The unique aspects of Babylonian rabbinic approaches to niddah, or menstrual impurity, have long been recognized, as have broader conceptual convergences regarding purity among Sasanian Jews, Zoroastrians, and others. Yet until now there have been few studies of these linkages. Shai Secunda's long-awaited monograph, developed from his 2007 doctoral dissertation, fills a significant lacuna with newly published transcriptions and keen analyses of sources related to niddah in the Babylonian Talmud. It represents an important contribution to newly robust research into the Bavli's Sasanian context, advancing scholarly conversations regarding methodological possibilities and the scope of such inquiries. Secunda situates his study around the concept of a “semiotically productive ‘red fence’ generating meaningful distinctions among the genders and neighboring communities in Sasanian society, and between the Babylonian Talmud and the rest of rabbinic literature” (xi). He thereby introduces us to the core proposition guiding the book: that menstruation was a potent topic for the construction and maintenance of religious boundaries precisely because it was grounded in shared landscapes of meaning.
In chapter 1, Secunda expands on his thesis that the Bavli's menstrual discourse constituted “a robust and active notion of difference” in terms of purity, gender, and Jewish identity (2). He surveys scholarship on niddah and purity discourse—from Leviticus to late antique rabbinic sources in Greco-Roman Palestine and Sasanian Babylonia—and engages with the work of Mira Balberg, Beth Berkowitz, Yaakov Elman, Charlotte Fonrobert, Christine Hayes, and others. Through a close reading of the tale of Rav Kahana and the heretic (B. Sanhedrin 37a), examining its development from Palestinian midrashim and its contextual significance within the Sasanian Mesopotamian world, he identifies a “textual differentiation” between “Palestinian sources submerged in the Bavli and their fully edited Talmudic form” (7–8), setting the stage for the rigorous source-critical analyses that follow.
In chapter 2, Secunda compares rabbinic discussions of menstruation to Greco-Roman and Iranian sources, respectively, focusing especially on their physiological, etiological, and demonological dimensions. He surveys rabbinic and Zoroastrian sources alongside Greek embryological traditions, noting the complex, long-standing relationships between them, arguing that “the shift from an Aristotelian downplaying of menses in Palestinian rabbinic embryology to the Bavli and Zoroastrian literature's neo-Galenic embrace of the powers of vaginal blood demonstrates that in Sasanian Iran, menstrual fluid was appreciated as powerful, generative stuff” (49).
In chapter 3, he broadens his purview to the local Sasanian context in which the Bavli arose. While Secunda and others have fruitfully explored this ground before—the past several decades being especially rich in such studies—his work here represents a significant theoretical and methodological advance by illuminating how Sasanian interreligious life was informed by distinctions operating within shared conceptual frameworks. Highlighting, for example, Babylonian rabbinic mobilizations of the Iranian term for menstruation—daštān—at B. Taʿanit 22a, B. Shabbat 110a, and B. Avodah Zarah 24b, he observes that “the very stuff which is supposed to distance the ‘other’ is a commonality” (81).
Secunda returns in chapter 4 to the Bavli's distinctive approach to menstruation within rabbinic corpora. He identifies discussions that suggest the Babylonian rabbis’ familiarity with Zoroastrian conceptions of purity, and he argues that their construction of “blood science in the Bavli” (96–98) as “impossibly involved” (103) reflects a world of competition and anxiety over menstrual diagnoses and stringencies. He traces textual shifts from “intra-religious competition” in the Yerushalmi and other Palestinian sources to “inter-religious competition in Sasanian Babylonia,” for instance, in the tale of Rava and the Sasanian queen-mother Ifra Hormiz, who sends him “bloodstains of no halakhic consequence” to examine (B. Niddah 20b), and in the “disquiet” engendered by his passing the final challenge through heavenly intervention alone (84–85, 98–103).
Chapter 5 combines the approaches of the previous two chapters, utilizing the topic of menstrual distancing and segregation as a focal point for exploring how the Bavli reconfigures Palestinian rabbinic traditions. Citing examples from Pahlavi (Zoroastrian Middle Persian) literature along with brief but illuminating references in Mandaean sources, Secunda notes that these Babylonian reconfigurations unfolded within an environment where such stringencies were common. Through a source-critical reading of a complex passage at B. Shabbat 13a–b, he argues that ambivalent Babylonian rabbinic approaches to the topic—unprecedented from the standpoint of “the previously established tannaitic purity system” (112)—bespeaks a “tectonic friction” along gendered and social axes (126) that is evidenced, too, in extrarabbinic, geonic, and early Islamic sources.
In chapter 6, Secunda engages directly with recent studies of rabbinic literature from a feminist standpoint, mobilizing his contextual analyses of niddah to help explain the “marked tendency in the Bavli to retreat from fully intruding on expressions of female autonomy and initiative” (135). He proposes that attributions of menstrual stringency to benot Yisraʾel (the daughters of Israel) and reliance on a wife to count clean days following cessation le-ʿaẓmah (for herself) were reflections of “popular piety” and “one-upmanship … between Jewish and Zoroastrian women” (162). Toward the end of this chapter and in the conclusion, Secunda returns to the critical insight that the biological, ritual, and social importance of menstrual blood in the Bavli and other Sasanian traditions was what made it such a powerful, generative site of religious differentiation.
Throughout his study, Secunda moves the conversation beyond straightforward questions of influence and textual parallelism, rendering the complex intersection of identity and practice in rabbinic Babylonia with appropriate nuance and circumspection. At key points he widens the scope to explore examples of menstrual polemics among Sasanian Jews, Zoroastrians, Christians, Mandaeans, and Manichaeans—as well as the producers and clients of cosmologically syncretic incantation bowls (49)—but his study would be enhanced by more developed analyses of such interreligious adaptation and triangulation. That he consistently acknowledges scholarly uncertainty, and the distance between traditions produced and transmitted by rabbinic male elites and everyday realities in late antique Mesopotamia, is all to his credit. With his thorough contextual analyses of Babylonian rabbinic sources on niddah, Secunda has paved the way for further interdisciplinary research, and he has rendered a great service to scholars of Jewish history and law, rabbinics, Sasanian studies, and late antique purity, gender, and religious identity alike.
