For the source text click/tap here: Chullin 122
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Our Mishnah states that the ritual impurity of human skin is more stringent than that of the skins of other animals: its impurity does not disappear even if the skin has undergone tanning or other processing. The Gemara explains that, according to the strict letter of biblical law, human skin should have had a more lenient status than other skins. The Sages, however, imposed a special decree upon it:
Ulla said: “By Torah law, human skin is pure. Why, then, did they declare it impure? It was a decree lest a person make the skins of his father and mother into carpets.”
Ulla’s statement raises several questions. The main one concerns the meaning of the extraordinary case he describes, in which a person makes carpets from the skins of his father and mother.
We explore this reading against modern sensibilities — the law of property in human tissue, museum and anatomical collections and their repatriation, plastination and display, the twentieth-century history of artefacts made from human skin, and the contemporary technologies of retained presence, from memorial jewellery to synthetic reanimation of the dead.