) and graphic novel technique (e.g. Art Spiegelman’s Maus) to the third generation victim-perpetrator binary opposition debunking non-realist literary techniques (e.g. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated). My main contention is that the contemporary Jewish-American Holocaust novel is as an interesting experiment in novel subgenre writing and reading, conveying history via novel art, surviving by informing a continuously changing public about versions of the past.
Inescapable Colonization: Norman Manea’s Eternal Exile
by Mihai Mindra
Literature in Exile of East and Central Europe, ed. Agnieszka Gutthy. N.Y.: Peter Lang, 2009. Series: Middlebury Studies in Russian Language and Literature.
This paper discusses the case of Jewish-Romanian writer Norman Manea as one instance of East-European ... more
This paper discusses the case of Jewish-Romanian writer Norman Manea as one instance of East-European intellectuals’ transatlantic encounters with American language and culture, foregrounding the tragic condition of identities irreversibly constructed by native nationalistic and totalitarian ideologies. The political and ideological colonizations occasioned by the writer’s experience in the Transnistrian Holocaust and nationalist-Communist Romania , as well as the German, via the writer’s Bukovinian native background, and Romanian high brow aestheticist imprints, conditioned not only Manea’s inability to relate to American culture but also his highly inter-textual artistic universe.
The corpus included in my analysis consists of the writer’s post-1989 work published in America, comprising mostly revisions of his pre-1986 fiction to be translated for the American reader, collections of essays and interviews published in post-Revolution Romania, and a memoir simultaneously (2003) published in the United States and Romania. Manea’s immigrant production proves one dramatic truth: transatlantic post-Communist Manea is an eternal exile. His Jewishness had been denied and dispatched in the 1942-1945 extermination camps in Transnistria, his Romanianness was politicized by his Communist past, and his America proves to be the perpetual Foreign Land.
Correspondingly, I have identified three major stages in the writer’s captivity/colonization process leading to his eternal exile status: Antonescu’s Transnistria (1942-45), Communist Romania (1946-86), and the America of his immigration (1987-to date). Whereas, in the first two phases, the author meets open, violent anti-Semitism and Communist political coercion, in the third one he confronts the challenge of cultural assimilation. For Manea the New World also means the entrapment of language in the “snail’s house” , to use the writer’s symbolical rendition. This metaphor expresses his belief that immigrant writers, inevitably, carry with them in exile their native language that represents their spiritual home and source of creativity.
“Exile and Ethnic Identity in Norman Manea’s Work”
by Mihai Mindra
Balkanistica 22 (2009): 75- 88.
One major characteristic of Manea’s pre-immigration (1986) and pre- revolution (1989) work is that it never discusses... more One major characteristic of Manea’s pre-immigration (1986) and pre- revolution (1989) work is that it never discusses or even mentions directly his, or anybody else’s for that matter, Jewish identity. A concordance edition of this literary output will probably never contain terms expressing notions linked to Jewishness or Judaism, except for rare, veiled hints and allusions. Manea, the anti-Communist, writing about the Ceausescu regime until 1986 (the year of his immigration to West Germany), perceived himself just as a politically persecuted Romanian intellectual and artist. Consequently, he included himself in the large and sad category of the greater part of the Romanian population at the time suffering the imposed internal political exile, with no specific ethnic identity, metaphorically a Jew in a nation of inmates of Ceausescu’s Gulag (Casa Melcului 130). This attitude, discussed here as a case study of Norman Manea’s writing, even if apparently discontinued by immigration or/and the 1989 Revolution, reveals the efficiency of Romanian Communist ideology and nationalism in its efforts to deconstruct and re-construct, by sheer coercion, the original ethnic and political identity of its opponents. In this way such a citizen of Romania was twice exiled, ethnically and politically, in his own country. Subsequent physical immigration will not, as I shall try to prove here, in Norman Manea’s case, essentially restore the inner ethnic sense of identity lost in the process of assimilation and adjustment to the oppressive native mainstream environment.
“Re-storying Tradition as Bricolage: Judaic Lore and Jewish American Fiction”
by Mihai Mindra
Herméneutique et bricolage. Territoires et frontières de la Tradition dans le judaïsme. Actes du colloque de Bucarest, 27-28 octobre 2006. Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, Wien: Peter Lang, 2008.
The continuous recreation of Jewish tradition will be discussed here within the theoretical framework created by... more
The continuous recreation of Jewish tradition will be discussed here within the theoretical framework created by Jacques Derrida in his groundbreaking study “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” and, indirectly, in connection with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of bricolage in The Savage Mind (first French edition in 1962), as perceived in Derrida’s study.
Structures, according to Derrida, are organized and made coherent by centers. The center, while it holds the whole structure together, limits the continuous “play” of the elements in the structure. He notices that “it has always been thought that center…escapes structurality…”. It “is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere” .
It is my observation that lasting structures, representing ideologies or philosophical systems, have a certain inner play, a natural leeway, reasonably limited by the organizing exterior centers. The centers’ flexibility and re-organizing will are maintained by a strong desire to persist.
Bricolages are the results of such adjusting work applied to structures with a center, when ruptures (a re-thinking of structures) occur. Derrida mentions Lévi-Strauss’s definition of the bricoleur in The Savage Mind as “someone who uses ‘the means at hand’, that is the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there” and in so doing one tries to adapt them “by trial and error”. “If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined,” writes Derrida, “it must be said that that every discourse is bricoleur” .
The structures I intend to discuss here are: Judaism (as a structure representing the cultural tradition/canon constituted by the Torah, and the Talmud where Yahweh is the playing center that is flexible enough to help at recreating, out of the elements of its previous components, a structure/discourse in a bricolage generated as Reform Judaism in Germany and the United States), Jewishness (the structure representing the secular ethnic bricolages created in the process of Jewish assimilation or dissimilation to/from a mainstream culture where secular, diaspora, post-biblical culture stands for the playing center) , and Americanness (the structure of the American national mainstream culture, whose playing center is its political core: the American Constitution, the ideological tenets of the New Republic).
“Exiles of the Ethnic Mind: Norman Manea’s The Hooligan’s Return”
by Mihai Mindra
University of Bucharest Review. A Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, Volume IX, No. 1/2007.
There are three major cultural uses of the hooligan concept that concern the discussion of Norman Manea’s last... more
There are three major cultural uses of the hooligan concept that concern the discussion of Norman Manea’s last memoir-novel, referred to in the title of the present paper. Mircea Eliade used the term in reference to the amoral young generation that contributed to the Iron Guard activities in his novel The Hooligans (1935). Mihail Sebastian employed it in his composite pamphlet How I Became a Hooligan (1935), which answered Nae Ionescu’s anti-Semitic Preface to his novel For Two Thousand Years (1934). The self-ironic hooligan self-denomination referred to his scandalizing both the Romanian anti-Semites and the Romanian Jews in his honest, direct novel. Finally, Norman Manea took the term over, ironically too, but also as a post-modernist inter-textual reference to Sebastian’s case, in The Hooligan’s Return (2003), wherein the hooligan stands for the Jewish anti-Communist artist’s condition opposing the Romanian anti-Semitic Communist and post-Communist mainstream.
The social outsider and rebel status suggested by this Jewish-Romanian hoodlum condition dramatizes Manea’s triple minority group exilic allegiance: ethnically as a Jewish Transnistrian Holocaust victim of the Romanian nationalist Antonescu regime (1934 – 1945), politically as an anti-Communist inmate of the Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s (1952 – 1965) and Nicolae Ceausescu’s gulag (1967 – 1986), and artistically as an immigrant writer in danger of losing his native linguistic foothold in the multicultural United States of America (1987-to date). Back in Romania, for a brief reluctant visit (1997), he will have the opportunity to doubly confirm the foreigner condition of his now dual cultural hyphenation as a Romanian-Jewish-American artist
“La Roumanie et les Juifs. Pessimisme ou lucidité?”
by Mihai Mindra
Cité, 29/2007, Presses Universitaire de France, 2007.
L’ensemble socio-politique roumain actuel ne pourrait être séparé de son aspect ethnique. On ne saurait... more
L’ensemble socio-politique roumain actuel ne pourrait être séparé de son aspect ethnique. On ne saurait raisonnablement exiger qu’il existe un courant libéral ou conservateur authentique dans un pays qui a vécu, jusqu’il y a peu, sous la coupe d’une tyrannie sans véritable couleur politique, nommée communisme. Le sens civique n’a pas trouvé, lui non plus, un terrain propice là où le Parti s’occupait de tout. L’« Autre » n’avait pas sa place dans une doctrine qui ne connaissait pas d’ethnies, bien qu’en apparence, avoir des positions politiques et des attitudes sociales et ethniques faisait partie du discours officiel.
Cependant, je ne crois pas que ce fût le communisme qui a inauguré notre duplicité dans la relation avec nous-mêmes, avec l’Étranger, avec l’Autre. Il s’agit plutôt d’une relation bien rodée entre le moi tribal de nos ancêtres, qui a traversé l’histoire identique à lui-même, et les exigences de l’Occident d’après la Renaissance et les Lumières. Le nationalisme et l’antisémitisme roumains s’inscrivent dans le même schéma. La même relation s’est installée entre les pulsions ancestrales que l’on a convenablement éduquées (pour ou contre, plutôt contre, à ce que je sache, dans l’esprit de l’intolérance orthodoxe) avant l’instauration de la République populaire, et la nécessité d’exister en Europe.
Early American Mikvaot: Ritual Baths as the Hope of Israel.
Published in Religion in the Age of Enlightenment
Rather than seeing Jewish ritual baths (mikvaot) a timeless and “pre-modern” institution that were used to regulate... more
Rather than seeing Jewish ritual baths (mikvaot) a timeless and “pre-modern” institution that were used to regulate female bodies in a punitive fashion, I argue that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, ritual baths were part of a larger Enlightenment-inflected religious discourse of redemption and medicinal “water cures” that postulated a more positive view of women than was found in non-Jewish communities in the colonies. For my analysis I draw upon recent excavations of ritual baths in Amsterdam, Recife, Barbados, Curaçao and St. Eustatius as well as still-standing colonial mikvaot in Suriname. I place a structural reading of these baths within the vision of redemption proposed by Amsterdam Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel, and the idealized discourse about purity laws and ritual baths in the popular eighteenth-century Sephardic biblical commentary, Me’am Loez.