Avodah Zarah 012

The exterior of a town in which there is idolatry is permitted. If the idolatry was outside the town its interior is permitted. What is the law [regarding someone who] goes there? - If the road leads specifically to that place it is forbidden; but if [the person] is going to another place through it, it is permitted. A town in which there is idolatry will have some shops that are decorated and some that are undecorated. There was such a case in Bet-She'an and the sages said that the decorated ones are prohibited and the undecorated ones are permitted.

1:
At first glance this mishnah is very difficult to understand. What can it mean by a town in which there is idolatry? Did not all the non-Jewish towns have idolatry of one kind or another? And how could the idolatry sometimes be outside the town and sometimes inside the town? In this mishnah does the term 'idolatry' indicate a statue or an idol or does it indicate some kind of ceremony? And what have shops to do with all this - be they decorated or not?

2:
Rabbi Ovadyah of Bertinoro understands our mishnah to be speaking of the occasion of an idolatrous festival. He explains that it is permitted to do business with the non-Jews outside the town because the fact that they are outside it is a sure indication that they are not all that interested in what is going on inside the town. He further explains that the issue of the road is concerned whether the Jew is travelling on a road that leads directly to that town and only to that town - in which case he is forbidden to travel that road - or whether it also goes to some other place - in which case he may travel along that road. He also says that decorated shops charge more because a part of their profit goes to a donation to the pagan worship.

3:
Rambam claims that our mishnah is simply forbidding Jews to go to towns in which there is idolatry:

And now Rambam launches into yet another diatribe against Christianity (for an earlier one see AZ 006):

Therefore, you must understand that it is prohibited to deliberately pass through any Christian town which contains a church - which is an idolatrous temple beyond all doubt - and obviously it is forbidden to dwell in such a town. But God has delivered us into their hands and we must live in their towns against our will in fulfillment of the verse [Deuteronomy 4:28] "There [in the land of your exile] you will serve man-made gods of wood and stone." If this is the law concerning the town all the more is it forbidden to enter into a church: it is almost forbidden just to see one, let alone to approach it and certainly not to enter it.

It is interesting to note that the verse which Rambam quotes is part of the Torah reading on Tish'ah b'Av. It seems to me that what distressed Rambam more than anything else was the doctrine of the trinity. For Rambam a triune god could not possibly have anything to do with 'emunat ha-yichud', pure, unadulterated monotheism. The fact that Christians had visual depictions of God and the saints and even made obeisance to them was also, for Rambam, a certain indication that Christianity was idolatry. He is clearly aware that Jews do live together with Christians in some parts of the diaspora (and even in Eretz-Israel itself) and he sees this as part of God's punishment of Israel. I wonder what the sages of northern Europe who were his contemporaries would have thought of this explanation.

4:
However, be all that as it may, both of these explanations - that of Rabbi Ovadyah and that of Rambam - are based on the discussion in the Gemara [AZ 11b-12a] - and, as we shall see - they are wrong!

To be continued.

In the discussion section in AZ 010 I wrote: I suspect that these statuettes were small so that they could be conveniently carried and that the original intention of the Hebrew word was derogatory.

Gideon Weisz writes:

I thought it was generally thought that "elilim", if it was a euphemistically derogatory word, referred to gilulim (where in Deuteronomy we find gilulim explicitly, so in any case the association is documented). In which case gelel or galal is the source, i.e., animal droppings, maybe especially goats and such. So, I wondered whether you didn't mention that because of some uncertainty about the nature of the derogatory reference, or because the details might become too cumbersome and didn't seem germane, or for the sake of delicacy (pardon the expression)?

I respond:

The Hebrew word elil is a diminutive form of the word el which denotes a god (or God). My intention was to indicate that the diminutive form of the word is derogatory: not 'god' but 'godling'. The Hebrew word gilulim occurs only once in the Torah [Leviticus 26:30] but it occurs many times in the words of the prophets. Clearly it is associated with the word galal which does indeed mean an animal dropping or a turd. When the prophets use this term to describe pagan idols they are certainly being derogatory. The word does not appear in the Mishnah; it does appear twice in the Tosefta, but only in biblical quotations. The phrase avodat gilulim ["turd worship"] occurs four times in the Gemara. Interestingly enough, one of the occasions is in Pesaĥim 116a, where Rav maintains that on Seder night we must begin our discussion of the Exodus from Egypt with the passage "Originally our ancestors were turd worshippers". When the passage reached the traditional Hagadah the term avodah zarah was substituted!

In the mishnah several terms are used. There is no doubt that the original term used was avodah zarah - pagan worship. However, at a certain stage the term was replaced in many codices by the term akum which is an abbreviation for 'worship of stars and planets'. This substitute was urged by Christian censors in the middle ages because it clearly indicates pagans: Christians do not worship stars and planets.