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Christine Hayes. Gentile Impurities and Jewish Identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 309 pp.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2004

Joshua Kulp
Affiliation:
The Conservative Yeshiva, Jerusalem, Israel
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Extract

Jonathan Klawans recently argued that there are two distinct types of purity in the Bible: ritual and moral. In biblical texts, the impurity of Gentiles is not ritual, but moral (the exception being corpse impurity, to which Gentiles are susceptible). Moral impurity is not contagious and is not subject to rites of purification. In the first section of her recently published work on Gentile impurities, Christine Hayes further categorizes impurity by introducing two types of purity considered to be intrinsic to Gentiles by some second temple groups: genealogical and carnal.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Copyright
© 2003 by the Association for Jewish Studies

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