In the above-listed binary distinctions, introduced by the Toseftato
complement and to supplement the Mishnah’s agenda, it is clear that the
Toseftais not simply engaged in a process of softening the Mishnah’s author-
itative stance. Although the latter is the often proffered explanation for
the differences between Mishnaic and Toseftan law on these particular
issues, it is, in my view, clearly a category error to ask why the later Tosef-
tan authorities have abandoned or moderated the Mishnah’s stance regard-
ing Jews’ interaction with Gentiles on the latter’s holy days. What Tosefta
is, in fact, asking is this: What does the Mishnah’s stance on commercial
interaction with Gentiles on their holy days really mean, when one consid-
ers the fuller array of differentiated social spheres and social distinctions
that are relevant to mapping the specific situation with which the Mishnah’s
rulings deal?
For the Tosefta,the cultic sphere of Gentiles is definitely off limits, just
as in the Mishnah.In the sphere of casual commercial exchange, however,
generally speaking, there is no differentiation between Jewish and non-
Jewish realms, but Jews and Gentiles are considered to inhabit a com-
mon world. So, too, in the case of the civil (not the civic) public sphere,
where Jews and Gentiles are once again understood to be co-inhabitants,
with full mutual responsibility for polite civil interaction. But the private
sphere, for the Tosefta,is something else entirely. There is a strong Tosef-
tan tendency to exclude Jews and Gentiles from one another’s private
domains, with flexible modalities for handling generally permitted com-
mercial activity.
The differentiation between the territory of the homeland and that of
the Diaspora, also introduced by the Toseftain this context, seems to be
parallel to the distinction between the private and public domains. The
land of Israel is, in some sense, private to the Jewish people as a whole,
although Gentiles clearly also inhabit it; which is, of course, not the case
for the personal private domain of individual Jews. The Diaspora, interest-
ingly, by contrast, is not akin to the private domain of the Gentile. Rather,
it is a kind of public domain, in which peoples of various religious persua-
sions are equal co-inhabitants.
Mishnah Avodah Zarah1:8–9 has preceded the Toseftain distinguishing
between the land of Israel, Syria, and other lands for the purposes of rent-
ing and buying real property. (Syria’s status is intermediate because of the
rabbinic conviction that the Davidic kingdom included much of Syria.) At
issue specifically for the Mishnahis the Mishnaic-rabbinic notion that bib-
lical law prohibits the sale of the biblical territorial inheritance of the
Israelites to non-Israelites, and the application of the laws of tithing and
nora
(Nora)
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