Jewish Quarterly Review

Neutralization is a productive way to think about how some early rabbis attempted to build and to bound Jewish identity. A neutralization strategy of the kind Moshe Halbertal has associated with Mishnah Avodah Zarah can be found in a passage from the Sifra (a third-century rabbinic legal compilation) that interprets Leviticus 18:3's injunction against following "their laws." The logic of neutralization for the Sifra is that legal significance is denied to popular, shared practice and restricted to the traditions passed on by a male elite. This reading of the Sifra draws from Daniel Boyarin's argument in Border Lines that early rabbis and Christians created new orthodoxies grounded in a notion of apostolic transmission. The Sifra passage creates a "perverse parallel" to rabbinic orthodoxy and, in so doing, tries to naturalize it. The Sifra's emphasis on gay marriage as the substance of gentile transmission points to the significance of gender and sexual identity for the creation of rabbinic orthodoxy. This neutralization strategy can be contrasted with the construction of Jewish/gentile difference found in a section of material from the Yishma'el school inserted into the Sifra, where rabbinic voices imply that it may be impossible to neutralize pagan practice. This inserted text represents an "anti-neutralization" strategy in which potency is recognized in a wide array of elite and popular habits. This analysis of the Sifra and its inserted materials contributes to an expanding conversation about early rabbis' strategies for negotiating Jewish identity within the Roman imperial context.