Post on 09-Apr-2023
1
Published in:
Journal of Jewish Studies 56 (2005) 285-297
Magiros, nahtom and women at home: cooks in the Talmud:
Susan Weingarten
Food in the time of the Talmud was prepared and cooked
by a number of different sorts of people. Clearly, as in every
age, much food was prepared by women in their own homes for
their own families. But there are also male cooks mentioned in
the Talmudic literature, the magiros and the nahtom. This paper
will look in some detail at the evidence for the functions of these
different cooks, and the gendered division of their labour.
The magiros
It has become proverbial in the English language that
when the Israelites in the wilderness looked back longingly to
Egypt, what they remembered was the food – in Exodus 16:3
they speak of the „fleshpots‟, but in Numbers 11:5 it is also the
fish and the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the
onions and the garlic! Of course, both God and Moses
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Society for Biblical Literature,
Hellenistic Section, Denver, Colorado, in November 2001. I am grateful to Jan
Willem van Henten and Leigh Gibson for their invitation to speak, and to the
participants at this session for their comments.
2
disapproved. But mishnaic and talmudic times bring us a more
positive attitude towards nostalgic memories of food. In
Midrash Lamentations Rabbah on Lam. 3, 16 Rabbi Judah ha-
Nasi himself is shown looking back wistfully to the time when
the Temple still stood. And one of the things he longs for is the
food: he is commenting on the verse: „My soul is removed far
off from peace, I have forgotten prosperity.‟ The Midrash says
Before the destruction [of the Temple], a woman would take her
son to a magiros, a chef, and say to him: Teach my son the trade. He
would say to her: let him stay with me five years and I will teach him a
hundred dishes made from eggs! Rabbi [Judah ha-Nasi] heard this and
said „Such luxury we have never seen (because we live after the
destruction.) We have forgotten prosperity.‟
There is quite clearly no condemnation here of the longing
for the wonderful variety of food prepared by the magiros. The
term magiros, pl. magirosin מגירוס, pl. מגירוסין which I have
translated as „chef‟ appears a number of times in the talmudic
literature, and clearly comes from the Greek word mageiros,
In the talmudic literature it has a generally positive
connotation and appears to be used of people of some status. In
Midrash Leviticus Rabbah and parallels a king has two
competing magirosin.
3
The first cooked a dish for him, and it pleased him. The second
cooked another dish for him and he ate it and it pleased him. But we do
not know directly which pleased him more. We may infer, however that
since the king enjoined the second cook saying to him „Prepare this dish
for me again‟ the dish of the second pleased him more.
Midrash Numbers Rabbah 4 compares a magiros to a
priest:
When the magiros of a human master walks out in the street, he
wears fine clothes, but when he prepares to do his cooking he takes off
these fine robes and puts on old rags and an apron. Moreover, when he
sweeps the stove or the oven he puts on clothing even worse than this.
But in the presence of the Holy One blessed be He, when the priest swept
the altar and removed the ashes from it he put on his magnificent
garments.1
We shall return to this connection between magiros and
altar later. Meanwhile it is clear that the magiros is a high status
and positive figure, and there is no condemnation of the
enjoyment of good food.
1 Cf A. Barr, P. Levy, The official foodie handbook: Be modern, worship food
(London,1984) 127 on the great Escoffier, chef at the Savoy, Carlton and Ritz in Paris
and London in the early 20th
century, who improved the working conditions of cooks
and „ruled that cooks were not to be seen in dirty “whites” by the public and must
change before going out in the street.‟
4
The word magiros is thus found a number of times in
talmudic literature. How did the Greeks regard it? For anything
related to food in the Greek world, including chefs, the prime
source is the work of Athenaeus of Naucratis, the
Deipnosophists, or the Philosophers at Dinner. Athenaeus was
contemporary with Rabbi Judah haNasi. He lived in Hellenistic
Egypt around the end of the second century and the beginning of
the third and his work collects much earlier information in the
form of direct quotations from literary works, and includes a
number of discussions of the mageiros his origin and
function.2 I say „his,‟ because Athenaeus specifically says that
there is no such thing as a mageiraina, a female chef. Athenaeus
describes the mageiros, like the midrash we saw above, as
wearing an apron as a sign of his trade. He tells us (Deip. xiv
659f) that the mageiros was a free man of some status. He was
originally the person who offered the public sacrifices to the
gods, killing the sacrificial animal, roasting the meat and
distributing it to the people. This was obviously the perception
of the derivation of this word at the time, and an interesting
parallel to the midrash we saw above which compared the
magiros of the human master to the priest at the altar of the
Holy One blessed be He. It would seem that many people in the
ancient Greek world, as in ancient Palestine, never ate meat
2 See generally on the mageiros in ancient Greece :G. Berthiaume Les rôles du
mageiros: étude sur la boucherie, la cuisine et le sacrifice dans la Grèce ancienne
(Paris, 1982) ; M. Detienne, J.-P. Vernant (eds.) The cuisine of sacrifice (tr. P.
Wissing of La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec, Chicago, 1989).
5
except from public sacrifices. The word mageiros, then, came to
be used for anyone who killed animals for food, and also for
anyone who cooked meat. Because meat was an extra, a luxury,
mageiros came to be used for someone who cooked luxury
foods. Greeks saw meals as having three main components.
Sitos, food, meant bread. Opson was what was eaten with bread,
the side dish. (Then after the meal came wine.) When Socrates
wants to condemn a young man for excessive indulgence in
luxuries, he calls him an opson-eater – someone who ate side-
dishes, not bread. 3 In contrast to Athenaeus‟ philosophers at
dinner there was a general tendency among several other
philosophical schools – Stoics, Cynics, Platonists – to deplore
luxuries, including food. Thus, for example, when Plato writes
of the role of the physician he compares it unfavourably with
that of the mageiros - the physician thinks of doing good, and
not of giving pleasure, the mageiros of giving pleasure and not
of doing good.4
John Wilkins has written a book recently on the mageiros
called The Boastful Chef,5 for as Athenaeus tells us „the whole
tribe of mageiroi is given to boasting (Deip. viii 290). Here
Wilkins shows how mageiroi and cooking form an important
3 Xenophon Memoirs of Socrates 3, 14 ; see on this: J. Davidson Courtesans and
Fishcakes: the Consuming Passions of Classical Athens (London, 1997)3-35 esp. 21-
2 4 Plato Gorgias 464f. (opsopoiike); 500 (mageirike empeiria).
5 J. Wilkins The boastful Chef: the discourse of food in ancient Greek comedy
(Oxford, 2000).
6
part of the subject matter of many ancient Greek comedies,
including many plays which we know now only from the
fragments preserved by Athenaeus. The „boastful chef‟ became
a stock character of these comedies, and much use is made
humourously of cut-up body parts. Sometimes this is rather
black humour, including parts of human bodies. Tragedy also
dealt sometimes in cut-up parts of human bodies, as when the
wicked Medea persuades the daughters of Pelias to chop up and
cook their old father to rejuvenate him.6 This myth is satirised in
Aristophanes‟ Knights where the mageiros is to chop up Demos,
the personification of the citizens of Athens, to rejuvenate him.
I want to turn now to look at the way the word mageiros
is used in some LXX contexts, and then turn to see
how Philo uses the word.
The Hebrew word t-v(b)-h טבח is ambiguous when taken
out of context. It can either mean tevah, slaughter, or tabah,
cook. We have seen how the Greek mageiros was
also originally seen as functioning as a sacrificer or slaughterer
of animals, and that its use as chef came later. The LXX thus
uses mageiros to translate tabah טבח as soldier or
killer of men (as in IKings 9:23) with archimageiros
quite often as sar ha-tabahim שר הטבחים or rav
ha-tabahim רב טבחים as in IIKings 25:8. It also uses mageiros
6 Hypothesis of Euripides‟ Medea; apparently in Aeschylus‟ lost Nurses of Dionysus.
See on this Wilkins The boastful chef: 198 in a discussion of the chopping up and re-
juvenation of Demos in Knights.
7
in the context of sacrificial cooking in Ezekiel 46:24.
In Genesis 37:36, the story of Joseph in Egypt, the Hebrew text
talks of sar ha-tabahim שר הטבחים referring to Potiphar. Sar ha-
tabahim שר הטבחים is translated by the Vulgate and the AV as
chief of the guard or the army, following Onkelos and the
Jewish commentators, who take it as referring to tevah,
slaughter, here, although it could also be tabah, chef, in this
context. The LXX translates sar ha-tabahim שר הטבחים here as
archimageiros , and thus preserves the ambiguity
of the Hebrew term.
I noted above that Athenaeus writes that there is no such
thing as a female mageiros. Here he is quoting a play by
Pherecrates, a prize-winning comic author of the fifth century
BCE, called The Oven [or The Vigil] (which has not survived)
where one of the characters says that just as there are no male
perfumers so there is no such thing as a female chef – he coins
the word mageiraina. However, a feminine form of mageiros
- not mageiraina but mageirissa
- does exist in the Septuagint. When the prophet
Samuel is trying to persuade the Israelites not to take a king, he
tells them that their daughters will be taken by the king for
perfumers, cooks tabahot and bakers (ISam 8:13). The טבחות
LXX translates these cooks as mageirissas . Could
the writers of the LXX have been aware of this passage in
Pherecrates (or something similar) where perfumers and female
8
chefs were mentioned together, and so used the word
mageirissa to translate female cooks, to convey the message that
the king would use their daughters in occupations that are not fit
for women?
Like Athenaeus, Philo too lived in Hellenistic Egypt,
although about a hundred to a hundred and fifty years earlier.
We have already noted the tri-partite division of a Greek meal,
into bread, opson and wine. In On drunkenness 214 Philo lists
the sitopoios who bakes bread, the opsartutes
who prepares the opson, the side-dish and the
oinochoos who served the wine. A few lines later, in
216, he uses the word mageiros in place of opsartutes
so that it is clear that for him too, the mageiros
was not a simply basic cook, but someone who
cooked the extras, the luxuries.7 And Philo disapproved of
luxuries, or any tendency to excess. Like Socrates, Philo also
talks disparagingly of gluttons as eaters of the opsonthe luxury
side dishes which often meant the meat.His explanation of the
Jewish dietary laws in Special Laws iv, 100f. was that they were
instituted to forbid Jews to eat the best and richest of meat and
fish, so that they should not be tempted into gluttony and excess.
Thus whereas Josephus‟ ascetic group, the Essenes, eat
bread and have their opson prepared for them by a mageiros
7 There does seem to have been a fine distinction between opsopoios/opsartutes and
mageiros (see Wilkins The boastful chef, 396f.) but Philo ignores this. 8 Spec. leg. iv, 91
9
,9 Philo‟s ascetic Therapeutae eat bread and have only
salt and hyssop for their opson.10
Philo writes elsewhere of the
biblical function of hyssop in purification: it was used as part of
a purification ritual by the High Priest as in Leviticus 14,
although the discussion he promises of the symbolic function of
hyssop in Special Laws i, is unfortunately not extant. However, I
wonder if Philo or his Therapeutae might have been influenced
by a real local food practice, still popular in today‟s Middle East
– bread rings or pitta-bread sprinkled with hyssop are still
widely sold.11
To return to our mageiros , Philo clearly
associates him with meat, and hence a tendency to excess. He
scorns the :
Erring and deluded life of men who have not undergone
purification, a life that finds its joy in the delights provided by bakers and
mageiroi and butlers. (Migration of Abraham 19)
Elsewhere (Confusion of tongues 95) he writes
9 Josephus on the Essenes : AJ xviii, ; BJ ii, 119f.
10 Prof. J. Efron has suggested to me that Philo‟s description of the Therapeutae may
be a Christian insertion. This may explain the extremes of their diet (not to mention
the presence of „nuns‟) but the attitude to food in the description is in keeping with his
attitude in the rest of his works. 11 Hyssop, ezov אזוב in biblical Hebrew, is nowadays commonly referred to by its
Arabic name of za‟atar. For hyssop, thyme and marjoram and the confusions between
them see AC Andrews „Hyssop in the Classical era‟ Classical Philology 56 (1961)
230-48; id. „Thyme as a condiment in the Greco-Roman era‟ Osiris 13 (1958) pp150-
156
11
It is the special mark of those that serve the Existent, that theirs are
not the tasks of cupbearers, or bakers or mageiroi or any other
tasks of the earth but in their thoughts [they] ascend to the heavenly
height.
Thus for Philo the mageiros provides the most earthly of
pleasures which can interfere with reaching the higher levels of
service of God.
I want to turn now to look at Philo‟s discussion of the
story of Joseph and in particular his description of Potiphar. We
have seen that the LXX (Genesis 37.36) uses the ambiguous
term archimageiros to translate the Hebrew sar
ha-tabahim שר הטבחים, and that this could mean either the chief
guard or the chief chef. Philo quite definitely prefers to see
Potiphar as chief chef. Potiphar, the archimageiros
is engaged in providing superfluous pleasures for
the belly, with no thought of what is beneficial, and here Philo,
following Plato‟s Gorgias, in Platonic vein contrasts the
mageiros with the physician: (Joseph 62)
As for the difference between mageiroi and physicians it
is a matter of common knowledge. The physician devotes all his energies
solely to preparing what is wholesome, even if it is unpalatable, while the
mageiros deals with the pleasant only and has no thought of what is
beneficial.
11
Philo goes even further than this in presenting the
mageiros as negative. I have already noted that he
associates the mageiros with meat in particular. And
it is clear both from his presentation of the Therapeutae and
from other places, that Philo had considerable sympathy with
vegetarianism.12
So on two occasions he presents his mageiros
as very negative indeed. Once it is connected with
Potiphar :
(Change of names 173)
Potiphar the eunuch and archimageiros because
in the way of a mageiros he slaughters living beings, chops and
divides them, piece by piece, limb by limb, and moves in a chaos of
lifeless carcasses, immaterial rather than material: and with his
elaborately seasoned dishes arouses and excites the appetites
Given this horrific image, we might very appropriately translate
mageiros as „butcher.‟ I have already noted that this
was indeed one meaning which Athenaeus attached to the word
mageiros. It might be argued that this is the influence of the
context, and although Philo clearly takes mageiros as chef
perhaps he was also aware that the Hebrew term tabah is indeed
associated with the root tevah, killing. Onkelos, in his Aramaic
translation of Genesis, translates sar ha-tabahim שר הטבחים as רב
12 cf. On dreams ii, 48-51.
12
.rav qatolaiya, chief killer קטוליא 13
But Philo also repeats this
violently negative image of a mageiros in a context that has
nothing to do with Joseph and Potiphar: In Every good man is
free 89 he writes of some of the bad rulers of Syria-Palestine,
that they were:
Potentates who … left no form of cruelty untried. They slaughtered
their subjects wholesale, or like mageiroi carved them
piecemeal and limb by limb whilst still alive…
Philo also presents kitchens mageireion in a
similarly negative way: these, he says, are places
„full of blood and smoke and cinders where the reason even more,
or at least no less than the body lives amid confusion and has no chance
of quietly retiring into itself.‟(Joseph 53)
Thus Philo seems to present an attitude towards the
mageiros which is nearer to that of his Greek predecessors,
although more negative, than to that of the Jewish midrashim.
Returning now to the midrashim which mention the
mageiros, I have already noted how the original Greek meaning
of the one who sacrifices, as well as the meaning of chef, seems
to be preserved in the midrash from Numbers Rabbah. Unlike
Philo, however, there are no negative connotations to this – the
13
Genesis 37:36
13
actions of the mageiros are compared to the sacred service of
the priest, who becomes metaphorically God‟s mageiros. The
sanctification of the activities of the mageiros is taken still
further in yet another midrash where God himself is presented as
mageiros, and here it is most definitely mageiros as chef,
without any connotations of slaughtering. This midrash is
quoted in the name of Rabbi Berekhiah, a third century CE rabbi
from Palestine. (Unfortunately we have no source which allows
us to be more exact about which place in Palestine Rabbi
Berekhiah lived in.) Jews are instructed to bring the omer, the
offering of the first fruits of the grain harvest, so that God as
magiros can have a cook‟s taste, and decide whether the
seasoning – dew, wind etc. is present in the correct quantities.
(Leviticus Rabbah 28:3 and parallels )14
According to R. Berekhiah, [God said]: I am your magiros, and
will you not let Me taste the dish prepared for you, so I may know what is
needed [for its seasoning] whether dew or rain?
R Berekhiah is saying that a good harvest needs the correct and
exact blending of rain and dew, which God as chef can only
decide on by tasting the ‘omer – the offering of first fruits of the
harvest. Note too, that unlike our previous mageiroi, here God is
a vegetarian chef.
14 Pesikta Rabbati: Piska 18 tr W G Braude (New Haven/London, 1968)
p383
14
This very beautiful midrash seems to me to present an
attitude to the mageiros which is not only not present in Philo
but indeed is quite foreign to him.
Also from third century Palestine comes yet another
reference to God as mageiros, from a very different context. The
Church father Origen moved from Alexandria in Egypt to
Caesarea, the capital of Roman Palestine, where he wrote,
taught and set up a library. Here he wrote around 247CE a
polemic work, Contra Celsum against the pagan Platonist
Celsus‟ Logos alethes in which Celsus had
attacked Christianity (and Judaism.) Among the various
diatribes which Celsus had flung at Christians, was the
accusation that the Christian God was like a mageiros because
he roasted the damned in hell! This is certainly a use of
mageiros as meat cook, recalling the ancient Greek comedies in
tone. The ascetic Christian Origen could hardly be supposed to
have approved of luxury cooking. He chooses to reply to this
jibe of Celsus, saying that God does not apply fire like a
mageiros, but that his fire is purifying, and a benefit to those
that need it.15
As seen above, his Jewish contemporary Rabbi
Berekhiah writes of God as a beneficial mageiros. Was Origen
aware of this Jewish metaphor of God as mageiros when writing
his anti-pagan polemic? Or was it just a coincidence?
Unfortunately the evidence is not really enough for us to decide.
15 Contra Celsum v, 14 (Celsus); 15 (Origen):
15
I have noted that Philo is no different from anyone else in
the ancient world, classical Greeks or talmudic Jews, in his
conceptual tri-partite division of the meal into bread, opson and
wine. Wine is a subject in its own right and I shall not be
dealing with it. The mageiros, as we heard from Philo, was the
opsartutes par excellence. God as mageiros, as we
saw, however, deals with wheat. For bread was the main food of
Jews and Greeks alike in antiquity.
Baking at home
I now wish to move to look at people involved in the
baking of bread in the private and the public spheres. When
looking at the high-status mageiros, who was often a public
figure, there were a number of classical and Hellenistic sources
available to us. The low-status woman in her own house was not
an object of interest for most classical writers, which is why the
Talmudic sources are so valuable in giving us a picture of her
life. In the case of yet another public figure, the professional
baker, I have taken a different approach, looking briefly at a
large number of Talmudic sources in order to build up the
picture.
Mishnah Qetubot (v,5) lays down that grinding flour,
baking bread and cooking are part of the duties of a woman to
16
her husband, unless she is rich enough to have maids to perform
some of her functions for her:
These are the works which the wife must perform for her husband:
grinding flour and baking bread and washing clothes and cooking food
and nursing her child and making his bed and working in wool. If she
brought him one maid she need not grind or bake or wash; if two she
need not cook or nurse her baby; if three she need not make ready his bed
or work in wool…
Grinding flour and baking bread come first in the list,
presumably because of their central importance in the diet. The
biblical virtuous woman in the book of Proverbs (31:10) was
said to get up before dawn to hand out food to her household,
and there is little reason to imagine this situation might have
changed by the time of the Mishnah. Daylight, especially in the
winter, was not to be wasted, and men would get up to work at
dawn. The women would use the time before dawn to prepare
the day‟s bread, grinding the flour, sieving it, making the dough,
kneading it and setting it aside to rise ready for baking.
I have noted that the Mishnah writes that if a woman had
one maidservant she was exempt from the necessity to grind or
bake for her husband. Thus only the poorest woman would grind
flour in her home hand-mill. The low status of the maidservant
who ground flour is reflected in Exodus 11:8 – which tells us
that all the first born of Egypt were to die, „from the first born of
17
Pharoah who sitteth upon the throne, to the first born of the
maidservant that is behind the mill‟ – the maid at the mill is the
very lowest grade of society from biblical times on.
After the grinding, the flour needed to be sifted. There
were different sizes of sieve, which let coarser or finer flour
through. The quality of the bread thus depended not only on the
raw material - wheat, barley or other grain16
- but on the fineness
or coarseness of the flour produced. Mishnah Shevi‟it v, 8
shows us a woman who needs to borrow two sorts of sieve or a
flour mill from her neighbour. The halakhic context here is very
interesting. What the Mishnah is actually asking here is whether
the wife of a haver, a man who had committed himself and his
family to the strictest observance of the laws of purity, could
lend her flour mill or sieves to the wife of an „am ha-aretz,
someone who was not committed to observing the laws of purity
in all their stringency?17
However, strict as he might be about
the laws of purity, the haver was also strongly committed to
observing the laws between man and his fellow, and to the
principle of acts of hesed, lovingkindness. Thus it was
concluded that his wife could lend these to her neighbour.
However strict the haver wanted to be about laws of purity,
these could not take precedence over what was a matter of life
or death for his neighbour – the ability to grind and sift flour for
16
Cf. M. Hallah i, 1 for the different types of bread grains. 17 On the haver and the ‘am ha-aretz see A. Oppenheimer The ‘Am ha-Aretz: a study
in the social history of the Jewish people in the Hellenistic-Roman period (Leiden,
1977).
18
the family‟s daily bread. As it says in Deuteronomy 24:6 „No-
one shall take the upper or the lower millstone as a pledge, for
he takes a man‟s life as a pledge.‟ The haver‟s wife was allowed
to lend her implements to her neighbour, but she was not
allowed to actually work together with her, presumably in case
her flour became contaminated. (Cf. Mishnah Toharot 7.4)
The woman baking in her own home was not always
alone. The Mishnah talks of women sometimes baking with a
friend, in which case there could be problems in distinguishing
whose dough belonged to whom (Mishnah Hallah 4).
Presumably members of the extended family would work
together as well, as is often recorded in traditional societies.18
Before Passover, with the large amount of work and the time
restrictions on baking matzah, unleavened bread, it is clear that
it was not uncommon for several women to work together to
speed up the baking process so that their dough would not have
time to ferment, something which was liable to happen very
quickly in the hot climate of Palestine. Mishnah Pesahim iii,4
writes:
Rabban Gamaliel says: Three women may knead dough at the
same time and bake it in the same oven one after the other.
18 Cf., for modern examples of women baking together in traditional Jewish
communities: Y. Kapah Halikhot Teman (Jerusalem, 1978, in Hebrew):mother and
daughters in the Yemen; and J. Bahloul The architecture of memory: a Jewish-
Muslim house in colonial Algeria, 1937-1962 (Cambridge, 1996=La maison de
mémoire1992): extended family in Algeria.
19
In other words, he is saying, the delay would not be enough for
the dough to ferment. However, the sages disagree:
Three women may work on the dough at the same time, one kneading,
one rolling out, and one baking. Rabbi Aqiva says: All women and all
kinds of wood and all ovens are not equal.
The Mishnah then continues:
If the dough swells, let her slap it with cold water.
In order to speed up the baking process, the sages
recommend that the women should each take a different task,
although they recognize that not even this will solve all
problems, and in the end they may have to resort to slapping the
dough with cold water to prevent it from rising. Thus the
Mishnah here provides us with a fascinating picture of a sort of
domestic production line.
The nahtom It is clear that not all baking was done by women in their
own homes. There was a gendered division of labour, for public,
professional bakers were male – the word used is nahtom. This
Aramaic word has a long history, being related to the Akkadian
21
nuhatimmu, in use from the time of Old Sumerian. 19
Nahtom is
found in both Babylonian and Palestinian sources, but we will
concentrate here on the picture given by the sources of the
nahtom in late antique Palestine. Nahtomim would prepare bread
to sell in the market in quantity, although sometimes a woman at
home would also prepare more than her family needed and sell
the surplus in the market (THallah i, 8). This does not seem to
have been common practice, however, and the rabbis generally
disapproved of women going to the market, saying things like
„The inevitable end of every woman who goes out into the
market-place is to fall into sin‟ (Midrash Genesis Rabbah viii,
12).20
The professional bakers would have larger and therefore
hotter ovens than the small domestic ovens, sometimes out in
the street rather than in a room or private courtyard. The
excavations of the main street of Herod‟s town of Antipatris
have revealed a row of shops with ovens sunk into the road
outside them.21
The remains of the town of Ostia in Roman Italy
19 Nuhatimmu = cook : Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (Chicago, 1980) 11/2, p.313. 20
Greek society also disapproved of young women in the market; there is only
evidence of old women selling there: A.Dalby „Food and sexuality in Classical
Athens: the written sources‟ in Food culture and history 1 (1993) ed G Mars, V
Mars, 178 21 M. Kokhavi Aphek-Antipatris: five seasons of excavations at Tel Aphek-Antipatris
(1972-1976) (Tel-Aviv, 1977) 12 and an unnumbered plate. Kokhavi interprets the
ovens as „circular bins‟, but Prof. M. Fischer thinks they were ovens (personal
communication).
21
also include a number of bakers‟ shops.22
Presumably they were
more necessary in towns, where people were more crowded
together and did not always have the courtyard space or
facilities to bake at home.
Nahtom is an unusual word which cannot be
confused with anything else in the Bar- Ilan computerised data-
base of sources where there are 202 occurrences of the word in
the talmudic literature.23
Ayali, in his Hebrew book on workers
and craftsmen in talmudic sources says that the nahtom is
mentioned more than any other craftsman in the talmudic
literature.24
The discussion here is not intended as an in-depth
analysis of all these extant sources, but they are all used together
to get a total picture of the nahtom. The sources inevitably come
from different periods, but I have not found any evidence so far
that methods of baking changed within the period of the
talmudic literature. Almost all the sources brought here come from
the Palestinan Talmudic literature., for the Babylonian Talmud was
redacted some hundreds of years after the Jerusalem Talmud
and in a geographically different place. However, it was also
based on the Palestinian Mishnah, and uses much of the same
material as the Jerusalem Talmud. But we must be careful when
assuming that the social contexts were the same in both cases,
22
Meiggs Ostia; Mau Pompeii and cf L. A. Moritz Grain-mills and flour in classical
antiquity (Oxford, 1958) . 23 The Responsa Project, Bar Ilan University, version 10 plus. 24 M Ayali Workers and craftsmen in the Talmud (Givatayim, 1987, in Hebrew)
22
and that we can use the evidence of one Talmud to enlighten us
about the other. Indeed, it is clear that different foods were
popular in different places: the Palestinan rabbis scorned the
Babylonian food called kutah, for example. Rabbi Yohanan said
the best thing to do with it was to spit it out!25
To return to the nahtom. This professional baker obviously
baked and sold much larger quantities than women baking in
their own home. This is clear from a number of sources.
Mishnah Hallah ii,7 tells us that a nahtom must give the priest
a 48th part of his dough as a dough-offering while a woman at
home is liable to a 24th
part, or none at all if she bakes only a
small quantity. It is clear from the context that this was because
the nahtom was expected to use much more dough. Tosefta
Pesahim (ii, 1) talks about when it is allowed to buy bread from
Samaritans after Passover, without fear of buying leaven which
has been kept over the festival. In other words, when can a
Samaritan baker be supposed to have used up all his or her stock
of flour? The answer is when he or she has baked three
ovensfull of bread, in other words, we are told, in three weeks
for a private baker, three days for a nahtom in a village and after
three ovensfull for a nahtom in a town. The oven of the nahtom
was much larger and hotter than a domestic oven. Thus Albeck
interprets M BB ii,3, which writes that the nahtom was not
25 BT Shabbat 145b.
23
allowed to set up shop underneath a place where food or drink
was stored, as being due to the problems of the heat.26
However, it could just as well have been due to the noise and
vibrations of grinding, as suggested by Ze‟ev Safrai27
, for we
know that some nahtomim ground their own flour. The
following source, from the late collection called Yalqut
Shim‟oni, (Devarim 808), which does, however, include much
earlier material, speaks of nahtomim grinding, and also working
all night, albeit in an emergency:
…It can be compared to a city which was in need of bread. The
people cried to the market controller. Two nahtomim stood and ground
all night. When they were ready to make their dough, the lamp went out
and they could not see. What did they do? They mixed their dough and
baked it and brought it out and filled the market. The market controller
came and saw that the loaf was mixed with barley flour. He said to them:
You deserve to have a hatchet taken to your necks and to be corrected in
[the eyes of] the whole city, but what can I do to you when you filled the
whole city in its time of trouble?‟
It is clear from this that the function of the nahtom, like the
sacrificial function of the mageiros, was a public function, here
under the aegis of the market controller, the agoranomos, who
was responsible for weights and quality of goods sold in the
26
C.Albeck (ed) M Baba Batra ii. 3, n. ad loc. Cf also BT Bava Batra 20b. 27
Z. Safrai The economy of Roman Palestine (London, 1994)
24
public market.28
Thus the bread made by the nahtom was more
uniform than that of a private person: his loaf kikar ככר was
made in a mould tfus טפוס which gave it a standard shape (JT
Demai 24d). This meant that if his loaves were found in the
street it was impossible to tell whose they were, while bread
baked in a private oven was more likely to be identifiable. (M
BM ii, 8) The work of the nahtom was indeed seen as work
which by its nature brought him into contact with the public –
like that of the bath-attendant, the hairdresser etc., so that if
someone sold himself into slavery his new master was forbidden
to make him work at this, so that his shame would not be always
publicly visible (Sifra Behar 5,7 and parallels).
The services of the baker were vital for the people he
serves – so that if there is no other nahtom in the town or village
he was allowed to bake even during his week of mourning, but
not obviously (Semahot, v,7). However, Avot de-Rabbi Natan
A,30, 5 (31,1) writes pityingly of people who buy from the
nahtom - which must mean that many people did so:
Someone who buys his bread in the market, what can he be
compared to? To someone whose grave has been dug and he is buried in
it. Someone who eats his own [bread] is like a baby who is raised at his
mother‟s breast.
28 On the agoranomos see D. Sperber The city in Roman Palestine (Oxford, 1999) ch.
3, with bibliography ad loc.
25
This source is referring to very poor people who are forced
to buy their bread because they cannot produce it themselves. In
contrast, the baby at his mother‟s breast represents someone
who has his own field to live on, which is seen as the natural
order of things.29
Avot de-Rabbi Natan A seems to have been
written after the Mishnah was completed in the third century,
but the version we have now is probably post-Talmudic.30
By
this time many Jews were no longer living in the Land of Israel
on their own land, and the source represents a nostalgia for a
sort of lost golden age, expressed through the image of women
who keep to their traditional functions of childrearing and
baking their own bread.31
There were quite often a number of nahtomim in any one
settlement - they were allowed to form a cartel and fix the price
of bread (T BM xi,25). And once again, if bread was found on
the road in a place where there were both Jewish and pagan
29
It is instructive to compare this source to William Cobbett‟s Cottage Economy of
1821-3: „How wasteful then, and indeed how shameful for a labourer‟s wife to go to
the baker‟s shop and how negligent, how criminally careless of the welfare of his
family must the labourer be who permits so scandalous use of the proceeds of his
labour… Servant women in abundance appear to think that loaves are made by the
baker as knights are made by kings.‟Cobbett too is objecting here to the woman who
buys bread rather than baking it at home, and blames her and her husband for
allowing this. In her classic work on breadmaking, English Bread and yeast cookery
(London, 1977), Elizabeth David comments that Cobbett‟s criticisms ignore the fact
that most cottagers had pitifully inadequate facilities for baking at home, not to
mention the fact that most of his intended audience were illiterate and couldn‟t have
read what he said. She concludes that the cottage part of Cobbett‟s economy was
figurative only. 30 G. Stemberger Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (Tr and ed M Bockmuehl,
Edinburgh, 1996) p226-7 31
Cf. BT Menahot 103b-104a, which expresses pity for the uncertain life of someone
who has to rely on the bread dealer פלטר paltar for his daily needs.
26
nahtomim, the Mishnah discusses whether it should be allowed
if there was a majority of Jewish bakers, or a majority of Jews in
the settlement – a majority of pagan bakers or pagans would
mean that it was forbidden. (M Makhshirin ii,8) The baker sifted
his flour, making different grades of bread from the different
grades of flour. (Tanhuma Tezave 1,5) We saw in the source
from Yalqut Shim‟oni above the trouble the nahtom got into
when he mixed different grades or kinds of flour in the dark. He
would then roll out his dough on a board (which was suceptible
to impurity). He would wet his hands to perform some of his
tasks – and there are discussions of whether it was permissable
to re-use this water for ritual hand washing before eating. It was
certainly not permissable to use „the water of the nahtom‟ for
Passover, however, for it was clear that water with flour in it
could ferment. (M Pesahim ii, 8) In fact, this was how the
nahtom made his bread rise, by putting a little of the previous
day‟s dough aside in water to ferment and produce se’or,
sourdough. Some times women would give him their own dough
to add to his se’or and he would ferment it for them. (M Hallah,
i, 7). The nahtom baked bread in a larger oven than the
domestic oven – it is sometimes referred to as a furnace in the
sources (Tanhuma Vayera 19,5). Thus one aggadah tells us that
the nahtom was able to put his hand in the oven and produce
either bread for his friends or hot coals for his enemy!
(Tanhuma Beshallah 20,5) Presumably his hand held a shovel to
27
extract the coals. Although baking was clearly the primary
work of the nahtom, the fact that he had a good heat source
available to him appears to have meant that he sometimes used
his oven for cooking other things – one source talks about his
adding spices to a cooking pot, although this source comes from
the Babylonian Talmud and may not be referring to Palestinian
practice (BT Betzah 29a). Another source, Palestinian this time,
mentions a roasting spit (M Kelim v,5) but since Athenaeus
talks of bread which may have been cooked on a spit (Deip iii,
111) it may be this which is being referred to here, rather than
meat. The nahtom would also use the residual heat in his oven to
warm up large amounts of water overnight, presumably after the
baking had finished, for we find he is not allowed to do this on
Friday night, even for use after the Sabbath (T Shabbat iii,2).
The nahtom‟s head must have got very hot bending over his
oven – a late source tells us he is allowed to remove his tefillin
from his head, and if he used both hands to take out the bread he
was allowed to remove them from his arm too (M Tefillin i, 16).
Like any shopkeeper, the baker was assumed always to praise
his own wares, and it became proverbial that the dough the
nahtom said was bad must be bad indeed! (Midrash Genesis
Rabbah 34,5).
We have already noted that the talmudic sources are very
concerned to know whether bread found in the road was allowed
to be eaten. They were indeed aware that bread is better fresh –
28
there is a discussion of the difference in laws relating to hot or
cold bread, although once again this is in the Babylonian
Talmud and we must be cautious when using it to relate to a
Palestinian context. (BT BM 56a). It is clear that if people
needed to be able to eat bread found in the road then the
population that the nahtom served was often extremely poor.
This is reflected in a further source which notes that someone
renting out a shop must give a year‟s notice if he wants his
lessee to leave, because a shopkeeper often gave long credit, but
a nahtom, who would also deal with the very poorest, must give
three years notice (M BM viii,6). Thus from these many brief
glimpses we can build up an over-all sketch of the baker
himself, his tools, his raw materials and the way he did his
work, and even his position in society.
This paper started with the magiros who told a woman
who brought him her son to be taught that before the Temple
was destroyed he could have shown him five hundred ways of
preparing eggs. We can now end with the parallel text about the
nahtom who tells a woman who brings him her son to be taught
that before the destruction he could have taught him five
hundred ways of baking bread: (Midrash Lamentations Rabbah,
iii,6/17)
My soul is removed far off from peace. I have forgotten prosperity
R. El„azar b. R. Jose said in the name of R. Hananiah b. R. Abbahu:
A woman of Caesarea once took her son to a nahtom and said to him:
„Teach my son your trade.‟ He replied to her: „Let him stay with me five
29
years and I will teach him five hundred confections baked with wheat‟…
R. Hanina and R Jonathan were sitting and reckoning [how many ways
there are of baking wheat] and got to sixty, when they stopped [i.e. after
the destruction they forgot the rest].
Thus an initial excursion into Talmudic cooking has led to
the identification of three different kinds of cooks responsible
for different domains of preparation – the mageiros, who was
primarily a meat chef, the nahtom the public professional baker,
as well as the nameless women who baked for themselves and
their families in the privacy of their own homes.
Susan Weingarten
Lady Margaret Hall
Oxford
March, 2003