Nedarim 66b ~ False Teeth, and False, False Teeth

From today’s page of Talmud:

נדרים סו, ב

תנא שן תותבת היתה לה ועשה לה רבי ישמעאל שן של זהב משלו. כי שכיב רבי ישמעאל פתח עליה ההוא ספדנא הכי בנות ישראל על ר' ישמעאל בכינה המלבישכן

A woman had a false tooth [that detracted from her beauty], and Rabbi Yishmael made a gold tooth for her.  When Rabbi Yishmael died, a eulogy was delivered that began: "Daughters of Israel, weep over Rabbi Yishmael, who clothed you...(Nedarim 66b)

A Roman False Tooth?

Several years ago there was a little academic skirmish over the question of Roman false teeth. A group of French anthropologists reported that they had found "a wrought iron dental implant of a second upper premolar from a Gallo-Roman necropolis at Chantambre (Essonne, France), from the first or second century AD."  That would date the implant to right around the time that Rabbi Yishmael lived.  

 Details of the false tooth. a, Antero-lateral view of the skull. The iron-made dental implant is where the right second upper premolar would have been. b, Retro-alveolar X-ray of the right maxilla. The implant was dropped after being handled and it broke near its apical third into two pieces that were then glued together again. The line of breakage is visible on this X-ray picture. The alveolar wall and the pseudo-root fit perfectly together. Only an area one to two millimetres high in contact with the mesial alveolar wall shows an absence of contact between the bone and the implant. From Crubezy et al.  False teeth of the Roman World.  Nature 1998; 391; 29.

The owner of the alleged false tooth seemed to have had it in place for at least a year before he died, (since it was somewhat well integrated into the surrounding bone known as the alveolar wall,) leading to the suggestion that "this implant might have been functional." The French anthropologists concluded that the false tooth "... in addition to its exceptional aspect and the technical craft it required, gives remarkable clues about medicine and anatomy in this rural community of the first or second century AD."

A Fake False Tooth?

Others were not convinced.  An American anthropologist, Marshall Becker, published a letter critical of the French conclusions.  The skill needed to produce a false tooth today is considerable, and it would be very unlikely "to be accepted by a human body under questionably sterile conditions." Instead, suggested Becker, the tooth was a natural one that had been stained "with oxides from proximity  with an iron-rich object."

“The ability of ancient “surgeons” throughout the world to cut pieces from human skulls and to have many of their patients survive is equally amazing. But whether they were interested in or capable of creating true dental implants in my view requires more evidence.”

— Marshall Joseph Becker. A Roman "implant" reconsidered. Nature 1998; 394; 534.

The French anthropologists fought back.  No metal objects had been found near the skull, and "metallurgical analysis unambiguously identifies it as metal and not as a biological tissue...Thus our anatomical, morphological, metallurgical and microscopic analyses of this specimen document, without question, the successful implantation of this dental prosthesis."  Becker was undeterred, and went on to publish a lengthy analysis of fifteen prostheses that had been found at various archeological sites.  "Poor scholarship", he wrote, " and the gullibility of authors over the decades has filled the literature with fanciful accounts." These included a "dental bridge" unearthed at Pompeii, dental "crowns" unearthed in tombs in Florence, a "false tooth" found in the head of an Egyptian mummy, and a "filled tooth" found in Lachish, Israel, that dates back to the Iron Age.  Marshall claimed that none were what they were claimed to be, and he noted that as recently as 1969 "the successful anchorage of dental implants in dogs was still in the experimental stages." None of the archeological findings "satisfy the primary requirements needed to conclude that they might be a true dental implant or even a variation on the known types of ancient dental prostheses."

Rabbi Yishamel's Other Prosthetics

We don't know whether the false tooth described in the daf today was a true dental implant, or some kind of wired tooth splinted to an adjoining one. But it seemed to have made all the difference to the woman for whom Rabbi Yishmael had it fashioned. In fact a parallel text found in the Jerusalem Talmud has Rabbi Yishmael going even further: According to that text  (ירושלמי נדרים פרק ט הלכה ח) Rabbi Yishmael made the blemished young woman a golden false tooth - and a golden false eye: "עשה לה עין של זהב שן של זהב". Our aesthetics have changed over the many centuries that separate us from Rabbi Yishmael. But his care of the maimed and the impoverished of his time is a record over which there is no talmudic dispute.  

Nedarim 65a ~ Bad Dog. Very Bad Dog.

נדרים סה, א

קונם לבית זה שאני נכנס שהכלב רע בתוכו או שהנחש בתוכו, אמרו לו מת הכלב או שנהרג הנחש הרי הן כנולד ואינו כנולד

If a person [takes a vow and] says : It is forbidden for me to enter this house because there is an evil dog inside, or a snake inside, and they said to him that the dog died, or that the snake was killed, these circumstances are like new developments [and so the vow is rendered void]. (Nedarim 65a)

JEWS AND DOGS

From this Mishnah in today's daf yomi, we learn a couple of things about dogs in the period of the Mishnah (that is, in Israel in the decades around 200CE). First, we learn that Jews, or those who interacted with Jews, kept them. And second, that some of them were very bad dogs.  So bad, that you'd literally swear not to visit a house that housed one of these mutts.   

Jews and dogs don't traditionally get along. In Bava Kamma 93a, Rabbi Eliezer does not mince his words: רבי אליעזר הגדול אומר: המגדל כלבים כמגדל חזירים .למאי נפקא מינה? למיקם עליה בארור

“Rabbi Eliezer the Great said: Someone who breeds dogs is like someone who breeds pigs. What is the practical outcome of this comparison? To teach that those who breed dogs are cursed...”

— BT Bava Kama 93a.

The American Veterinary Medical Association estimates that in the US there are about 43 million households that own almost 70 million dogs; that means over one-third of the households in the US own a dog.  (Fun Fact: Cats are owned by fewer households in the US, but are more often owned in twos or more. That means that there are more household cats - some 74 million - than there are dogs.) In the UK, a 2007 study estimated that 31% of all households owned a dog. In Israel, over 10% of all families own a dog. 

BAD DOGS

There are some really bad dogs. In a 10 year period from 2000-2009, one paper identified 256 dog-bite related fatalities in the US. Of course that's a tiny number compared to the overall number of dogs owned, but that's still 256 too many; the tragedy is compounded when you read that over half the victims were less than ten years old. 

Partaken, GJ. et al. Co-occurrence of potentially preventable factors in 256 dog bite–related fatalities in the United States (2000–2009). Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 2013. 243:12: 1726-1736.

“Az a yid hot a hunt, iz oder der hunt keyn hunt nit, oder der yid iz keyn yid nit

If a Jew has a dog, either the dog is no dog, or the Jew is no Jew”

— Sholem Aleichem. Rabtshik. Mayses far Yidishe Kinder. Ale Verk. Warsaw 1903

Fatalities from dog bites are rare. Dog bites are not. Over my career as an emergency physician I must have treated hundreds of patients with dog bites. And my experience is pretty typical. One recent study estimated that more than half the population in the US will be bitten by an animal at some time, and that dogs are responsible for 80-90% of these injuries. 

GOOD DOGS

Although Jews are thought not to have a historical affinity for dogs, one theologian has reassessed the evidence. In his 2008 paper Attitudes toward Dogs in Ancient Israel: A Reassessment, Geoffrey Miller  suggests that in fact dogs were not shunned in Israelite society. He notes that the remains of over a thousand dogs were discovered in a dog cemetery near Ashkelon dating from about the 5th century BC. It was described as "by far the largest animal cemetery known in the ancient world" by Lawrence Stager who also pointed out that during this period, Ashkelon was a Phoenician city - not a Jewish one. Miller surveys several mentions of dogs in the Bible and the Book of Tobit, and concludes that at least some Israelites "valued dogs and did not view them as vile, contemptible creatures." Joshua Schwartz from Bar-Ilan University surveyed Dogs in Jewish Society in the Second Temple Period and in the Time of the Mishnah and Talmud (a study that marked "...the culmination of several years of study of the subject of dogs...").  He found that while "most of the Jewish sources from the Second Temple period and the time of the Mishnah and Talmud continue to maintain the negative attitude toward dogs expressed in the Biblical tradition" there were some important exceptions. There were sheep dogs (Gen. Rabbah 73:11) and hunting dogs (Josephus, Antiquities 4.206) and guard dogs (Pesahim 113a), and yes, even pet dogs (Tobit, 6:2), though Schwartz concedes that "it is improbable that dogs in Jewish society were the objects of the same degree of affection as they received in the Graeco-Roman world or the Persian world."  

“A certain person invited a sage to his home, and [the householder] sat his dog next to him. [The sage] asked him, ‘How did I merit this insult?’ [The house-holder] responded, ‘My master, I am repaying him for his goodness. Kidnappers came to the town, one of them came and wanted to take my wife, and the dog ate his testicles.”

— PT Terumot 8:7

Very Good Dogs

Whatever your feeling about dogs, lets's be sure to remember that they serve alongside soldiers in the IDF, where they save lives. In 1969, Motta Gur (yes, the same Mordechai "Motta" Gur who commanded the unit that liberated the Temple Mount in the Six Day War, and who uttered those immortal words "The Temple Mount is in our hands!" הר הבית בידינו‎,) wrote what was to become a series of children's books called Azit, the Canine Paratrooper (later turned into a popular feature film with the same title. And was once available on Netflix. But IDF dogs don't just feature in fiction. They are a fact, and an amazing addition to the IDF, where they make up the Oketz unit.  Here's a news report (in Hebrew) about the amazing work these dogs - and their handlers - perform. These are very good dogs indeed.

[Mostly a repost from Ketuvot 41.]

From the Talmudology Archives: Was There a Chanukah Miracle?

שבת כא, ב

מַאי חֲנוּכָּה? דְּתָנוּ רַבָּנַן: בְּכ״ה בְּכִסְלֵיו יוֹמֵי דַחֲנוּכָּה תְּמָנְיָא אִינּוּן דְּלָא לְמִסְפַּד בְּהוֹן וּדְלָא לְהִתְעַנּוֹת בְּהוֹן. שֶׁכְּשֶׁנִּכְנְסוּ יְווֹנִים לַהֵיכָל טִמְּאוּ כל הַשְּׁמָנִים שֶׁבַּהֵיכָל. וּכְשֶׁגָּבְרָה מַלְכוּת בֵּית חַשְׁמוֹנַאי וְנִצְּחוּם, בָּדְקוּ וְלֹא מָצְאוּ אֶלָּא פַּךְ אֶחָד שֶׁל שֶׁמֶן שֶׁהָיָה מוּנָּח בְּחוֹתָמוֹ שֶׁל כֹּהֵן גָּדוֹל, וְלֹא הָיָה בּוֹ אֶלָּא לְהַדְלִיק יוֹם אֶחָד. נַעֲשָׂה בּוֹ נֵס וְהִדְלִיקוּ מִמֶּנּוּ שְׁמוֹנָה יָמִים. לְשָׁנָה אַחֶרֶת קְבָעוּם וַעֲשָׂאוּם יָמִים טוֹבִים בְּהַלֵּל וְהוֹדָאָה. 

What is Chanukah, and why are lights kindled on Chanukah? The Gemara answers: The Sages taught in Megillat Ta’anit: On the twenty-fifth of Kislev, the days of Chanukah are eight. One may not eulogize on them and one may not fast on them. What is the reason? When the Greeks entered the Sanctuary they defiled all the oils that were in the Sanctuary by touching them. And when the Hasmonean monarchy overcame them and emerged victorious over them, they searched and found only one cruse of oil that was placed with the seal of the High Priest,undisturbed by the Greeks. And there was sufficient oil there to light the candelabrum for only one day. A miracle occurred and they lit the candelabrum from it eight days. The next year the Sages instituted those days and made them holidays with recitation of hallel and special thanksgiving in prayer and blessings.

The miracle of the oil that was meant to burn for only one day yet stretched out for eight is a deeply beloved story whose origin in only briefly mentioned in the Talmud. It is fascinating therefore to learn that the great Russian maskil Chaim Zelig Slonimski, (a Talmudology hero to be sure) unleashed a storm when he published an essay questioning the authenticity of the miracle.

Some Background

Hayyim Zelig Slonimski aged seventy-five. From The Jewish Encyclopedia, New York, Funk and Wagnalls, 1912.

We have discussed Slonimski before. To coincide with the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1835, he published Kokhava Deshavit (The Comet) in Vilna. It described where and when the comet would be visible with precise coordinates for the inhabitants of Bialystok, as well as an explanation of the nature of comets and their orbits. Hayyim Zelig Slonimski, (1810-1904), was also the founding editor of Hazefirah (The Dawn), a weekly Hebrew-language newspaper first published in Warsaw in 1862. He also wrote Mosdei Hokhmah (The Foundation of Wisdom), a work on algebra, and struck up a friendship with the famed German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Not content with all this, Slonimski invented a method to send two telegraphs simultaneously over one wire (which was a very big deal at the time,) and developed a calculating machine that he later presented to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. It was so successful that in 1845 the Russian minister of education made Slonimski an honorary citizen, a remarkable honor given the general oppression faced by the Jews at the time. So yes, Slonimski is a Talmudology hero.

The Chanukah Polemic of 1891

In December 1891 Slonimski published a short essay in the Hebrew language journal Hazefirah, which he happened to edit. In the piece he claimed that the Chanukah miracle of the oil discussed in the Talmud may not have happened, and that furthermore Maimonides himself did not appear to believe in the historicity of the story. There was indeed a miracle at Chanukah, he claimed: it was the victory of the Hasmoneans over the Greeks. But the miracle of the oil was witnessed only by a handful of the Cohanim who entered the Temple. “Who else besides them” he wrote “saw anything?”

In support of his skepticism Slonimski cited Maimonides himself. Here is how Maimonides described the events surrounding the oil:

רמב׳ם משנה תורה הלכית מגילה וחנוכה ג, ב

וּכְשֶׁגָּבְרוּ יִשְׂרָאֵל עַל אוֹיְבֵיהֶם וְאִבְּדוּם בְּכ''ה בְּחֹדֶשׁ כִּסְלֵו הָיָה וְנִכְנְסוּ לַהֵיכָל וְלֹא מָצְאוּ שֶׁמֶן טָהוֹר בַּמִּקְדָּשׁ אֶלָּא פַּךְ אֶחָד וְלֹא הָיָה בּוֹ לְהַדְלִיק אֶלָּא יוֹם אֶחָד בִּלְבַד וְהִדְלִיקוּ מִמֶּנּוּ נֵרוֹת הַמַּעֲרָכָה שְׁמוֹנָה יָמִים עַד שֶׁכָּתְשׁוּ זֵיתִים וְהוֹצִיאוּ שֶׁמֶן טָהוֹר 

When, on the twenty-fifth of Kislev, the Jews had emerged victorious over their foes and destroyed them, they re-entered the Temple where they found only one jar of pure oil, enough to be lit for only a single day; yet they used it for lighting the required set of lamps for eight days, until they managed to press olives and produce pure oil.

Do you see what is missing? Slonimski did. There is no mention of any miracle. Instead Maimonides seems to hedge, and notes instead that “they used it for lighting the required set of lamps for eight days.” Slonimski suggested that the Menorah was lit for a short time each evening, and then the lamps were extinguished, instead of burning through the rest of the night. That is how the oil managed to last eight days. Nothing miraculous to see here.

The Response, and THE response to THE response…

Dozens of books and essays were written in response to Slonimski’s one page essay. (You can find them here, together with a helpful Hebrew language post about the episode.) For example in 1892 in Warsaw, Shmuel Alexandrov published Agadat Pach HaShemen (The Story of the Flask of Oil). The book was dedicated to Chaim Slonimski, and explained the miracle of the oil allegorically. Conservative reaction to the book was swift and strong. So much so that Alexandrov later wrote this retraction:

והנני אומר גם מפורש כי כל מה שכתבתי בקונטרסי אגדת פך השמן… הוא רק בתור בירור וביאור האגדות האלה ע”ד הביקורת, אולם בנוגע לגוף הקבלות והמסורות העתיקות המסתעפות מהאגדות האלו, הנני אומר מפורש אם קבלה היא נקבל, ואם אולי נמצאו ביטויים בספרי אגדת פך השמן שפלטה קולמוסי, הנוגעים בגוף הקבלה, הנני מתחרט ע”ז חרטה גמורה. מטרתו בכל מאמרינו השונים היא רק לבנות ולנטוע ולא לסתור ולעקור חלילה

I wish to explicitly clarify that everything I wrote in by book Agadat Pach HaShemen was written only to clarify the stories, but regarding the received tradition about theses actual events, I want to state explicitly…that I completely regret certain expressions that slipped from my pen regarding these events. My purpose throughout was to build and to plant, and not to destroy or uproot…

(You can find Agadat Pach HaShemen at the Jewish National Library here. But you won’t find it on HebrewBook.org. I wonder why.)

As Marc Shapiro has pointed out, there are examples of several other orthodox authors who appeared to ignore or deny the reality of the miracle of Chanukah. He notes that “ It could be that Isidore Epstein should be added to the list, as in his classic work Judaism he describes Hanukkah and the kindling of lights, but mentions nothing about the miracle….Yet I think it is telling that he does not even say something like, “according to tradition a cruse of oil with enough for one day burnt for eight.”” Another traditional author who ignores the miracle was Rabbi Zev Yavetz, a founder of the Mizrachi movement. The miracle of the oil is simply not mentioned in his fourteen volume Toldot Yisrael. Marc also points out that the miracle of the oil is omitted in R. Joseph Hertz’s  Authorized Daily Prayer Book, (or, as it is known by its short title, The Authorised Daily Prayer Book of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire,) used by orthodox Jews in Britain for generations.

Whether you believe that the miracle was an improbable military victory or long-lasting oil, Chanukah remains a beloved holiday for the Jewish people. On that, at least, we can all agree.

Just in time for Chanukah! The Eleventh Plague: Jews & Pandemics from the Bible to COVID-19

It is with great excitement that Talmudology announces the release of my latest book, The Eleventh Plague: Jews and Pandemics from the Bible to COVID-19. In the US, the book is available on Amazon (two-day delivery!) where you can read the introduction and the first chapter. So buy it for yourself and get a copy for a loved one for Chanukah. (Or Christmas. Or Kwanzaa.) For some reason, Amazon is not currently delivering it to Israel. In the UK, the book will be released in March, so you will have to wait. Though I guess you could buy the e-book.

The book is packed with utterly fantastic material and historical events that have largely been hidden until now, and it tells the story of how infectious disease and pandemics have shaped and reshaped Jewish life. It was an absolute pleasure to write, and my research days would end with me announcing “…you’ll never believe what I found today!” (Thanks Erica, for being a good sport. And for believing.) Some of the background material was first published here on Talmudology, and it grew (and grew) from there.

Here is the table of contents, to whet your appetite:

“When I began the work, I did so with no hypothesis to test. I simply let
the sources speak for themselves, and any conclusions came later. What
I uncovered— much to my surprise— was the profoundly deep way in which
pandemics have impacted the story of Jews and Judaism. It was a story of which
I was completely unaware, despite being a physician and having a lifelong familiarity with Jewish sources. I discovered not only how Jews have been affected
by pandemics but also how they shared their encounters with their non-Jewish
neighbors. It was a common story but told in different dialects.”

— Jeremy Brown. The Eleventh Plague; Jews and Pandemics from the Bible to COVID-19. New York, OUP 2023. p.3

You can buy the book on Amazon, and also directly from the publisher with a 30% discount. Just click the images below.

The Eleventh Plague: Jews and Pandemics from the Bible to COVID-19 Buy on Amazon

Many thanks for your support.

And a Happy Chanukah from Talmudology