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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.

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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).

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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).

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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.

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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

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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