Rafael Rachel Neis
University of Michigan, History, Faculty Member
- University of Michigan, Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History, Department MemberUniversity of Michigan, Judaic Studies, Faculty Memberadd
- Rabbinic Literature, Talmud, Late Antiquity, Jewish Studies, Religion, Ancient History, and 36 moreJewish Art History, Sensory Cultures & Visuality, History of the Senses, Space and Place, Visual Culture, Law and Religion, Ancient Law, Ancient Judaism, Jurisprudence, Comparative Legal History, Ancient Legal Systems, History of Judaism In Antiquity, Bible, Greco-Roman World, Qumran, History of Religions, Early Christianity, Rabbinics, Jewish Mysticism, The Body, Gender Studies, Animal Studies, Disability Studies, Queer Theory, Posthumanism, Feminist science and technology studies, Science and Technology Studies, Feminist Science Studies, History of Science, History of Medicine, History of Medicine and the Body, Research Interests: Rabbinical Literature (The Mishnah, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudim, Aggadic Midrashim), Midrash, Redactional Criticism of Rabbinic Literature, Literary Criticism, Rabbinic Literature, and Rabbinics, Ancient Science, Ancient Medicine, Ancient Jewish Science, and Jewish Science Studiesedit
- Jean & Samuel Frankel Chair of Rabbinicsedit
Below, author Rafael Rachel Neis provides a comic on When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species.... more
Below, author Rafael Rachel Neis provides a comic on When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species. https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/64217/in-pictures-how-ancient-rabbis-upend-traditional-ideas-of-reproduction-gender-and-humanity/
Only the first page of the comic is uploaded here. For the full, three page comic, see the link provided.
Only the first page of the comic is uploaded here. For the full, three page comic, see the link provided.
Research Interests: Religion, History, Ancient History, Gender Studies, Classics, and 15 moreArt History, Jewish Studies, Transgender Studies, Queer Theory, Animal Studies, Comics Studies, Talmud, Reproduction, Monogamy, Late Antiquity, Drawing, Rabbinic Literature, Comics and Graphic Novels, Zines, and Science and Technology Studies
Rafael Rachel Neis's, "The Multiplicity of Deviancy," is Part 6 of a multipart and multimedia installation by Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson in the show BROKEN / CLB / LABA Berlin. A critical reflection on Ponizovsky Bergelson's installation,... more
Rafael Rachel Neis's, "The Multiplicity of Deviancy," is Part 6 of a multipart and multimedia installation by Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson in the show BROKEN / CLB / LABA Berlin. A critical reflection on Ponizovsky Bergelson's installation, as well as an intervention into the pain and possibilities of reading ancient sources today, and in artistic conversation (including the repro. image, "Figures of Speech" orig. pen and ink on paper, 11 in. x 17 in., 2020 ). See further: http://www.ellaponi.com/exhibitions#/the-deviator/)
Ponizovsky Bergelson's installation The Deviator sought to tackle the misogyny and absence of women in the talmudic tractate of Sotah (woman suspected of adultery).
Ponizovsky Bergelson's installation The Deviator sought to tackle the misogyny and absence of women in the talmudic tractate of Sotah (woman suspected of adultery).
Research Interests:
CFA Fellowship in Jewish Studies, Queer Studies, Trans Studies. In this theme year, we aim to explore in the broadest possible ways how queer/trans studies intersect with studies of Jews, Jewishness, Judaism, and indeed Jewish Studies... more
CFA Fellowship in Jewish Studies, Queer Studies, Trans Studies.
In this theme year, we aim to explore in the broadest possible ways how queer/trans studies intersect with studies of Jews, Jewishness, Judaism, and indeed Jewish Studies itself, from the full range of humanistic, artistic, activist, and social science perspectives. We thus intend to assemble a group of scholars, writers, and artists that will allow us to explore this set of fundamental issues across the temporal gamut of ancient to the present and in Middle Eastern, African, Asian, European, and American societal contexts.
In this theme year, we aim to explore in the broadest possible ways how queer/trans studies intersect with studies of Jews, Jewishness, Judaism, and indeed Jewish Studies itself, from the full range of humanistic, artistic, activist, and social science perspectives. We thus intend to assemble a group of scholars, writers, and artists that will allow us to explore this set of fundamental issues across the temporal gamut of ancient to the present and in Middle Eastern, African, Asian, European, and American societal contexts.
Research Interests: Religion, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Performing Arts, Humanities, and 15 moreJewish Studies, Social Sciences, Transgender Studies, Queer Theory, Gender and Sexuality, Critical Race Theory, Race and Ethnicity, LGBT Issues, Sephardic Studies, Judaism, Visual Arts, Sephardi/Mizrahi Studies, Activism, Religious Studies, and Arts and Humanities
https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2023/6/7/rabbis-and-the-reproduction-of-species In my hot-off-the-press book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species, I start with the perhaps obvious,... more
https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2023/6/7/rabbis-and-the-reproduction-of-species
In my hot-off-the-press book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species, I start with the perhaps obvious, perhaps controversial, premise that we should take ancient worldmaking seriously and "literally." I advocate what might seem to be an old-fashioned anti-presentism: a critical-historical approach that pushes against continuities of present and past and that (quixotically? naively? conservatively?) seeks to meet the past "in its own terms." At the same time, I draw upon queerfeminist science studies, disability studies, and gender theory. These latter theoretical approaches bolster critical historical methods. They caution us against taking a set of contemporary Euro-American notions-like animal, human, science, nature, and reproduction-as if they were ultimate categories or metrics.
In my hot-off-the-press book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species, I start with the perhaps obvious, perhaps controversial, premise that we should take ancient worldmaking seriously and "literally." I advocate what might seem to be an old-fashioned anti-presentism: a critical-historical approach that pushes against continuities of present and past and that (quixotically? naively? conservatively?) seeks to meet the past "in its own terms." At the same time, I draw upon queerfeminist science studies, disability studies, and gender theory. These latter theoretical approaches bolster critical historical methods. They caution us against taking a set of contemporary Euro-American notions-like animal, human, science, nature, and reproduction-as if they were ultimate categories or metrics.
Research Interests: Religion, Ancient History, Classics, Disability Studies, Transgender Studies, and 14 moreQueer Theory, Posthumanism, Animal Studies, Ancient Science, Gender, Late Antiquity, Midrash, Judaism, Comics and Graphic Novels, Knowledge, Religious Studies, Classification, Speciesism, and Rabbinical literature (The Mishnah, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudim, aggadic midrashim)
Purpose: Gender-affirming hormones (hormones)-the use of sex hormones to induce desired secondary sex characteristics in transgender and nonbinary (TGNB) individuals-are vital health care for many TGNB people. Some hormone providers... more
Purpose: Gender-affirming hormones (hormones)-the use of sex hormones to induce desired secondary sex characteristics in transgender and nonbinary (TGNB) individuals-are vital health care for many TGNB people. Some hormone providers require a letter from a mental health provider before hormone initiation. We explore the perspectives of TGNB individuals regarding the impact of the letter requirement on their experience of care. Methods: We conducted semistructured interviews with 21 TGNB individuals who have sought or are receiving hormones. We purposively sampled respondents who were (n = 12) and were not (n = 8) required to provide a letter. An Advisory Board of transgender individuals guided the methodology. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and coded both inductively and deductively. Results: We identified three themes related to the letter requirement: (1) Mental health: While participants appreciated the importance of therapy, the letter requirement did not serve this purpose; (2) Trans identity: The process of obtaining a letter created doubt in participants' own transness, along with a resistance to the pathologization and conflation of mental illness with transness; and (3) Care relationships: The letter requirement negatively impacted the patient-provider relationship. Participants felt the need to self-censor or to perform a version of transness they thought the provider expected; this process decreased their trust in care professionals. Conclusion: A letter requirement did not improve mental health and had several negative consequences. Removal of this requirement will improve access to hormones and may paradoxically improve mental health.
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Social Sciences, History of Medicine, Transgender Studies, Mental Health, and 13 moreQueer Theory, Qualitative methodology, Stigma, LGBT Issues, Gender, Theories of Gender and Transgender, Qualitative Research, Public Health, Health Services Research, Transgender Health, Mental Illness, Mad Studies, and Nonbinary Gender Idenitity
The Mishnah was a compendium of the teaching of the Jewish sages (the rabbis) from the first to early third centuries in Palestine, comprising 63 (or 60) tractates. The Talmud was the commentary of the later rabbis (ca. 3rd to 7th cents... more
The Mishnah was a compendium of the teaching of the Jewish sages (the rabbis) from the first to early third centuries in Palestine, comprising 63 (or 60) tractates. The Talmud was the commentary of the later rabbis (ca. 3rd to 7th cents CE) on the Mishnah. The goal of this project is to create and co-create an alternative commentary or Talmud, using the format and genre of the zine and covering all 63 tractates (some with multiple zines, but each with at least one). I will be collaborating with scholars and artists on several of the Talmud-Zines.
Hamapelet or NiddahZine, the inaugural volume, gives a small window onto a chapter of the Mishnah’s Tractate Niddah on menstrual and gynecological ritual purity. Rather than merely translating a few of its oddities to the contemporary eye, I critically intervene creating images and snippets of text that pull out its potentials to unravel human-centricity and encourage a multispecies approach to reproduction. At the same time, using a queerfeminist lens, I seek to critically, redraw, & rewrite the exclusionary dimensions of this ancient Jewish text, drawing it into conversations and imagery related to reproduction, disability, and human/animal boundaries.
For more on Zines and on the Talmud-Zine Project, see https://rachelrafaelneis.com/projects
Hamapelet or NiddahZine, the inaugural volume, gives a small window onto a chapter of the Mishnah’s Tractate Niddah on menstrual and gynecological ritual purity. Rather than merely translating a few of its oddities to the contemporary eye, I critically intervene creating images and snippets of text that pull out its potentials to unravel human-centricity and encourage a multispecies approach to reproduction. At the same time, using a queerfeminist lens, I seek to critically, redraw, & rewrite the exclusionary dimensions of this ancient Jewish text, drawing it into conversations and imagery related to reproduction, disability, and human/animal boundaries.
For more on Zines and on the Talmud-Zine Project, see https://rachelrafaelneis.com/projects
Research Interests: Religion, Hebrew Literature, Jewish Studies, Feminist Theory, Visual Culture, and 15 moreAnimal Studies, Reproduction, The Body, Biology, Menstruation, Rabbinic Literature, Text And Image, Medieval illuminated manuscripts, Comics and Graphic Novels, Feminist science and technology studies, Zines, New Materialism, Ritual Purity, Handbook, and Science and Technology Studies
The tractates of Niddah, Bekhorot, and Hullin investigate the generation of material bodies through ritual and status frameworks concerned with purity, dietary rules, sacrifice, property, and kinship. Drawing on insights from feminist... more
The tractates of Niddah, Bekhorot, and Hullin investigate the generation of material bodies through ritual and status frameworks concerned with purity, dietary rules, sacrifice, property, and kinship. Drawing on insights from feminist science studies and new materialisms, I chart how nascent or emergent bodily materials were parsed in rabbinic science to then be theoretically donated, married, killed, ingested, or otherwise disposed. I show how the rabbis envisaged bodily products along a spectrum, drawing only a thin line between offspring (valad) and other material entities, with determinations of materiality and species factoring into such distinctions. Besides the content of rabbinic knowledge, I consider the conditions in which these knowledges were formulated. Feminist science studies and new materialist analyses of knowledge-making and agency offer approaches that go beyond dualist framings of active, knowing subjects (e. g. rabbinic men, humans, Romans) versus passive known objects (e. g. non-rabbis or women, non-human entities, or non-Romans). These approaches allow us to account for the ways in which rabbinic thinkers, from ca. the second through late fourth centuries, were entangled with and shaped by the "bodies" of their knowledge. Collectively, these approaches to the generation of bodily material and to the production of rabbinic knowledge thereof, make for a late ancient biology that differs from contemporary, "common sense," Euro-American intuitions about the distinction between living and nonliving, between human and nonhuman, and between knower and known. Furthermore, this biology queers accounts of generation that rely on same-species, heterosexual reproduction.
Research Interests: Philology, Ancient History, Classics, Jewish Studies, Feminist Theory, and 15 moreHistory of Medicine, Queer Theory, Posthumanism, Animal Studies, History of Science, Reproduction, The Body, Late Antiquity, Rabbinic Literature, Roman Empire, Feminist science and technology studies, Knowledge, Religious Studies, New Materialism, and Science and Technology Studies
AJS Perspectives "The Body Issue," Featured Artist Statement
Research Interests:
**Please email RNEIS@umich.edu for the full article** While biologists argue about the limits and definition of a species, the urge to cluster and distinguish among the plenitude of lifeforms that populates the planet remains.... more
**Please email RNEIS@umich.edu for the full article**
While biologists argue about the limits and definition of a species, the urge to cluster and distinguish among the plenitude of lifeforms that populates the planet remains. Contemporary concerns about attempts to clone monkeys and to engineer human-porcine chimeras point to problems with species boundaries, resemblances, and causing suffering to other creatures. The fears about resemblances (and attendant slippery slope concerns) relate to how humans may be implicated. Such concerns about resemblances among kinds, the boundaries between species, and attempts to uphold distinctions, also populated late ancient zoological and anthropological thought, including that of the rabbis. While the rabbis drew somewhat on tselem elohim (humans as images of God) to theorize human reproduction and uniqueness, this article traces an alternative zoological vision that integrated humans among other kinds, while explaining resemblances among species with a theory of territorial doubles. This theory of territorial doubles claimed that all creatures—including humans—have versions that exist in the wild and in the sea. The article follows rabbinic zoological classifications as they sought to order lifeforms, viewed as similar and/or distinct.
While biologists argue about the limits and definition of a species, the urge to cluster and distinguish among the plenitude of lifeforms that populates the planet remains. Contemporary concerns about attempts to clone monkeys and to engineer human-porcine chimeras point to problems with species boundaries, resemblances, and causing suffering to other creatures. The fears about resemblances (and attendant slippery slope concerns) relate to how humans may be implicated. Such concerns about resemblances among kinds, the boundaries between species, and attempts to uphold distinctions, also populated late ancient zoological and anthropological thought, including that of the rabbis. While the rabbis drew somewhat on tselem elohim (humans as images of God) to theorize human reproduction and uniqueness, this article traces an alternative zoological vision that integrated humans among other kinds, while explaining resemblances among species with a theory of territorial doubles. This theory of territorial doubles claimed that all creatures—including humans—have versions that exist in the wild and in the sea. The article follows rabbinic zoological classifications as they sought to order lifeforms, viewed as similar and/or distinct.
Research Interests: Posthumanism, Animal Studies, Critical Animal Studies, History of Science, Jewish Ethics, and 15 moreScience and Religion, Émmanuel Lévinas, Late Antiquity, Rabbinic Literature, Origen, Judaism, Religion and Animals, History of Zoology, Ancient Judaism, Science Studies, Image of God, Pliny, Resemblance, Talmud and Rabbinics, and Science and Technology Studies
This essay considers the category of "Jewish law" in Jewish studies while inviting scholarly and historiographic assessment of the ways that Judaism's link to law has come to appear as obvious. Considering that our present concepts of law... more
This essay considers the category of "Jewish law" in Jewish studies while inviting scholarly and historiographic assessment of the ways that Judaism's link to law has come to appear as obvious. Considering that our present concepts of law are invariably linked to a geographically and temporally parochial "mythology of modern law," the essay sounds a preliminary set of interventions and conversations designed to open critical reflection on these links. First, it considers how halakhah is assimilated as law, which is in turn seen as quintessentially Jewish. Second, it invokes critical assessments of law as a modern European colonial construct. Third, it moves to Hindu law and Islamic law as examples of scholarly fields whose histories are implicated in European colonialism. Fourth, it discusses the construction of Jewish law in Israeli Zionist contexts and in the context of the U.S. law school. It then closes with some suggestions for future directions.
KEY WORDS
Jewish law, Halakhah, law, Hindu law, Islamic law, colonialism, law school, Jewish studies
KEY WORDS
Jewish law, Halakhah, law, Hindu law, Islamic law, colonialism, law school, Jewish studies
Research Interests: Religion, Christianity, Islamic Law, Jewish Law, Comparative Law, and 15 moreJewish Studies, Legal History, Law and Religion, Critical Legal Theory, Legal Theory, Colonialism, Jewish History, Normativity, Rabbinic Literature, Historical Development of Halakhah, Israel and Zionism, Religious Studies, Imperialism, Hindu law, and Halakhah
This paper was precirculated and then discussed for "At the Crossroads: New Directions in the Study of Rabbinic Literature Workshop," at Northwestern University, May 18-19, 2015. ABSTRACT: I begin by running through the set of products... more
This paper was precirculated and then discussed for "At the Crossroads: New Directions in the Study of Rabbinic Literature Workshop," at Northwestern University, May 18-19, 2015.
ABSTRACT: I begin by running through the set of products listed in m. Niddah and t. Niddah, considering at what point particular entities cease being viewed as potential menstruation (niddah) and move to potential valid childbirths (valad). Two features of this move are noted: the usage of the species-based synonym ke-min to describe certain products, and the notion of human form (tsurat ha-adam) to include or exclude borderline products as childbirths. Turning to a discussion of species (minim), I show that the rabbis conceive of species in terms of similitude and variation, and also that the hybrid or interspecies creature is described in similar rhetorical terms to the borderline human delivery. I consider how the rabbis use "min" (species) to parse a variety of animal and plant life and to sort potentially hybrid kinds - including the adnei hasadeh and the sirenos (human-like wild animal and sea creatures).
Moving from resemblance-based determinations of species, I then focus on the notion of human form (tsurat ha-adam). Here I argue that the aesthetic lens is no metaphor: scrutiny
of the term tsurat ha-adam and its constituents reveals that the rabbis are playing with pictorial and artistic notions of images and their reproduction to set forth the makings and markings of the human. Going back to our uterine entities, I show how appearance, particularly (in the Tosefta) of the face and its features, as the site of species specificity and in other cases of identification serves as a focus for fetal determinations. I then make two moves. First, I argue, that a facial aesthetic lens also sorts which humans and animals fail to rise to the test of perfection – in part in terms of species-based characteristics - demanded for priestly service or sacrifice. Second, I claim that a less absolute lens is used to determine what counts as a fetus, effectively making species determinations a matter of degree, allowing for some degree of hybridity.
I then turn to two other types of uterine products, those that signal the presence or absence of a fetus, and those that take their cue from human body parts. I seek to show how the specter of human form hovers over both these kinds of product.
ABSTRACT: I begin by running through the set of products listed in m. Niddah and t. Niddah, considering at what point particular entities cease being viewed as potential menstruation (niddah) and move to potential valid childbirths (valad). Two features of this move are noted: the usage of the species-based synonym ke-min to describe certain products, and the notion of human form (tsurat ha-adam) to include or exclude borderline products as childbirths. Turning to a discussion of species (minim), I show that the rabbis conceive of species in terms of similitude and variation, and also that the hybrid or interspecies creature is described in similar rhetorical terms to the borderline human delivery. I consider how the rabbis use "min" (species) to parse a variety of animal and plant life and to sort potentially hybrid kinds - including the adnei hasadeh and the sirenos (human-like wild animal and sea creatures).
Moving from resemblance-based determinations of species, I then focus on the notion of human form (tsurat ha-adam). Here I argue that the aesthetic lens is no metaphor: scrutiny
of the term tsurat ha-adam and its constituents reveals that the rabbis are playing with pictorial and artistic notions of images and their reproduction to set forth the makings and markings of the human. Going back to our uterine entities, I show how appearance, particularly (in the Tosefta) of the face and its features, as the site of species specificity and in other cases of identification serves as a focus for fetal determinations. I then make two moves. First, I argue, that a facial aesthetic lens also sorts which humans and animals fail to rise to the test of perfection – in part in terms of species-based characteristics - demanded for priestly service or sacrifice. Second, I claim that a less absolute lens is used to determine what counts as a fetus, effectively making species determinations a matter of degree, allowing for some degree of hybridity.
I then turn to two other types of uterine products, those that signal the presence or absence of a fetus, and those that take their cue from human body parts. I seek to show how the specter of human form hovers over both these kinds of product.
Research Interests: Religion, Aesthetics, Jewish Studies, Disability Studies, History of Medicine, and 15 morePosthumanism, Animal Studies, Hybridity, Reproduction, Ancient Science, Late Antiquity, Humanism, Rabbinic Literature, History of Medicine and the Body, Antiquity, Classification, Speciesism, Rabbinical literature (The Mishnah, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudim, aggadic midrashim), History of Judaism In Antiquity, and Science and Technology Studies
**A VERSION OF THIS PAPER IS NOW OUT IN JOURNAL OF ANCIENT JUDAISM. See here: https://www.academia.edu/41856843/Fetus_Flesh_Food_Generating_Bodies_of_Knowledge_in_Rabbinic_Science .** This paper was uploaded and available in advance to... more
**A VERSION OF THIS PAPER IS NOW OUT IN JOURNAL OF ANCIENT JUDAISM. See here: https://www.academia.edu/41856843/Fetus_Flesh_Food_Generating_Bodies_of_Knowledge_in_Rabbinic_Science .**
This paper was uploaded and available in advance to participants of the Association for Jewish Studies annual conference of December 2017. It was discussed as part of the Seminar, "What did the Rabbis Know," organized by Lennart Lehmhaus and was responded to by John Mandsager.
....
How to understand the processes, by which bodies ingest, gestate, generate, excrete, and expel various kinds of substances? This paper treats these questions as sorted through in rabbinic texts. The ways in which we think about how material bodies come into being, and the ways in which we distinguish and explain the emergence, entry, and coming into being of bodies inside of, into, and out of other bodies. Related to such distinctions and explanations, are categories, and then determinations about the destinies of distinctive, newly-generated, or emergent bodies. This article shows how these distinctions about generated bodies and related determinations about their destinies are worked out in both Palestinian rabbinic writings and Greco-Roman philosophical texts of late antiquity. Drawing on feminist anthropology and science studies, as well as feminist new materialisms, means that attention is drawn to the ways that bodies once emergent are placed, interpolated, ingested, consumed, disposed, dismembered, or delivered for life/death. In attending to this combination of determination and destiny, this paper considers not only the curious content of late ancient rabbinic and philosophical conceptions of generation but also attends to the material conditions in which these conceptions were formulated. How was it that the rabbis and philosophers in the Roman empire came to claim and claim creation of such knowledges about generation for themselves? What social-political-material conditions enabled and were upheld by such claims to know bodies of generation? Finally, in full attention to the insights of posthumanist thought, animal studies, and feminist new materialisms: can we account for the ways in which ancient thinkers (rabbis among them) were entangled with and shaped by their fleshy, female, and/or animal " objects " of knowledge?
This paper was uploaded and available in advance to participants of the Association for Jewish Studies annual conference of December 2017. It was discussed as part of the Seminar, "What did the Rabbis Know," organized by Lennart Lehmhaus and was responded to by John Mandsager.
....
How to understand the processes, by which bodies ingest, gestate, generate, excrete, and expel various kinds of substances? This paper treats these questions as sorted through in rabbinic texts. The ways in which we think about how material bodies come into being, and the ways in which we distinguish and explain the emergence, entry, and coming into being of bodies inside of, into, and out of other bodies. Related to such distinctions and explanations, are categories, and then determinations about the destinies of distinctive, newly-generated, or emergent bodies. This article shows how these distinctions about generated bodies and related determinations about their destinies are worked out in both Palestinian rabbinic writings and Greco-Roman philosophical texts of late antiquity. Drawing on feminist anthropology and science studies, as well as feminist new materialisms, means that attention is drawn to the ways that bodies once emergent are placed, interpolated, ingested, consumed, disposed, dismembered, or delivered for life/death. In attending to this combination of determination and destiny, this paper considers not only the curious content of late ancient rabbinic and philosophical conceptions of generation but also attends to the material conditions in which these conceptions were formulated. How was it that the rabbis and philosophers in the Roman empire came to claim and claim creation of such knowledges about generation for themselves? What social-political-material conditions enabled and were upheld by such claims to know bodies of generation? Finally, in full attention to the insights of posthumanist thought, animal studies, and feminist new materialisms: can we account for the ways in which ancient thinkers (rabbis among them) were entangled with and shaped by their fleshy, female, and/or animal " objects " of knowledge?
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Feminist Theory, Posthumanism, Animal Studies, History of Science, and 15 moreHybridity, Talmud, Embryology, Reproduction, Ancient Science, Natural History, Animals and Animality, Monsters and Monster Theory, Roman imperialism, Mishnah, Animals, Ritual Purity, Rabbinical literature (The Mishnah, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudim, aggadic midrashim), Feminist new materialism, and Science and Technology Studies
Research Interests: Religion, Jewish Studies, Disability Studies, History of Medicine, Animal Studies, and 11 moreHistory of Science, Reproduction, Menstruation, History of Medicine and the Body, Ancient Judaism, Mishnah, New Materialism, Materiality, Gynecology and Obstetrics, Rabbinical literature (The Mishnah, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudim, aggadic midrashim), and Science and Technology Studies
This article explores some of the same sources as these scholars, reading them as rabbinic biological science and following Tannaitic ideas about the limits and possibilities of reproductive and species nonconformity. I read rabbinic... more
This article explores some of the same sources as these scholars, reading them as rabbinic biological science and following Tannaitic ideas about the limits and possibilities of reproductive and species nonconformity. I read rabbinic sources in the tractates of Niddah, Kil’ayim, and Bekhorot, as expressions of a science of generation, or a biology, in
which nonhuman zoology and human gynecology were entwined. I argue that the rabbis, like other ancient thinkers, understood that creatures of a particular kind (or species), including the human-kind, might deliver a creature that appears to be of a different kind. I show that in the majority of cases the Tannaim believed these species nonconforming offspring not to be genuine hybrids, that is, they did not believe that they the results of cross-species mating. Instead they understood them to be spontaneously arising. By reading Bekhorot and Kilayim together, I note how the human features in such cases of cross-species variation, as well as in rabbinic zoological distinctions between *different* kinds that nonetheless looked alike. In other words, I tackle the rabbinic principle that all animals have doubles in the wild and in the seas, including the human.
which nonhuman zoology and human gynecology were entwined. I argue that the rabbis, like other ancient thinkers, understood that creatures of a particular kind (or species), including the human-kind, might deliver a creature that appears to be of a different kind. I show that in the majority of cases the Tannaim believed these species nonconforming offspring not to be genuine hybrids, that is, they did not believe that they the results of cross-species mating. Instead they understood them to be spontaneously arising. By reading Bekhorot and Kilayim together, I note how the human features in such cases of cross-species variation, as well as in rabbinic zoological distinctions between *different* kinds that nonetheless looked alike. In other words, I tackle the rabbinic principle that all animals have doubles in the wild and in the seas, including the human.
Research Interests: Gender Studies, Disability Studies, History of Medicine, Critical Animal Studies, History of Science, and 15 moreReproduction, Ancient Science, Ancient Religion, Rabbinic Literature, Categorization, Animal reproduction, Ancient Judaism, Tannaitic Literature, History, Science, Astronomy, Ancient Chronological Systems, Calendars, Speciesism, Ancient Zoology, Midrash, Talmud, Comparative study of Rabbinic Literature, Rabbinical literature (The Mishnah, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudim, aggadic midrashim), Talmud and Rabbinics, and Science and Technology Studies
This article, part of a Forum on Animals in Late Antiquity hosted on Ancient Jew Review, considers human/animal overlaps in the Mishnah in reproductive and other contexts through the lenses of contemporary art, disability studies... more
This article, part of a Forum on Animals in Late Antiquity hosted on Ancient Jew Review, considers human/animal overlaps in the Mishnah in reproductive and other contexts through the lenses of contemporary art, disability studies scholars/artists, feminist science studies, and animal studies. It illuminates species-queer ways of thinking about bodily variation, reproduction, and nonconformity, that go beyond the oft-cited "image of God" (tselem elohim) concept. Relatedly, it calls on new materialist and feminist science studies for an approach to rabbinic texts that acknowledges the complex dynamics of power/knowledge involved in rabbis (elite, Jewish men) writing about women and animals, while themselves being subject to Roman imperial rule.
http://www.ancientjewreview.com/articles/2018/5/8/when-species-meet-in-the-mishnah
http://www.ancientjewreview.com/articles/2018/5/8/when-species-meet-in-the-mishnah
Research Interests: Art History, Aristotle, Disability Studies, History of Medicine, Queer Theory, and 26 morePosthumanism, Animal Studies, History of Science, Talmud, Embryology, Reproduction, Natural History, Rabbinics, Humanism, Rabbinic Literature, Representation Theory, Comics and Graphic Novels, Feminist science and technology studies, Reproductive Justice, Pliny the Elder, Donna Haraway, Mishnah, New Materialism, Image of God, Arts and Sciences, Karen Barad, Tosefta, Rabbinical literature (The Mishnah, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudim, aggadic midrashim), Pseudo-Aristotle, Feminist new materialism, and Joann Sfar
Tracing an early rabbinic approach to the human, this article analyzes how the Tannaim of the Mishnah and Tosefta set the human side by side with other species, and embedded their account within broader considerations of reproduction ,... more
Tracing an early rabbinic approach to the human, this article analyzes how the Tannaim of the Mishnah and Tosefta set the human side by side with other species, and embedded their account within broader considerations of reproduction , zoology and species hybridity. The human here emerges at the intersection of menstrual purity law and Temple sacrificial law in the tractates of Niddah and Bekhorot and is part of a reproductive biology that sought to determine the boundaries and overlaps between species. This rabbinic biology ought to be understood amid ancient conversations about what constitutes a proper member of a species, in terms of reproduction, resemblance and variation. The article shows how, even as it disavows genealogical links between humans and animals (and indeed across other species), rabbinic reproductive biology nonetheless implicates humans among and as animals.
Research Interests: Ancient History, Jewish Studies, Disability Studies, History of Medicine, Critical Disability Studies, and 42 morePosthumanism, Animal Studies, Critical Animal Studies, History of Science, Embryology, Reproduction, Ancient Science, Jewish History, Digital Signal Processing, Critical Posthumanism, History of Biology, Humanism, Rabbinic Literature, Ancient Greek Philosophy, Feminist science and technology studies, Human-Nonhuman Assemblages, Donna Haraway, History of Zoology, science and technology studies (STS), Mishnah, New Materialism, Image of God, Judeo-Christianity, History of the ancient world of science and technology, Interspecific Hybridisation, Speciesism, Gender and Sexuality in the Premodern World, Ancient Zoology, Tosefta, New Materialisms, History of medicine, Jewish medicine, Niddah, Rabbinical literature (The Mishnah, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudim, aggadic midrashim), Histology & Embryology, Rabbis, Ancient Knowledge, Fetus, Premodern History, Jewish Medicine, Ancient Gynecology and Obstetrics, Ancient Biology, and Ancient Jewish Science
Neis traces an expression of bodily language (kavvanat halev, literally “directing the heart”) from biblical to early rabbinic sources and demonstrates how it oriented people to the affective, physical, and spatial dimensions of prayer.... more
Neis traces an expression of bodily language (kavvanat halev, literally “directing the heart”) from biblical to early rabbinic sources and demonstrates how it oriented people to the affective, physical, and spatial dimensions of prayer. Rejecting a binary that would treat such language as either mental/subjective (and thus metaphorically) or soley physical/objective , Neis argues that we must unpack the fraught meaning of such corporeal spatial terminology to understand “rabbinic concepts of body-mind, ritual technology, and sacred geography." Neis highlights the guidelines for the body in prayer mode found in the rulings of Mishnah and Tosefta Berakhot, which provide a geography and choreography of bodily and affective orientation that calls into question the notion of a fixed, mandate to turn toward the site of the Jerusalem Temple. Although later directions found in the Babylonian Talmud on the praying toward the holy of holies have come to be viewed as normative, Neis warns against reading these into the earlier sources on prayer, finding multiple focal points in her anatomy of the tannaitic evidence. Analyzing kavvanat halev in Mishnah Rosh Hoshana 3 and its parallel in the Tosefta, Neis shows how the sages turned hearing into ritual listening and ordinary gazing into observing, directions grounded in the body, space, and affect. Neis closes with a section on the broader implications of this analysis for scholarly discussions of mind/body dualisms and metaphorical and embodied language.
Research Interests: Space and Place, Ritual, History of the Senses, Embodied Mind and Cognition, Prayer, and 19 moreThe Body, Second Temple Judaism, Intentionality, Metaphor, Rabbinics, Spatiality (Cultural geography), Rabbinic Literature, Body Language, Jerusalem, Religious Studies, Corporeality, Subjectivity, Mishnah, Jewish Prayer, Sacred Space, Tosefta, Ritual Space, History of Judaism In Antiquity, and Techniques of the Body
Drawing on rabbinic sources redacted in the early third and late fourth/ early fifth centuries, this paper tracks the intertwined lives of divine image-things and rabbis living in late Roman and Byzantine period Palestine. The paper... more
Drawing on rabbinic sources redacted in the early third and late fourth/ early fifth centuries, this paper tracks the intertwined lives of divine image-things and rabbis living in late Roman and Byzantine period Palestine. The paper argues that the religious image-things of others (or avodah zarah, in rabbinic terms) pressed in different ways on rabbinic notions of animation, materiality, agency, and representation , as well as on the boundaries between the thing, the human, and the divine. Additionally, the paper argues that while rabbis attempted to neutralize the claims of such image-things, in part by exposing their materiality, their excess nonetheless escaped such rabbinic efforts. Finally, the paper argues that in the fourth century, along with " material turn " in the Roman world inspired by Christian engagement, we find not only a greater sense of the excess in the things of avodah zarah, but also a concomitant thingification of the rabbinic sage.
Research Interests: Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, Material culture of religion, Talmud, Ancient Religion, Late Antiquity, and 8 moreThing Theory, Rabbinic Literature, Materiality of Art, Mishnah, Materiality, Idolatry, Rabbinical literature (The Mishnah, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudim, aggadic midrashim), and Roman statues
This chapter makes makes the case for a positive rabbinic visuality, in this case through the creation of rabbinic “icons.” If direct access to the sight of God’s face and a reciprocal vision of the deity marked as a nostalgic loss by... more
This chapter makes makes the case for a positive rabbinic visuality, in this case through the creation of rabbinic “icons.” If direct access to the sight of God’s face and a reciprocal vision of the deity marked as a nostalgic loss by late ancient Jews, how was the sacred visible in the here and now? Both surprisingly and unsurprisingly, the rabbis invited this searching gaze to behold their own persons. Perhaps it is predictable that the quest for beholding the divine face should come full circle and end in viewing the face of the rabbi. But what might be unexpected is the degree to which rabbis invested the visible sage not only with ritual but also with pedagogic, scholastic, and mnemonic power. That is, seeing the radiant face of the sage was bound up with the transmission of Torah knowledge itself.
Research Interests: Ancient History, Jewish Studies, Pilgrimage, Talmud, History of the Senses, and 15 moreEarly Christianity, Late Antiquity, Ekphrasis, Visual Piety, Holy Men/Magicians in Antiquity, Literature and visuality, Religious Studies, Vision, Shekhinah, Images, Scholasticism, History of the Body, Cult of the Saints, Rabbinical literature (The Mishnah, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudim, aggadic midrashim), and Talmud and Rabbinics
This chapter investigates Palestinian and Babylonian "visual eros" by considering the gendering of vision in the realm of desire. Tracing through different themes ranging from: "genitalia and the gender of the gaze," to "visual... more
This chapter investigates Palestinian and Babylonian "visual eros" by considering the gendering of vision in the realm of desire. Tracing through different themes ranging from: "genitalia and the gender of the gaze," to "visual asceticism," and then to "beautiful men," the chapter situates rabbinic desire across Palestine and Babylonia and in conversation with Greco-Roman and Christian trends.
Just as visions of God triggered anxieties about sexuality and idolatry, so too did the rabbis construct a visual opposition, in certain circumstances, between the erotic and the sacred in the field of vision. Even if looking at the divine was dangerous, it was laudatory in ways that looking at sexually arousing entities was not. Yet, it quickly becomes apparent that the rabbis thought in highly gendered terms about seeing sexually. Rabbinic ideas about visual erotics, particularly in the context of prohibition and visual asceticism, seem at first glance to rest on a basic binary: a gendered distribution of visual labor, with a masculine, penetrative gaze and a feminine visual object. Yet, the concerns triggered by the sexual gaze and the possible solution of male visual asceticism themselves had curious consequences. Withdrawing from the world of visual eros turned unseeing rabbis into visual objects desired by women, by other rabbis, and by gentile men and women. This effectively troubled a simple binary division of visual and erotic labor. Amidst these sexual dramas, we see that just as the visualization of God was shaped by the politics of a post-temple world and life under the Roman Christian imperium, so too did their cultural and political circumstances impact the rabbis’ sense of their own visible desirability.
Just as visions of God triggered anxieties about sexuality and idolatry, so too did the rabbis construct a visual opposition, in certain circumstances, between the erotic and the sacred in the field of vision. Even if looking at the divine was dangerous, it was laudatory in ways that looking at sexually arousing entities was not. Yet, it quickly becomes apparent that the rabbis thought in highly gendered terms about seeing sexually. Rabbinic ideas about visual erotics, particularly in the context of prohibition and visual asceticism, seem at first glance to rest on a basic binary: a gendered distribution of visual labor, with a masculine, penetrative gaze and a feminine visual object. Yet, the concerns triggered by the sexual gaze and the possible solution of male visual asceticism themselves had curious consequences. Withdrawing from the world of visual eros turned unseeing rabbis into visual objects desired by women, by other rabbis, and by gentile men and women. This effectively troubled a simple binary division of visual and erotic labor. Amidst these sexual dramas, we see that just as the visualization of God was shaped by the politics of a post-temple world and life under the Roman Christian imperium, so too did their cultural and political circumstances impact the rabbis’ sense of their own visible desirability.
Research Interests: Roman History, Jewish Studies, Queer Theory, Gender and Sexuality, History of the Senses, and 15 moreEarly Christianity, Late Antiquity, Desire, Eroticism, Rabbinics, Monasticism, Vision and the Gaze, Religious Studies, Gender and sexuality in the ancient world, Imperialism, Vision, Nudity, Sight, Modesty, and Homoeroticism
The present chapter traces how the rabbis in the tractate of Hagigah developed the biblical commands concerning cultic pilgrimage into laws for a bygone Jerusalem temple pilgrimage to see and be seen by God. Our investigation points to... more
The present chapter traces how the rabbis in the tractate of Hagigah developed the biblical commands concerning cultic pilgrimage into laws for a bygone Jerusalem temple pilgrimage to see and be seen by God. Our investigation points to how the desire for, and loss of, the sight of God’s face punctuates and centers the Babylonian Talmud tractate of Hagigah. The biblical commandment to "see the face of God three times a year" allowed the rabbis to conjure forms and narratives of pilgrimage in an age of Greek and Roman "visual piety" but without the Jerusalem temple. The chapter shows how in varying ways earlier and later rabbis construct a pilgrimage of reciprocal vision (in which pilgrim and god mutually behold and are beheld), particularly in the Babylonian Talmud which emphasizes "homovisuality."
Research Interests: Ancient History, Roman History, Jewish Studies, Disability Studies, Narrative, and 57 morePilgrimage, Jewish Mysticism, Blindness, History of the Senses, Roman Religion, Cult of Saints, Emperor Julian, Jewish - Christian Relations, Rabbinics, Rabbinic Literature, Pilgrimage and travel to the Holy Land, Religions of the Roman Empire, Roman imperialism, Tannaitic Literature, Mishnah, Vision, Ephrem the Syrian, Shekhinah, Pilgrimages, Divine Revelation, Rabbinic Literature, Syriac Patristic, Imago Dei, Jewish-Christian Polemics, Visuality, Rabbinic Judaism, Babylonian talmud, Tosefta, Midrash, Talmud, Comparative study of Rabbinic Literature, Sight, Ways of Seeing, 2 Corinthians, Caesar, Haptic Visuality, Icons and Rituals: Sacred Biography, Pilgrimage and Sacred Spaces, Shapur II, Evil Eye, Graeco-Roman Religion, Divine Body, Talmud and Rabbinics, Theoria, Face of God, Theopany, Hagigah, Sifrei, Mekhilta d'R. Ishmael, Merkabah Mysticism and Hekhalot Literature, Palestinian Talmud, Rabbis and Images, Seeing God, Bavli Hagigah, Yerushalmi Hagigah, Mishnah Hagigah, Tosefta Hagigah, Yerushalmi, Jewish sensorium, Rabbinic piety, and pardes
This chapter gives an overview of the study of vision and the multitude of ancient and late ancient ideas about the mechanics of the eye. It considers the challenges and potentials of writing a history of sight.
Research Interests:
Drawing on rabbinic sources redacted in the early third and late fourth/early fifth centuries, this paper tracks the intertwined lives of divine image-things and rabbis living in late Roman and Byzantine period Palestine. The paper argues... more
Drawing on rabbinic sources redacted in the early third and late fourth/early fifth centuries, this paper tracks the intertwined lives of divine image-things and rabbis living in late Roman and Byzantine period Palestine. The paper argues that the religious image-things of others (or avodah zarah, in rabbinic terms) pressed in different ways on rabbinic notions of animation, materiality, agency and representation, as well as on the boundaries between the thing, the human, and the divine. Additionally, the paper argues that while rabbis attempted to neutralize the claims of such image-things, in part by exposing their materiality, their excess nonetheless escaped such rabbinic efforts. Finally, the paper argues that in the fourth century, along with “material turn” in the Roman world inspired by Christian engagement, we find not only a greater sense of the excess in the things of avodah zarah, but also a concomitant thingification of the rabbinic sage.
Research Interests:
This article makes several claims. It argues that the genre of “pilgrim's literature” is present in rabbinic sources, and identifies rabbinic pilgrimage itineraries. Secondly, it shows that aside from the expected melancholic post-Temple... more
This article makes several claims. It argues that the genre of “pilgrim's literature” is present in rabbinic sources, and identifies rabbinic pilgrimage itineraries. Secondly, it shows that aside from the expected melancholic post-Temple itinerary, there exist itineraries for Babylon and for biblical conquest that do a very different kind of visual and affective work. Furthermore, like Christian and Greco-Roman pilgrimage writings, these rabbinic itineraries seek to visualize the past (and sometimes the future) in the landscape. The article reads these rabbinic itineraries not as sources through which to reconstruct a history of actual travel, but rather as mediations and techniques in and of themselves, through which the past was made visible. Related to this is how, like many Greco-Roman and Christian writings, these rabbinic sources thematize sight. However – and this is linked again to textuality – these sources almost always call for the performance of vision through liturgical or scriptural acts of recitation.
Research Interests: Jewish Studies, Pilgrimage, Talmud, Early Judaism (2nd Temple, Greco-Roman), Early Christianity, and 11 moreHistory of Religions, Late Antiquity, Rabbinic Literature, Bible, Sensory Cultures & Visuality, Itineraries (Medieval History), Pilgrimage and travel to the Holy Land, Qumran, Greco-Roman World, Rabbinical literature (The Mishnah, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudim, aggadic midrashim), and History of Judaism In Antiquity
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Read online https://luminosoa.org/site/books/10.1525/luminos.158/read/?loc=001.xhtml This book investigates rabbinic treatises relating to animals, humans, and other life-forms. Through an original analysis of creaturely generation... more
Read online https://luminosoa.org/site/books/10.1525/luminos.158/read/?loc=001.xhtml
This book investigates rabbinic treatises relating to animals, humans, and other life-forms. Through an original analysis of creaturely generation and species classification by late ancient Palestinian rabbis and other thinkers in the Roman Empire, Rafael Rachel Neis shows how rabbis blurred the lines between humans and other beings, even as they were intent on classifying creatures and tracing the contours of what it means to be human. Recognizing that life proliferates by mechanisms beyond sexual copulation between two heterosexual “male” and “female” individuals of the same species, the rabbis proposed intricate alternatives. In parsing a variety of creatures, they considered overlaps and resemblances across seemingly distinct species, upsetting in turn unmitigated claims of human distinctiveness. When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven enters conversations in animal studies, queer theory, trans theory, and feminist science studies to provincialize sacrosanct ideals of reproduction in favor of a broader range that spans generation, kinship, and species. The book thereby offers powerful historical alternatives to the paradigms associated with so-called traditional ideas.
This book investigates rabbinic treatises relating to animals, humans, and other life-forms. Through an original analysis of creaturely generation and species classification by late ancient Palestinian rabbis and other thinkers in the Roman Empire, Rafael Rachel Neis shows how rabbis blurred the lines between humans and other beings, even as they were intent on classifying creatures and tracing the contours of what it means to be human. Recognizing that life proliferates by mechanisms beyond sexual copulation between two heterosexual “male” and “female” individuals of the same species, the rabbis proposed intricate alternatives. In parsing a variety of creatures, they considered overlaps and resemblances across seemingly distinct species, upsetting in turn unmitigated claims of human distinctiveness. When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven enters conversations in animal studies, queer theory, trans theory, and feminist science studies to provincialize sacrosanct ideals of reproduction in favor of a broader range that spans generation, kinship, and species. The book thereby offers powerful historical alternatives to the paradigms associated with so-called traditional ideas.
Research Interests: Ancient History, Roman History, Jewish Studies, Feminist Theory, Disability Studies, and 14 moreTransgender Studies, Queer Theory, Animal Studies, History of Science, Talmud, Ancient Science, Anthropology of Reproduction, Jewish History, Late Antiquity, Animals and Animality, Rabbinic Literature, Religious Studies, Ancient Judaism, and Science and Technology Studies
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Ancient History, Art, Religion and Sexuality, Talmud, and 23 moreCultural Theory, History of the Senses, Trauma Studies, Science Fiction, Performance, Ancient Religion, Late Antiquity, Midrash, Affect Theory, Ancient Near East, Rabbinic Literature, Conceptual Art, Roman Empire, Psychical Research, Sassanian Persia, Visual Art, Ancient Judaism, Vision, Telepathy, Creative Practice, Visuality, History of Judaism In Antiquity, and Technological Futurism
Please join the next SAM webinar to celebrate the publication of Catherine Michael Chin’s Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe (UC Press, 2024), and Rafael Rachel Neis’ When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and... more
Please join the next SAM webinar to celebrate the publication of Catherine Michael Chin’s Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe (UC Press, 2024), and Rafael Rachel Neis’ When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (UC Press, 2023).
Together with the authors, Aileen R. Das will be discussing their books as well as their academic and art practices. The event will take place via Zoom, April 26, from 3-4:30pm EST. Registration is required, via the following link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_AtnYV1yFSZSQyJo6sI7idg
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
Book covers pictured, from left to right: Rafael Rachel Neis, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (UC Press, 2023) and Catherine Michael Chin, Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe (UC Press, 2024).
Together with the authors, Aileen R. Das will be discussing their books as well as their academic and art practices. The event will take place via Zoom, April 26, from 3-4:30pm EST. Registration is required, via the following link: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_AtnYV1yFSZSQyJo6sI7idg
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.
Book covers pictured, from left to right: Rafael Rachel Neis, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species (UC Press, 2023) and Catherine Michael Chin, Life: The Natural History of an Early Christian Universe (UC Press, 2024).
Research Interests: Religion, History, Ancient History, Art History, Jewish Studies, and 15 moreDisability Studies, History of Medicine, Transgender Studies, Queer Theory, Animal Studies, History of Science, Reproduction, Early Christianity, Late Antiquity, Church History, Rabbinic Literature, Comics and Graphic Novels, Nature, Religious Studies, and Science and Technology Studies
This seminar brings together scholars sharing an interest in an emerging subfield within rabbinic literature, in line with developments in adjacent disciplines. A growing number of projects and publications attest to an increasing... more
This seminar brings together scholars sharing an interest in an emerging subfield within rabbinic literature, in line with developments in adjacent disciplines. A growing number of projects and publications attest to an increasing awareness of new approaches (historical anthropology, cultural studies, critical science studies, gender studies) to the study of ancient sciences. Moreover, the diverse nature of ancient knowledge, its socio-historical contexts and varied ways of knowledge transfer have come more into focus.
Earlier studies typically assumed the idealized Graeco-Roman scientific thinking as the foil against which one retrieves parallels and influences, without paying attention to the plurality of cultural transfers and endemic developments in Late Antiquity. This seminar on rabbinic knowledge culture(s) from a comparative perspective engages a broader approach, asking how manifestations of different forms of ancient knowing impacted on the period under discussion, and in turn were shaped by larger socio-historical, cultural and religious formations. The contributions will inquire into different but interrelated fields of knowledge about nature and creatures (Watts Belser; Neis; Hayes), the body and medicine (Fonrobert, Lehmhaus), law, truth and philosophy (Hidary; Hayes), the senses and spatiality (Mandsager; Novick; Kalmin), and ethnography (Redfield). Special attention will be paid (e.g., by Kalmin; Hayes; Neis; Watts Belser; Fonrobert, Hoffmann Libson) to modes, practices, and concepts of knowing and reasoning (e.g., embodied knowledge; empiricism and theory; exegetical approaches) as well as to their epistemic dimensions (e.g., conceptualization of 'scientific' knowledge in ancient cultures and its embeddeness within other knowledge complexes; the "Jewishness" of knowledge in rabbinic texts). Papers will address rabbinic conceptions of knowledge transfer, acquisition or displacement with a focus on strategies of framing or representing expertise and experts in certain genres and discursive contexts (e.g., lists, de-/prescriptive narratives, Halakhic debates, compilational, encyclopaedic or epitomizing discourses).
The papers and discussions within this seminar shall help to increase the awareness for the topic within Jewish studies and beyond. Furthermore, the seminar will start a dialogue about methodological and theoretical issues at stake in such inquiries and it aims at fostering collaboration among the involved scholars and forging links between interested colleagues for future research on the topics at hand.
Earlier studies typically assumed the idealized Graeco-Roman scientific thinking as the foil against which one retrieves parallels and influences, without paying attention to the plurality of cultural transfers and endemic developments in Late Antiquity. This seminar on rabbinic knowledge culture(s) from a comparative perspective engages a broader approach, asking how manifestations of different forms of ancient knowing impacted on the period under discussion, and in turn were shaped by larger socio-historical, cultural and religious formations. The contributions will inquire into different but interrelated fields of knowledge about nature and creatures (Watts Belser; Neis; Hayes), the body and medicine (Fonrobert, Lehmhaus), law, truth and philosophy (Hidary; Hayes), the senses and spatiality (Mandsager; Novick; Kalmin), and ethnography (Redfield). Special attention will be paid (e.g., by Kalmin; Hayes; Neis; Watts Belser; Fonrobert, Hoffmann Libson) to modes, practices, and concepts of knowing and reasoning (e.g., embodied knowledge; empiricism and theory; exegetical approaches) as well as to their epistemic dimensions (e.g., conceptualization of 'scientific' knowledge in ancient cultures and its embeddeness within other knowledge complexes; the "Jewishness" of knowledge in rabbinic texts). Papers will address rabbinic conceptions of knowledge transfer, acquisition or displacement with a focus on strategies of framing or representing expertise and experts in certain genres and discursive contexts (e.g., lists, de-/prescriptive narratives, Halakhic debates, compilational, encyclopaedic or epitomizing discourses).
The papers and discussions within this seminar shall help to increase the awareness for the topic within Jewish studies and beyond. Furthermore, the seminar will start a dialogue about methodological and theoretical issues at stake in such inquiries and it aims at fostering collaboration among the involved scholars and forging links between interested colleagues for future research on the topics at hand.
Research Interests: History, Ancient History, Cultural Studies, Comparative Law, Gender Studies, and 14 moreEpistemology, Empiricism, Expertise, Ethnography, History of Science, Talmud, Culture, Late Antiquity, Ancient Near East, Rabbinic Literature, Philosophy of Nature, Encyclopedism, Greco-Roman World, and Science and Technology Studies
The first thing that often comes to mind when thinking about Jewish and Christian ideas of humanness is the Hebrew Bible's notion of humanity "created in the image of God" (Genesis 1:27). Noting the ways that the human as "image of God"... more
The first thing that often comes to mind when thinking about Jewish and Christian ideas of humanness is the Hebrew Bible's notion of humanity "created in the image of God" (Genesis 1:27). Noting the ways that the human as "image of God" can form the basis of exclusions as much as they can gesture to diversity, Dr. Neis will present a very different approach to classical Jewish approaches to humanness. Neis will argue that the ancient rabbis actually thought about the limits and makings of the human within broader considerations about reproduction and species hybridity. Neis will show the surprising ways in which the early rabbis of the Mishnah created a "biology" that sought to determine the boundaries and the overlaps between species. This alternative Jewish approach to the human opens up possibilities for a more porous and varied approach to bodily variation and dovetails with insights drawn from the fields of disability studies and animal studies. Drawing upon understudied traditions in the tractates on menstrual and agricultural laws in the Mishnah, Neis also shows surprising affinities between these ancient rabbinic traditions and the graphic novel The Rabbi's Cat by Joann Sfar and the paintings of Sunaura Taylor.
Thursday, November 3, 2016
4:10-5:30 PM
Amphitheatre Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.)
Professor Rachel Neis, Jean and Samuel Frankel Professorship in Rabbinic Literature, Inaugural Lecture
Thursday, November 3, 2016
4:10-5:30 PM
Amphitheatre Rackham Graduate School (Horace H.)
Professor Rachel Neis, Jean and Samuel Frankel Professorship in Rabbinic Literature, Inaugural Lecture
Research Interests: Ancient History, Jewish Studies, Disability Studies, History of Medicine, Posthumanism, and 15 moreAnimal Studies, History of Science, Hybridity, Reproduction, Ancient Science, Early Christianity, Late Antiquity, Rabbinic Literature, Ancient Medicine, Religious Studies, Ancient Judaism, Humans, Image of God, Speciesism, and Rabbinical literature (The Mishnah, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudim, aggadic midrashim)
This set of primary sources and a short commentary entitled "WHEN SPECIES MEET IN THE MISHNAH," was pre-circulated to panelists and respondent for the "flipped" panel, "METHODOLOGICAL BOUNDARIES AND THE FIELD OF RABBINICS: INTERRUPTIONS... more
This set of primary sources and a short commentary entitled "WHEN SPECIES MEET IN THE MISHNAH," was pre-circulated to panelists and respondent for the "flipped" panel, "METHODOLOGICAL BOUNDARIES AND THE FIELD OF RABBINICS: INTERRUPTIONS FROM PHILOSOPHY," organized by Chaya Halberstam and Marjorie Lehman. At the session (Sunday December 17, 2017), copies of sources+commentaries were distributed to audience.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Ancient History, Jewish Studies, Feminist Theory, Disability Studies, and 15 moreHistory of Medicine, Posthumanism, Animal Studies, History of Science, Hybridity, Reproduction, Gender and Sexuality, Ancient Science, Late Antiquity, Animal reproduction, Feminist science and technology studies, Religious Studies, Ancient Judaism, Rabbinical literature (The Mishnah, Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudim, aggadic midrashim), and Science and Technology Studies
This new series attempts to study ancient histories of knowledge and their entanglement with religious, cultural and socio-political aspects, while paying attention to the historicity and cultural relativity of specific figurations of... more
This new series attempts to study ancient histories of knowledge and their entanglement with religious, cultural and socio-political aspects, while paying attention to the historicity and cultural relativity of specific figurations of knowledge.
Research Interests: Ancient History, Cultural Studies, Medical Sciences, Roman History, Jewish Studies, and 15 moreSociology of Knowledge, History of Science, Ancient Science, Early Christianity, Coptic Studies, Islamic Studies, Syriac Studies, Ancient Near East, Ancient Medicine, Ancient Greek History, Medicine, Judaism, History of knowledge, Ancient Egyptian History, and Mandean
Author and scholar Rafael Neis joins us to talk about their book, "When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species", featuring a riveting discussion of furries, gender, what happens if your brother is a bird,... more
Author and scholar Rafael Neis joins us to talk about their book, "When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species", featuring a riveting discussion of furries, gender, what happens if your brother is a bird, gay demon divorce and much more! Keep up with them on insta @postrafelite and on their website at https://rachelrafaelneis.com.
To ask us questions, text or leaves us a voicemail at the Talmud Hotline at 401-484-1619 or email us at xaihowareyou@gmail.com. Support us on patreon at patreon.com/xaihowareyou. Follow us on twitter @xaihowareyou and @miss_figured. Music by Ben Schreiber.
To ask us questions, text or leaves us a voicemail at the Talmud Hotline at 401-484-1619 or email us at xaihowareyou@gmail.com. Support us on patreon at patreon.com/xaihowareyou. Follow us on twitter @xaihowareyou and @miss_figured. Music by Ben Schreiber.