Rafael Rachel Neis's, "The Multiplicity of Deviancy," is Part 6 of a multipart and multimedia ins... 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).
CFA Fellowship in Jewish Studies, Queer Studies, Trans Studies.
In this theme year, we aim to ex... 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 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.
Purpose: Gender-affirming hormones (hormones)-the use of sex hormones to induce desired secondary... 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.
The Mishnah was a compendium of the teaching of the Jewish sages (the rabbis) from the first to e... 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.
The tractates of Niddah, Bekhorot, and Hullin investigate the generation of material bodies throu... 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.
**Please email RNEIS@umich.edu for the full article**
While biologists argue about the limits ... 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.
This essay considers the category of "Jewish law" in Jewish studies while inviting scholarly and ... 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
This paper was precirculated and then discussed for "At the Crossroads: New Directions in the Stu... 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.
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?
Strength to Strength: Essays in Honor of Shaye J. D. Cohen, 2018
This article explores some of the same sources as these scholars, reading them as rabbinic biolog... 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.
This article, part of a Forum on Animals in Late Antiquity hosted on Ancient Jew Review, consider... 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.
Tracing an early rabbinic approach to the human, this article analyzes how the Tannaim of the Mis... 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.
Neis traces an expression of bodily language (kavvanat halev, literally “directing the heart”) fr... 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.
Drawing on rabbinic sources redacted in the early third and late fourth/ early fifth centuries, t... 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.
The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity, 2013
This chapter makes makes the case for a positive rabbinic visuality, in this case through the cre... 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.
Rafael Rachel Neis's, "The Multiplicity of Deviancy," is Part 6 of a multipart and multimedia ins... 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).
CFA Fellowship in Jewish Studies, Queer Studies, Trans Studies.
In this theme year, we aim to ex... 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 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.
Purpose: Gender-affirming hormones (hormones)-the use of sex hormones to induce desired secondary... 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.
The Mishnah was a compendium of the teaching of the Jewish sages (the rabbis) from the first to e... 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.
The tractates of Niddah, Bekhorot, and Hullin investigate the generation of material bodies throu... 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.
**Please email RNEIS@umich.edu for the full article**
While biologists argue about the limits ... 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.
This essay considers the category of "Jewish law" in Jewish studies while inviting scholarly and ... 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
This paper was precirculated and then discussed for "At the Crossroads: New Directions in the Stu... 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.
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?
Strength to Strength: Essays in Honor of Shaye J. D. Cohen, 2018
This article explores some of the same sources as these scholars, reading them as rabbinic biolog... 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.
This article, part of a Forum on Animals in Late Antiquity hosted on Ancient Jew Review, consider... 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.
Tracing an early rabbinic approach to the human, this article analyzes how the Tannaim of the Mis... 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.
Neis traces an expression of bodily language (kavvanat halev, literally “directing the heart”) fr... 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.
Drawing on rabbinic sources redacted in the early third and late fourth/ early fifth centuries, t... 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.
The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity, 2013
This chapter makes makes the case for a positive rabbinic visuality, in this case through the cre... 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.
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.
Please join the next SAM webinar to celebrate the publication of Catherine Michael Chin’s Life: T... 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).
This seminar brings together scholars sharing an interest in an emerging subfield within rabbinic... 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.
The first thing that often comes to mind when thinking about Jewish and Christian ideas of humann... 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
This set of primary sources and a short commentary entitled "WHEN SPECIES MEET IN THE MISHNAH," w... 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.
This new series attempts to study ancient histories of knowledge and their entanglement with reli... 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.
Author and scholar Rafael Neis joins us to talk about their book, "When a Human Gives Birth to a ... 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.
Uploads
Only the first page of the comic is uploaded here. For the full, three page comic, see the link provided.
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).
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 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.
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
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.
KEY WORDS
Jewish law, Halakhah, law, Hindu law, Islamic law, colonialism, law school, Jewish studies
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.
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?
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.
http://www.ancientjewreview.com/articles/2018/5/8/when-species-meet-in-the-mishnah
Only the first page of the comic is uploaded here. For the full, three page comic, see the link provided.
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).
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 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.
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
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.
KEY WORDS
Jewish law, Halakhah, law, Hindu law, Islamic law, colonialism, law school, Jewish studies
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.
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?
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.
http://www.ancientjewreview.com/articles/2018/5/8/when-species-meet-in-the-mishnah
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.
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).
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.
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
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.