Purity, body, and self in early rabbinic literature / Mira Balberg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Balberg, Mira, 1978-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Purity, Ritual--Judaism.

Purity, Ritual.

Rabbinical literature--History and criticism.

Rabbinical literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (277 p.)

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, California : University of California Press, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This book explores the ways in which the early rabbis reshaped biblical laws of ritual purity and impurity and argues that the rabbis' new purity discourse generated a unique notion of a bodily self. Focusing on the Mishnah, a Palestinian legal codex compiled around the turn of the third century CE, Mira Balberg shows how the rabbis constructed the processes of contracting, conveying, and managing ritual impurity as ways of negotiating the relations between one's self and one's body and, more broadly, the relations between one's self and one's human and nonhuman environments. With their heightened emphasis on subjectivity, consciousness, and self-reflection, the rabbis reinvented biblically inherited language and practices in a way that resonated with central cultural concerns and intellectual commitments of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean world. Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature adds a new dimension to the study of practices of self-making in antiquity by suggesting that not only philosophical exercises but also legal paradigms functioned as sites through which the self was shaped and improved.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. From Sources of Impurity to Circles of Impurity

2. Subjecting the Body

3. Objects That Matter

4. On Corpses and Persons

5. The Duality of Gentile Bodies

6. The Pure Self

Epilogue: Recomposing Purity and Meaning

Notes

Bibliography

Subject Index

Source Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780520958210

0520958217

OCLC:

869641251