Can someone please explain these Jewish customs to me

[pooh bear]

I'm reading Some Danger Involved by Will Thomas. A couple of Jewish customs happen that I don't know the meaning of. Can anyone explain what they mean?

 

It is set in Victorian London and a Jewish man has just been murdered. In the morgue, the officals want to do a postmortem, but the Rabbi want him buried by the next morning. Why is this?

 

When the private investigator is looking at the body, he does not touch it, and raises the dead arm using his walking stick. After he leaves the morgue, he does to visit a leading figure in the Jewish community. Before he enters the house, he leaves the walking stick outside. The PI lets the man know where he has come from, and says that he has left the walking stick outside, and never once touched the body, because if he had, he would never have entered the house. Why is this?

[micheller1]

Jewish custom says that touching a dead body makes you unclean so it you don't touch the body of the dead, whether its your mother, brother, son, etc. This is related to particular commandments found in the Torah.

 

As far as the burying of the body, it is also custom that a person be buried before sundown of the next day - the next day starts at sundown as Judaism follows the lunar calendar.

 

HTH :)

[pooh bear]

Jewish custom says that touching a dead body makes you unclean so it you don't touch the body of the dead, whether its your mother, brother, son, etc. This is related to particular commandments found in the Torah.

 

As far as the burying of the body, it is also custom that a person be buried before sundown of the next day - the next day starts at sundown as Judaism follows the lunar calendar.

 

HTH :)

 

Thank you.

 

I thought it might be something like that, but I wanted to be 100% sure.

[Ester Maria]

One is not allowed to purposely come into a physical contact with a dead body so as not to become, in lack of a better translation, "spiritually impure". A nice short explanation can be found here.