Ketuvot 23b ~ The Cohen Gene

HEllo, I'm Your New Cohen

משנה כתובות דף כג עמוד ב 

וכן שני אנשים, זה אומר כהן אני וזה אומר כהן אני - אינן נאמנין, ובזמן שהן מעידין זה את זה - הרי אלו נאמנין; רבי יהודה אומר: אין מעלין לכהונה על פי עד אחד

Likewise in the case of two men; one says, "I am a Cohen", and the other says "I am a Cohen", they are not believed. If however they testify about one another they are believed. R. Yehuda said: we do not elevate [a person] to the status of Cohen based on the testimony of only one witness....

Being a Cohen comes with rights and duties. They get called to the Torah first, and are given preference to lead Birkat Hamazon.  During Temple times, they got lots and lots of food.  But how do you prove you are a Cohen, and entitled to these privileges?  According to the Mishnah in today's Daf Yomi, (and discussed in detail in the talmudic discussion that follows,) you need witnesses to attest to your status. But what if the Cohen was mistaken about his ancestors? What if the witnesses were being paid to dupe the locals into believing the Cohen was legitimate? Is there an alternative to the methods mentioned in this Mishnah? Perhaps.

The Saturday Night Live Cohen 

My friend Misha Galperin, (the former CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington and  CEO of International Development at The Jewish Agency) is a Cohen. Only he didn't know it when he arrived in America from the Soviet Union.  Here's what happened, as told to me in a recent email  that he kindly allowed me to share:

Five months after arriving in the US, I am sitting in the lounge of Yeshiva University's dorm watching SNL with my tutor who was teaching me Alef Bet is so I can start classes on Monday.
A skit starts with guest host Leonard Nimoy dressed as Mr. Spock - with ears - and at the end he raises his right palm in the symbolic gesture and says: "Live long and prosper!"
I turn to the tutor and ask him what this gesture means. Why?--he asks. "Because my father taught me this, and his father taught it to him before being murdered by Nazis in 1941. My father did not know what it meant, but he taught me..."

And so Misha learned that he was a Cohen from Saturday Night Live. But not all Cohanim are so lucky. (Fun fact: Leonard Nimoy ז’ל wrote about his decision to give Mr. Spock this priestly hand salute in his 1997 autobiography I Am Not Spock.)  With neither witnesses nor TV to help, is there another way to establish one's genealogy as a member of the priestly class? That's where the Cohen Gene comes in.  

The Cohen Gene

If all Cohanim are descended from Aaron, and the privilege is only transmitted from father to son, then perhaps being a Cohen can be genetically linked to a chromosome that is only passed from father to son. And there is such a chromosome. It's the Y chromosome, and all (fertile) men carry a copy that comes only from their biological father. (Quick recap: girls are XX and boys are XY. So all girls carry one X chromosome from mum and one X chromosome from dad. Boys, on the other hand, only get their X chromosome from mum, and their Y chromosome from dad. This can lead to other problems like hemophilia, which we've talked about elsewhere.) That's exactly what prompted  Karl Skorecki from the Technion, and colleagues from University College London, to analyze the Y chromosome in Cohanim and compare it to the rest of the Jewish population.  In 1997 they published a paper in Nature that looked at a special bit of the Y chromosome called YAP. Actually, they looked at 6 kinds of the YAP haplotype, (a haplotype being what geneticists call bunches of DNA sequences), and compared their frequency in Cohanim and non-Cohanim.    

Skorecki K, et al. Y Chromosomes of Jewish Priests. Nature 1997. 385:32.

As you can see highlighted, the YAP+ haplotype was found in only 1.5% of those who self-identified as Cohanim, but in over 18% of non-Cohanim.  The different frequency was found in both Ashkenazi and Sephardi Cohanim,  a result that the authors claimed was "consistent with an origin for the Jewish priesthood antedating the division of world Jewry into Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities."

“These Y-chromosome haplotype differences confirm a distinct paternal geneology for Jewish priests.”

— Skorecki et al. Nature 1997. 385: 32.

David Goldstein, who now directs a genetics lab at Columbia University, also published a study on the Y-chromosome of Cohanim, using a sample that included the DNA swabbed "from the mouths of sunbathers on the beaches of Tel Aviv." Here is what Goldstein concluded:

Despite the high levels of variation, we could see a clear difference between Cohen and Israelite chromosomes. The most common chromosomes observed in the Israelites (that is, non-Cohen and non-Levite Jews) were found in only 12% of the Israelite individuals sampled. By contrast, more that half of the Cohen Y chromosomes were identical at the sites considered - that is, the majority of the self-identified Cohanim had the same type of Y chromosome. Even more remarkable, this same type of Y was found at high frequencies in both Ashkenazi (45%) and Sephardi (56%) Cohanim. (Goldstein, p.31)

Goldstein named this chromosome type the Cohen Modal Haplotype, and claimed that it showed "definitively" that Cohen status was not adopted (i.e. made up by some, eager for the benefits) but inherited.  And now things started to get really interesting. 

Dating the Original Aaron

So all, (OK, not all, but certainly most) of the approximately 500,000 Cohanim alive today seem to have originated from a common ancestor - a primordial Cohen. And just when did he live? Well, by analyzing small differences in the Cohen Modal Haplotype, and assuming that a generation time is 25 years, Goldstein et al. stated (with a confidence interval of 95%) that the origin of the priestly Y chromosome was "sometime during or shortly before the Temple period in Jewish history."

Not So Fast...

OK, a couple of things need to be noted here, before anyone claims that "genetics proves the Bible." First- as Goldstein himself notes in his book, his numbers may be off, by quite a bit:

Permit me here, after what was for me the first - and still one of the few - real thrills of discovery that punctuate the tedium and detail of science, the necessary reality check. Our results appeared to be a striking confirmation of the oral tradition. It even led to repeated claims in the press that my colleagues and I "found Aaron's Y chromosome." But although three thousand years is our best guess [as to when Primordial Cohen may have lived] the range of possible dates was and is very broad. Given our uncertainty about the ways mutations happen and how fast, we may be off by several hundred years or more in either direction. (Goldstein p.38).

Second, some later work done by Skorecki (he of the Technion 1997 Nature paper) suggests that the class of Cohanim may have had more than one common ancestor.  This work posits that there was not one primordial Cohen, but a few clans of Cohanim, from whom all later Cohanim are descended. (Or more technically stated:"...lineages characterized by the 6 Y-STRs used to define the original Cohen Modal Haplotype are associated with two divergent sub-clades...and thus cannot be assumed to represent a single recently expanding paternal lineage.")

And finally, work from Brigham Young University (and boy, those guys are really into ancestry) reminds anyone looking to do a quick Cohen DNA test to be careful.

The Cohen Modal Haplotype is observed in high frequency within the Cohanim, but also presents with significant incidence in other non-Jewish populations. The occurrence of the CMH in deeply divergent SNP haplogroups also indicates a lack of specificity of the CMH to the ancient Hebrew population. As such, inference of relation to Jewish populations for individuals or groups should be performed with caution when using the original CMH definition, as a false-positive result is likely.

 "A false positive is likely" - in other words, the test may show you are a Cohen, but really...you aren't. 

Genetic Testing - It's Not Just for Cohanim

And now that a Cohen "Gene" may have been identified, what about the rest of us non-Cohanim? Some have used genetic testing to discover a forgotten heritage or find long-lost cousins.  One rather keen family member of Polonsky rabbinic lineage (claiming in passing to be descended from King David, the Kalonymos family, and Rashi) used the presence of a "relatively rare R-M124 haplotype" on the Y chromosome to confirm a common ancestor and find a new marker that represents "Polonsky rabbinic lineage." (I confess I am jealous. My grandfather drove a black London taxi, and last time I checked, Rashi was not one of my known ancestors.) 

It's Not About Your Ancestors, It's About You

רמב"ם הלכות שמיטה ויובל פרק יג הלכות יב –יג 

ולמה לא זכה לוי בנחלת ארץ ישראל ובביזתה עם אחיו? מפני שהובדל לעבוד את יי לשרתו ולהורות דרכיו הישרים ומשפטיו הצדיקים לרבים שנאמר יורו משפטיך ליעקב ותורתך לישראל, לפיכך הובדלו מדרכי העולם לא עורכין מלחמה כשאר ישראל ולא נוחלין ולא זוכין לעצמן בכח גופן, אלא הם חיל השם שנאמר ברך יי חילו, והוא ברוך הוא זוכה להם, שנאמר: אני חלקך ונחלתך

ולא שבט לוי בלבד אלא כל איש ואיש מכל באי העולם אשר נדבה רוחו אותו והבינו מדע להבדל לעמוד לפני יי לשרתו ולעובדו לדעה את יי והלך ישר כמו שעשהו האלהים ופרק מעל צוארו עול החשבונות הרבים אשר בקשו בני האדם הרי זה נתקדש קדש קדשים. ויהיה יי חלקו ונחלתו לעולם ולעולמי עולמים ויזכה לו בעה"ז דבר המספיק לו כמו שזכה לכהנים ללוים, הרי דוד עליו השלום אומר: יי מנת חלקי וכוסי אתה תומיך גורלי

Why did the Levi'im not receive a portion in the inheritance in Israel and in the spoils of war like their brethren? Because they were set aside to serve God, to minister to Him and to instruct the masses about His just paths and righteous judgments... Therefore they were set apart from the mundane matters of the world. They do not wage war like the remainder of the Jewish people, nor do they receive an inheritance, nor do they acquire for themselves through their physical power. Instead, they are God's legion...and He provides for them...

Not only the tribe of Levi, but any human whose spirit moves him and who understands with his wisdom to set himself aside and stand before God - to serve Him and minister to Him and to know Him, proceeding justly as God made him, removing from his neck the yoke of the many mundane things which people seek - that person is sanctified like the Holy of Holies [in the Temple]. God will be his portion and heritage forever and will provide what is sufficient for him in this world, just as He provides for the Cohanim and the Levi'im...

Maimonides, in his Mishnah Torah,  reminds us about what is really important. It's not bringing a witness into town and telling everyone who your ancestors are. And it's not getting a DNA test to prove your stock. It's about searching for religious meaning in a world of materialism.  And that search is open to anyone, woman or man, Jew or not, Cohen, Levi, or even a plain old Yisrael.  

Ketuvot 15a ~ Talmudic Probability Theory

תלמוד בבלי כתובות דף טו עמוד א 

  א"ר זירא: כל קבוע כמחצה על מחצה דמי ..מנא ליה לר' זירא הא? ...מתשע חנויות, כולן מוכרות בשר שחוטה ואחת בשר נבלה, ולקח מאחת מהן ואינו יודע מאיזה מהן לקח - ספיקו אסור, ובנמצא - הלך אחר הרוב, 

R. Zera said: Any doubt about something that is fixed in its place is considered be a fify-fifty chance... Where does he learn this from ? [From a Baraisa which teaches the following. Consider a town in which] there are nine shops, all of which sell kosher meat, and one store that sells meat that is not kosher. If a person bought meat from one of these [ten] stores but he cannot recall from which, his doubt means that the meat is forbidden. But if he found a piece of meat [in the street and he cannot tell from which store it came] he may follow the majority [and assume the meat is kosher]...

As Dov Gabbay and Moshe Koppel noted in their 2011 paper, there is something odd about talmudic probability. If we find some meat in an area where there are p kosher stores and q non-kosher stores, then all other things being equal, the meat is kosher if and only if p > q.This is clear from the parallel text in Hullin (11a) where the underlying principle is described as זיל בתר רובא – follow the majority. Or as Gabbay and Koppel explain it:

“Given a set of objects the majority of which have the property P and the rest of which have the property not-P, we may, under certain circumstances, regard the set itself and/or any object in the set as having property P.
”

— Gabbay and Koppel 2010

In other words, what happens is that if there are more kosher stores than there are treif, the meat is considered to have become kosher. It's not that the meat is most likely to be kosher and may therefore be eaten.  Rather it takes on the property of being kosher. 

We encountered another example of talmudic probability theory only a week ago, on Ketuvot 9a. There, a newly-wed husband claims that his wife was not a virgin on her wedding night. The Talmud argues that his claim needs to be set into a context of probabilities:

1. She was raped before her betrothal.

2. She was raped after her betrothal.

3. She had intercourse of her own free will before her betrothal.

4. She had intercourse of her own free will after her betrothal.

Since it is only the last of these that renders her forbidden to her husband (stay focussed and don't raise the question of a husband who is a Cohen), the husband's claim is not supported, based on the probabilities. Here is how Gabbay and Koppel explain the case - using formal logic:

Oh, and the reference to Bertrand's paradox? That is the paradox in which some questions about probability - even ones that seem to be entirely mathematical, have more than one correct solution; it all depends on how you think about the answer. One if its formulations goes like this: Given a circle, find the probability that a chord chosen at random will be longer than the side of an inscribed equilateral triangle. Turns out there are three correct solutions. Gabbay and Koppel claim that just like that paradox, the solution to many talmudic questions of probability will have more than one correct answer, depending on how you think about that answer.

Rabbi Nahum Eliezer Rabinovitch (1928-2020) was the Rosh Yeshiva of the hesder Yeshivah Birkat Moshe in Ma'ale Adumim.  (He also had a PhD in the Philosophy of Science from the University of Toronto, published in 1973 as Probability and Statistical Inference in Ancient and Medieval Jewish Literature.)  Rabbi Rabinovitch seemed to have been the first to point out the relationship between Bertrand's paradox and talmudic probability theory in his 1970 Biometrika paper Combinations and Probability in Rabbinic Literature. There, the Rosh Yeshiva wrote that "the rabbis had some awareness of the different conceptions of probability as a measure of relative frequencies or a state of general ignorance."

James Franklin, in his book on the history of probability theory, notes that codes like the Talmud (and the Roman Digest that was developed under Justinian around 533) "provide examples of how to evaluate evidence in cases of doubt and conflict.  By and large, they do so reasonably. But they are almost entirely devoid of discussion on the principles on which they are operating." But it is unfair to expect the Talmud to have developed a notion of probability theory as we have it today. That wasn't its interest or focus. Others have picked up this task, and have explained the statistics that is the foundation of  talmudic probability. For this, we have many to thank, including the late Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Rabinovitch.

“(The [Roman] Digest and) the Talmud are huge storehouses of concepts, and to be required to have an even sketchy idea of them is a powerful stimulus to learning abstractions.”

— James Franklin. The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal, 349.

Ketuvot 11a ~ Conversion

תלמוד בבלי כתובות דף יא עמוד א

אמר רב הונא גר קטן מטבילין אותו על דעת בית דין. מאי קמ"ל? דזכות הוא לו

Rav Huna said: "A young child [whose father had died and] who is converting may be immersed in the mikveh by order of the Bet Din." Why did he teach this? Because [becoming Jewish] is a benefit...

Joining...and Leaving

How many Jews-by-choice do you know? (Perhaps you are one, or you are dating or married to one.) How many converts to Judaism do you know socially? How many do you pray with during the week and on Shabbat? I’ll bet the number is somewhere in the region of “quite a few, actually.” I know that’s the number I came up with - and that’s not counting all those Jews who I may know but of whose origins I am simply unaware. We are fortunate to live in an era when nearly all of us are blessed to have converts as part of our communities.

It wasn’t always like this. In fact a hundred years ago or so, the question would be different: How many Jewish converts to Christianity do you know? If you lived in Europe in the nineteenth century, or in America in the early twentieth, chances are you’d know – or be related – to several Jews who converted out. 

According to data compiled by Christian missionaries, about 200,000 Jews converted to Christianity during the nineteenth century (but beware, they probably had reason to inflate these numbers). Some 15,000 Polish Jews converted, the majority to Catholicism (here, p 245). Hayyim Zelig Slonimski (d.1904) is a personal hero of mine. He founded the Hebrew-language journal of science, Hazefirah (The Herald), in Warsaw in 1862. His life exemplified how a traditionally observant Jew could combine his interest in scientific matters with his faith. But his son Leonid wasn’t convinced, and converted. Slonimski was by no means the only prominent educator or rabbinic leader whose children left Judaism for Christianity.

“Especially well known in Jewish circles in the modern era are the tragedies that affected such prominent figures as Mendele Mokher Sforim (Yaakov Shalom Abramowitz) whose beloved son converted to Christianity; Shimon Dubnow, Ahad ha-Am and Mordeckai Ben-Hillel HaKohen, whose daughters married into Russian Orthodox families; and Rabbi Eliyahu Klatskin of Lublin, whose son Yaakov, a renowned philosopher and ardent Zionist, abandoned Judaism and married the daughter of a Protestant minister,” (ibid., 31–32.)

Oh, and don’t forget Moshe, son of the founder of the Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty, Rabbi Shneyur Zalman of Lyady. He converted to Christianity in 1820.

The Pew Study

In 2013 the Pew Research Center delivered its Portrait of Jewish Americans. It found that 2% of its 3,475 respondents had undergone some "formal conversion", (though be careful of drawing any big conclusions from this – the margin of error is +/- 3%. I could find no data on this in the 2020 survey). We are proud of that. But it also reported that 22% were Jews of no religion.  That’s a sizeable net loss. In the 2022 survey, that number has increased to 27%.

In today’s daf, we are reminded how to view our heritage – a heritage we may carry either by a deliberate choice or by an accident of birth. Rav Huna tells us that being Jewish is a זכות– a benefit, a privilege, and an honor. If only more of us felt that way.

Ketuvot 10b ~ More than You Ever Wanted to Know about the Barrel Test

On tomorrow’s page of Talmud, we will read the following:

כתובות י, ב

הַהוּא דַּאֲתָא לְקַמֵּיהּ דְּרַבָּן גַּמְלִיאֵל בַּר רַבִּי אֲמַר לֵיהּ רַבִּי בָּעַלְתִּי וְלֹא מָצָאתִי דָּם אֲמַרָה לֵיהּ רַבִּי עֲדַיִין בְּתוּלָה אֲנִי

אָמַר לָהֶן הָבִיאוּ לִי שְׁתֵּי שְׁפָחוֹת אַחַת בְּתוּלָה וְאַחַת בְּעוּלָה הֵבִיאוּ לוֹ וְהוֹשִׁיבָן עַל פִּי חָבִית שֶׁל יַיִן בְּעוּלָה רֵיחָהּ נוֹדֵף בְּתוּלָה אֵין רֵיחָהּ נוֹדֵף אַף זוֹ הוֹשִׁיבָה וְלֹא הָיָה רֵיחָהּ נוֹדֵף אָמַר לוֹ לֵךְ זְכֵה בְּמִקָּחֶךָ

The Gemara relates: A certain man who came before Rabban Gamliel bar Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi said to him: My teacher, I engaged in intercourse and did not find blood. The bride said to him: My teacher, I am still a virgin.

Rabban Gamliel said to them: Bring me two maidservants, one a virgin and one a non-virgin, to conduct a trial. They brought him the two maidservants, and he seated them on the opening of a barrel of wine. From the non-virgin, he discovered that the scent of the wine in the barrel diffuses from her mouth; from the virgin he discovered that the scent does not diffuse from her mouth. Then, he also seated that bride on the barrel, and the scent of the wine did not diffuse from her mouth. Rabban Gamliel said to the groom: Go take possession of your acquisition, as she is a virgin.

And so there was a happy ending to the story, and thus began the couple on a journey of happiness and mutual trust.

Another case of the Barrel TesT

In the last, bloody chapter of the Book of Judges, the civil war against the tribe of Benjamin reaches its climax. For reasons that we don’t have time to get into, four hundred virgins were captured from the town of Yavesh Gilad, and offered as a peace offering to the men of Benjamin.

21:12 שופטים

וַֽיִּמְצְא֞וּ מִיּוֹשְׁבֵ֣י ׀ יָבֵ֣ישׁ גִּלְעָ֗ד אַרְבַּ֤ע מֵאוֹת֙ נַעֲרָ֣ה בְתוּלָ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֧ר לֹא־יָדְעָ֛ה אִ֖ישׁ לְמִשְׁכַּ֣ב זָכָ֑ר וַיָּבִ֨אוּ אוֹתָ֤ם אֶל־הַֽמַּחֲנֶה֙ שִׁלֹ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֖ר בְּאֶ֥רֶץ כְּנָֽעַן׃

They found among the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead 400 maidens who had not known a man carnally; and they brought them to the camp at Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan

How, wondered the rabbis on that page of Talmud, did the soldiers know who was, and who was not, a virgin? Easy, said Rav Kahana, who lived in Babylon around the year 250 CE. All you need is a barrel of wine and a good sense of smell.

יבמות ס, ב

מְנָא יָדְעִי? אָמַר רַב כָּהֲנָא: הוֹשִׁיבוּם עַל פִּי חָבִית שֶׁל יַיִן, בְּעוּלָה — רֵיחָהּ נוֹדֵף, בְּתוּלָה — אֵין רֵיחָהּ נוֹדֵף

How did they know that they were virgins? Rav Kahana said: They sat them on the opening of a barrel of wine. If she was a non-virgin, her breath would smell like wine; if she was a virgin, her breath did not smell like wine.

(Rav Kahana, by the way, demonstrated an unusual enthusiasm when it came to the study of sexuality. It was he who hid under the bed of his teacher Rav, while the latter was having intercourse with his (Rav’s) wife. When Rav discovered this intrusion and asked for an explanation, Rav Kahana famously replied “תּוֹרָה הִיא, וְלִלְמוֹד אֲנִי צָרִיךְ” - “this too is Torah, so I need to learn all about it.” Rav’s outrage is not recorded.)

Maybe it’s all a metaphor

Perhaps this passage of Talmud should be understood as a metaphor. Here, for example is the commentary of Rabbi Shmuel Eidels, better known as the Maharsha (1555 – 1631):

מהרש"א חידושי אגדות מסכת יבמות דף ס עמוד ב

הכתוב שהוא מורה על הזנות ועבירה דבתולות כמ"ש זנות ויין וגו' ותירוש ינובב בתולות וק"ל

The verse teaches a relationship between immorality and virginity, as it is written “harlotry and wine [and new wine take away from the heart]" (Hos. 4:11) and "new wine will cause maids to speak" (Zec. 9:16), which is easy to understand.

Except that the passage in Ketuvot is clearly describing something that Rabban Gamliel actually did, and Rav Kahana in Yevamot was not suggesting a metaphor. So today on Talmudology, we ask what you were all thinking. “Is there anything to the suggestion that this test really works?”

©ufabizphoto - Can Stock Photo Inc.

Bertrand RusselL’s Teapot

The great British philosopher Bertrand Russell (d.1970,) was also a great British atheist, who tired of some of the claims made in support of a belief in God. In 1952 he wrote the following:

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

Whether or not one believes that Russel’s teapot is a reasonable analog to theistic belief, it is a reminder that when making an empirically unfalsifiable claim, the burden of proof does not lie on others to disprove it. We have no reason to believe the claim unless it has been proven by those who asserted its truth. It is worth remembering Russel’s teapot when considering some claims made in the Talmud; those which are not plausible must be considered to be just that, regardless of whether the claim has been empirically disproven.

Rather unexpectedly, one noted scholar seems to have taken up Russel’s Teapot challenge, and set out to explain that the Barrel Test as described by Rabban Gamliel, was a reliable test of a woman’s virginity.

Rabbi Mordechai Halperin AND The Barrel TesT

Rabbi Mordechai Halperin is an accomplished and highly respected physician in Jerusalem. Some of his books adorn the Talmudology library. He was the Chief Ethics officer at the Israeli Ministry of Health, and the editor of Assiah, the Journal of Jewish Ethics and Halacha. And Rabbi Halperin believes that the test has a basis in fact. Here are the steps in his argument, (and you can read the original here):

1) Some foods, like garlic, are broken down into substances that are absorbed into the bloodstream. These may later be expelled from the blood in the lungs, and may be smelled on the breath.

2) Many medicines and food substances can be directly absorbed from the mucosa. So, for example, some drugs are placed under the tongue, where they may directly enter the blood stream by crossing into the tiny blood vessels that line the mucosal surface. Alcohol can not only be absorbed into the blood by ingestion into the stomach. It may also cross directly, via a mucosal surface. The vagina is a mucosal surface,

3) The difference between a virgin and non-virgin is in the tone of the vaginal passage.

As a result, Rabbi Halperin claims that a non-virgin has a lower vaginal tone and that the vaginal mucosa will absorb more alcohol when placed over a wine barrel when compared with a woman who is a virgin. And so the blood alcohol concentration will be higher in the former than in the latter. This will be detectable by the smelling the breath of the woman. QED.

Before we go on, an apology

OK, before we go on any further, I want to apologize to the many woman (and men) who might feel outraged at this discussion. I know it reminds us of a time when, in Judaism (and in Christianity too) virginity was the most important of qualities that a bride could have. (For more on that, see yesterday’s post.) In many cultures it still is, and women who are suspected of not being virgins on the night of their wedding sometimes face violence and even murder. Here is Michael Rosenberg’s take, from his terrific (and expensive) book Signs of Virginity: Testing Virgins and Making Men in Late Antiquity (p.139):

We need not - and should not - ignore the grotesque and degrading image of setting a woman up on a barrel to test her virginity to see that Rabban Gamliel b. Rabbi’s action is meant to bear the trappings of an objective process….

Critical to understanding the story is reading it in the light of its parallel in Tractate Yevamot of the Bavli. There, the Babylonian sage Rav Kahana suggests the barrel method for determining virginity. The striking difference between the appearance of the barrel test in bYev60b and its appearance here is that the version in Yevamot lacks the use of two maidservants to test out the method. There, Rav Kahana simply explains what one should do. In our passage [in Ketuvot] , this plot device highlights the “objectivity” of what Rabban Gamliel b. Rabbi is doing; the editor(s) of the story depict Rabban Gamliel b. Rabbi’s experiment as rigorous and /or objective. In the language of the modern scientific method: he tests out a hypothesis using controlled variables, and when that hypothesis is confirmed, he then makes use of it to determine the answer to an unknown question.

So, we must continue, in the name of science. The problem with Rabbi Halperin’s suggestion is that while the individual steps might be correct, they do not in any way lead to his conclusion.

How Scientific was Rabban Gamliel’s Methodology?

Rosenberg points out some of the features that Rabban Gamliel’s test has in common with “the language of the modern scientific method.” But to be clear, there was nothing scientific about it, at least in so far as we use the word today. For this, Rabban Gamliel cannot be blamed. He lived about 1,300 years before the birth of modern science, and it is silly of us to think he should have been conducting his test along the same lines that we conduct scientific tests today. Still, it is worth thinking about his methods through the lens of modern science. We will quickly see that the test, at least as described in Ketuvot, was far from scientific.

1. Rabban Gamliel selected two women to take part in the calibration phase. They were “maidservants” a position that might mean anything from an employee to a slave. Were they coerced, or did they volunteer? If the former, the study was unethical.

2. What were their ages, had they borne the same number of children, and where in their menstrual cycles were they? The latter is especially important since it affects the lining of the vagina and uterus (more on this below).

3. Was the test blinded? Were the barrels identical? Was the same wine used in each? When calibrating his nose, how often did he smell? How long did each woman sit over the wine?

4. In the actual test, did the bride seat herself for the same length of time as the women in the calibration phase? Was the same barrel used? Was it the same wine? Was the woman in the same part of her menstrual cycle as the women in the calibration phase?

Unless we know the answers to these questions (and many more), Rabban Gamliel’s test, interesting as it is, remains a far cry from anything that would pass as modern science. While it was published in the Talmud, it would not make it into any peer reviewed journal today. (Well, OK, maybe this one.)

With the possible exception of Rabbi Shimon ben Chalafta, the rabbis of the Talmud weren’t scientists. They were rabbis.

How good is the nose at detecting blood alcohol Levels?

Most of us are able to smell alcohol on the breath of a person who has consumed it. (Yes, I know that actually, pure alcohol has very little or no odor [think of vodka] and that the smell is really from the tannins, hops and other substances that make up the wine or beer or whatever. But let’s keep going.) How sensitive are our noses? Not very, it turns out. In one study, twenty “experienced” police officers were asked to smell the breath of fourteen volunteers who had been drinking, and whose precise blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) were known. How did the officers do?

Well, it depends on the BAC. Consider a BAC of 0.08%, the legal limit for driving in many places. To get that, most people would need to have four or five drinks. At that high level, the odor was correctly identified 80% of the time. At levels less that that, the alcohol could not usually be detected.

Decisions for positive BACs by beverage type and BAC. From H. Moskowitz et al. Police officers’ detection of breath odors from alcohol ingestion. Accident Analysis and Prevention 1999. 31; 175–180.

It should be noted that wine was the hardest odor to detect, and that when BACs were lower than 0.04% fewer than one third of noses could smell alcohol.

It might be countered that Talmudic wines were far stronger than wine made today; in fact, Rabbi Yosef Chaim of Baghdad, better known as the Ben Ish Chai, makes just this claim in his commentary on Yevamot.

ומה שהיה מסתפק רבן גמליאל בתחלה בניסיון זה היינו משום דחשש אולי יין של דורות ראשונים בזמן שעשו לבנות יבש גלעד היה יותר חזק מן יינות שבימיו ולכך אותו יין בדק וזה אינו בודק על כן עשה ניסיון תחלה בשפחות

Rabban Gamliel was initially uncertain about the test because of the concern that the wine that was used earlier in history , when it was used to test the women of Yavesh Gilad, was stronger that the wines of his time. Perhaps, therefore, that earlier wine worked in this test, but the current wines were untested. That is why Rabban Gamliel started with the experiment with the maidservants…

These wines contained a greater alcohol content, and so would cause a greater spike in the blood alcohol level. This may have been so, but there is good evidence (like this) that water was added to wine because that was the way the Greeks drank it, not because it was otherwise too strong to imbibe.

The Vaginal Mucosa and drug absorption

I am not aware of any research describing how a woman’s blood alcohol content varies with time she spent over a barrel of wine. But there is a lot of work on the vagina and its role in drug absorption. One review of the topic from two pharmacologists at Texas Tech noted that the“successful delivery of drugs through the vagina remains a challenge, primarily due to the poor absorption across the vaginal epithelium.” If that is true for drugs directly introduced into the vagina, the vaginal absorption of alcohol over a barrel must be considerably worse, if it exits at all.

To counter this factor, there is the urban legend of women inserting vodka filled tampons into their vaginas to get drunk. Snopes, which concluded the rumor was false did add this, though:

If one were to ingest vodka vaginally (or anally, as the rumor is also expressed that way), the practice wouldn’t result in booze-free breath because alcohol is partially expelled from the body via the lungs. Once liquor is in the blood, at least some of it gets breathed out, which is how breathalyzers measure blood alcohol content.

They provided no reference for this claim, though I suppose they could have cited Yevamot 60b. Be that as it may, the amount of alcohol absorbed by the vaginal mucosa would be so negligible as to be unmeasurable, and certainly not detectable on the breath.

Ancient Greeks and the Barrel Test

In his Hebrew defense of the barrel test, Rabbi Dr. Halperin did not place the belief into a context. And context is always important when examining the Talmud, because it was, after all, a product of its time and place (even if that time spanned several hundred years, the the place spanned many hundreds of miles). It turns out that the belief in smells and fragrances easily passing in and out of a woman’s body was also one that was held by the Ancient Greeks. Writing at least six hundred years before Rabban Gamliel bar Rabbi (who was a first generation Amora, and lived around the third century C.E) or Rav Kahana, the Greek physician Hippocrates had this to say:

If a woman does not conceive, and wish to ascertain whether she can conceive, having wrapped her up in blankets, fumigate below, and if it appears that the scent passes through the body to the nostrils and mouth, know that of herself she is not unfruitful.

The uterus, it was once believed, had a sort of mind of its own, and was especially partial to strong smells. Here, for example, is Aretaeus of Cappadocia, who lived around the time of Galen in the second century CE, perhaps only two or three generations before Rabban Gamliel Bar Rabbi:

In the middle of the flanks of women lies the womb, a female viscus, closely resembling an animal; for it is moved of itself hither and thither in the flanks, also upwards in a direct line to below the cartilage of the thorax, and also obliquely to the right or to the left, either to the liver or the spleen, and it likewise is subject to prolapsus downwards, and in a word, it is altogether erratic. It delights also in fragrant smells, and advances towards them; and it has an aversion to fetid smells, and flees from them; and, on the whole, the womb is like an animal within an animal.

Still, even among the Greeks, the assumption that the uterus could absorb smells was not accepted by all. The second century physician Soranus thought the idea was mistaken, but his objections demonstrate that the idea was popular.

The fumigation of women to determine their fecundity was not only a Talmudic belief. It was apparently one that was part of the ancient world. So why would the rabbis not believe it? Has Rabbi Dr. Halperin succeeded in persuading you that Rabban Gamliel’s test could reliably work? Or have the objections we have raised left you skeptical? I will leave that for you to discuss around your shabbat table this evening.

Shabbat Shalom from Talmudology