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Learning – at least the cognitive kind we do – is an abstract activity, and like most such activities, we often seek metaphors to describe it.  As a teacher, do I best see myself as a guide?  Mentor?  Coach?  Expert? Is a student a “consumer” of knowledge?  Disciple?  Apprentice?  Is learning itself a winding path? A process of self-discovery? A struggle?  No metaphor will fully capture all the dimensions of a particular learning situation, but I think that whether consciously or not we, as individual teachers and learners, have some operative metaphor at work.

The rabbis had several metaphors.  In The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture 100 C.E.-350 C.E.: Texts on Education and Their Late Antique Context, Marc Hirshman provides a fascinating exploration of some of them.  In the index, under the entry on “educational metaphor,” the sub-entries are: animal the crushes things underfoot; bird imagery; cistern; doe; dog lapping up the sea; ear; fig tree; hunting; pendant; receptacle; sieve; sponge; spring; student as garden; water imagery.  The metaphors are predominantly drawn from agriculture and the natural world.  It would seem that if one overarching metaphor is dominant, it is that the teacher imparts knowledge to the student as receptacle of some kind in this selection of texts.

Yet, as we know especially from work such as Jeffrey Rubenstein’s The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud, the study of Torah in Babylonian contexts is often seen as a war.  The struggle is between the sages themselves, who struggle with each other in a public venue.  The very goal of that struggle is contested: while purportedly truth, it also appears to be honor (which is exactly why there are so  many talmudic exhortations against the pursuit of honor in intellectual debate).  This martial imagery as applied to Torah study is not entirely absent in earlier and in Palestinian texts, but it does seem to dominate in the Babylonian Talmud.

How do we account for this shift?

At a conference this July at the University of Huddersfield entitled “Religious Men in the Middle Ages,” I will take up this question, and suggest that this shift is inextricably linked to issues of gender.  The Babylonian academy has itself co-opted the traditional virtues of masculinity, making the study hall a place to prove oneself a man in “combat.”

This weekend, Brown’s commencement coincides with Shavuot, the Jewish festival traditionally associated with the study of the Torah.  Whether we are receptacles, combatants, hunters, gatherers, seekers, or (God forbid!) consumers, we are all learners, and this is the weekend to take stock and reflect on the kind of learner that we want to be.

As we have now become increasingly aware, the “real cost” of meat in America is more than we actually pay.  The precise figures are difficult to come by and a bit squishy, but it seems relatively clear that rarely, if ever, has a human community been able to eat the quantity of flesh that we do at such a low market price.  If we had to pay the real price of meat, we are often told, most of us would simply eat less of it.

This, most scholars assert, is exactly what they did in antiquity, and even today is a feature of the “Mediterranean Diet.” Meat was available, but expensive, and was thus eaten only rarely, usually on special occasions.

So this obviously raises an empirical question: How much did meat actually cost in antiquity?  Are we talking about caviar-style expensive?

It is notoriously difficult to recover prices from antiquity.  The fact that much of the economy was not monetized compounds the problem.  Yet one source from antiquity might give us at least a little purchase on the relative value of meat.

In 301 CE the Roman emperor Diocletian issued an edict meant to set maximum prices on a large range of commodities. This edict was inscribed in Greek and Latin, many copies (or fragments) of which were found throughout the eastern part of the empire.

Relative prices in antiquity are frequently computed in “bread equivalents.”  That is, since bread was the primary dietary staple, if we can calculate prices relative to the amount of bread that creates some sense of values.  According to Diocletian’s Edict, the price of one “army modius” of wheat was 100 denarii.  One modius of wheat can produce twenty one-pound loaves of bread.  So each one-pound loaf of bread should cost around 5 denarii.

According to the Edict, 1 Italian pound of pork was 12 denarii; 1 Italian lb of beef, 8 denarii; and 2 chickens, 60 denarii.  An “Italian”, or Roman, pound was 345 grams (our pound is 454 grams).

So now let’s do the math.  One pound (our measure) of pork would cost 15 denarii (3 loaves of bread); one pound of beef, 11 denarii (a little over 2 loaves of bread); and if each chicken weighed 2 lbs (our chickens are significantly bigger), chicken would cost 7.5 denarii (1.5 pounds of bread) per pound.

Now we can compare.  My local, artisanal bakery charges around $3.00 and up for a 1 lb. loaf.  If I used this figure to compute contemporary prices for meat in Diocletian’s day, that would price pork at $15/lb; beef at $6.00/lb; and chicken at $4.50/lb.

And wages?  According to the Edict, unskilled laborers could expect about 25 denarii (5 loaves of bread) a day, and skilled labor twice that.  Each 1 lb loaf of bread has around 1000 calories, so we should assume about 2.5 loaves or “bread equivalents”/day for each person.  A single skilled laborer, then, might pay 25% of his income in food costs, just for himself.

So the upshot is that meat does not appear to have been “caviar-style” expensive.  In fact, the relative cost of meat then was only a little more than the price of ordinary kosher meat is today (pork excepted, of course).

This is only an exercise, and a very rough one at that, but the results are intriguing.  If in antiquity unsubsidized meat was really at these prices, then perhaps the gap is not as great as it is sometimes thought.

 

In his review in the Jewish Daily Forward of a new book on the “genetic history” of the Jews, Jon Entine writes, “‘Who is a Jew?’ has been a poignant question for Jews throughout our history.”  It is a question that has been very much in the news of late, not primarily for reasons of genetics but of conversion.  As has been extensively reported, there is a simmering debate, particularly in Israel, about whether Jewish conversions can be retroactively annulled. This issue has itself grown from an increasingly rigorous and hard-line position on the requirements for Orthodox conversion.

Yet while “Who is a Jew?” has been an important and controversial question throughout my lifetime, I suspect that it has actually not been very important throughout most of Jewish history.  For most Jewish communities, at most times and places, whether one was a Jew was rather obvious.  A rare exceptional incident might raise the issue (e..g, whether Jews in the Middle Ages who were forced to convert to Islam remained “good” Jews, as discussed by Maimonides), but for the most part the question of “Who is a Jew?” was far less poignant than we imagine.

I recently had occasion to revisit the classic rabbinic text on conversions, found in the Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 47a-b.  Classical rabbinic literature actually has surprisingly little to say about conversion to Judaism, articulating a procedure for it only here:

A.  Our rabbis taught:  One who comes to convert in this time, they say to him, “What do you see that you come to convert?  Don’t you know that Israel at this time is broken, oppressed, swept around, and torn, and afflictions come on them?”  If he says, “I know and I am not worthy,” they accept him immediately.

B.  And they inform him some of the light mitzvot and some of the more serious mitzvot.  They inform him of the sin [of neglect of] the laws of gleanings, forgotten sheaths, pe’ah [leaving the corners of the field for the poor], and the poor tithe.  They [then] inform him of the punishments of the mitzvot, saying to him, “Know that until you reach this state, if you ate the forbidden fat you would not have received the punishment of extirpation, and if you had violated the Sabbath you would not have received the punishment of stoning.  Now, if you eat the forbidden fat you are liable for extirpation, and if you violate the Sabbath you are liable for stoning.”  And thus they inform him of the rewards….and they don’t draw it out and are not exacting with him.

C.  If he accepts, they circumcise him immediately….

D.  When he is healed, they immerse him immediately and two sages stand by him and inform him of a few of the light mitzvot and few of the more serious mitzvot.  He immerses and emerges and behold, he is like an Israelite in every respect.

In his book, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties, Shaye J. D. Cohen has extensively analyzed this tradition (pp. 198-238).  He is undoubtedly correct that this was a rabbinic attempt to bring some order to what was otherwise a chaotic understanding of Jewish identity.  It is not at all clear that in their time they succeeded, although this tradition would later serve as the template for a relatively consistent procedure for conversion.

In revisiting both the tradition and Cohen’s essay, two things really stood out to me.  First, in light of the increasing requirements for conversion, is actually how little the Talmudic rabbis required.  Steps A-C would take no more than a couple of hours.  The educational requirement is extremely minimal (and continues for a few minutes in D), and no proof of commitment or Jewish living is necessary.  Talk about a quickie conversion!

The second aspect relates to my current research on the patterns of Jewish giving in antiquity and their relationship to piety: how did Jews (and not just rabbis) understand the gifts that they made to the synagogues, poor, and priests and Levites?  In this tradition, of all the mitzvot in which the rabbis could have instructed the potential convert, they chose the laws dealing with support of the poor.  This – not the ritual obligations or the educating of Jewish children in holy texts – was the essence.  Curiously, the Talmud itself understands this (presumably earlier) tradition as a way to deter non-Jews from converting (their money is too important to them), but that I think reflects the more general ambivalence toward converts found in the Babylonian Talmud.  For the framers of this ceremony, though, it is support of the poor that stands at the center of their understanding of what it is to be/come a Jew.

 

 

A couple of months ago I gave a presentation at a workshop that I organized, “Ancient Religion, Modern Technology,” in which I outlined a rationale and vision for a digital project that mapped and analyzed the social network of the rabbis.  I am linking here the presentation, for which I used a new (to me) presentation software, prezi.  For those who have or want to experiment with the network analysis program Gephi, I would be happy to send you the dataset  (must be downloaded and opened with Gephi, and can’t be posted here for technical reasons), Rabbi Abbahu’s social network.  Just contact me by email.

 

Recovering the actual religious practices of Jewish women in antiquity – or, really, of almost all non-elite/non-rabbinic Jews – is at best a tricky business.  Our main sources are rabbinic texts, which are so insular, academic, and either prescriptive or utopian that it is often hard to figure out what, if anything, they actually do reflect.  Yet every once in a while these texts serve up a nugget that brings the historian up short.

I recently stumbled upon such a passage in the Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah, 30a.  It occurs in the midst of a complicated discussion about the status of “uncovered” wine or water.  The rabbis believe that snakes will enter the vessels of certain uncovered liquids and inject its venom, thus poisoning it.  (Obviously, this belief merits a discussion in its own right, but not here.)  The relevant passage reads:

שמואל לא שתי מיא מבי ארמלתא אמר לית לה אימתא דגברא ולא מיכסיא מיא

Shmuel would not drink water from the house of a widow.  He reasoned that she no longer had fear of her husband and [therefore] did not cover the water.

Shmuel’s reasoning, which might well be added later by the redactor of the Babylonian Talmud (that is, it may not be Shmuel’s reasoning at all), is intriguing.  He seems to be saying that any normal Jewish woman would not cover the water unless her husband told her to.  Given the rabbinic understandings, this makes no sense.  If she feared poisoning, why wouldn’t she continue to cover it?  The obvious answer is that she is not really afraid of snake poisoning, but only goes along with her husband’s request to cover the water out of “fear,” which may simply refer here to the desire to keep a peaceful house.

It is worth considering the logic of this passage more generally.  Men, particularly rabbis, had certain ideas and religious practices that they asked their wives to observe.  As in any human relationship, these requests would have met with a variety of responses.  What is so interesting about this particular passage is that even the rabbis themselves recognized that many of their wives found this particular rule stupid, and were ready to jettison it as soon as they could.

Were there other such “stupid” rules?  The precise phrase “fear of the husband” appears nowhere else in classical rabbinic literature, but if anyone knows of other examples of the same phenomenon, please pass them along!