INTRODUCTION
Fairs in the life of ancient Israel touched every facet of society. Many
people were involved in the life of the fair, because it was the place in
which goods and services were sold and purchased. The fair included
luxury as well as small, inexpensive goods; land was sold, and slaves and
animals bought. This institution included many characteristics that were
considered offensive by the authors of the seminal literature of the Sages:
theMishnah,theTosefta,and both the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds.
However, many of the prohibitions against participating in the fair were
removed by the simultaneous introduction of ways in which Israelites
could be involved in this economic aspect of daily life.
Most secondary discussions of fairs and their meaning aim to demon-
strate how the Sages permitted the Israelites’ involvement in the fair
after the Bar Kochba revolt. Missing in the scholarly literature, how-
ever, is a survey of attitudes toward the fair in general. To what are the
Sages objecting? Do these objections parallel the general opposition to
idolatry in Christian literature of the same period? Drawing on the work
of Russian formalists (in particular, Bakhtin) and a modified formalist
(Canetti), we will seek to contextualize the underlying assumptions that
the Sages held toward surrounding non-Jewish culture through the life
of the fair.