The Aroma of Righteousness: Scent and Seduction in Rabbinic Life and Literature by Deborah A. Green (review)

The current trend in historical scholarship to include the five senses as worthy research categories, ones that may shed light on the human experience of far away civilizations, has not passed over Judaic Studies. During the last century, interest has gradually shifted from political and military events on one hand, and textually based investigations on the other, to the social and cultural dimensions of people’s life; the lower strata as well as peripheral social groups, together with the full spectrum of human emotions, mundane daily activities, and the interactions of people with the physical landscape that engulfed them, all have proved worthy of inspection and capable of enriching our understanding of the ancient world. Then came the senses, first with a series of studies unpacking the processes involved in viewing, and more recently studies about smelling (one can only extrapolate that the future may bring about works on hearing and listening habits, and perhaps even touching and tasting).

Deborah Green strides into these still uncharted territories with elegance and confidence. Her book exhibits wide learning in rabbinics, especially midrash, and biblical studies, as well as sharp eye for those details minute yet significant, which creep up in our sources and tend to be overlooked by those who study them. She sets out to tell us the story of fragrance as it is depicted and perceived by the rabbis. The book consists of five chapters and a short concluding statement. In her first, introductory chapter, Green surveys the theoretical and methodological issues involved in her research. She correctly points out the contribution of psychology to this area of study since much of the impact of smell registers in the intangible realms of human experience, in the mind and in the imagination. Good and bad odors are very much a matter of psyche; consider, for example the horrible, disgusting stench encountered by visitors to the Jerusalem Temple precinct—the blood, the meat rotting in the Mediterranean heat with no refrigerators, the flies—a reality well portrayed by Green (69). But Jews inhaled such smells with the greatest joy, as it symbolized for them the open communication lines with their God, who accepted their animal offerings. They called the place the Mountain of God’s perfume (har ha-moriah).

Green’s assertion, on the other hand, that scholarly work on scent developed with the rise of women and feminism in the academy (13) seems puzzling (perhaps requiring psychology as well), especially in Judaic Studies where the early inquiries into the intricate world of perfumes and smelling date back to the first decade of the twentieth century, a time when, as far as our records show, there was not even one woman in this discipline in the academy. Samuel Krauss devoted an entire section in his magisterial book— Talmudische Archäologie—to kosmetik (vol. 1, 233–52), dissecting “feminist” topics such as ointments, perfumes, and the ideal of beauty (Schönheitsideal). Krauss’s book is not used even once in Green’s work (other than a general reference in ch. 1n36), one of very few glaring lacunas.

The next four chapters are divided thematically. Chapter 2 deals with the physical environment, discussing the entities that made perfumes available to people (merchants, markets), the various places that consumed them (such as bathhouses with their wide expenditure of oil, used as both soap and ointment), and some tools that were used in the consumption of these products. The next chapter studies scent in biblical language. It goes back in time to the biblical world, that is, the Iron Age, a chronological leap of some 750 years that may irritate some historically oriented readers, especially since the rich Jewish literature of the Second Temple is completely ignored (other than a short reference to the Book of Enoch on 119), but which Green justifies due to the ontological fusion of the rabbis with the imagery and terminology of the...