The second century CE has long been recognized as a time of intense preoccupation with medicine and health in the Graeco-Roman world.Footnote ¹ Medicine had always been a part of the Greek paideia,Footnote ² and acquaintance with it was traditionally required of every aristocrat,Footnote ³ but it was during the second Sophistic period that a new form of medical self-presentation emerged in which the knowledge of medicine was hailed not only as one of the apices of the intellectual habitus,Footnote ⁴ but also as indispensable to everyday life.Footnote ⁵ As Michel Foucault observed, the literature of this period placed an enormous emphasis on the body not just as a tool to be used but also as an end in itself, and the classic philosophical ideal of “caring for the Self” (epimeleia heautou) came to entail unrelenting attention to one's health and physical well-being.Footnote ⁶ In this setting, the doctor—the bearer of medical knowledge and the ultimate caretaker of the Self—was seen as offering more than physical relief: The doctor was both a healer and a mentor, and functioned as a watchperson and a guide to right living.Footnote ⁷ Indeed, it is in this period that we first come across the appellations iatrophilosophos (doctor-philosopher) and iatrosophistes (doctor-sophist).Footnote ⁸ Medical knowledge had thus become a most esteemed form of knowledge during the Antonine period of the Roman Empire, and doctors, as its guardians, interpreters, and practitioners, were invested with substantial power and authority.Footnote ⁹

Many scholars of rabbinic literature have shown that the rabbis were familiar with Graeco-Roman medical perceptions and concepts,Footnote ¹⁰ and have striven to reveal traces of Hellenistic medicine in rabbinic compilations.Footnote ¹¹ However, several recent works have been especially attentive to the complex ways in which the rabbis wove together their own cultural framework of knowledge—namely, the Hebrew Bible and its interpretive tradition—and the Graeco-Roman medical and pseudo-medical ideas and practices with which they were directly or indirectly familiar. Thus, Charlotte Fonrobert has demonstrated how the laws of menstrual purity in the book of Leviticus were interpreted and developed in light of contemporary medical literature to formulate a unique rabbinic system of gynecological knowledge.Footnote ¹² Similarly, Ishay Rosen-Zvi has examined the ways in which biblical laws regarding physical defects in humans and animals were intertwined with pertinent physiognomic concepts on the ideal body that were prevalent in the second Sophistic literature, thereby presenting a novel rabbinic discourse in which the body and the Temple are inextricably linked.Footnote ¹³ As these studies and others demonstrate,Footnote ¹⁴ the fact that the rabbis endorse many concepts and ideas that we know from Greek and Roman writers, in this case medical writers, is not very surprising or interesting in itself; what does call for exploration are the ways in which the rabbis shaped their own distinctly “rabbinic” institutions, such as the laws of purity or of the Temple, through these frameworks of knowledge, and the choices that they made in championing some ideas over others in particular junctures in time.

Following the same path, in this article I examine the rabbinic interpretation and construction of a biblical ritual institution, namely, the inspection of skin afflictions, in the context of Galenic medicine, and argue that the rabbinic discourse on skin afflictions and their examination is profoundly shaped by its contemporaneous medical discourse. However, rather than suggesting concrete parallels between rabbinic medical or pseudo-medical concepts and Graeco-Roman ones, I focus on the very rhetoric of medicine and its role in the construction of rabbinic authority. Specifically, my main interest is in the ethos of bodily hermeneutics, that is, in the notion that the body can be read “like a book,” and in the way this ethos manifests itself in the mishnaic text that is, ostensibly, a reading of a book—in this case, the book of Leviticus.

The text on which this study will focus is tractate Nega‘im of the Mishnah, which relies heavily, not to say exclusively, on the laws of afflictions in humans, garments, and houses that are elaborated in Chapters 13 and 14 of the book of Leviticus.Footnote ¹⁵ While the Mishnah's manifest objective is not a systematic exegesis of the biblical text, and there are not many biblical quotations per se in the tractate,Footnote ¹⁶ tractate Nega‘im closely follows the sequence of the biblical discussion and makes a distinct use of the Levitical terminology, apparently without using any materials except for the biblical text.Footnote ¹⁷ In a manner atypical of most mishnaic tractates, the biblical text constitutes the tractate's main organizing principle and serves as its unmistakable reference point.Footnote ¹⁸ In this respect, the mishnaic tractate is a hermeneutical enterprise, centered on the biblical text and committed to its interpretation.

At the same time, however, the biblical text, and thereby the mishnaic tractate that expounds it, is a treatise on the topic of semiological examination (i.e., searching for tokens of impurity in humans and objects). As such, the biblical text itself introduces a hermeneutical project—namely, the hermeneutics of bodies. Although the examination and inspection of skin afflictions is by no means a strictly medical practice, notably because it is not geared toward healing but rather toward determination of ritual status,Footnote ¹⁹ it easily lends itself to medical rhetoric and medical ethos. In the very setting of tractate Nega‘im, the rabbis, who proponed themselves as the ultimate interpreters of biblical texts,Footnote ²⁰ situate themselves also as the interpreters of bodies.

The interweaving of the hermeneutics of texts and the hermeneutics of bodies has been noted as one of the most prominent aspects of the work of Galen and other Graeco-Roman physicians of his persuasion. Galen presented himself not only as the quintessential key holder to the works of his medical predecessors (most notably of Hippocrates),Footnote ²¹ but also as a capable interpreter of the works of the great philosophers,Footnote ²² and argued that it was this literacy that allowed him access to the truths of the human body. At the same time, he took great pride in his ability to diagnose a patient with a glance, and emphasized his capability to “read” accurately the signs of the body so as to know the patient's exact malaise.Footnote ²³ According to Judith Perkins, it was exactly this hermeneutical ability—or, perhaps, this hermeneutical ethos—that won him more admiration and recognition than any doctor before him: In a period in which people felt that they were their bodies, the doctor who could read the body was seen as having a gateway to the most inner workings of the individual, and it was because of this conviction that individuals willingly surrendered their autonomy and accepted the physician's orders and authority.Footnote ²⁴ The prestige of the rabbis (at least in their own eyes), and the source of whatever authority they had, usually lay in their proclaimed capacity as interpreters of the biblical text. However, in tractate Nega‘im, because of the nature of the biblical material on which it relies, the rabbis' skills in interpreting texts allowed them to claim a skill in interpreting bodies, and thereby won them a quasi-medical prestige—the prestige of those who hold the key to the mysteries of the human body. It is this unique juncture of text, body, knowledge, and authority that I will explore in this article.

I begin by arguing that the rabbis construct the knowledge of skin afflictions as a form of medical expertise by creating a highly specialized language and taxonomy, and that their rhetorical efforts to establish their uncontested competence as experts in this field resonate with themes found in Galenic medical writings. In this way, the rabbis are solidifying their prerogative to inspect bodies physically, that is, to fantasize themselves into the quasi-medical setting of the physical examination, which is marked with the compliance and obedience of the ones being examined. I then show that the rabbis emphatically medicalized the inspection procedure for skin afflictions, not just because this practice, as they imagined it, epitomized authority and power, but especially because it served as a manifestation of their overall interpretive skills. I continue to show that the rabbis implicitly but systematically place themselves as the most competent examiners of the body, in a manner that relegates the biblically ordained function of the priests to that of a mere rubber stamp, but do so in a depersonalized way that renders their authority entirely objective. Finally, I show that the rabbis are defining the bodies of “Israel” as constituted by the law in such a way that only bodies that are subordinated to the Torah are considered to be meaningful and interpretable in terms of impurity. I argue that the self-proclaimed expertise of the rabbis in the interpretation of bodies is constructed in the tractate as a derivative of their claim for expertise in the law.

Them and Their Names: Visual Epistemology and Linguistic Expertise

At the core of the biblical concept of bodily impurity, delineated primarily in Leviticus 12–15, lies the assumption that the body must be interpreted in order to determine its status of purity or impurity, and thus that the discernment of ritual impurity is by and large an act of “reading” bodies. For most bodily impurities, the Priestly Code does not specify by what means and by whom they are diagnosed, and presumably one could discern one's own ritual status; however, a significant exception to this rule is found in the biblical law of skin afflictions.Footnote ²⁵ It is the only form of impurity that is explicitly and emphatically said to be diagnosed by a priest,Footnote ²⁶ and therefore the only case in which the biblical text stresses over and over again the importance of sight and visual inspection.Footnote ²⁷ For each and every case of skin abnormality, the priest is to inspect the afflicted area, often several times at fixed intervals, and based on its appearance (color, depth, size, etc.), he is to make the call regarding impurity. The biblical text thus shapes the ritual of the priestly inspection of skin afflictions as dependent on an elaborate body of knowledge based solely on sight; we may therefore describe the underlying principle of Leviticus 13 as visual epistemology.

Although the priestly inspection of skin afflictions is by no means medical as such, in that it is interested in ritual status rather than in prognosis and cure, there is close correspondence between the biblical emphasis on the priest's meticulous search for visible tokens of impurity and the Galenic ethos of medical practice as based on the reading of semeia (signs or indications) in patients.Footnote ²⁸ In his many case narratives, Galen stresses time and again how he reached an accurate diagnosis merely by observing his patients, and emphatically by observing the surface of their bodies: the color of their complexion, swellings, lacerations, wounds, abscesses, and so on.Footnote ²⁹ Through the expert's eyes, bodily signs are given meaning, and the body becomes a legible and decipherable text (not accidentally, the word semeia also means “letter-characters”).Footnote ³⁰ For the rabbis, perhaps not without relation to the medicine-invested climate of the first centuries CE, the discernment of all forms of bodily ritual impurity, not just of skin afflictions, was to a great extent conceived in terms of a visual epistemology.Footnote ³¹ For example, in various contexts the Mishnah prescribes elaborate methods for determining one's pure or impure status by scrutinizing the looks of one's secretions and effluvia in ways remarkably similar to that which we find in Greek and Roman medical writings.Footnote ³²

However, as in medical prognosis so in ritual impurity, visual impressions must be paired with knowledge and interpretive skills: Bodily semeia are meaningless unless perceived by a competent reader who knows what to look at and what to look for. Within this scheme, the question of who has that knowledge is inherently related to the question of who is qualified to do the looking: To be given the right of gaze, one has to prove oneself as a capable interpreter of visual data. As Fonrobert showed in her work on tractate Niddah, the creation of an elaborate body of (rabbinic) visual knowledge on the bodies of women, both in respect to the shape and color of bloodstains and in respect to physical examinations for menarche and for signs of puberty, nourishes the rabbis' claim for authority over women, and specifically their claim to examine and scrutinize women's bodies.Footnote ³³ Needless to say that the subjection of one's body to another person's gaze is a quintessential way of asserting the power of the one looking over the one being looked at; the one who looks directly at the body of another is always objectifying him or her, and thereby becomes, in a way, a sovereign over the other's body.Footnote ³⁴ Thus, the connection between sight and knowledge is bidirectional: One knows because one sees (this is the Galenic ethos), but one also gets to see in the first place because one knows.

The bidirectional link between seeing and knowing manifests itself through language. As Foucault has shown in detail, in the clinical framework sights become identical with words, as if visual impressions are inherently “speaking.”Footnote ³⁵ Language standardizes individual cases and turns specific symptoms into legible general signs, so that establishing a language that expresses visual impressions as accurately as possible is the prerequisite for the creation of a valid body of knowledge. This inextricable connection between sight, knowledge, and language stands at the center of the opening passages of tractate Nega‘im.

Tractate Nega‘im commences with a taxonomy of colors as the primary diagnostic tool for two types of potentially impure skin afflictions—discoloration (baheret) and swelling (se’et). While the distinction between a dark discoloration (baheret kehah) and a bright one (baheret ‘aza) is explicitly mentioned in the biblical text, the Mishnah suggests four variations on the color white, asserting that only skin abnormalities in which the color is within this range of whiteness would be rendered baheret or se‘et, and should then be further examined for tokens of impurity (simane tum’a), such as white hair or the spreading of the affliction. Any affliction darker than these four shades of white is considered a “bright spot” (bohak) and is automatically rendered pure. The discernment of skin afflictions thus rests on a hermeneutics of colors.

Colors, like most forms of sensual experience, are highly subjective and are almost impossible to describe verbally. The way in which the rabbis choose to tackle this issue is to use similes,Footnote ³⁶ thereby turning colors into language:

Whereas the biblical text mentions only two kinds of afflictions that have the potential of impurity—discoloration and swelling—the Mishnah establishes that each of these skin conditions also has a secondary appearance, that is, a more minor form; hence, the title “two which are four” states that there are two kinds of afflictions, but four possible appearances.Footnote ³⁸

There is, as Fonrobert pointed out, a noticeable similarity between this color taxonomy and the color taxonomy of uterine blood in M. Niddah 2:6–7, which is also introduced through a series of similes: “Five bloods are impure in a woman: red, black, like saffron, like muddy water, and like diluted wine . . . the red—like the blood of a wound, the black—like the sediment of ink. . . .” Fonrobert suggests that the taxonomy of skin afflictions is in fact the source for the construction of rabbinic knowledge on uterine blood in the form of color discernment: Because the rabbis are attempting to present themselves as experts in distinguishing the pure from the impure, they are following the most prominent biblical example of such an expert at work. Authoritative knowledge thus takes the form of color expertise.Footnote ³⁹

The notion that visual impressions are transformed into authoritative knowledge through the creation and application of accurate descriptive language is stated quite explicitly in the opening Tosefta passage of tractate Nega‘im:

Yehoshu‘a, R. Akiba's son, wonders what is gained by the taxonomic rhetoric of the Mishnah. If the point was merely to state that the darkest shade of white that would still constitute a potentially impure affliction is eggshell color, why bother to mention all the other possibilities? R. Akiba's reply is straightforward: This taxonomy is not meant to convey essential information, but rather to create a body of knowledge that would make possible a distinction between experts and nonexperts. In other words, taxonomy and nomenclature are a way of entrusting the inspection of skin afflictions only to the hands of those who have halakhic knowledge and mastery of halakhic language. We see here the notion that one is given the initial right to see if one has established oneself as knowing, and this self-establishment is achieved through language.

This candid comment on the importance of the structure and jargon of knowledge remarkably resonates with what Tamsyn Barton identifies as Galen's medical rhetoric, which was meant to persuade both his patients and his opponents of his competence as a physician.Footnote ⁴¹ Barton shows in detail how Galen labors to turn his medical discourse into a technē (skill or art), and to present it as an authoritative and exclusive body of knowledge: He does so by placing emphasis on accurate language and precision in names, and by developing an elaborate set of distinctions and taxonomies.Footnote ⁴² While nomenclatures and taxonomies are ostensibly designed to make the art of medicine accessible and teachable, argues Barton, they also serve to mystify it and thus to invest the physician with uncontestable authority. In particular, Barton emphasizes the rhetorical power of presenting multiple divisions and subdivisions of medical phenomena as an ultimate marker of knowledge, and, moreover, as what separates the expert from the nonexpert. Not unlike R. Akiba, Galen proclaims:

According to Galen, beginners are only capable of suggesting simple divisions, whereas more advanced students will be able to divide further and further. Galen himself, as Barton shows, at one point suggests no less than seventy-five divisions in a single category.Footnote ⁴⁴ Returning to the Mishnah, then, we should not be surprised that the rather simple fourfold division in the first passage is followed by more elaborate and complex divisional systems:

The Mishnah does not spell out the various subcategories into which the appearances of skin afflictions can be divided according to each of these sages. This could presumably be explained by the Mishnah's overall concise and thrifty style; but by mentioning that such complex taxonomies exist without actually presenting them, the Mishnah conveys the message that this body of knowledge is far more intricate than the student perceives, and accentuates the disparity between learner and master. Furthermore, it is perhaps not incidental that these opinions are all attributed to sages from the time of the Second Temple, whose aura of ancientness renders their teachings especially prestigious. Much like Galen, then, the rabbis are creating a discourse on the body that turns their knowledge—in this case, their proficiency in the biblical text—into a technē, a practical skill or a craft, thus providing them with the authority of medical experts and with the prerogative of the clinical, or quasi-clinical, gaze.

The rabbinic emphasis on proficiency in a highly specialized language and on mastery of an elaborate array of taxonomies and categories is, of course, hardly unique to tractate Nega‘im, and characterizes the entire enterprise of the Mishnah insofar as it is a book of law. Law, like medicine, was considered in the ancient world to be a highly regarded technē with its own jargon, taxonomies, and ethos of quest for truth, and the most appropriate way of understanding the Mishnah in its entirety is through the rabbis' self-proclaimed capacity as legal experts. However, tractate Nega‘im stands out in the Mishnah in that it is concerned with a legal setting that explicitly requires the interpretation of bodies, and thus transposes the rabbis from the realm of law to the realm of medicine. Here their legal knowledge is translated into the prerogative to inspect skin afflictions physically, to “play doctor,” as it were, and thereby this legal expertise takes the form and rhetoric of a distinctly medical expertise. In what follows, I will show that the rabbis radically medicalized the procedure of the inspection of skin afflictions, not only in quest of a medical-like prestige, but also because for them the inspection of bodies represented the ultimate hermeneutical authority.

Imagining Inspection and Control

On the face of it, the procedural inspection of skin afflictions as prescribed in Leviticus 13 is a means to an end: It is designed to generate a halakhic decision regarding the pure or impure status of the person in question, just as a medical examination is meant to enable a decision on a course of treatment. However, as I suggested above, the physical examination is exactly the juncture at which power and knowledge are mutually produced through the interpretive gaze of the examiner. The authority to look is granted to the examiner on account of his or her presumed interpretive skills and knowledge, but at the same time the very act of looking establishes the authoritative status of the examiner and marks the subjection of the one being examined. In this sense, the physical examination stands at the heart of the medical and quasi-medical imagination.

The physical inspection of skin afflictions as imagined by the rabbis of the Mishnah is the most conspicuous indication of the medical horizon with which the rabbis were operating in the making of tractate Nega‘im. In a passage that delineates the procedure of inspection, the rabbis noticeably refantasize the biblical inspection scene into a medical-like setting, and turn the examiner's look into a clinical gaze par excellence. The passage reads as follows:

Strictly speaking, this passage is concerned with skin afflictions located in concealed places—the armpits, under the breasts, and the genital area—and prescribes a list of postures in which these areas are revealed so as to be inspected. The very concern with these areas seems to contradict the rabbinic principle that bodily areas that are normally hidden (bet ha-starim) are impurity-proof,Footnote ⁴⁶ and moreover, the wording seems to contradict another passage in our tractate in which the armpits and the area under the breasts are explicitly mentioned as areas that cannot contract impurity (M. Nega‘im 6:8). This could be reconciled if we distinguish between parts of these areas that are sometimes seen (when performing certain labors, as mentioned in M. Nega‘im 2:4), and parts of these areas that are never seen (which would be those referred to in M. Nega‘im 6:8). Indeed, a parallel passage in the midrash Sifra denotes our Mishnah passage as exemplifying the notion that the entire body must be inspected except for “hidden places”: “In accord with the vision of the eyes of the priest (Leviticus 13:12)—except for hidden places. From here they said: The man is inspected as hoeing and as harvesting olives, as hoeing—for the hidden place [i.e., genitalia], and as harvesting olives—for the armpits.”Footnote ⁴⁷

One way of interpreting the curious inspection procedure described in M. Nega‘im 2:4 is to suggest that these various postures are required only if the inspected person is known to have a skin affliction in one of the bodily areas mentioned in this passage—namely, the armpits, the genitalia, and under the breasts. The purpose of posturing is to see whether the affliction in question is located in a bodily area that is revealed in certain positions (and thus requires further inspection) or in a completely hidden area (and can thus be dismissed as pure). This interpretation, however, is not commensurate with the general title given to this practice: “How is the inspection of the skin-affliction.” I am therefore inclined to think that what is being imagined in this passage is an overall physical examination, rather than a close inspection of a specific bodily area. Such examination is not even remotely implied in the biblical text, which seems to suggest that only the affliction itself is being inspected.

The Mishnah does not specify whether the examinee ought to be clothed or naked during the inspection. Since the concern here is clearly with bodily areas that are naturally revealed in the course of everyday practices in which one is normally clothed, it is plausible that the rabbis merely wish to see bodily parts that are exposed on a regular basis and do not require the removal of clothes. Nevertheless, it is quite difficult to assume that the rabbis consider normally covered areas to be impurity-proof so as not to warrant examination. If we assume that the question at hand is which parts of the body ought to be inspected and which are considered naturally hidden, as the parallel Sifra passage explicitly states, then it is quite conceivable that the entire body must be exposed in the course of the examination. This is the interpretation suggested by the Mishnah's commentator Nathan b. Yehiel of Rome (1035–1110): “When a priest sees the afflictions of a person, the man has to stand naked in front of him and raise his arms the way he does when hoeing . . . so that his armpits will be shown. Then he turns his back to the priest and bends over as he would bend when assembling olives . . . he then sees the parts of bet ha-starim that can be seen, and the rest is not necessary.” Similarly, Maimonides depicts this scene in his commentary on the Mishnah: “[He] strips naked and stands in front of the priest . . . and the woman strips naked and sits on the ground and stretches her limbs . . . any place that is visible of the man or of the woman when posturing like that may contract the impurity of skin afflictions.”Footnote ⁴⁸

It is important to note that this rather invasive examination procedure for skin afflictions, which seems to involve nakedness and inspection of private parts, is emphatically designated for men and women alike. This is not to say, of course, that gender is not a prominent factor in the shaping of the inspection scene: As Miriam Peskowitz has noted, the postures prescribed for men and women are defined in terms of distinctly gender-specific labors. The Mishnah does not simply describe the different positions in which semihidden parts in the male and female bodies are exposed, but also unequivocally identifies those bodies with their respective gendered roles and functions.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, the inspection process itself is not different in its essence or in its purposes for men and women, despite the fact that the female examination presumably defies the rabbis’ strict norms of modesty. This fact is of importance in view of the resemblance of the examination procedure described here to the examination of tokens of puberty (simane bagrut), which also involves nakedness and inspection of private parts, and itself resonates, as Fonrobert points out, with the Roman indagatio corporis.Footnote ⁵⁰ Fonrobert argues that the rabbis embrace the custom of physical inspection for maturity as a means of closely supervising women's sexuality, and of establishing their legal and interpretive authority over the bodies of women.Footnote ⁵¹ While I entirely agree with Fonrobert that the examination of tokens of impurity as it is imagined in rabbinic texts (particularly in the Babylonian Talmud) is invested with a desire to control women's bodies and with erotic undertones, I believe that M. Nega‘im 2:4 serves as an indication that the rabbinic quest for close supervision of bodies was not limited to female bodies. Clearly, the rabbis have devised a distinct set of practices and concepts in their legal and quasi-medical discourse on the female body as such; but their self-positioning as authoritative interpreters of exposed and docile bodies is also manifest in the context of skin afflictions, which are not gender-specific.

Like the examination of tokens of puberty, the inspection of skin afflictions as described in the Mishnah is a cultural fantasy on power and control over bodies—in this case, emphatically bodies of both genders. Imagining a scene in which a man or a woman removes his or her clothes in order to be inspected from head to toe by an authoritative figure is imagining the epitome of subjection.Footnote ⁵² There is a significant aspect of docility and self-subjection in the inspection scene even if we do maintain that one remains clothed during the inspection and merely displays his or her body in different postures at the request of the examiner.

However, the rabbinic medicalization of the inspection procedure should not be understood only in terms of a power fantasy, although this is certainly one of its aspects. Rather, it must be understood in the context of the rabbis' larger hermeneutical claim. The rabbis are, first and foremost, interpreters; their special skill, their technē if you will, is their ability to read texts and decipher the clues, the semeia, that are hidden in those texts. The physical examination of skin afflictions allows a direct transition from the realm of the text to the realm of the “real,” and, moreover, to the most critical and obsessed-with realm of the “real” at this period, that of the body. Through their knowledge of the text, the rabbis can, in the case of skin afflictions, become knowers of the body. This, I believe, is what is really at stake for them. It is not the mere official authority to inspect skin afflictions, which may as well have been entirely irrelevant at their time, in which the rabbis are interested; rather, it is the affirmation that through their hermeneutical skills they have access to all of knowledge, and that the rabbinic knowledge is congruent with the most prestigious components of the paideia of their time.

“All Are Fit to Inspect Skin Afflictions”

In reshaping the knowledge of skin afflictions as relying on linguistic and theoretical expertise, and in asserting that the authority to inspect skin afflictions depends on such knowledge, the rabbis implicitly replaced the ritual prerogative of the priests, as prescribed in the Levitical text, with their own prerogative as bearers of scriptural and halakhic knowledge.Footnote ⁵³ As Ishay Rosen-Zvi describes it, “On the one hand they [the rabbis] considered them [the priests] to be situated at the top of the religious hierarchy, but on the other hand they subordinated them to the ethos of Torah studies, whose only bearers are the Sages.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Indeed, as we shall see, while the rabbis do not explicitly exclude priests from their sacred role in regard to skin afflictions, they make them depend almost entirely on rabbinic knowledge.

In his analysis of a passage in the Damascus Document (CD 13:2–7), Steven Fraade convincingly shows that already in Second Temple literature the question of the authority to inspect skin afflictions was closely related to that of expertise and knowledge.Footnote ⁵⁵ The passage asserts that a nonpriest who has the required specialized knowledge of skin afflictions should be able to inspect them, an assertion that later appears in tractate Nega‘im and in the midrash Sifra to Leviticus.Footnote ⁵⁶ While I concur with Fraade that it is reasonable to consider the tannaitic texts as continuous with, though most likely not directly influenced by, the passage in the Damascus Document, I believe that Mishnah Nega‘im does more than merely declare that the rabbis are as entitled as the priests to inspect skin afflictions; it also establishes the reliable inspection process as essentially dependent on the rabbinic body of knowledge and thereby undermines the competence of priests to perform it.

Throughout the second chapter of tractate Nega‘im, the rabbis cast doubts on the value of visual impressions by themselves. These doubts are conveyed through a series of comments on the ways in which the sense of sight can be misleading, thus implying that what one sees attains validity only when coupled with theoretical knowledge. For example, according to M. Nega‘im 2:1, the aforementioned color taxonomy is not absolute, but is contingent on other factors, such as the individual's skin tone. If a person has extremely light or extremely dark skin, the observer is prone to make mistakes in the diagnosis, since the whiteness of the affliction, which is the key to the declaration of purity or impurity, can only be discerned in relation to a “standard” skin tone. I will return to this curious passage later, but for our purposes here suffice it to note that the Mishnah complicates its own system, making it clear that one may not take the taxonomy of skin afflictions at face value and simply apply it to real cases. Sight alone does not account for all cases, and some kind of halakhic resourcefulness is required to attain valid knowledge about visual impressions. Similar doubts regarding the validity of visual impressions alone recur in the following passages, which mention that the inspection must be performed only in appropriate lighting conditions (M. Nega‘im 2:2) and only by an able-sighted priest (M. Nega‘im 2:3).Footnote ⁵⁷ Since various natural conditions may jeopardize the “truth” of visual impressions, comprehensive halakhic knowledge is absolutely crucial for the inspection process itself. Thus, as Chaya Halberstam astutely observes, “uncertainty about impurity, which would seem to create fear or helplessness, instead creates a space for rabbinic legal creativity and authority.”Footnote ⁵⁸ By highlighting how insufficient mere visual impressions are, and how the determination of impurity of skin afflictions is studded with potential doubts and uncertainties, the rabbis posit themselves and their knowledge as indispensable to the inspection and diagnosis procedure. This is so not because they necessarily always have access to the “true” status of impurity (which they admit cannot always be known), but because they have the measures both to attain a valid decision when it is possible, and to handle cases in which such a decision is not possible.Footnote ⁵⁹

In light of this, it would be only natural for us to expect that the rabbis will claim the authority to inspect skin afflictions to themselves. However, when the Mishnah actually comes to define who is qualified to inspect skin afflictions, even though the monopoly of the priests is explicitly denied, it is also not suggested that the Sages are the only candidates for the task:

In this passage, rabbinic knowledge does not merely supplement the priestly role, but the authority is entirely redistributed: The priest is relegated to the function of a rubber stamp, in an almost blatant contrast to his biblical role. Similarly, in describing the inspection of houses afflicted with mildew (M. Nega‘im 12:5), it is noted that even if the owner of the house is a disciple of the Sages who knows exactly the nature of the house's condition, he still ought to convey the impression that the priest is the one making the decree: “Even if he is a disciple of the Sages and knows that it is a definite affliction, he should not decree and say ‘an affliction was seen in my house’ but rather ‘as an affliction was seen in my house.’”Footnote ⁶¹ This passage displays a clear tension between the Sages' acquired knowledge and the priests' official status, and implies that for the rabbis the priests' role is essentially an atrophied ritual.

However, while the term “all” (hakol) in the Mishnah serves to reject the notion that the practice in question is restricted to the priests,Footnote ⁶² as is the case in the majority of the occurrences of this expression in the Mishnah,Footnote ⁶³ the rabbis noticeably refrain from saying explicitly that it is the sage who may perform the inspection. The Mishnah does not contrast the priest with the expert, but rather with everyone: The word “all” seems to include all the people of Israel (although it is rather unlikely that women and minors were considered legitimate inspectors of skin afflictions). This rhetorical choice is of importance especially in light of the parallel passage in the Sifra, which specifies that it is the “sage in Israel” (hakham she-be-Israel) who may instruct the priest in the declaration of purity status:

In a remarkable interpretive move, the Sifra turns the biblical passage that highlights the indispensability of the priest in the inspection process to a proof text for his marginalization and relegation to the role of a marionette operated by the sage.Footnote ⁶⁵ This passage does not even suggest, as does the Damascus Document, that the sage should instruct the priest if the priest is not proficient himself,Footnote ⁶⁶ but rather asserts that it is the sage and only the sage who determines the status of impurity. Such assertion is noticeably missing from the Mishnah. Whether the Sifra here quotes an earlier version of the Mishnah or rather suggests a glossed version of it cannot be known;Footnote ⁶⁷ in the Mishnah as it stands before us, however, although it seems reasonable that the only ones who are considered adequate to perform the inspection are the Sages, the explicit statement is that “all,” without any qualification, may do so.Footnote ⁶⁸

I suggest that what we have here is not an affirmation of the laymen's prerogative to inspect skin afflictions, as Fraade argues,Footnote ⁶⁹ nor an effort to extend the sanctity of the priests to all of Israel, as Neusner argues.Footnote ⁷⁰ Rather, by depersonalizing the inspecting agent in such way, while at the same time emphatically stressing that rabbinic knowledge is indispensable for the inspection process, the rabbis present the power invested in the sage as the presumed inspector as objective and as received strictly because of skill and merit. Interestingly, a similar dual rhetoric can be identified in Galen's works: Galen often declares that “everyone” can master the art of medicine, and that the workings of the body can be understood by anyone of sufficient intelligence,Footnote ⁷¹ but at the same time he goes to great lengths to demonstrate how complicated and intricate this knowledge is.Footnote ⁷² Thereby he affirms his own status as the quintessential knower of the body, but detaches this status from his own person and thus presents it as an objective result of his skills. The rabbis can be seen as following the same pattern.

The power with which the rabbis are invested in the context of inspecting skin afflictions, and their implied unique adequacy as interpreters of bodies, derives not only from their halakhic resourcefulness and interpretive skills, but also from the nature of the bodies that they are empowered to interpret. As I will now argue, the body of the people of Israel is depicted in tractate Nega‘im as defined by the subordination of the people to the law. It is the Torah that gives the body meaning, making it decipherable in terms of purity and impurity; thereby, it is the rabbis, as the competent interpreters of the Torah, who are seen as qualified to interpret and decipher the Israelite body.

Israel's Two Bodies

Through its repetition of the word all (“all contract the impurity of skin afflictions . . . all are fit to inspect skin afflictions”), the mishnaic passage discussed above presents an analogy between two collectives: the one that must be inspected and the one that has the prerogative to inspect. Both these collectives can be entered under the title Israel, but whereas the latter collective is defined by whom it includes (i.e., nonpriests), the former collective is defined by whom it does not include: Gentiles and resident aliens, who are said not to contract the impurity of skin afflictions.Footnote ⁷³

In this ruling, tractate Nega‘im is in keeping with the overarching halakhic principle that excludes non-Jews from contracting all forms of ritual impurity, a principle that has been extensively discussed in several scholarly works.Footnote ⁷⁴ At first sight, the exclusion of Gentiles from the system of impurity seems counterintuitive: As observed by Mary Douglas in her seminal work Purity and Danger, the concepts of purity and impurity are often used to define and solidify group boundaries,Footnote ⁷⁵ but ordinarily the members of the group in question are rendered pure and all the “others” are rendered impure, whereas here the rabbis seem to maintain the exact opposite.Footnote ⁷⁶ In her recent work, Vered Noam suggests (in respect to corpse-impurity) that Gentiles may have been excluded from the impurity system—that is, they were rendered as unable to contract the impurity of corpses—since they were considered by the rabbis to be less than fully human. Presumably, in the same manner that articles whose making is not completed cannot contract impurity, the inability of Gentiles to contract impurity stems from their consideration as less than complete persons.Footnote ⁷⁷ I would suggest a more refined explanation, and argue that in the mishnaic system the bodies of Gentiles cannot be read as impure because they cannot be read at all. Rather than being seen as less than human, Gentiles are viewed as uninterpretable humans.

The body imagined in tractate Nega‘im is a body marked with ethnic identity.Footnote ⁷⁸ The only kind of body to which the rabbinic system pertains is one that is halakhically significant, that is, a body of an “Israelite.” This is powerfully demonstrated in M. Nega‘im 2:1, addressing the question of nonstandard skin tones, which I have briefly mentioned above:

Prima facie, the Mishnah mentions the disparate ethnic categories germani and kushi Footnote ⁸⁰ only to illustrate noticeably light or dark skin tones. Since these two peoples were identified throughout the Greek and Roman worlds by their “unusual” appearance,Footnote ⁸¹ it is not necessarily surprising that these geographic descents (as the appellations germani and kushi are derived from the names of the regions Germania and Kush) became synonymous with specific appearances.Footnote ⁸² However, the conflation of color and ethnicity is not without significance in this mishnaic passage. While the term kushi is also used in two other tannaitic contexts to denote a person of very dark skin color, the light-skinned counterpart of the kushi in those contexts is not the germani but the labkan, or “albino” (M. Bekhorot 7:6 and T. Berakhot 6:3); thus, in the context of Nega‘im the rabbis chose a distinctly ethnically signified term, even though they had an ethnically neutral term at their disposal. This fact is of particular importance in view of the rule that non-Jews are not susceptible to impurity, and therefore should not be inspected for skin afflictions at all: The terms germani and the kushi connote a markedly non-Jewish ethnicity in the context of a system in which non-Jews do not partake. The German and the Ethiopian are said to complicate the process of inspection of skin afflictions, to which they are presumably not subject in the first place. While this passage is easily interpreted as referring to converts or simply to Jews with unusual skin tones, R. Ishmael's comment emphasizes that there is an inextricable link between the distinctly non-Jewish origin of the German and the Ethiopian and the inability to examine their skin afflictions in a straightforward manner.

R. Ishmael praises the people of Israel for their “perfect” skin tone, which is not too black and not too white. While his words clearly resonate with the notion of “medium” skin tone as an aesthetic ideal in the Graeco-Roman world,Footnote ⁸³ they do more than assert that the people of Israel are aesthetically pleasing. In the context of the Mishnah's teaching that an extreme skin tone constitutes an aberration that does not allow for the simple application of biblical law, to praise the Israelites' “intermediate” skin tone is in fact to say that their body is the type of body intended in the Torah. The Jewish body thus becomes the body for which the law was given. Put differently, R. Ishmael suggests that only the Israelite body is hermeneutically significant: It is the only kind of body through which biblical law can be read, and the only kind of body that can be read through biblical law. The Israelites' merit is manifested in the readability of their skin afflictions, that is, in the ability to interpret their bodies in terms of purity and impurity.

The capacity to be read as impure is, therefore, a quality of Israelites alone, since only their bodies are intelligible within the biblical hermeneutic system. However, while R. Ishmael associates the readability of Jewish bodies with the physical characteristics of the Jews as an ethnic group, another key passage in tractate Nega‘im identifies the Jews' readability as based exclusively on their subordination to the Torah. To use Shaye Cohen's terms, while R. Ishmael's statement invokes the Israelite ethnos as the identifying marker of the body, the following passage identifies the body as invested with ethnoreligious identity.Footnote ⁸⁴ This passage suggests that it is the Torah that makes the body; once one becomes defined by the Torah, one's body becomes interpretable, or, more accurately, one acquires an interpretable body:

According to this passage, any discolorations that existed in one's body prior to one's taking on of Jewish identity are categorically pure even if they contain signs of impurity.Footnote ⁸⁵ The passage mentions three analogous transitions: receiving the Torah, converting, and being born. For all of these situations, there is a lack of continuity between the pre- and the post-transitional phases—any skin conditions that preceded the transition are regarded as nonexistent. As Moshe Lavee states, “the convert's body is a new body . . . the ongoing bodily phenomenon is disrupted by the conversion and is conceived as two separate bodily phenomena.”Footnote ⁸⁶ This passage thus suggests that while Gentiles have only one physical body, the people of Israel have two bodies, so to speak: one physical and concrete, and one ideal and “toraitic.” While it is the physical body that goes through different bodily states, it is the toraitic body that can be read in terms of purity or impurity.

Note that it is not the case that once a body that used to be outside the system enters it, this body is reinterpreted in the system's terms. Rather, when one enters the community one metaphorically receives a new body altogether. The temporal schism between “before” and “after” is translated into a schism between two sets of bodies. This could be clarified, I believe, by using Bryan Turner's distinction between “having a body” and “being a body.” The body that one has is fluid and subjected to constant changes; the body that one is is “a necessary requirement of social identification” and a crucial part of one's sense of self.Footnote ⁸⁷ In our case, converts or Israelites after receiving the Torah still have the same bodies as they did before, but legally and conceptually these are new bodies.Footnote ⁸⁸ By subjecting oneself to divine legislation, one's body becomes a “body of Israel,” that is, an interpretable body, and hence susceptible to impurity. Physical afflictions identical to what these persons had had before will now be interpreted as meaningful, but the actual afflictions they brought with them are dismissed as irrelevant—as belonging to a different body.

This principle, according to which any skin affliction that appeared before conversion is of no consequence, is unique to human beings; for inanimate objects, the case is different. While garments and houses that belong to Gentiles cannot contract impurity, if an Israelite buys a house or garment from a Gentile, the item has to be examined for afflictions, and will be rendered impure even if those afflictions appeared during the period of Gentile ownership (M. Nega‘im 11:1, 12:1). The uniqueness of the body's status in this system is further indication that the ability to contract impurity depends on being a “toraitic” body, a body defined by the law and a body that makes the law applicable.

This notion of the Jewish body as uniquely defined by the law to which it is subordinate allows the rabbis to conflate their own established expertise in the law (that is, in extrapolating and interpreting the Torah) with the prerogative to inspect, examine, and interpret bodies—that is, with medical-like practices. Purity and impurity are clearly legal phenomena, and it is the rabbis' legal specialty (which is tantamount to their proficiency in the biblical text) that qualifies them to make decisions in this field. However, rather than suggesting that the physical body has a legal aspect to it—that is, that purity and impurity are legal phenomena manifested in the body—the rabbis maintain that the Jewish body as a whole is a legal entity. That is to say, by suggesting that one conceptually acquires a new body when one becomes a Jew, a body entirely defined by Jewish law, the rabbis put forth that examining the bodies of Jews is by definition a juristic activity, and is thus to be entrusted into the hands of the legal specialists. There is no aspect of the Jewish body that is not legal, because this very body was created by the law. Thereby, the rabbis' legal specialty introduces them into the realm of medicine—the realm of examining and interpreting bodies—and wins them medical-like authority. The interpretive authority that they possess in regard to the biblical text makes them the ultimate decipherers of bodies, thus allowing them participation in the prestigious Graeco-Roman discourse in which the interpretation of the body is, ultimately, the interpretation of the self.