Michael L. Satlow

As we have now become increasingly aware, the “real cost” of meat in America is more than we actually pay.  The precise figures are difficult to come by and a bit squishy, but it seems relatively clear that rarely, if ever, has a human community been able to eat the quantity of flesh that we do at such a low market price.  If we had to pay the real price of meat, we are often told, most of us would simply eat less wheat.

This, most scholars assert, is exactly what they did in antiquity, and even today is a feature of the “Mediterranean Diet.” Meat was available, but expensive, and was thus eaten only rarely, usually on special occasions.

So this obviously raises an empirical question: How much did meat actually cost in antiquity?  Are we talking about caviar-style expensive?

It is notoriously difficult to recover prices from antiquity.  The fact that much of the economy was not monetized compounds the problem.  Yet one source from antiquity might give us at least a little purchase on the relative value of meat.

In 301 CE the Roman emperor Diocletian issued an edict meant to set maximum prices on a large range of commodities. This edict was inscribed in Greek and Latin, many copies (or fragments) of which were found throughout the eastern part of the empire.

Relative prices in antiquity are frequently computed in “bread equivalents.”  That is, since bread was the primary dietary staple, if we can calculate prices relative to the amount of bread that creates some sense of values.  According to Diocletian’s Edict, the price of one “army modius” of wheat was 100 denarii.  One modius of wheat can produce twenty one-pound loaves of bread.  So each one-pound loaf of bread should cost around 5 denarii.

According to the Edict, 1 Italian pound of pork was 12 denarii; 1 Italian lb of beef, 8 denarii; and 2 chickens, 60 denarii.  An “Italian”, or Roman, pound was 345 grams (our pound is 454 grams).

So now let’s do the math.  One pound (our measure) of pork would cost 15 denarii (3 loaves of bread); one pound of beef, 11 denarii (a little over 2 loaves of bread); and if each chicken weighed 2 lbs (our chickens are significantly bigger), chicken would cost 7.5 denarii (1.5 pounds of bread) per pound.

Now we can compare.  My local, artisanal bakery charges around $3.00 and up for a 1 lb. loaf.  If I used this figure to compute contemporary prices for meat in Diocletian’s day, that would price pork at $15/lb; beef at $6.00/lb; and chicken at $4.50/lb.

And wages?  According to the Edict, unskilled laborers could expect about 25 denarii (5 loaves of bread) a day, and skilled labor twice that.  Each 1 lb loaf of bread has around 1000 calories, so we should assume about 2.5 loaves or “bread equivalents”/day for each person.  A single skilled laborer, then, might pay 25% of his income in food costs, just for himself.

So the upshot is that meat does not appear to have been “caviar-style” expensive.  In fact, the relative cost of meat then was only a little more than the price of ordinary kosher meat is today (pork excepted, of course).

This is only an exercise, and a very rough one at that, but the results are intriguing.  If in antiquity unsubsidized meat was really at these prices, then perhaps the gap is not as great as it is sometimes thought.

In his review in the Jewish Daily Forward of a new book on the “genetic history” of the Jews, Jon Entine writes, “‘Who is a Jew?’ has been a poignant question for Jews throughout our history.”  It is a question that has been very much in the news of late, not primarily for reasons of genetics but of conversion.  As has been extensively reported, there is a simmering debate, particularly in Israel, about whether Jewish conversions can be retroactively annulled. This issue has itself grown from an increasingly rigorous and hard-line position on the requirements for Orthodox conversion.

Yet while “Who is a Jew?” has been an important and controversial question throughout my lifetime, I suspect that it has actually not been very important throughout most of Jewish history.  For most Jewish communities, at most times and places, whether one was a Jew was rather obvious.  A rare exceptional incident might raise the issue (e..g, whether Jews in the Middle Ages who were forced to convert to Islam remained “good” Jews, as discussed by Maimonides), but for the most part the question of “Who is a Jew?” was far less poignant than we imagine.

I recently had occasion to revisit the classic rabbinic text on conversions, found in the Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 47a-b.  Classical rabbinic literature actually has surprisingly little to say about conversion to Judaism, articulating a procedure for it only here:

A.  Our rabbis taught:  One who comes to convert in this time, they say to him, “What do you see that you come to convert?  Don’t you know that Israel at this time is broken, oppressed, swept around, and torn, and afflictions come on them?”  If he says, “I know and I am not worthy,” they accept him immediately.

B.  And they inform him some of the light mitzvot and some of the more serious mitzvot.  They inform him of the sin [of neglect of] the laws of gleanings, forgotten sheaths, pe’ah [leaving the corners of the field for the poor], and the poor tithe.  They [then] inform him of the punishments of the mitzvot, saying to him, “Know that until you reach this state, if you ate the forbidden fat you would not have received the punishment of extirpation, and if you had violated the Sabbath you would not have received the punishment of stoning.  Now, if you eat the forbidden fat you are liable for extirpation, and if you violate the Sabbath you are liable for stoning.”  And thus they inform him of the rewards….and they don’t draw it out and are not exacting with him.

C.  If he accepts, they circumcise him immediately….

D.  When he is healed, they immerse him immediately and two sages stand by him and inform him of a few of the light mitzvot and few of the more serious mitzvot.  He immerses and emerges and behold, he is like an Israelite in every respect.

In his book, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties, Shaye J. D. Cohen has extensively analyzed this tradition (pp. 198-238).  He is undoubtedly correct that this was a rabbinic attempt to bring some order to what was otherwise a chaotic understanding of Jewish identity.  It is not at all clear that in their time they succeeded, although this tradition would later serve as the template for a relatively consistent procedure for conversion.

In revisiting both the tradition and Cohen’s essay, two things really stood out to me.  First, in light of the increasing requirements for conversion, is actually how little the Talmudic rabbis required.  Steps A-C would take no more than a couple of hours.  The educational requirement is extremely minimal (and continues for a few minutes in D), and no proof of commitment or Jewish living is necessary.  Talk about a quickie conversion!

The second aspect relates to my current research on the patterns of Jewish giving in antiquity and their relationship to piety: how did Jews (and not just rabbis) understand the gifts that they made to the synagogues, poor, and priests and Levites?  In this tradition, of all the mitzvot in which the rabbis could have instructed the potential convert, they chose the laws dealing with support of the poor.  This – not the ritual obligations or the educating of Jewish children in holy texts – was the essence.  Curiously, the Talmud itself understands this (presumably earlier) tradition as a way to deter non-Jews from converting (their money is too important to them), but that I think reflects the more general ambivalence toward converts found in the Babylonian Talmud.  For the framers of this ceremony, though, it is support of the poor that stands at the center of their understanding of what it is to be/come a Jew.

A couple of months ago I gave a presentation at a workshop that I organized, “Ancient Religion, Modern Technology,” in which I outlined a rationale and vision for a digital project that mapped and analyzed the social network of the rabbis.  I am linking here the presentation, for which I used a new (to me) presentation software, prezi.  For those who have or want to experiment with the network analysis program Gephi, I would be happy to send you the dataset  (must be downloaded and opened with Gephi, and can’t be posted here for technical reasons), Rabbi Abbahu’s social network.  Just contact me by email.

Recovering the actual religious practices of Jewish women in antiquity – or, really, of almost all non-elite/non-rabbinic Jews – is at best a tricky business.  Our main sources are rabbinic texts, which are so insular, academic, and either prescriptive or utopian that it is often hard to figure out what, if anything, they actually do reflect.  Yet every once in a while these texts serve up a nugget that brings the historian up short.

I recently stumbled upon such a passage in the Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah, 30a.  It occurs in the midst of a complicated discussion about the status of “uncovered” wine or water.  The rabbis believe that snakes will enter the vessels of certain uncovered liquids and inject its venom, thus poisoning it.  (Obviously, this belief merits a discussion in its own right, but not here.)  The relevant passage reads:

שמואל לא שתי מיא מבי ארמלתא אמר לית לה אימתא דגברא ולא מיכסיא מיא

Shmuel would not drink water from the house of a widow.  He reasoned that she no longer had fear of her husband and [therefore] did not cover the water.

Shmuel’s reasoning, which might well be added later by the redactor of the Babylonian Talmud (that is, it may not be Shmuel’s reasoning at all), is intriguing.  He seems to be saying that any normal Jewish woman would not cover the water unless her husband told her to.  Given the rabbinic understandings, this makes no sense.  If she feared poisoning, why wouldn’t she continue to cover it?  The obvious answer is that she is not really afraid of snake poisoning, but only goes along with her husband’s request to cover the water out of “fear,” which may simply refer here to the desire to keep a peaceful house.

It is worth considering the logic of this passage more generally.  Men, particularly rabbis, had certain ideas and religious practices that they asked their wives to observe.  As in any human relationship, these requests would have met with a variety of responses.  What is so interesting about this particular passage is that even the rabbis themselves recognized that many of their wives found this particular rule stupid, and were ready to jettison it as soon as they could.

Were there other such “stupid” rules?  The precise phrase “fear of the husband” appears nowhere else in classical rabbinic literature, but if anyone knows of other examples of the same phenomenon, please pass them along!

For many years, we have incorporated a children’s drama into our Passover Seder.  During the Magid (telling of the Passover story) we send the children out of the room to prepare a drama relating to the story of the Exodus from Egypt.  They return a little while later, perform it before the adults, and then we all sit down to discuss it.  It has always worked well.  It helps the kids learn while giving them an opportunity to move around, and, of course, it gives the adults a few minutes to catch our breath.

This year, though, whether out of boredom or mere mischievousness, I decided to change the parameters of the play.  They would still create the drama, but this time they were to do it from the perspective of the Egyptians.  They bubbled with excitement and disappeared for five minutes to prepare.

They returned with a drama featuring “Joe Schmo” Egyptian as the protagonist.  In scene one, Joe, a farmer-villager, visits a great Egyptian city.  It is so big and beautiful.  How was it built, Joe wonders.  He looks around but sees no workers.  The thought, though, quickly vanishes as he does his business and then returns home.  In scene two, Joe is farming when his cow suddenly drops dead of disease.  Struck by the plagues, Joe cannot figure out what he had done wrong.  The curtain drops.

As the play ended, I thought immediately of my iPad.

Over the past several months it has been hard to escape the stream of news stories about the conditions of the workers in China who assemble Apple products.  The basic lines of this story are far from new.  While the precise details of (especially foreign and migrant) worker conditions are often debated, it is clear that there are many, many people who work in sub-optimal circumstances to create our commodities at affordable prices.  This vast, ugly underbelly of the production of everything from coffee to cars is one upon which my lifestyle depends.

The ensuing conversation at our Seder was entirely predictable.  We justify it by pointing out that these jobs do provide support and opportunities for families who otherwise would live in even worse conditions.  We excuse the system by plaintively (and correctly) noting that without these affordable items our already strained budgets would break.  We throw up our hands: What, in any case, could we as individuals do to change this massive global economic machine?  The adults flailed for an answer.  The children smiled.

As we moved to recounting the ten plagues, I began to feel my own perspective shift.  As I removed the drops of wine from my cup, I thought of “Joe,” the small, hapless Egyptian whose only sin was not asking too hard about the source of a city’s wealth.  I thought of the taskmaster who Moses killed, whose sin may only have been trying to do his job.  I thought of my family, my people, my community, and me.

The basic narrative of Passover, like those of Purim and Hanukkah, encourages us to think in black and white.   They are evil, we are good.  They attempt to oppress us, but we triumph.  There is never any doubt about how the story should end.

Yet most of us know that life is not so simple.  Evil and good rarely come unalloyed.  Our lives, like those of our ancestors, involve a continuous stream of uncomfortable choices.  We fantasize about a world in which the choices are clear, in which buying shoes isn’t fraught with the fear of being complicit in child abuse.  Perhaps when Elijah comes.

We are all Israelites, and we are all Egyptians.  We are oppressed and we oppress.  This is the uncomfortable message of Passover, one so clear that even – or maybe only – a child could see it.

In academic circles, “tradition” has long taken a beating.  Scholars have correctly pointed out that “tradition” or “traditions” are often quite malleable as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger put it in the title of their edited volume, The Invention of Tradition.

While all of this is well and good, the concept “tradition” itself has been undertheorized.  What do we really mean by this term, and can it be used as an analytic category for the study of religion?  I have recently published an essay in which I attempt to resuscitate the term and argue for a working definition: static resources that individuals, communities, and institutions understand as authentic and regard as authoritative.

The full essay explaining what I mean by this definition can be found in Michael L. Satlow, “Tradition: The Power of Constraint,” in Robert A. Orsi, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 130-150.

Over the past few months, as noted earlier, with the help of research assistants I have been compiling a spreadsheet that records each occurrence of a biblical verse cited in the Bavli. The purpose of this data is not so much to ask qualitative questions (e.g., where and how does the Bavli cite a particular verse?) but to allow for quantitative analysis that might lead to new questions and avenues of investigation.

As I slowly gain more familiarity with the many extraordinary but poorly documented powers of Excel, I’ve just begun to analyze this data.  Here are a couple of preliminary observations:

1.  The Bavli cites somewhere in the neighborhood of 5900 discrete verses of the Hebrew Bible.  The Hebrew Bible contains approximately 23,700 discrete verses.  That equates to about 25% of the Bible; meaning, of course, that 75% of the Bible is never cited.  It is worth noting that 3,295 verses are cited only a single time in the Bavli.  I am not yet sure what to make of this – one next step is to analyze the density of citations by biblical book.  Does the Bavli prefer citing from certain books, especially when the size of the book is also taken into account.

2.  The seven most-cited verses (with NRSV translations, and some surrounding material added for context) are:

• Deuteronomy 24:1 (37 times): Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman, but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her, and so he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house; she then leaves his house and goes off to become another man’s wife.
• Numbers 5:13 (29 times): If any man’s wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him, if a man has had intercourse with her but it is hidden from her husband, so that she is undetected though she has defiled herself, and there is no witness against her since she was not caught in the act; if a spirit of jealousy comes on him, and he is jealous of his wife who has defiled herself; or if a spirit of jealousy comes on him, and he is jealous of his wife, though she has not defiled herself…
• Leviticus 25:5 (24 times): You shall not reap the aftergrowth of your harvest or gather the grapes of your unpruned vine: it shall be a year of complete rest for the land.
• Numbers 30:3 (24 times): When a woman makes a vow to the Lord, or binds herself by a pledge, while within her father’s house, in her youth, and her father hears of her vow or her pledge by which she has bound herself, and says nothing to her; then all her vows shall stand, and any pledge by which she has bound herself shall stand. But if her father expresses disapproval to her at the time that he hears of it, no vow of hers, and no pledge by which she has bound herself, shall stand; and the Lord will forgive her, because her father had expressed to her his disapproval.
• Leviticus 2:2 (21 times): After taking from it a handful of the choice flour and oil, with all its frankincense, the priest shall turn this token portion into smoke on the altar, an offering by fire of pleasing odour to the Lord
• Numbers 6:5 (21 times): All the days of their nazirite vow no razor shall come upon the head; until the time is completed for which they separate themselves to the Lord, they shall be holy; they shall let the locks of the head grow long.
• Leviticus 6:3 (20 times): When any of you sin and commit a trespass against the Lord by deceiving a neighbour in a matter of a deposit or a pledge, or by robbery, or if you have defrauded a neighbour, or have found something lost and lied about it—if you swear falsely regarding any of the various things that one may do and sin thereby— when you have sinned and realize your guilt, and would restore what you took by robbery or by fraud or the deposit that was committed to you, or the lost thing that you found…

Five of these verses deal with matters of civil law; three deal with women.  Why these verses in particular, though?  Verses dealing with some expected topics, such as Shabbat or circumcision, are absent.

I have some ideas for at least some of the verses.  Deuteronomy 24:1-4 are the basis for almost the entire legal institution of divorce – the rabbis need to keep appealing to them for authority, perhaps at a time when most Jews would have respected the Bible far more than rabbinic say-so.  Similarly, the sotah (“suspected wife,” in Numbers 5), issues dealing with female vows (Numbers 30:3), and the nazirite vow (Numbers 6:5) are dealt with only in these places and all generate a large body of laws. I am not yet entirely satisfied with these explanations, and would welcome yours as well!

The twitter updates will begin shortly, and can be followed at #armt.

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman returns several times to a formative experience he had in the Israeli army.  Assigned to a unit responsible for assigning fresh recruits to approriate units, he soon discovered that the interviews that he and his colleagues conducted with these recruits were, approximately, useless.  The interviews yielded secure impressions that over time turned out to be worthless for predicting the actual future fit and performance of recruits in their assigned units.  So Kahneman was charged with changing the system.  He retained the interviews, but developed an objective checklist of features and characteristics that were then processed through an algorithm.  The algorithm performed well in predicting future success, certainly far better than the subjective judgments reached in interviews.

Algorithms and their cousins, checklists, are hot now.  Through the work of Kahneman and others, we have come to increasingly recognize our own human limits.  We turn out to be predisposed, probably biologically, to overvalue our own, frequently biased, judgments.  In some cases, as in a critical surgery or on a crippled spaceship, literally life and death may hang on the balance of a human judgement.  Checklists increase the possibility for better judgement calls, and these are call we would all prefer to get right.

In my own professional world, we never make judgements of life and death.  We do, though, make judgements that have significant impacts on people’s lives, as well as on the climate of institutions and our own professional advancement.  We admit graduate students, hire faculty, and vote on their tenure and promotion.  They are not life and death decisions, but they are not unimportant either.

As I read Kahneman’s book, which deals explicitly with issues of hiring, I could not help but think of how we hire faculty.  I have taught at several institutions now in which I’ve participated in these decisions, and the process at each was similar.  We individually read the materials and recommendation letters and reach preliminary judgements about: fit; interest and viability of research; scholarly achievement (or potential for this); potential to contribute to our curriculum; and “collegiality.”  We then have a very unsystematic discussion of the candidates to arrive at a shortlist.  Candidates visit for a day or two, we chat with them and hear them speak, and then we have another unsystematic discussion that (usually) yields a decision.

Does this process work?  On the one hand, there are very few hires in which I have been involved that in retrospect I regret.  Yet on the other hand, the unsystematic way we make these decisions, and what comes across in the meetings as clear biases based on what Kahneman calls the “halo effect” (i.e., because we like somebody for one reason we assign them higher ratings in other areas), make me uneasy.  A spectacular lecture or charming interview might unduly help a weaker candidate, or vice-versa.  The question this raises is whether academic hiring, like the other kinds of hiring Kahneman discusses, would produce better decisions based on checklists and algorithms.

Kahneman discusses multiple cases in which algorithm-driven hiring was implemented, and each case met with fierce resistence on the part of those who have control over the hiring but better overall results.  Intuitively, I too cringe at the notion of hiring a colleague based on a checklist.  But I wonder if it would make me cringe more than the messy, often subjective, decision making process we already practice.  And I wonder, ultimately, about whether it would work out for the best, and how we might track and know that.

This rumination does in any case lead to (what is for me) an interesting consideration of the still-hypothetical checklist itself:  What would it look like, and what algorithm would process it?  I might pursue this more in another post, but in the meantime would be interested in hearing from others whether the entire idea of acacdemic hiring in this manner is crazy.