Excerpted from my Master’s thesis
“The History of Niddah in America as Social Drama: Genealogy of a Ritual Practice”
I have chosen to use the term Niddah rather than the more common alternatives: Taharat HaMishpacha or Family Purity. Niddah is the biblical and rabbinic term for Jewish menstrual rituals. The word itself translates literally as “separation” or “put aside”[1]. This meaning evokes images of lonely, isolated women, shunned due to the impurity of menstrual blood, connotations present even in the Ketuvim (Writings) such as Ezra 9:11 and Lamentations 1:8[2] of the Jewish Tanak[3]. In late nineteenth century Germany,[4] the new term Taharat HaMishpacha, literally Purity of the Family, emerged. R. Miriam Berkowitz traces the usage of the new phrase,
“The termהחפשמה טהרת [Taharat Hamishpacha] was coined in the early 1900s, originally concerning the desirable lineage for a marriage partner, and then about the laws of Niddah specifically. It was not used when the Temple was standing. Rather it was introduced by poskim [deciders of Jewish law] like Rabbi Haim Ozer Grodzinski (1863-1940) in a teshuvah [legal response] in 1907 and Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaKohen Kook (1865-1935) to evoke a myriad of associations.”[5]
I understand this change as essentially an attempt to rebrand Niddah in a way that would be more appealing to Jews in these areas at that time. I have not found a historicization of the term Taharat HaMishpacha that describes the socio-cultural context in which the phrase was coined. However, my sense from the time and location of its origin, and that of its American reception, places this term, at least coterminous with the nineteenth century Western European and American Cult of Domesticity, which polarized and gendered the religious (feminine) and secular (masculine) domains. However, Grodzinski lived in Poland, Eastern Europe. More research is necessary to determine if Grodzinski engaged this term in the same sense that R. Kook received it in. For that matter, did R. Kook engage the term along the lines of the Cult of Domesticity or was that a latter engagement of the term? Given that the writings from both rabbis is available, this topic might be among the easier lines of research proposed in this work to pursue. Both Hebrew and English versions of this term are prevalent in today’s literature on Niddah and have been criticized for placing undue responsibility for the purity of the whole family on the wife and mother.[6] This emphasis on women obscures the fact that Niddah is observed by both men and women. Albeit women manage and direct the observance informing their male partner when his behavior proscriptions begin and end; but in its wholeness, in the Jewish tradition Niddah observance is always observed by both men and women.[7] My discomfort with the polarized and gendered associations of the religious feminine and secular masculine inherent in the Cult of Domesticity, and—for me—conveyed to this terminology, drives my aversion to the terms Taharat HaMishpacha and Family Purity. Additionally, my study of Niddah as a ritual entity focuses on the proscribed ritual behaviors which create a real physical distance between the observant couple. In this regard, the meaning of separation is more precise for my purposes, historically and descriptively.
[1] Berkowitz, Miriam, “Reshaping the Laws of Family Purity for the Modern World,” 7. Berkowitz specifically identifies the root of Niddah, הדנ, as a form of the verb root ה.ד.ד.
[2] Ibid.,–both references are cited on this page.
[3] TaNaK is an acronym for Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim, literally, Instructions, Prophets, and Writings. These three sets of compiled chapters constitute the Hebrew Bible.
[4] Berkowitz, “Mikveh and the Sanctity of Family Relations.”
[5] Berkowitz, “Reshaping the Laws of Family Purity,” 8.
[6] Grossman, “Mikveh and Sanctity of Family Relations,” 19.
[7] Halakha (Jewish Law) only requires niddah observance in the context of a married relationship, assumed to be heterosexual. It is not required of unmarried or otherwise single women.