Avodah Zarah 36

Oil greases the rabbis on today’s page of the Talmud. Oil is, in fact, an essential ingredient in one of the broadest slippery slope arguments the rabbis ever proposed.

Today’s daf sets out to explain why foreign oil is forbidden in the Mishnah. Rav posits that Daniel, a 6th-century B.C.E. Jew who served in the court of the Babylonian Empire and has his own eponymous biblical book, promulgated the original ban. Rav’s sparring partner, Shmuel, argues that the ban is a later innovation based that parallels concerns we’ve recently reviewed about foreign wine: We do not consume oil from a non-Jewish source because it may have come into contact with liquid seepage from vessels that were impure.

Complicating matters, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi (the redactor of the Mishnah) and his court reversed the ban, deeming oil from all sources permitted. If Daniel had indeed made the ruling, we should be surprised Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi had the authority to overturn it. After all, as Shmuel reminds us:

A court may not nullify the words of a peer court, unless the court (considering the active case) is greater in wisdom and in number than the other.

Is it possible that the deeply influential Daniel — a Jewish politician in the highest court of a foreign empire — held lesser authority than Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi? Shmuel is doubtful.

Stacking the evidence against Rav’s view that Daniel made the original prohibition, the Talmud cites the sage Bali’s recollection that Rav himself had once taught that foreign oil was prohibited by a special gathering of students of Hillel and Shammai, who gathered in the attic of one of their colleagues to resolve 18 new decrees (see Mishnah Shabbat 1:4). These pronouncements included forbidding Jews from the bread, wine, the daughters of gentiles. And their oil.

Having established the ban was likely a rabbinic innovation, the next logical question is: Why did Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi overturn the ban? For the simple reason that a law most people are unwilling to follow will be short-lived. Rav Mesharsheya tells us that before Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi officially overturned the ban on foreign oil many Jews consumed it anyway.

At this point, Rav’s case for Daniel authoring the oil ban has been utterly decimated, much as the ban itself later was. The sage Geniva explains that the bread, oil, wine and daughters of gentiles were all prohibited by the rabbis because of the fear that any one could turn Jews toward foreign worship. The Talmud expands on this and declares that the rabbis prohibited:

… their bread and their oil on account of their wine, their wine on account of their daughters, their daughters on account of a sexually illicit matter, and a sexually illicit matter on account of something else.

This is a rather austere and isolationist perspective. The Gemara expresses surprise at the severity of at least implicitly banning relationships between Jews and gentiles:

According to the Torah, the prohibition pertains to seven nations condemned by God in the Hebrew Bible, but those sages came and decreed that the prohibition applied to the remnant of all other nations.

The Torah prohibits the Israelites from relationships with seven forbidden Canaanite nations. Some rabbis read this as a warning against fraternizing with any non-Jews.

Oil, schmoil. Today’s daf never pins down the true architect of the prohibition on foreign oil, but in leading an excavation into the heart of this decree the Talmud clearly demonstrates the root of the anxiety: A Jew who becomes too close with a gentile (even in ways as minor as breaking bread together) may ultimately fall into the trap of worshipping a false god. Oil, they fear, greases that slippery slope.

The Talmud today can inform new debates in the broader Jewish community about rabbis officiating at interfaith weddings. Jews who idealize a life deeply informed by traditional texts must answer whether the marriage between a Jew and non-Jew truly leads to the Jewish partner becoming an idolater. And one who rejects the idea that a Jew who marries someone from outside the fold is fated to worship false idols must consider what, if any, values in or beyond these pages of Talmud should dictate how a Jew today can relate to a larger world where so few of us are Jews.

Oil failed as the dividing line between Jew and gentile in the ancient world. Despite the prohibition, Jews wanted their neighbors’ delicious oil. Do we survive as Jews by living exclusively within the confines of our inheritance? Or do we find that our religion continues even when we have pushed for new boundaries?

Read all of Avodah Zarah 36 on Sefaria.

This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on July 24, 2025. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.