A problem in the assessment of the function of ritual purity in Judaism is the role of the ritual purity societies (haburot), the members of which were known as haberim. These people cultivated the practice of ritual purity as an end in itself, not as a means of avoiding defilement of the Temple. The haburot existed while the Temple was still standing, and continued to exist after its fall. According to Neusner, these societies have a defining role in the history of Pharisaism and the subsequent rabbinic movement. They were the leaders of a new kind of Judaism which sought to transfer the holiness of the Temple to the home. ‘… the Pharisees held that even outside the Temple, in one's own home, the laws of ritual purity were to be followed in the only circumstance in which they might apply, namely, at the table. Therefore, one must eat secular food (ordinary everyday meals) in a state of ritual purity as if one were a Temple priest’ (Neusner, 1979, p. 83). Neusner, in fact, equates the Pharisees with the haberim. A superficial justification for this equation is the fact that purity-devotees are sometimes called in rabbinic literature perushim and this word is identical to the name of the Pharisees. But the word perushim means several other things apart from ‘Pharisees’ (in some contexts, it can even mean ‘heretics’). In ritual purity contexts, it means not ‘Pharisees’ but ‘ascetics’ (see Rivkin, 1969–70), and its abstract form perishut is used to mean the saintly virtue of asceticism (M. Sotah 9:15).