On today’s daf, the Talmud quotes a beraita that puts limits on economic transactions with two distinct groups: non-Jews and Samaritans, a sect that shares ancestry and some scriptures with Jews, and therefore occupied a historical gray zone between Jew and non-Jew. The concern is not abetting idolatry, but the potential for physical violence.
One may not sell weapons or the equipment of weapons to these groups, and one may not sharpen weapons for them. And one may not sell them stocks, or iron neck chains or foot chains, or iron chains, neither to a gentile nor to a Samaritan.
While free trade might be an aspirational value for some economists, the beraita forbids Jews from selling weapons and their accoutrements to non-Jews. Similarly, the beraita prohibits the selling of various kinds of restraints used to physically and psychologically control captives and enslaved people. As a people, Jews are not supposed to support their own oppression, nor that of others. The Talmud’s discussion of this beraita includes a surprising sentiment.
Rav Dimi bar Abba says: Just as it is prohibited to sell to a gentile, it is prohibited to sell to a Jewish bandit.
What are the circumstances of this prohibition? If the thief is suspected of killing, it is obvious that it is prohibited — because he is a gentile! And if he is a bandit who does not kill, why not sell to him? Actually, Rav Dimi bar Abba is referring to a bandit who does not kill, and here we are dealing with one who steals, as sometimes he makes use of his weapon to save himself.
The Talmud reads Rav Dimi as insisting that you also can’t sell weapons to a Jewish thief, even a largely non-violent thief, since one who robs others is prepared to use physical violence to get what they want and then get away safely. But what is truly shocking to me in this discussion is the claim that a Jewish bandit who murders is not Jew at all: “He is a gentile!” After all, in all of Tractate Sanhedrin, where the rabbis discussed the criminal justice system that applies to Jews who commit heinous crimes, there was no suggestion that a Jew who murders is not a Jew.
There’s a famous 20th quip, dubiously attributed to Gertrude Stein, that, “A Jew is a Jew is a Jew” — meaning that there is nothing you can do to erase your Jewish identity, a fact that was certainly true under the Nazis. But here the Talmud states that, in fact, there are acts of violence so destructive that they do destroy one’s connection to Judaism. This phrase is so surprising that the Steinsaltz translation actually adds a modifier: “He is (the same as) a gentile.”
But that’s not what the text really says. According to the language of the Talmud rendered literally, there are acts so heinous that one who commits them stops being Jewish. Making one’s living as a murderous bandit is a bridge too far — grounds for losing one’s claim to Jewish peoplehood.
If we take this phrase in the Talmud seriously, we are left with a series of questions without easy answers: What does it mean to see our Jewish identities as contingent on certain kinds of behaviors? What does that mean for our understanding of Judaism as a religious, ethnic or social identity? What does it mean for the Jewish community if the rabbis don’t see someone as Jewish, but the non-Jewish world does? The Talmud today reminds us that we need to continually interrogate even those assumptions we largely take for granted. We can never stop critically thinking about our traditions and our lives.
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