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4 “These Gentile Items Are Prohibited” The Foodstuffs of Foreigners in Early Rabbinic Literature Judean literature from the Hellenistic era reflects the existence of norms absent from earlier Biblical texts: Jews ought not share food with gentiles, and they ought not eat food prepared by such foreigners, especially if that preparation involved the worship of foreign deities. By marking the difference between Us and Them and, moreover, by hindering interaction between insiders and outsiders, these norms serve the social functionofpreventingundueassimilation.TheyalsoconstructasenseofJewishdistinctiveness and gentile otherness within a Hellenistic culture that treated identity as mutable and granted little credence to traditional claims regarding Israel’s holiness. The first centuries of the Common Era witness the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism within Hellenistic Judean society, a movement that derives its name from the honorific title “rabbi” (roughly: master teacher) held by its leaders. The rabbis whose opinions appear in the foundational sources of Rabbinic Judaism are known as the Sages, a term analogous to “Church Fathers.” The present chapter focuses primarily on the earliest of these foundational sources, which date from approximately the third century and are known as tannaitic literature because they preserve the words of Sages called tanna’im, “transmitters.” The Sages, who originally constituted an insular group of scholars with little popular support, regarded themselves as the authorized interpreters of God’s instruction (torah) to Israel as primarily—but not exclusively—contained in the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible.1 The Sages devoted considerable energy to elucidating the norms of proper Jewish behavior in legal terms so as to enable punctilious observance of the divine will. Their vision of the law, captured in the literature that came to be known as the “Oral Torah” (complementing the “Written Torah” of the Bible), ultimately achieved dominance in the Jewish world. The Sages did not regard Hellenistic-era literature as authori47 tative and may well have been unfamiliar with most of the works we examined in the previous chapter.2 Nevertheless, the Sages were members of Judean society. As such, they inherited, internalized, and interpreted the norms of their community’s literary elite governing the food of non-Jews, as well as the distinctively Judean style of thought regarding the proper relationship between Us and Them.3 The literature produced by these Sages displays most—arguably, all—of the characteristics which José Ignacio Cabezón associates with “scholasticism”: a strong sense of tradition, an interest in language, a tendency toward expansiveness in both breadth and depth of coverage, a conviction that the received canon overlooks nothing and contains nothing unessential, a belief that everything of importance can be known, a commitment to reasoned argument, a high degree of self-reflexivity, and a drive toward the systematic presentation of knowledge.4 The scholastic mode of thinking, and the last of its aforementioned characteristics in particular, is especially pronounced in the Mishnah (redacted ca. 200 c.e.), the foundation of all subsequent Rabbinic legal discourse. “The Mishnah constructs legal categories, which often appear to be theoretical and abstruse, and then discusses, usually in great detail , the precise definitions and limits of those categories. It creates lists of analogous legal phenomena, and then proceeds to define and analyze every item on the list. It posits legal principles, and devotes much attention to those objects, cases, or times, which seem to be subject to more than one principle at once, or perhaps to none of the principles at all.”5 The process of subjecting vague pre-Rabbinic foreign food restrictions to scholastic analysis that seeks to systematize precise knowledge has a significant impact on the nature and practical ramifications of these laws. This process also reveals the Rabbinic system of classifying humanity. In the Mishnah and, to a lesser extent, the near-contemporary tannaitic work known as the Tosefta,6 Rabbinic scholasticism effectively weakens the function of foreign food restrictions as a barrier to interaction with gentiles. Pursuit of order in the realm of ideas, we will see, comes at the expense of norms that seek to preserve order in the realm of social intercourse. Tannaitic Sages, moreover, express greater concern about the foodstuffs of foreigners than about foreigners themselves. By devoting only minimal attention to gentiles within their discussions of foreign food restrictions, the Mishnah and the Tosefta implicitly highlight the fundamental difference between Us and Them: gentiles do not merit scholastic reflection in their own right. The way the authors of these works think (or do not think) about gentiles reflects how...

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