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Concepts and practices of purity and defilement are a central medium for articulating and embodying hierarchy, difference, and change in human culture and religions. The marking of members of the group as distinct from those outside it, the construction of the interior hierarchy of the group, and the specification of certain times, spaces, and actions as unique and differentiated from others, are all frequently achieved through language and practices of purity and defilement. Religious purity discourses and practises create such hierarchies primarily by constructing axes of purity and defilement in relation to different degrees of compatibility with the sacred or the divine. The Abrahamic religions made extensive use of this medium to structure their social, ritual, and moral worlds.
The force of these practices and discourses and their universality may be a result of their being an articulation of a universal human emotion, disgust, harnessed for the creation and expression of cultural structures and hierarchies (Haidt et al. 1997; Rozin et al. 2008). This basis lends purity discourse a number of its defining characteristics: both disgust, and impurity are commonly induced by substances crossing the body’s borders, decaying substances, and things conceived as strange and irregular; both are created by physical substances as well as by moral affronts; and both can be allayed through rituals. Disgusting substances and actions are typically perceived as contagious, i.e. as producing negative results in their surrounding context (whether spatial, temporal, or social), going beyond their immediate vicinity. When disgust is co-opted for creating or supporting religious values, it may remain as a relatively unstructured emotion, unconstrained by clearly defined formulations or actions, or it may be expressed through ritual and formulas. In the former case, although the discourse of purity and defilement usually remains on the level of language without being structured into regular religious practice, it may have significant impact on the worldview and values of the adherents. In the latter case purification rituals are possible, whether for bodily or for moral defilements.
Purity and defilement are used in religious discourse and practice to evaluate and construct a highly varied range of phenomena; therefore, saying that something or someone is ‘pure’ or ‘defiled’ may have very different meanings in different contexts and domains. Rather than a unified or even diverse ‘system’ of purity and defilement, a better image is of purity and defilement as an idiom employed in religious discourse to construct order, institutions, and identity, and implemented in varying ways according to historical context and religious needs (Lemos 2013; Valeri 2000: 112–13).
The diverse usages of this purity and impurity idiom can be charted in several ways. A pervasive typology in recent scholarship is according to the origins or causes of impurity, which correlates to some extent to the type of rituals through which it is purified. In the study of Judaism and early Christianity, it is common to use the terms ‘ritual impurity’ and ‘moral impurity’ (Klawans 2000; for alternative terminologies, see Hayes 2007; Kazen 2002: 214–22; Freidenreich 2011). Ritual impurity results from bodily events, many of them non-intentional, such as birth, genital emissions, certain illnesses, and death. This impurity is temporary, creating some degree of disruption in social life; purification rituals return the default status of purity. As such, purification is a preparatory ritual, and its function is to allow a person to participate in social life, to enter sacred space, come in contact with a sacred object, or participate in a sacred ritual. The moral dimension of this type of impurity is significant, but indirect: it delineates the borders of society’s structures and safeguards the sacred. Moral impurity results from particularly sinful behaviour. Its purification requires some moral change in the sinner, but also a social response and, in certain cases, elaborate rituals which assist in removing the impurity. Such impurity is seen as a force (demonic or otherwise) at battle with forces of holiness and purity, operating on both cosmic and personal levels. Purification (when possible) is therefore not a temporary measure to allow contact with the sacred, but a vanquishing of evil. Here, purity and defilement have a direct moral meaning; sin and impurity mingle and blur. To these two types David Freidenreich (2011: 27) adds intrinsic impurity, which is naturally inherent in a substance and therefore cannot be purified, only distanced from the person. Examples are the impurity of the pig in Islam and impure animals or the corpse in Judaism. This type is closely linked to the basic emotion of disgust discussed above.
Though this typology is useful for comparing and analysing different purity rituals and discourses, it is important to note that the three forms are frequently not well differentiated in the sources, and presumably in the minds of religious adherents.1 They rather overlap and interact, creating a web of allusions and meaning. Although all three forms are represented in the three religions, the picture in Christianity is quite different from in Judaism and Islam. While in Judaism and Islam certain substances, bodily processes, or people are seen as intrinsically impure and therefore as the basis for circumstantial impurity rituals, Christian theologians nominally rejected the notion of intrinsic impurity as incompatible with that of a uniformly good creation, and with it also rejected the possibility of circumstantial impurity and its purification. They therefore required sin to be at the basis of all impurity; impurity can only originate from the actions or thoughts of a being with free will, i.e. a person or a demon. On the other hand, while in Judaism and Islam the management of moral impurity remains mostly in the realm of personal religion or of the courts, Christianity created complex ritual and religious systems for the management of moral impurity.
As an alternative to a typology of causes, the field of purity and impurity may also be analysed according to the locus of holiness threatened by impurity and constructed through maintenance of purity. Three main options occur: a specific sacred space, time, or group inside the community; the community as a whole; and the individual. In the first option, the sacrality of spaces, times, objects, or groups is maintained and constructed by maintaining their purity and the purity of the people connected to them, through distancing from both circumstantial and offensive impurity. Examples are the historical Jerusalem Temple in Judaism (and associated sancta and priesthood), prayer and the ḥajj in Islam, and the Eucharist and priesthood in Christianity. Human life legitimately includes both profane and sacred moments and places, and purity rituals are those which separate the sacred from that which is not. For the second option, the community may also be seen as sacred, requiring purity rituals to maintain its borders and to purge it from impurities. This conception is present already in the Book of Leviticus as relating to the Israelite community, and is used to explain the dietary laws of Lev. 11; it was reiterated in the prophets and Ezra. In Christianity, it received significant emphasis by Paul’s description of the community of believers as a temple and as a ‘body of Christ’ (1 Cor. 6: 19, 12: 12–27, Rom. 12: 5) and in the ritual of baptism safeguarding the entrance to the holy Christian community. In Islam, the idea of the purity of the community has a weaker presence, but still comes into play in the rhetoric of an original, pure Islam to which some movements such as the Wahhabis aspired to return. The third option is that the individual is seen as the sacred locus requiring safeguarding and distancing from pollution. This perspective leads to an ideal of perpetual purity, and is most commensurate with an ascetic ideology and practice, for which the individual body is the main staging ground of the struggle between good and evil. Though ascetic leanings are found already in early rabbinic literature (Diamond 2003; and see Balberg 2014), they are much more pronounced in early Christianity and especially the monastic movement, and here we find pervasive conceptions of individuals (or their moral faculties) as sacred and requiring protection or purification, especially from sin. In Islam, too, such ideas were frequent in currents of thought and practice which emphasized individual religious achievement.
A note on the scholarship: of the three Abrahamic religions, studies of purity and defilement have historically focused on Judaism. This was presumably a result of the importance of purity rules in the Hebrew scriptures, in the Mishnah, and in subsequent halakha. In Christian scholarship, purity and defilement were typically seen as a solely ritual matter, characteristic of the Old Testament rather than the New, and as quite irrelevant to the central message of Christianity. Purity was therefore rarely studied as a Christian topic. This situation has changed somewhat with the ‘cultural turn’ and the interest in the role of the body in Christian culture, but here too the focus has been more on sex and gender than on purity and defilement. The study of purity in Islam, for different reasons, has also been very limited until the past two decades (Maghen 1999).
The impurity of certain animals or foods, and their resulting prohibition for consumption, is a central feature of Jewish, Islamic, and to a lesser extent Christian custom, and also a common subject for interreligious discussion and polemic. This subject, however, is the focus of Freidenreich’s comprehensive article in this volume, and therefore we shall relate to it only occasionally.
The Bible designates as impure various types of genital emissions (Lev. 15); giving birth (Lev. 12: 2–8); ṣaraʿat, a type of skin disease or fungus, commonly translated as leprosy (Lev. 13–14), and corpses or graves. The biblical laws governing the methods of contraction, contagion, and purification of these defilements are highly complex, and are further elaborated in the Qumran documents and in rabbinic literature. Defilements vary in severity: some require complex and lengthy purification rituals, with the polluted person banished from the Israelite camp (Num 5: 2–3), while others require only a single day’s wait and a single washing in water. In general, contracting these defilements is not a sin; only contact with the sacred while defiled (Lev. 7: 20–1; 22: 1–7, Num. 9: 6–7) and in certain cases delaying purification (Lev. 17: 15–16; Num. 19: 13, 20) are considered sinful. All of these defilements are natural occurrences, and their contraction and subsequent purification are described as a routine part of Israelite worship.
Following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple the relevance of most ritual purity rules for Jewish life waned, though there are narratives about certain individuals who continued to maintain ritual purity. To this day, ritual purity remains a practical issue in three main areas, in which defilement caused ritual results even without a temple. By far the most important of these for everyday life is menstruation (niddah), as the period of menstrual defilement corresponds with a period of prohibition of sexual contact or intimacy; the second and less significant is the prohibition of priests’ contact with corpses. A third area is that of the washing of hands after sleep and before eating, which presupposes a slight degree of impurity. Nevertheless, discussions of all areas of ritual purity laws continued: the sixth and largest section of the Mishnah is dedicated to purity laws, and discussions of ritual purity continued in the Talmud and subsequent literature, though in a less organized fashion.
In legal Islamic sources, certain substances are viewed as impure, e.g. urine, faeces, blood, semen, pigs, dogs, carrion, or wine; if these adhere to a person, they must be removed and washed off in order to allow participation in sacred activities. Furthermore, certain human actions or events are defiling to the person, some in a major fashion, requiring an elaborate whole-body ablution (ghusl), and some minor, requiring a washing of head, hands, and feet (wuḍūʼ). Major defiling events are all genital: sexual intercourse, the emission of sperm, or menstruation, while minor defiling events are more diverse. In Islamic law, there is no essential problem with being in a state of pollution. However, as prayer cannot be performed in a state of defilement, in practice purification must be achieved within a short time. Purification is also required before touching (and for some authorities, reciting) the Quran, entering a mosque, fasting during Ramadan, and performing the central rites of the ḥajj.
In Christianity, bodily purity is constantly problematized but nevertheless frequently practised. On the background of the differentiation of earliest Christianity from its Jewish context, the Gospels (Mark 7, Matt. 15) relate that Jesus rejected the possibility that certain foods are impure, ‘making all foods clean’ (Mark 7: 19). Paul, too, states that food is categorically pure (Rom. 14: 14, 20), and a vision to Peter (Acts 11) conveys a similar message. Early Christian writers expanded this to a more general principle: impurity cannot be a natural status or the result of an involuntary bodily event; to create true impurity, conscious moral choice must be present. While this principle would appear to preclude impurity as a result of involuntary bodily events or of eating certain foods, in fact Christians did practise such purity rules in many cases, appealing to ascetic, demonic, or scriptural motivations.
As in most of the ancient Near East and in ancient Greece, in the Hebrew Bible death is a major source of impurity. Contact with human corpses (Num. 11: 11–20) and certain animal carcasses (Lev. 5: 2–3, 11: 24–7) requires purification, the former through a week-long ritual including sprinkling with the ashes of a red cow, the latter by a shorter ritual. Purification is essential in order to enter sacred space or eat of sacrifices or tithes; to priests and the nazir, who must maintain a higher degree of holiness, the contraction of corpse impurity is categorically prohibited (21: 1–5, 22: 8, Num. 6: 6–7; cf. Ezek. 44: 15–31, Judg. 13: 14). Death impurity is contracted not only by contact but also by abiding in the same structure or under the same roof with a corpse. Rabbinic literature testifies to a trend beginning already in the late Second Temple period (first century ce) of circumscribing the ambit of death impurity by restrictive exegesis of the biblical laws (Noam 2008). With the destruction of the Temple, which essentially limited the consequences of death impurity to priests only, this trend became stronger. In the Talmuds (third–eighth century) we find attempts to permit defilement by corpses even to priests in certain cases. Nevertheless, orthodox Jewish priests (kohanim) maintain their distance from corpses and graves to this day.
Early Christianity did not devote much attention to the question of death impurity, and it was little disputed until the late fourth century. At this time, the spread of cult surrounding tombs of saints and martyrs meant that corpses, or at least some of them, were seen as sources of powerful holiness rather than impurity, an opposition explicitly made by several Christian writers (Chrysostom, On St Babylas; Didascalia apostolorum 26). The custom of burial near or inside churches, adjacent to the relics of the saints, created a closeness between the sacred and the dead totally antithetical to ideas of death impurity. Though some anti-Christian polemicists attempted to ridicule the cult of the saints by appealing to the disgustingness of corpses and bones, the issue was never central to inter-Abrahamic discourse.
Though in earliest Islam there are disputes about the question of corpse impurity, by the eighth century the dominant Sunni opinion was that the corpse itself must be washed and purified, but those touching it are not defiled, since ‘a Muslim is not impure/defiling, dead or alive’. Shi’ites ruled that the corpse is intrinsically impure, and yet not contaminating to its handlers. In general, however, Islamic law is preoccupied more by impurity spreading from the living to the dead than vice versa (Halevi 2011: 71–5).
According to Leviticus (12: 2–8) birth defiles the mother, requiring a minor sacrifice and a lengthy wait before entering sacred space. The sacrifice, and implicitly the impurity, is linked by some rabbinic sources to possible sins committed by the mother. The child, however, is not said to be impure, though some have explained circumcision on the eighth day to have a purificatory function, and the Gospel of Luke (2: 2) records a tradition for which the child was impure as well. Christian exegetes starting with Origen rejected the ritual understanding of this impurity, and read it as relating to an impurity adhering to all humans at birth, as an aspect of their corporeal nature or of Original Sin. This impurity could be managed only through baptism. Nevertheless, while in Judaism this impurity had little practical import after the destruction of the Temple, in Christianity the sacral dimensions of the Eucharist and the church prompted the development in the Middle Ages of abstinence of parturients from entering the church, marking the first entrance with a ritual known as churching, which had penitential and purificatory themes. In Islamic law, a woman who has given birth is defiled, but this is not a result of the birth of itself but rather because the blood emitted during birth is a genital discharge.
In the Bible (Lev. 15), genital emissions by both males and females are defiling, affecting the individual to whom they occur and other persons with whom they come in contact. Abnormal emissions resulting from illness create heavier pollution than normal ones such as menstruation or seminal emission in intercourse. Since a woman polluted by genital emissions was not only barred entrance to the Temple but also prohibited sexual contact, this impurity (especially that of menstruation or niddah) and the purification from it (by waiting a set number of days and washing in water) continued to be practised after the destruction of the Temple, and are observed to this day; this is the main domain of impurity which has significant practical repercussions in contemporary Judaism. As it relates directly to women only, this led to a strong gender bias in the field of impurity (Koren 2011).
Christian authorities in late antiquity and the Middle Ages debated the question of the impurity of genital emissions, both male and female. Despite the repudiation of most Old Testament impurity laws, some Christian writers believed it self-evident that menstruation would bar a woman from participating in Eucharist or baptism, seeing these rituals as sacred activities parallel to temple worship; an opinion which was canonized in the eastern Orthodox tradition (Synek 2001; Taft 1998). This conception is somewhat different from the Judaic concept as it developed in late antiquity, where niddah impurity, at least for the dominant halakhic tradition, relates to the domestic sphere and does not require abstinence from religious worship. Other Christian writers, however, allowed menstruating women to participate in worship (Cohen 1991; Meens 2000; Marienberg 2003).
Seminal emissions were dealt with much more leniently. In Judaism vestiges of observance of their impurity appeared to have mostly died out in late antiquity, to be revived to some extent in mystical movements of the Middle Ages. In monastic Christianity, however, they were seen as one of the major dangers to the body of the monk or the cleric and linked to the work of demons, although many authorities argued that the emissions without sexual thoughts are not defiling (Brakke 1995; Leyser 1998).
The attitude towards sex is undoubtedly the major difference in purity perceptions between Christians on the one hand and Muslims and Jews on the other. Both the Jewish and the Islamic tradition are generally highly positive towards marriage, including sexual relations in marriage (though there are some exceptions to this). Sexual relations and their relationship to sacred practices and places could be managed through ritual rules of impurity, and had minimal moral implications, as long as they were practised as part of a legitimate marriage (Maghen 2005). Thus in the Bible sexual relations produce a minor impurity, which can be relatively easily purified. In the Christian tradition, however, sexual asceticism became a central part of Christian culture mostly thanks to monastic heritage. Sexual relations, even in marriage, were repeatedly cast as polluted and polluting, a stain that cannot be purified through ritual alone. The only totally pure option was virginity and celibacy, or, as a second-best option, chastity in marriage. In Christian literature, ‘purity’ was synonymous with ‘chastity’, and ‘pollution’ meant sexual pollution, and specifically sexual sin. The degree of a Christian’s sexual abstinence became an index for his or her spiritual level, and thereby a social-religious index.
The impurity of sexual relations was linked with Adam and Eve’s original sin and with human corporeality, a reflection of human sinfulness. In practical terms, this impurity meant that community members who had had sexual relations were called upon not to partake of the Eucharist for some time, even by authorities such as Gregory the Great, who was more lenient regarding other defilements (Meens 2000). The implications were most severe for the clergy; it was argued that as they should be perpetually ready for ministering, they should abstain from relations altogether. This provided the basis for calls for clerical celibacy in the church, which met with differing success through Christian history (Callam 1980; Hunter 2007).
Classic texts in the Abrahamic traditions frequently speak of sins as defiling or as disgusting. A basic function of such descriptions is to arouse strong negative emotions towards such acts and the person perpetrating them. In many cases, however, the use of such images goes further to suggest certain ways of understanding and managing sin which are equivalent to the management of bodily impurities: first, sin is contagious, influencing people and places beyond its perpetrator: once unleashed, it may work its evil automatically, harming even those who have no evil intentions. Second, it lingers on for some time after its performance, but may nevertheless be purified through the correct procedures. Third, it is inimical to the sacred, and thus is especially dangerous to those who see themselves as true believers, closer to God than the rest of humanity.
In the Hebrew Bible, some types of sins were seen to be so serious that they polluted not only the person involved but the sanctuary and/or the land as well. These sins, namely murder, sexual sins, and idolatry, could not in fact be expiated through ordinary ritual. Other sins—or perhaps the defilement they created—could be allayed through a purification sacrifice (ḥaṭat) and blood ritual at the sanctuary. The rituals and sacrifices of the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16) are said both to expiate for sin and to purify the sanctuary of impurity, and in the prophets, images of defilement and purification are commonly used for depicting Israel’s sins and future restoration. The triad of idolatry, sexual sin, and murder return under various formulations in Second Temple literature as the most significant moral defilements.
Early Christians, who nominally rejected the possibility of bodily defilement lacking a moral aspect, focused on the defilement of sin as the only real and significant defilement. They therefore commonly read scriptural references to bodily defilement as relating symbolically to the defilement of sin. Furthermore, Christianity developed institutions and rituals through which sin could be purified and removed: baptism for those still outside the community, and penitence for those already inside it. While these rituals were conceived mainly as transforming the sinful persons themselves to reach a new spiritual state, they were also seen as a purification of the sins committed by the persons, requiring both repentance and faith as well as the performance of the required ritual in order that God send his grace (Stroumsa 1999). Christianity continued the scriptural and Jewish emphasis on bloodshed, idolatry, and sexual sin as the paradigmatic polluting sins, most dangerous to the divine presence in the community. To these we may add deceit, heresy, and disrespect for authority, sins which endangered social trust and structure.
The Quran, too, speaks of certain sinful behaviours, especially idolatry, unbelief, and associated sins, as impure or abominable (rijs: Q. 5: 90, 22: 30, 33: 33; see Freidenreich 2010: 14–19); ceasing from these behaviours is at times described as purification (see e.g. Q. 2: 125, 19: 13, 91: 9; Ṣaḥīḥ Bukhārī 1: 345, 8: 386). Nevertheless, the dominant object of purification in Islamic sources is certainly bodily defilement rather than moral, and the central objective of rituals is not described as purification from sin.
While sin as defilement and its removal as purification was a more frequent image in the Christian church than in Islamic and Jewish traditions, this is true mostly of the mainstream tradition as codified in halakhah and fiqh. Among mystical, ascetic, and philosophical groups and currents, as well as in penitential traditions, images of purification of the individual’s soul and/or the heart from the defilement of sin are more common. Prayer, the study of religious texts, repentance, charity, and other pious acts are described as a purification of the individual from evil influences and experiences. In certain cases, purification may be the objective of an ascetic or mystical programme, intended to raise the individual closer to God (thus some Sufi traditions, Picken 2011). In these currents the performance of the standard bodily purity rituals as well as additional, supererogatory rituals for bodily purity (at times involving some degrees of sexual and alimentary abstinence) was seen as especially conducive to spiritual or moral purity. This was frequently based on an understanding of the body defiling as the soul and therefore of the suppression of the former as the purification of the latter (see m. Sota 9: 15, Reid 2013: 144–97). These common concepts of individual purification are at least partly attributable to the strong impact of Platonic thought on these strands of Judaism and Islam.2
An important perspective for understanding the character of purity in the Abrahamic traditions is the relationship between bodily impurity and sin impurity: to what extent is ritual purity conceived of also in terms of purification from sin? Klawans (2000: 75, 93) claimed that in Rabbinic Judaism the two realms are mostly ‘compartmentalized’, while in Qumran as well as in early Christianity they were ‘merged’. In Christianity, the centrality of asceticism meant that bodily purity and purity of the heart or the soul were always seen as closely linked. The majority of scholars see the situation in Islam as opposite: generally speaking, ritual purity in Islam is not an expression of spiritual purity but rather a legal requirement for prayer (Maghen 2005; Reinhart 1990). Nevertheless, when looking away from legal writings to folklore and philosophy, the picture becomes more complicated with additional, spiritual meanings being given to the legal purity requirements. The situation in medieval and early modern Judaism is similar.
Theorists have long observed that the human body and the rituals relating to it may be taken as a symbol for the social group. Purity rituals, which typically define, protect, and regulate the borders of the body, may therefore express and support the definition, regulation, and protection of society’s borders (Mauss 1936; Douglas 1966). Indeed, this idea is expressed in a more functional fashion by many classical religious writers, starting with the Bible, who emphasize the role of purity laws in maintaining the identity of the religious community vis-à-vis external groups who threaten it or compete with it. In line with this conception, all three religions have developed conceptions of the impurity of foreigners, though with greatly differing emphases. The practical question of the impurity of foreigners naturally arises concerning the ritual of conversion and incorporation in the community, but more commonly as regards quotidian contacts and the cultural image of the foreigner.
Furthermore, purity rituals are frequently used to create a hierarchy inside a society, whether to set apart a religious, cultural, or gendered elite (Douglas 1970) or to degrade deviants, ‘heretics’, or opposition groups. This inner hierarchizing function was also present in all three Abrahamic religions, though the degree of its formalization differed.
In attributions of impurity to foreigners, there is a spectrum in all Abrahamic religions between the understanding that impurity is produced simply by the evil behaviour they supposedly adhere to (especially idolatry and sexual misdoing), and the understanding that foreigners are intrinsically impure. Another question, to some extent corresponding with the first, is the extent to which this impurity is ritual and therefore may be managed through ritual means, or is moral or spiritual only.
The Bible identifies Israel as a holy nation, set apart from other peoples both by divine election and by their (desired) behaviour. To achieve and maintain this status, Israel is called to remain pure in its dietary customs and in the abomination of bloodshed, sexual impurity, and idolatry, all of which, according to the Bible, were practised by its enemies, the Canaanites and Egyptians. This implies that these nations are impure, due to their behaviour if not intrinsically. The usage of purity imagery to enforce separatism became more urgent with the notion found in Ezra (chs 9–10) and reiterated in later Second Temple sources that intermarriage defiles the holy seed of Israel (Hayes 2002). The rabbis sought to integrate the ill-defined impurity of Gentiles into the general ritual purity system by stating that they defile ‘like a zavah (a woman with irregular genital emission)’ (b. Shab. 83b), a comparison probably used for its disgust factor. More significant than this ruling in maintaining the aura of Gentile defilement were the dietary laws as well as the rules of kosher wine (yein nesekh); although these are not predicated on the assumption that Gentiles are impure, they make common eating difficult if not impossible.
Similarly, throughout history Christians frequently used the language of disgust, commonly gendered, to denigrate non-Christians, both Jews and Gentiles, to weaken their appeal, and to justify their oppression (Cuffel 2007). The discourse of pollution joins that of demonization in the demarcation of Christians from outsiders. Entrance into the Christian community through baptism is described not only as an act of faith, a renewed birth in which all sins are removed, but also as the rejection of Satan and protection from polluted demons that accompany non-Christians, attracted by their sins and assisting them (Kelly 1985). Although at first this language was directed mostly at pagans, whose gods were equated to demons, with the demise of the Graeco-Roman cults its main object became Jews, Muslims, and heretics.
We have seen that the Quran uses defilement language to describe idolatry as well as idolaters, associated with Satan’s influence, and in this it was similar to Judaism and Christianity. As opposed to Christianity, however, Islam had a complex ritual purity mechanism with which it managed impurity; thus the question of foreigners’ impurity could potentially be expressed through a ritual system, and not remain only on the level of image and rhetoric. In practice, however, this option was only partly utilized: in general, while Shīʿah Islam practised ritual purification after contact with foreigners or idolaters, Sunnis did not (see Maghen 2007; Freidenreich in this volume).
Purity practice and language serve to enhance the power of social-religious groups and to create internal hierarchies. First, purity rules can be used to create, maintain, and justify institutional hierarchies and religious elites, such as a priesthood of which stricter purity rules are demanded. In this case the requirements of purity go together with enhanced rights of access to sacred space, rights of conducting religious ceremonies, and rights to tithes or taxes from the laity. In parallel, such elites may malign competing groups by casting them as heretics and deviants, describing them through language of defilement and disgust. Second, purity discourse may also serve the opposite function: an upstart group which wishes to gain power may represent itself as purer than the rest of society and/or the elite and thus justify its ascendancy; these claims may be supported by actual purity practices. Historically, in times of social strife, both scenarios occurred simultaneously, with various groups describing themselves as pure and their opponents as defiled.
The Bible requires priests and the nazir to adhere to more rigorous purity rules than the rest of Israel. However, the separation of priests from non-priests is not a main objective of the biblical purity rules, which referred much more frequently to Israel as a whole, and was hardly relevant in later Jewish history. Purity rules for Jews thus served more for the othering of non-Jews rather than of competing Jewish groups. Nevertheless, some exceptions may be found. Late Second Temple Judaism witnessed a general trend towards an expansion of the ritual purity rules to contexts outside of the Temple and its personnel. As a result, the degree of maintenance of ritual purity in daily life was now used as an index for piety and social prestige, with groups such as the Qumran sect or the Pharisees (and, for some interpretations, the Jesus movement as well) proving their superiority over other Jewish groups by adherence to more rigorous or morally significant purity rules (Baumgarten 1997: 81–113). Medieval and early modern Jewish groups, such as the Qara’aites and the Ḥasidei Ashkenaz, also emphasized their adherence to purity rules, as did more isolated magicians or mystics (Swartz 1994). However, this could cut both ways, as some groups differentiated themselves by emphasizing their leniency in purity issues relative to others (for an excellent discussion in an early Christian context, see Brakke 1995).
This function of purity as an instrument for social power was especially prominent in Christianity. In the first centuries of Christianity, certain Christian groups cast themselves as purer than others due to their adherence to more rigorous ascetic regimes or unbending stance in face of persecution (e.g. the groups described in 1 Tim. 5 and Titus 1; the Nag Hammadi Testimony of Truth; the Montanist movement in Asia Minor; and the North African Donatists). Competing, perhaps more powerful groups countered that their rejection of central authority made these groups polluted rather than pure. The history of Christianity is punctuated by the emergence of reform movements, in which groups called for a return to the original purity of the Christian church (the medieval Cathars (‘pure ones’) and the early modern Puritans are cases in point; see Lansing 2001). Central authorities reacted by demonizing heretics as polluted groups which defile the pure and virginal church by their disgusting beliefs and behaviours, instigated by Satan and his minions. On a more static level, the priesthood and the monastic movements demonstrated their superiority over the laity through their sexual purity, whether in total celibacy or in greater abstinence. Indeed, in many cases there was competition between the clergy and the monastics, with the latter appealing to their asceticism to enhance their status.
In Islam, the main purity rules are equally binding on all believers and are therefore a force for religious homogeneity rather than hierarchy. At the same time, Islamic ascetic and reform movements, whether medieval or modern, commonly used purity discourse to bring their point home (for a modern example, see Gauvain 2012).
Impurity in the Hebrew Bible is rarely linked to the realm of spirits, good or evil. An understanding that demons cause or accompany impurity first surfaces distinctively in the Gospel narratives on Jesus’ exorcism of ‘impure spirits’ (Wahlen 2004), though the precise nature of their impurity, generally linked to disease and madness, is unclear. More significant was the identification of the pagan gods as demons and the resulting demonization of idolatry (LXX Ps. 95: 5; 1 Cor. 10: 20–1), as well as the casting of demons as instigators of other sins, especially of sexual nature, by Hellenistic Jews and early Christians. Demons could thus be identified as the quasi-material carriers of the impurity of sin, providing early Christians with a vehicle for conceptualizing defilement, contagion, and purification as physical processes with a strong moral dimension. Demons played star roles in Christian descriptions of struggle between good and evil, whether intra-personal (as in monastic literature, e.g. Athanasius’ Life of Anthony), social, interreligious, or cosmic (Origen, On First Principles 1.5, 8). These diverse roles, and the association of demons with the impurity of sin and corporeality, at times expressed in bodily pollution (e.g. in seminal emissions, an idea present also in the medieval Kabbalah) continued into medieval Christianity (Elliott 2011).
In Islam and Judaism the dominant legal discourse of impurity was not closely linked to demons; ritual impurity was a result of natural bodily processes, and therefore did not require demonic explanation. There are a good number of exceptions to this rule, however: defecation, which requires purification, is linked to demonic activity in Islam, and wuḍūʼ purification is said to drive away demons (Katz 2002: 13, Gauvain 2012: 68); a much-discussed Jewish text explains the method of purification from death defilement by analogy to healing by expulsion of demons (Pesiqta De Rav Kahanna 4.7, though the text itself has its doubts about this analogy).
Though Islamic sources of defilement, rituals of purification, and general attitude towards ritual purity bear many resemblances to the corresponding Jewish ritual purity system, they are by no means simply adaptations of the Jewish rites. For example, while the human corpse is perhaps the source of strongest defilement in Jewish law, most Muslim authorities do not recognize human corpses as defiled or defiling. In the Bible impurity is contagious, passing from person to person, while in Islamic law it only affects the person first in contact with it. In general, while in Judaism impurity appears to have a tangible/physical existence, in Islam it is cast as a legal construct. For example, though menstruation is defiling, if a woman has an ongoing emission of blood due to illness she may nevertheless pray, since otherwise she will not be able to pray at all. Many scholars have seen this as the expression of a tendency to leniency in Islamic ritual law, at times explicitly opposed to supposed Jewish rigorousness. However, the opposite is also true: in Islam daily prayer can only be performed when pure, while in Judaism the consensus (arrived at after some deliberation) is that impurity does not normally prevent prayer. Therefore, defilement necessarily has greater significance in the day to day religious life of Muslims than of Jews. Indeed, this can be seen in the placement of the chapter on ṭaharah (purity) at the very beginning of Islamic legal tracts.
Christian ritual purity practices have a rather different flavour from those of Judaism and Islam; they were shaped by several factors, somewhat at odds with one another. As a religion which created sacred spaces (churches), times (festivals), people (saints), and objects (relics and the Eucharist), ritual purity was essential for determining and marking off hierarchies of sacrality. Furthermore, the focus on the human body in Christian theologies of incarnation and resurrection and the correspondence between the body of the individual Christian, of the community, and of Christ meant that attitudes towards the body were central for Christian practice and society. At the same time, the theological importance of the body and the insistence that the person is a combination of body and soul meant that for Christians, bodily ritual practices had to have an explicit moral or spiritual dimension. Thus, while ritual purity rules certainly exist in Christianity, they are typically overlaid with moral language and/or symbolism.
To these internal dynamics we may add interactions with Jewish and Graeco-Roman traditions in the formative first centuries of Christianity, which led to much theoretical discussion of the ideas and practices of impurity. Already in the Gospels Jewish purity rituals are criticized, though there is much scholarly debate concerning the precise extent of this criticism: did it entail total rejection of such rituals or a more traditional critique of external practice lacking in true meaning. By the third century, in any case, Jewish dietary laws were almost unanimously rejected by Christians, and this rejection was cast as an opposition to the idea and practice of ritual purity in general. Since all animals were created by the good God, asked Christian theologians, how could some of them be pure and others impure? Following the Gospels, most Christian writing on the subject concerned the Jewish dietary laws rather than other Jewish purity rules. Nevertheless, issues such as death defilement, leprosy, or genital emissions were also treated to a similar argument: purity and defilement are—or should be—products of the heart or mind of the person, relating to vices and virtues, and not of the body or its actions. A conception of purity in which the vagaries of the body are treated without direct recourse to moral semantics was non-comprehensible and unacceptable for Christians.
Despite this legacy of anti-Judaism and anti-ritualism, however, Christians actually did hold to many purity rules similar to the Jewish ones. The prohibition on food offered to idols and on blood, and their perception as defiled, was common through most of the first millennium, and additional dietary rules were found in many communities. Menstruation and seminal emissions were considered impure and precluding participation in the Eucharist as early as the third century.
Additional aspects of Christianity’s attitude towards purity are found in the rituals of baptism and the Eucharist. To a greater extent than Jewish or Muslim rituals, the sacraments of Catholic and Orthodox Christian denominations have a strong sacral dimension: they are performed in sacred space and by a priesthood; the wine and bread of the Eucharist, as well as the water and oil used in baptism, are seen as sacred and blessed by the Holy Spirit, and in the case of the former, as the body of Christ. This sacrality leads to purity requirements for participating and especially for officiating in these rituals. These requirements include not only sexual abstinence prior to performing the ritual, but also (in the case of baptism) exorcisms of demonic spirits preceding baptism, or demands of purity from circumstantial defilements such as menstruation or seminal pollutions. Furthermore, both baptism and Eucharist are perceived not only as holy but also as purifying from sin, i.e. as rituals in which God purifies the adherents from their sins. Such a dimension of purification from sins is less central in mainstream Jewish and Muslim rituals, though it features in the more mystical traditions.
The Abrahamic religions are not alone in their purity and defilement discourse: though each religious tradition is of course unique, the functions and phenomenology of the purity discourses and practices of many religions are broadly similar to those described above. Nevertheless, there are some characteristics of the Abrahamic religions which lead to particular problematics and dynamics in the development of their purity discourses.
The very idea of impurity indicates that some created things are essentially incompatible with the sacred sphere, and indicates that value ascription may derive not only from the actions of humans as moral agents but also simply exists as part of creation. For dualist theologies impurity is simple to explain: its source is some totally evil sphere or creator. For monotheistic schemes, however, there is at times a tension between the fundamental belief in a single and good creator and the independence of impurity. The Abrahamic religions utilized two main avenues to accommodate impurity in the monotheistic programme: either it is not evil, but rather a temporary result accompanying bodily processes (as in the dominant Jewish and Muslim ritual purity traditions); or it is indeed evil, but derives from sin—moral decisions made by free-willed agents, whether human or demonic (producing moral impurity in all three religions). These explanations, however, were never totally successful. The first is difficult to square with the perception both in Islam and in Judaism that certain substances or animals are naturally and inherently impure; the second, with the fact that not all types of impurity, even in Christianity, can be directly linked to a sin. Furthermore, dualist mythologies if not mythogonies are found in the Abrahamic religions, and then we encounter terms such as ‘powers of impurity’, when impurity is closely associated with evil spiritual beings. Although these powers are formally subordinate to the Creator, in fact they function as largely independent agents.
Another problematic is the status of the human body. In all three religions, the body is the focus of a spectrum of views and practices, between conceptions of the perfected human body as imago dei and of the body as a husk, obstacle, or prison for the soul. Ritual purity rules in Islam and Judaism cohere with a view of the body as perfectible, at least temporarily; though it is always susceptible to defilement, the body can be purified so as to approach sacred places or be compatible for worship (though the picture is certainly complicated by the conception that most impurities derive from the body itself; see Katz 2002: 164–86, 207–9). In both religions, however, ascetic and mystic currents saw the usual purity rules as capable of refining the body only up to a point, beyond which more rigorous purity practices may be required; even these cannot totally purify the embodied person. In Christianity the lack of ordered ritual purity practices meant that ascetic currents, along with their purity discourse, were more dominant, and that options for temporary bodily purification, though recognized (e.g. purification as allowing access to the Eucharist), were less central in the purity discourse, which centred on more radical purification through asceticism, baptism, or penitence. Furthermore, accepted doctrines of Original Sin informed a view of the body as inherently flawed and fallen, only partly purifiable through the rituals of the church (Beatrice 1978). Nevertheless, ascetic practices could be conceived not only as a total rejection of the defiled body in favour of the soul, but also as its refinement in order to gain an exalted, angelic, pure body (Miller 1994). The bodies of Jesus and of the ‘immaculate’ Virgin provided models for such pure and purified bodies (Stroumsa 1990; Foskett 2002).
Despite, and perhaps because of, the similarities between the purity discourse and practices of the three religions, they themselves were frequently the focus of polemic, reciprocal differentiation, and stereotyping. Both Christians and Muslims characterized Jewish purity practice as harsh and inhumane, as opposed to their own practices which are more lenient and reasonable. Patristic and later Christian writers worked to create an image of Jewish purity practice as ritualistic, arbitrary, and external, not corresponding to moral and spiritual truths. The identification of Judaism with purity practices, especially of food (kashrut), in turn served to reinforce an image of Judaism itself as a religion obsessed with technical bodily purity, rather than religious truths and morals. At the same time, some writers identified purity practices as a universal feature of human religion, essential for honouring the divine and setting apart the sacred.
1 For similar (though by no means identical) typologies in classical sources, see Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed 3.47; Nawawi, as cited in Reid 2013: 170.
2 e.g. Ibn el-Arabi, Mysteries of Purity (thirteenth century); The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (tenth–eleventh century). For Plato on the purification of the soul from the influences and effects of the body in order to gain true virtue, salvation, and a good afterlife, see Phaedo 67–9.