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Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law Wasserfall: Women and Water Page Iii Wasserfall: Women and Water page i Women and Water Wasserfall: Women and Water page ii BRANDEIS SERIES ON JEWISH WOMEN Shulamit Reinharz, General Editor Joyce Antler, Associate Editor Sylvia Barack Fishman, Associate Editor Susan Kahn, Associate Editor The Hadassah Research Institute on Jewish Women, established at Brandeis Uni- versity in 1997 by Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Inc., supports interdisciplinary basic and applied research as well as cultural projects re- lated to Jewish women around the world. Under the auspices of the Institute, the Brandeis series on Jewish Women publishes a wide range of books by and about Jewish women in diverse contexts and time periods. Marjorie Agosín, Uncertain Travelers: Conversations with Jewish Women Immigrants to America Rahel R. Wasserfall, ed., Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law Wasserfall: Women and Water page iii Women and WateR Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law Edited by Rahel R. Wasserfall Brandeis University Press Published by University Press of New England Hanover and London Wasserfall: Women and Water page iv Brandeis University Press Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755 © 1999 by Brandeis University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 54321 cip data appear at the end of the book Illustrations are from Rabbi David Miller, The Secret of the Jew: His Life— His Family, © 1930 by Rabbi David Miller and published by the author. This book was published with the help of the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, Inc. Wasserfall: Women and Water page v Contents Acknowledgments vii rahel wasserfall Introduction: Menstrual Blood into Jewish Blood 1 I. The Historical Context 21 tirzah· meacham (leBeit Yoreh) An Abbreviated History of the Development of the Jewish Menstrual Laws 23 leslie a. cook Body Language: Women’s Rituals of Purification in the Bible and Mishnah 40 charlotte elisheva fonrobert Yalta’s Ruse: Resistance against Rabbinic Menstrual Authority in Talmudic Literature 60 shaye j. d. cohen Purity, Piety, and Polemic: Medieval Rabbinic Denunciations of “Incorrect” Purification Practices 82 sharon koren Mystical Rationales for the Laws of Niddah 101 danielle storper perez and florence heymann Rabbis, Physicians, and the Woman’s/Female Body: The Appropriate Distance 122 Wasserfall: Women and Water page vi vi ❖ Contents II. The Ethnographic and Anthropological Tradition 143 susan starr sered with romi kaplan and samuel cooper Talking about Miqveh Parties, or Discourses of Gender, Hierarchy, and Social Control 145 lisa anteby “There’s Blood in the House”: Negotiating Female Rituals of Purity among Ethiopian Jews in Israel 166 rahel wasserfall Community, Fertility, and Sexuality: Identity Formation among Moroccan Jewish Immigrants 187 joëlle allouche-benayoun The Rites of Water for the Jewish Women of Algeria: Representations and Meanings 198 janet liebman jacobs The Return to the Sacred: Ritual Purification among Crypto-Jews in the Diaspora 217 naomi marmon Reflections on Contemporary Miqveh Practice 232 tirzah· meacham (leBeit Yoreh) Appendix A. The Elimination of Niddah in favor of Ziva 255 B. Retroactive and Internal Impurity and the Varieties of Blood 256 Glossary 263 Contributors 267 Index 269 Wasserfall: Women and Water page vii Acknowledgments To the colleagues who sent notes, references, and encouragements and those who read and commented, thanks. To Shula Reinharz, thanks for providing an intellectual “home” in the Scholar in Residence Program at Brandeis. To Harvey Goldberg, Art Green, S. J. D. Cohen, thank you for reading chapters or all of the collection. To Rabbi Alan Selis, thank you for your enthusiasm. To Jackie Wong, thank you for being the first to share in this project. To David Gordis, thank you for lending me the book that pro- vided the illustrations for this volume. To the contributors to this collec- tion, thank you for your willingness to correct again and again. It was worth it! My friends in my Rosh Hodesh group were the first test readers and gave more than their time. To Fran Schlitt, Roberta Apfel, Dorit Harverd, Evelyne Dreyfuss, Sherry Grossman, Roberta Isberg, Janna Kaplan, and Maxine Lyons, who read and took their role very seriously, again thank you for the spiritual path that we are building together. To my editor at the University Press of New England, Phyllis Deutsch, thanks for reading, commenting and finding the right voice for this collection. To Deborah Fogel, thanks for polishing the English. To Marc Fogel, thank you for the technical assistance. To my spouse, Adam Seligman, who read and commented, thank you. My daughters: Sarah Ana, my pride who taught me humility, thank you; Amiya, born with this project, thank you for coming into our lives with peace and sun. My mother, Hermine Wasserfall Berkovits Wieder, who died thirty years ago in her prime, taught me to love and appreciate life in the midst of personal and collective catastrophes. She introduced me as a child to the delicious atmosphere of the hammam in Paris. She made me appreciate and long for the atmosphere of casual friendship between women. She taught me the invaluable gift of being at ease with one’s body, the compassion and joy that come from being without judging oneself and others. A link between generations, let my soul become anchored in the waters of compassion. Rahel R. Wasserfall Wasserfall: Women and Water page viii blank Wasserfall: Women and Water page ix Women and Water Wasserfall: Women and Water page x blank Wasserfall: Women and Water page 1 Rahel Wasserfall Introduction Menstrual Blood into Jewish Blood Women and water . Jewish women and water . Jewish women and living water . Jewishness and purity . Such words bring to mind a world of associations and feelings: female rituals, impurity, oppression, spirituality, health, women’s culture. The contributors to this volume unfold these and many other associations with what have become known as the laws of family purity governing the niddah (menstruating or the menstruating woman) and miqveh (ritual dipping or cleansing). In these pages, scholars from different disciplines examine the ways the laws and rituals of female purification have been understood and enacted by Jewish communities in different times and places. They show us that women’s actions and feelings during niddah and miqveh are the result not only of revered traditions but of polemics and reinterpretations that have taken place through the centuries as Jewish women and men adapted their traditions and practices to different contexts. Niddah (laws of family purity) and miqveh have played such an important role in Jewish women’s lives over the centuries that they have, in many ways, defined Jewish wom- anhood in the eyes both of women themselves and of the community. They have been revered as part of a symbolic order but also manipulated and con- tested as part of the concrete order of power relations between husbands and wives, rabbis and women, and rabbis and physicians. To envision the importance of both niddah and miqveh in Jewish life, let us consider three stories, each taken from the recent past and each pointing Wasserfall: Women and Water page 2 2❖ Women and Water to the symbolic centrality of these issues as well as to the subtle (or not so subtle) contest for power between the people involved. The first story comes from my own anthropological fieldwork among Jewish Moroccan women living in an Israeli moshav in the 1980s. A young woman (35), born in Fez but educated from childhood in a large town in Is- rael, told me with some reticence of her problems with her mother-in-law, problems that influenced her decision to leave the common roof of the ex- tended family. Her action was both symbolic and powerful because her hus- band, being the firstborn, was set to become the master of the household. The point of contention in this dispute was the mother-in-law’s insistence that her daughter-in-law obey the laws of niddah and go to the miqveh. There are a number of ways of interpreting the argument between the women. Quite plausibly, they were in conflict over influence in the house, love of the son or husband, the division of common labor, modernism ver- sus traditionalism, and so forth. Yet it is interesting to note that the dispute crystallized around the issue of niddah. The laws of purity served as the in- stitutionalized and hence legitimate means of channeling the tensions between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law in this setting, a moshav set- tled by Moroccan Jews who immigrated to Israel in the 1950s. They were put forth as the reason and the cause behind her leaving the common household.1 The second story is from Tripolitania in the 1920s, where Mordechai Ha-Cohen was born. Because of conflict with the leaders of his commu- nity, he moved to Benghazi, where he served on the Beit din. Ha-Cohen took a scientific interest in the customs and mores of his community and wrote the Iggid Mordechai. This book was not published until 1978, when H. Goldberg edited it and published it in Hebrew as the Book of Mordechai. In the meantime, however, working with Martino Moreno, an Italian Orientalist in Benghazi, Ha-Cohen also contributed to a 1924 book in Ital- ian on various rituals and customs of the Jewish family.2 It included a chap- ter describing rituals related to childbirth and the laws of niddah, and this was the source of Ha-Cohen’s problems with the Jewish community lead- ers: they accused him of writing about “private” female matters and divulg- ing “secrets” to the Gentiles. As Goldberg writes (1993, 13, 43n. 40), the community of Benghazi was basically one of merchants, many of whom were acculturated to an Italian way of life and did not like the idea that “se- crets” of the Jewish community would be known to outsiders.
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