170 A History of Judaism
was done on condition that she not prepare foods requiring conditions
of cleanness under the supervision of an ordinary person.’^17
The enthusiasm for scrupulous tithing which distinguished these
haverim had lost its appeal by the medieval period. In part this was
because the medieval rabbis decreed that the duty to set aside tithes did
not apply in the diaspora, on the basis of a ruling in the Mishnah that
‘every precept dependent on the Land [of Israel] is in force only in that
land.’ A preoccupation with purity remained, but by the sixth century
ce within rabbinic circles the term haver came to be transferred to the
rabbinic sages themselves, so that it was said that ‘the haverim are none
other than the scholars.’ But one powerful legacy of the original haverim
that remained throughout the history of Judaism was the centrality of
the home, and especially the kitchen, as a locus of piety. It was there that
kosher dietary laws could and should be observed with scrupulous
care.^18
Allegorizers
The philosopher Philo, a contemporary of Rabban Gamaliel, would
have agreed with these haverim on the importance of the purity and
tithing laws in the Torah. He noted with approval that Moses ‘ordains
that first- fruits should be paid of every other possession; wine from
every winepress, wheat and barley from every threshing- floor, similarly
oil from olives, and fruits from the other orchard- trees, so that the
priests may not have merely bare necessities, just keeping themselves
alive in comparatively squalid conditions, but enjoy the abundance of
the luxuries of life and pass their days amid cheerful and unstinted com-
fort in the style which befits their position.’ But for Philo the significance
of keeping the Torah as scrupulously as possible lay not just in the act
itself but in its deeper meaning. He devoted much of his life, and many
treatises, to elucidating what that meaning might be.^19
Enough is known about Philo’s life from his writings to establish
quite precisely the cultural and social milieu he inhabited, even if the
details of his own career are elusive. He was born in c. 10 bce into a
leading family in the long- established Jewish community of Alexandria,
soon after the Roman conquest of Egypt had demoted the city from a
royal capital dedicated to conspicuous consumption to a teeming entre-
pot in which a disgruntled population witnessed the power and wealth
of the hinterland exported to Rome.