A Foetus Shaped Like a Sandal: Birth Anomalies in Talmudic Tractate Niddah

Abstract

The talmudic tractate Niddah mainly deals with menstruation, as well as with a number of collateral cases, such as a bnormal genital discharges, doubtful childbirths, and miscarriages. The assumption that underlies the connection between menstruation and miscarriage is that each of these issues can be formalized as a "discharge"-regardless of what is actually expelled from the woman's body.Among these collateral issues, the case of a foetus shaped like a "sandal" is particu larly interesting for the semantic difficulty it presents as well as for its juridical importance.1 Etymology and semantics of the term ‫ סנדל‬ / sandāl First of all, the Hebrew term ‫ סנדל‬ / sandāl is not difficult to interpret, for it is rather obvious. It is clearly modelled on the morphology and semantics of two almost homographic terms: the Greek term σάνδαλον / sandalon and the Persian term ‫سندل‬ / sandal (that is also reflected in the later Arabic ‫صندل‬ / ṣandal); accordingly, the Hebrew term ‫ / סנדל‬ sandāl designates a very common open type of footwear: a "sandal." 1 Yet the linguistic Sitz im Leben is actually more complex when examined accurately. It is mostly complicated by the unclear, complex transmission of several morphologically related terms-mostly from the Persian and Arabic milieus-that indeed exhibit a quite diverse semantics. Indeed, there are several linguistic formations deriving from a common root, *sandal, that are disseminated in several Eastern as well as Middle Eastern ancient languages: Sanskrit, Persian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic. These different lexemes appear to catalyze around a number of semantically discrete terms that are morphologically very close but that designate four different entities: a type of footwear, a plant, a boat, and a fish. * A first draft of this paper was delivered, in an abridged form, as a conference paper at the European Association for Jewish Studies congress in Paris in July 2014 and then, in a longer, more elaborated form, as a workshop paper at the "Contemporary Bioethics and the History of the Unborn in Islam" (COBHUNI) at the University of Hamburg in April 2016. I would like to thank Prof.