Abstract This article explores the religious injunctions for shaving male and female body hair, primarily within the rabbinical texts of the Jewish tradition. It contrasts the rules that are explicit in the Pentateuch with the exposition of the Talmud, followed by the further regulations collected in the Shulchan Aruch and later nineteenth-century responses to the Shulchan Aruch . It shows how religious regulations that claim to be either true for all time and/or the rules that are endemic to a particular closed tradition both shift according to time and place, and are also formed in dynamic interaction with other religious and cultural norms. It reveals how bodily hair becomes a site of religious projections of identity, gender anxieties, and historical self-understanding—both in regulation and in the historiographical tradition discussing the regulation of bodily grooming.
Simon Goldhill (Wed,) studied this question.