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Personal Hygiene and Grooming

Concept · http://data.judaicalink.org/data/ep/2139843

Religious law calls on Jews to undertake ritual washings or ablutions that range from immersion of the whole body (tevilah) to pouring water over the hands (netilat yadayim), although there is no evidence to prove that the practice of such rituals contributed to higher standards of hygiene among the Jews of Eastern Europe. Still, these laws infused with an aspiration for physical purity had some bearing on the general approach of the East European Jew to his or her level of hygiene and grooming. Thus, according to the Shulḥan ‘arukh, it is incumbent upon a Jew on awakening to purify himself by washing his hands and face and rinsing his mouth. Jews must also flow water over their hands before meals and recite a blessing. Immersion in a mikveh (ritual bath) is required to cleanse a man of an impurity such as a seminal issue and, in the case of women, immersion is performed before marriage and after menstruation, among other states of ritual impurity. No ablution, however, is valid unless the person or, in certain cases an object, has been made scrupulously clean beforehand, so as to ensure that no barrier of foreign matter intervenes between the person or object being immersed and the purifying waters. These laws most certainly contributed to the Jews’ perception of what was hygienic, although immediate factors such as the availability of water, cleansers, and medicine, as well as contemporary understandings of what constituted hygiene were certainly even more important to the hygienic life of East European Jewry.

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