Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science Rachel Rafael Neis (University of Michigan)1 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, nonhuman 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, hetero-sexual reproduction. Introduction By what means did people in antiquity understand the ways that bodies produce, contain, or expel material entities? How did they understand the processes by which these materials came to be and how did they classify them? What gestatory, excretory, or other kinds of relationships did they conceive between human and nonhuman beings and the material entities that they produced? These questions about the ways that matter or new stuff comes into being – or to echo feminist science theorist Karan Barad, the ways that matter comes to 1 Portions of this material were presented at the “Talmud, Interrupted,” Feminist Research Seminar and at the Frankel Professorship Inaugural Lecture in 2016. A short version was presented at the conference Non/Human Materials Before Modernity in 2017: thanks to Elizabeth Roberts for her response. Another version was available to registrants of the AJS 2017 for the seminar on “rabbinic knowledge cultures in late antiquity.” I thank Lennart Lehmhaus for his invitation and John Mandsager for his insightful response. My appreciation to Chaya Halberstam and Marjorie Lehman for inviting me to share significant segments of this material at another panel at AJS 2017, to respondent Mira Wasserman, and to commentators Yonatan Brafman and Dana Hollander. I am grateful to Charlotte Fonrobert and the anonymous reviewer for their helpful remarks and to Michail Kitsos for his editorial assistance. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 182 Rachel Rafael Neis matter – were concretized in rabbinic writings from the third century onward, albeit in unlikely places such as tractates on firstborn offerings to the temple and on menstrual purity. In ostensibly technical disquisitions, the tractates of Niddah, Bekhorot, and Hullin simultaneously investigate the generation of material bodies through ritual and status frameworks concerned with purity, dietary rules, sacrifice, property, and kinship. As abstract as inquiries into generative and materializing processes may have been, their resolutions potentially made for very material consequences of life, death, and value for various entities and creatures. Thus, to discern that an entity found within or expelled by a human or animal was “offspring” (valad) rather than something introduced into the host body, a secretion (rir), or some other produced material (e. g. genital flow, menses, or milk), was to posit a particular destiny for that entity. This article tracks how these distinctions about such material bodies, their origins, and relatedly, determinations about their destinies, were worked out in late ancient Palestinian rabbinic writings. 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.2 I show that the rabbis created a spectrum of material entities, with a thin line between a generated creature (valad) and other material things, and with determinations of materiality and species often factoring into such distinctions. Putative offspring, of both human and nonhuman creatures, it turns out, were considered among an array of solid and liquid materials that bodies hosted and/or expelled, and through an assortment of species variability. And it was the form and materiality of the emergent entities that factored into their assessments as offspring and/or proper members of their host or parents’ species or not. This inquiry presses further into the ways that the rabbis, like other late ancient thinkers, envisaged a variety of reproductive modes and a certain degree of species fluidity that had the potential to challenge the supremacy of the human.3 2 3 See, e. g., M. Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); R. Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); C. Wolfe, “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities,” PMLA 124 (2009): 564–75; M. J. Hird, “Biologically Queer,” in The Ashgate Companion to Queer Theory (eds. N. Giffney and M. O’Rourke; London: Routledge, 2009), 347–62; D. Coole and S. Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); D. J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). See R. Neis, “The Reproduction of Species: Humans, Animals and Species Nonconformity in Early Rabbinic Science,” JSQ 24 (2017): 289–317; idem “Interspecies and Cross-species Generation: Limits and Potentialities in Tannaitic Reproductive Science,” in Strength to Strength: Essays in Appreciation of Shaye J. D. Cohen (ed. M. L. Satlow; Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2018), 309–28; idem “’All That Is in the Settlement:’ Humans, Likeness, and Species in the Rabbinic Bestiary,” The Journal of Jewish Ethics, 5,1 (2019), 1–39; idem “When Species Meet in the Mishna,” Ancient Jew Review, Forum on Animals/Species, 2018, https://www.ancientjewreview.com/articles/2018/5/8/when-species-meet-in-the-mishnah. On species fluidity see © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science 183 In attending to this combination of classification and consequent destiny of bodily material, I argue that we must not stop at the curious content of late ancient rabbinic conceptions of generation and materialization, fascinating as it is. Rather we ought to also attend to the conditions in which these knowledges were formulated. This includes taking seriously the material agency of the supposed “objects” of knowledge: the bodies and bodily products of women and animals, as well as the social-political-material conditions that shaped Palestinian rabbinic knowledge-making between the first and late fourth centuries. Here too, science studies and feminist new materialist analyses of knowledge-making and agency offer approaches that go beyond dualist framings of active knowing subjects (whether rabbinic men, humans, Romans) versus passive known objects (whether non-rabbis or women, nonhuman entities, or Jews). These entwined approaches also allow us to account for the ways in which rabbinic thinkers were entangled with and shaped by the “objects” of their knowledge.4 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 the living and the nonliving or between the human and the nonhuman. This biology, we will see, also provided alternatives to accounts of generation in terms of same-species, hetero-sexual reproduction. In what follows I trace these ideas in the Tosefta and the Palestinian Talmud beginning with Tosefta Bekorot on animal emissions and materials (part two, Animal Gestation, Ingestion, Emission, turning then to Tosefta Niddah on human materials (part three, Human Emission, Gestation, Xenogenesis) and questions of nonbinary analytic frameworks (part four, The Generation of Bodies of Knowledge: Beyond Binary Analytic Frameworks). I close (part five, Conclusion: Family or Food? The Afterlives of Abortuses) with an analysis of a passage in Yerushalmi Niddah that joins the human and animal.5 But first I turn briefly to ancient ideas of generation (part one). 4 5 L. M. V. Totelin, “Animal and Plant Generation in Classical Antiquity,” in Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day (eds. N. Hopwood, R. Flemming, and L. Kassell; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 53–66, esp. 57, 63. On non-human entanglement with the human, see, e. g., M. J. Hird, “Animal Transex,” Australian Feminist Studies 21 (2006): 35–50, and J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 12, 23, 48, 112, 120. Braidotti considers the possibilities in the techno-scientific present, which “writes hybridity into our social and symbolic sphere and as such it challenges all notions of purity”; R. Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 99. Tosefta citations are according to S. Lieberman ed., Tosefta Ki-Fshuta: A Comprehensive Commentary on the Tosefta, 12 vols. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary Press, 1962) or M. S. Zuckermandel ed., Tosephta: Based on the Erfurt and Vienna Codices with Parallels and Variants Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1970), with consultations of the Primary Textual Witnesses to Tannaitic Literature. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 184 Rachel Rafael Neis 1. Generation Before Reproduction The history of narratives describing how materials come to be found within and to emerge from bodies is complex and various. One way in which Euro-Americans have sought to narrow and name such narratives (at least since the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) is through the concept of “reproduction.”6 Reproduction is often narrated as a particularly human process involving entities known as men and women engaging in very specific kinds of activity described as sexual, which are then seen as resulting in pregnancy, culminating in birth and delivery of offspring. In both its more simplified and complex variants, this story creates, replicates, and enacts a particular kind of cultural work, including in its “scientific” guises.7 It is important for us to distinguish between the post-nineteenth century legacies of reproductive thinking and ancient ideas of generation. As scholars of antiquity and modernity have shown, “generation” signified a different semantic and conceptual range than did “reproduction.” Nick Hopwood, Rebecca Flemming, and Lauran Kassell describe how generation referenced “a larger, looser framework for discussing procreation and descent.”8 Laurence Totelin explains that generation was not humancentric and included “not just animals and plants, but minerals too.”9 The inclusion of plants and minerals reminds us that coming into being, or life itself, was not a binary matter for ancient thinkers. Generation was understood by people in antiquity, including the rabbis, to largely fall along the lines of “like begets like.” However, as I have shown for the rabbis, and as we know from Greek and Roman authors, the world of late antiquity was one in which a variety of generative modes were operative, e. g. spontaneous generation10 and parthenogenesis, and in which generative out6 7 8 9 10 S. Lettow, “Generation, Genealogy, and Time: The Concept of Reproduction from Histoire naturelle to Naturphilosophie,” in Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences (ed. S. Lettow; Albany: SUNY Press, 2014), 21–44; B. B. von Wülfingen, C. Brandt, S. Lettow, and F. Vienne, “Temporalities of Reproduction: Practices and Concepts from the Eighteenth to the Early Twenty-First Century,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 37 (2015): 1–16; D. McGowan Tress, “The Metaphysical Science of Aristotle’s Generation of Animals and Its Feminist Critics,” in Feminism and Ancient Philosophy (ed. J. K. Ward; New York: Routledge, 1996), 31–50, 33 (and see 32). On the emergence of the concept of “reproduction” in the mid-19th century (and its association with mechanized replication) instead of “generation,” see N. Hopwood et al., “Introduction: Communicating Reproduction,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 89 (2015): 379–404, esp. 380, 384. E. Martin, “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16 (1991): 485–501. Hopwood et al, Reproduction, 4. Ibid. Both the rabbis and other ancients believed that certain entities could be “spontaneously generated” – the rabbis mention a variety of flies generated by wine and other liquids. See e. g., S. Lieberman, “Light on the Cave Scrolls from Rabbinic Sources,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 20 (1951): 395–404, 396 and G. L. Campbell, “Origins of Life and Origins of Species,” in The Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought and Life (ed. G. L. Campbell; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 233–47. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science 185 comes were not always mimetic.11 The rabbis and others lived in a world of reproductive unpredictability that not only made for species mutability but that also allowed for generative modes beyond hetero-sexual and same-species reproductive models. Rabbinic ideas of reproduction queer our modern ideas of a two-parent, same-species, dual-gendered model – at least for humans – by introducing divine input into generation, sometimes at the expense of the female parent.12 Another example that we find in tannaitic sources is the possibility of spontaneously arising species-variant offspring born to parents of the same species.13 Similar to the ways that modern accounts of hetero-sexual reproduction may be inadequate to ancient understandings of how entities come to be, are the ways that such accounts have been shown as insufficient for contemporary and modern reproductive contexts and biological narratives.14 Whether by denaturalizing the means of reproduction or by considering newer reproductive and biogenetic technologies,15 medical anthropologists, historians of science and medicine, and feminist science studies scholars not only highlight shifting practices 11 12 13 14 15 See Neis, “Rabbinic Bestiary,” 1–5, 8–9, 30n24; idem “Interspecies,” 310–312, 327. For examples of spontaneous generation see m. Hullin 9:6 (half flesh, half earth mouse), b. Sanhedrin 91a, and b. Sanhedrin 107b. The Sifra distinguishes between creatures that are vertebrates that reproduce and multiply (‫)בעל עצמות ופרה ורבה‬, those that have neither characteristic, and those that have just one: Sifra Shemini 3, 5 (Weiss ed. 49c); Sifra Shemini 5, 1 6 (Weiss ed. 52a); Sifra Shemini 5, 6 (Weiss ed. 52b) on sheratsim that sexually reproduce, not like the mouse of half flesh half earth 52b; Sifra Shemini 12,4 (Weiss ed. 57b) – all per Ms. Vatican. See b. Hullin 58a on possible parthenogenesis. I address all these reproductive modes again in a future venue. On Greek and Roman thinkers see D. Lehoux, “Why Doesn’t My Baby Look Like Me?” in Probabilities, Hypotheticals, and Counterfactuals in Ancient Greek Thought, ed. Victoria Wohl (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014) 208–229 and idem, Creatures Born of Mud and Slime: The Wonder and Complexity of Spontaneous Generation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) and the kinds of questions about bodies and their generative workings in medico-philosophical texts like Aristotle, Generation or Pseudo-Aristotle, Problems. See Neis, “Reproduction of Species,” 296; idem “Interspecies,” 315; Kessler, Conceiving Israel, 14–16, 78, 82, 104). Neis, “Reproduction of Species;” idem “Interspecies.” On the introduction of additional data into the formation of the fetus, see Neis, The Rabbinic Sense of Sight: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 131–35, 154–55. See Heidi Marx-Wolf, “Living Plants, Dead Animals, and Other Matters: Embryos and Demons in Porphyry of Tyre,” Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural vol.7, n.1 (2018): 1–26. Marx-Wolf approaches Porphyry ideas on embodiment and materiality with attention to their multiplicity and becoming by engaging with Deleuze and Guatarri. She suggestively experiments with “a kind of genealogical connection” between the thought of Porphyry and these postmodern thinkers. I take myself to be working in a similar vein, informed by some of the new materialist thinkers to which Marx-Wolf points (3–4). M. Meskus, “Agential Multiplicity in the Assisted Beginnings of Life,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22 (2015): 23–39; E. F. S. Roberts, “Gods, Germs, and Petri Dishes: Toward a Nonsecular Medical Anthropology.” Medical Anthropology 35/3 (2016), 209–219; idem, “When Nature/Culture Implodes: Feminist Anthropology and Biotechnology,” in Mapping Feminist Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century (eds. Ellen Lewin and Leni Silverstein; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 105–25. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 186 Rachel Rafael Neis but also queer simplistic linear or causal narratives of reproduction in terms of specific kinds of bodies, acts, events, and materials.16 As we turn to Tosefta Bekorot and Niddah we find the rabbis placing offspring (including those with species variation) alongside other entities and materials emitted by animals or humans respectively. As I have shown previously in the case of Niddah, the rabbis placed fetal materials (vālād) released by humans, along a continuum of other uterine materials including menstrual products (niddâ), blood that was not niddâ, and solid entities – several in the form of other species – that were viewed as neither menstrual nor fetal.17 That the rabbis would embed the putative vālād in such an array of humanly produced entities, and that they similarly placed the nonhuman vālād in a spread of materials emitted or contained by animals in Bekorot, makes sense when we remember that the rabbis conceived of “sexual generation” or “periyâ u-reviyâ” with its sometimes mimetic product as only one possible generative mode and outcome. In such a world, the precious place of the human becomes precarious: the human is implicated in both species fluidity and material variability. 2. Animal Gestation, Ingestion, Emission We begin with Tosefta Bekorot which contains a sizeable textual unit (t. Bek. 1:5–12) that works through different cases in which entities or materials come to be nested within or emitted by various creatures’ bodies.18 The biblical obligation to donate firstborn animals and to dedicate priests to God via the Temple, along with biblical exclusions of animals and humans with bodily variation or “blemishes” (mûmîm), undergird the tractate. The tractate not only constructs idealized able-bodied animals and humans that count as firstborn donations and priests, but also, in the unit under study and elsewhere, considers fundamental questions about what counts as offspring.19 This unit begins in t. Bek. 1:5 by stipulating that for those animal species subject to firstborn donation, the birthing animal and the one birthed must be of the same species for the obligation to be incurred.20 The possibility of a crossspecies delivery is immediately raised (t. Bek. 1:6) and resolved with a short ver16 17 18 19 20 M. Strathern, Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Reproductive Technologies (New York: Routledge, 1992) and J. Hird, “Biologically Queer.” Perhaps the most obviously politicized site of such determinations in the US is in the realm of reproductive justice. On thinking with the rabbis through contemporary cloning and chimera as challenges to hetero-sexual reproduction Neis, “Rabbinic Bestiary,” 1–5, 30n24. Neis, “Reproduction.” A shorter parallel to this unit is to be found in the Mishnah (m. Bek. 1:2). The obligation applies to pure animal kinds (cows, sheep, goats) and the donkey (impure, therefore cannot be offered to the Temple, so must be “redeemed” or substituted (t. Bek. 1:2). See m. Bek. 1:2 for cases of a cow delivering something like a donkey species and a donkey delivering something like a horse kind. On the relationship between the Tosefta and the Mishnah see J. Hauptmann, “The Tosefta as a Commentary on an Early Mishnah,” JSIJ 4 (2005): 1–24. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science 187 sion of what I term the principle of generation (which I will explain presently).21 Following a series of scenarios in which creatures issue or host unlike entities (t. Bek. 7–8) and a dispute about cross-species delivery, the principle is reiterated (t. Bek. 1:9) along with a precis of differing periods and modes of animal reproduction (t. Bek. 10–11). The passage is capped with an implicit acknowledgement of the difficulty of identifying certain materials and species, bowing to the expert, the hunter, and expert tradition. Here is the passage in full: 5. R. Yose the Galilean says: “But the firstborn of an ox or the firstborn of a sheep or the first born of a goat you shall not redeem. They are holy” (Num 18:17). The firstborn of an ox is only [subject to the firstborn obligation] when both the birthing one and the one birthed are oxen. The firstborn of a sheep is only [obligated] when both the birthing one and the birthed one are sheep. The firstborn of a goat is only [obligated] when both the birthing one and the birthed one are goats. But [even] if it [only] has some signs resembling its father it is obligated as a firstborn.22 6. A pure animal that gave birth to an impure kind of animal (‫)מין בהמה טמאה‬, [the offspring] is permitted for eating, and if it has some of the signs [of its parents] it is obligated for the firstborn. And an impure animal which delivers a pure animal, [the offspring] is forbidden for eating. [Generation principle:] For that which emerges from the impure is impure and that which emerges from the pure is pure. 7. An impure fish that swallowed a pure fish, it [the latter] is permissible for eating. And a pure fish that swallowed an impure fish, it [the latter] is forbidden for eating because it is not its products (‫)גידוליו‬. 8. Why did they say that bee honey is permitted [when bees are impure creatures]? Because they do not emit (‫מוציאות‬, or produce) it, rather they draw (‫ )מכנסות‬it in. The honey of wasps is forbidden as it is a secretion (‫)ריר‬.23 9. Rabbi Simon says: what does [Scripture] come to teach you by having camel (Lev 11:4) camel (Deut 14:7) twice? To include the camel that is born of a cow as if it were born of (‫ )כנולד מן‬a camel. And if its head and majority resemble its mother’s, it is permitted for eating. And the sages say: [Generation principle:] that which emerges from (‫ )היוצא מן‬the impure is impure, and that which emerges from (‫ )היוצא מן‬the pure is pure, for an impure animal is not born of (‫ )יולדת מן‬the pure, neither is a pure animal born of (‫ )יולדת מן‬the impure. 21 22 23 See Neis, “Interspecies,” 317, 319–323 and Neis, “Bestiary;” cf. Neis, “Reproduction of Species,” where I refer to it as the reproductive principle. Ms. Vienna gives “l -’āvîw,” whereas the editio princeps has “l -îmô.” Admittedly even in Ms. Vienna, the letters ‫ ב‬and ‫ י‬run together in such a way, that it is just possible that we are looking at a ‫ מ‬in which the left stem was not truncated. ‫הגוזין‬, Ms. Vienna; ‫הזיזין‬, editio princeps. For this translation see M. Sokoloff, Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods (Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2002), 273; M. Jastrow, Dictionary of the Targumim, Talmud Bavlim, Talmud Yerushalmi and Midrashic Literature (Judaica Press, 2004), 228. See 4Q386 1 ii:5: “and the wasp? (‫ )תזיז‬will not make honey" (M. Κister, “Divorce, Reproof, and Other Sayings in the Synoptic Gospels: Jesus Traditions in the Context of Qumranic and Other Texts,” in Text, Thought, and Practice in Qumran and Early Christianity [eds. R. A. Clements and D. R. Schwartz; Leiden: Brill, 2009], 195–23, leaves as taziz) and b. Šabb. 106b (see Rashi there). See m. Makš 6:4 bee honey; it also determines that hornets’ honey (‫ )דבש צרעים‬is pure and permissible for eating; cf. b. Bek. 7b. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 188 Rachel Rafael Neis And not a large one from a small one, nor a small one from a large one, and not a human (‫ )אדם‬from any of them, nor any of them from a human (‫)מאדם‬.24 (10) A pure small domesticated animal gives birth at five months; a large pure domesticated animal at nine months,25 an impure large domesticated animal at twelve months; a dog at fifty days; a cat at fifty-two days; a pig at sixty days; a fox and creeping creatures at six months; the wolf, lion, bear, panther, leopard, elephant, baboon and monkey at three years; the snake at seven years. (11) Dolphins give birth and grow (‫[ )מולידין ומגדלין‬offspring] like the human (‫;)כאדם‬ impure fish breed; pure fish lay eggs. (12) The intestines of fish and their eggs (‫ )עוברן‬are not to be eaten except according to the expert (‫)המומחה‬. A bird is eaten according to tradition. A hunter is trustworthy when saying “this bird [species] is pure.” The passage, which begins with a basic statement about identity between parent and offspring as the basis for a firstborn’s obligation to the Temple, occasions a series of scenarios in which there is a lack of duplication or mimetic resemblance between parent or host body and emitted or nested material. These are all cases in which one entity appears to house or emit an anomalous kind. In its effort to understand the relationships between these unlike entities, or the means by which one entity subsumes (or emits) another, the Tosefta distinguishes cases of ingestion from those of gestation. For those cases which it supposes are gestational it twice cites the principle of generation (“for that which emerges from the impure is impure, etc.” in t. Bek. 1:6 and 9).26 In other cases it explains that ingestion rather than generation is the cause of the cross-species or anomalous material (e. g. the im/pure fish, bees/honey). These determinations affect human (or at least Jewish) ingestion of creatures and their products. The inaugurating exegesis of Rabbi Yose the Galilean in t. Bek. 1:5 simply states that for a delivery to be subject to the obligation of the firstborn donation it must be of the same kind (or species) as its birthparent. In what is possibly a later addition, the paragraph stipulates that species variation is tolerated, so that species-variant offspring is still liable for donation as long as it bears some resemblance to its (male) parent.27 Qualifying for the firstborn donation does 24 25 26 27 Here is the entire parallel at m. Bek. 1:2: “When a cow gives birth to something like a donkey kind or a donkey gives birth to something like a horse kind, it is exempt from the firstborn obligation, as it is written (Exod 34:20) “firstborn donkey” and (Exod 13:13) “firstborn donkey”-twice, [to teach that] the birthing one must be a donkey, and the born one must be a donkey. But what about eating? If a pure kind gives birth to something like an impure kind, it is permissible to eat [the offspring]; if an impure species gives birth to [a creature which] looks like a pure species, it is forbidden to eat [the offspring], [generation principle:] for that which comes from an impure species is impure and that which comes from a pure species is pure. If an impure fish swallows a pure fish, [the pure fish found inside] is permissible to eat; if a pure fish swallows an impure fish, [the impure fish found inside] is forbidden to eat, for it is not its product. Cf. t. Ḥul. 3:14. Parallels to the generation principle in m. Bek. 1:2, t. Bek. 1:9; t. Kil. 5:8 and b. Bek. 7a. See t. Bek. 2:6:, par. m. Bek. 2:5. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science 189 not map onto ultimate determinations of species: the rabbis vastly expanded the list of biblical bodily variation or “blemishes” that disqualified both animals and priests from temple donation and service, including species nonconforming features.28 This did not mean that disqualified creatures and humans were not members of their species. Despite this it seems that per t. Bek 1:5 and 6 (par m. Bek 2:5 but cf. m. Bek 1:2) a delivery of a creature that has only some of its parents’ species markers can qualify as a bekhor. However, as the rulings and generation principle in t. Bek 1:6 and 9 clarify, disqualification for the firstborn donation does not – at least according to majority opinion – change species classification. Thus, per the principle of generation, the camel-like calf born of a cow (t. Bek. 1:9, cf. m. Bek. 1:2, cow delivers donkey) is still a cow “as it emerges from” the pure cow and it can be ritually slaughtered and consumed.29 Both versions of the principle of generation assume the classificatory schema of Leviticus of pure/impure animals – a shorthand for a much larger schema in which various species are enumerated and sorted. At the same time, the rabbis understood that one species could generate another species outside cases of genuine hybrid offspring of two species, but they offer no explanation for such phenomena. That this type of spontaneously occurring species nonconformity can arise across different classificatory registers is explicit in the longer version of the generation principle reiterated in t. Bek. 1:9. There, in addition to pure/impure species nonconformity, we see the Tosefta entertaining similar anomalous generative events across additional rabbinic classificatory divisions such as large versus small species of animals (behemah gasah versus behemah daqah) and perhaps most surprisingly animals versus humans (“all of them” or qulan versus adam). In these instances, the principle simply reminds us that, even if appearances are to the contrary, the offspring is classified according to its birthparents. Lodged between its two cross-species scenarios and concomitant generation principles (in t. Bek. 1:6 and 9), are considerations of fish/fish and bees, wasps, and honey (t. Bek. 1:7–8). A fish of one species is discovered within another species of fish. Strikingly the Tosefta (and its parallel mishnah) do not talk of birthing or emitting as in the cases of spontaneously occurring interspecific deliveries of animals. Instead the Tosefta’s description – the one fish swallowed the other – is already explanatory and it further clarifies that even though the impure fish (forbidden for consumption) ostensibly hails from within the pure fish, the former may not be eaten because it is not the latter’s products (gîddûlaw). This conforms to the generation principle: it is neither delivered by (t. Bek. 1:6) nor does it properly “emerge from” or derive from (t. Bek. 1:9) the host body. Con28 29 See m. Bek. 6:8, t. Bek. 4:11 and m. Bek. 6:9. On the multiplication of rabbinic blemishes beyond the relatively few biblical ones in the case of human mûmîm see I. Rosen-Zvi, “Temple of the Body: The List of Priestly Blemishes in Mishnah. Bekorot and the Place of the Temple in Tannaitic Discourse,” Mada‘ei HaYahadut 43 (2005–2006): 49–87 [Hebrew]. This sequence is paralleled in m. Bek. 1:2. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 190 Rachel Rafael Neis versely, honey is permitted from bees (an impure species) because the bees do not emit (or “produce”) it but are instead understood to ingest it (or “draw it in”) from the outside. This is in contrast to wasp honey which is accounted for as a secretion (rir), and which therefore is forbidden for human-Jewish consumption. While the wasp material is not gestational, it is understood as genuinely generated by the emitting body.30 We thus have different scenarios in which bodily materials are viewed as either generated (whether gestationally or as excretion) or non-generated (e. g. ingested).31 Rabbinic expansions of the Levitical classification schema of creaturely species across the pure/impure grid (and further subdivisions) mean that these generated/non-generated entities are ultimately sorted by their admission/ prohibition to human/Jewish stomachs. Per this taxonomy of life, creatures are either pure species that can be consumed (some require ritual slaughter) or are species that transmit impurity to Jews upon ingestion and are therefore forbidden.32 While Mary Douglas argued for the ways in which dietary rules are world-making, Aparecida Vilaça and Marilyn Strathern analyze eating or ingestion as a fundamental classificatory or logical operator.33 What we see here vividly is the way that species classification is upheld not only by human ingestion (or its prohibition) but also by “rules of nature” (such as the principle of generation) that shape the material’s designation as generative or not in the first place. The complexity of such determinations is pointed to in the conspicuous display of zoological knowledge (t. Bek. 1:10–11) that follows the generation principle, with the role of professional knowledge (of the expert, of the hunter, and of some body of knowledge or “tradition” about these matters) also invoked in the identification of fish innards and bird species (t. Bek. 1:12). 30 31 32 33 See late ancient Pseudo-Aristotle, Problems 4.878a.1–4 (ed. and trans. R. Mayhew; LCL 316; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 156–57: “Why, if the animal is born from our seed, is it our offspring, but if it comes from some other part or excretion, it is not ours? For many things come to be from what is putrefying as well as from seed. So why, then, if something is like us, is it more our own, but if it is like another, it is not?” The inclusion of bees in the list of anomalous material is curious. Bees were themselves objects of curiosity in ancient generative knowledge in that they were thought to be generated spontaneously from a rotten cow carcass; Vergil, Georgics 4.316–566 and M. Gale, Virgil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 228–31 (thanks to Celia Schultz for pointing me to these sources.) Cf. Aristotle, Generation 759a and Philo De Speliabus legibus 1.291.4). See Ahuva Gaziel, “Spontaneous Generation in Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Theology,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 34, no. 3 (2012): 461–79. See H. Rabinowicz and R. Mintz Geffen, “Dietary Laws,” Encyclopedia Judaica 5:650–59. On the rabbinic use of both the term kind (mîn) and creaturely nomenclature of various registers (e. g., tripartite or bipartite classifications such as b hēmâ, ḥayâ, and of, as well as names of specific species) in Bekorot and Niddah see Neis, “Reproduction.” A. Vilaça, “Relations between Funerary Cannibalism and Warfare Cannibalism: The Question of Predation,” Ethnos 65 (2000): 83–106, (esp. 88 and 104), cited and paraphrased in M. Strathern, “Eating (and Feeding),” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 30 (2012): 1–14. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science 191 Disputing Camel Calves Born of Cows: The Limits of Generation The Tosefta’s case in t. Bek. 1:9 of the cow delivering a camel exemplifies the more general scenario of a “pure animal gives birth to an impure kind” in t. Bek. 1:6 and gives rise to a fascinating dispute. Unlike the fish and bees, here the language of birth is clearly used. Disregarding its bovine maternal parentage, Rabbi Simon classifies the camel calf “as if it were born of (k nôlad mîn) a camel.” For Rabbi Simon, presumed logics of heterosexual same-species reproduction and gendered divisions of generative labor are not at play.34 From a narrowly-informed, anachronistic perspective on reproduction it might be hard to understand the mechanics that might produce this result. But we are certainly aware of cultural instances in which parentage and kinship are not limited by what we might take to be the most obvious material constraints.35 The upshot of Rabbi Simon’s view is that the camel-like calf is considered a member of the impure camel species and is therefore forbidden for consumption.36 However, Rabbi Simon (or perhaps a later interpolator) concedes that in a case in which the creature resembles both camel and cow, “if its head and the majority of its body” bear bovine features, the offspring is permissible. We infer that in such a scenario, the hybrid-appearing creature is classed as a cow.37 We see that the majority view disagrees with Rabbi Simon. It is worth repeating its refutation and reiterated principle of generation: That which emerges from (‫ )היוצא מן‬the impure is impure, and that which emerges from (‫ )היוצא מן‬the pure is pure, for an impure animal is not born of (‫ )יולדת מן‬the pure, neither is a pure animal born of (‫ )יולדת מן‬the impure. And not a large one from a small one, nor a small one from a large one, and not a human (‫ )אדם‬from any of them, nor any of them from a human (‫)מאדם‬. As already discussed this version of the principle emphasizes emergence, origin, and birth in ways that dovetail with similar considerations in the previous cases of fish, bees, and wasps (gîddûlaw, môṣî’ôt, makhnîsôt). This makes the 34 35 36 37 It is likely that Rabbi Simon is not referring to a case of interspecies breeding as that goes to the distinctive class of kil’ayim. However, even if he is, the sages’ principle of generation directly negates the possibility of such events occurring. The rabbis like Aristotle, did not believe that interspecies mating resulted in offspring (outside of limited cases such as mules). M. Weismantel, “Moche Sex Pots: Reproduction and Temporality in Ancient South America,” American Anthropologist 106 (2004): 495–505. Cf. Psuedo-Aristotle, Problems, for whom neither bodily variant uterine deliveries “born of corrupted seed” nor worms generated by excrement are to be called offspring; cf. Aristotle, Generation of Animals 4.767b–769b (trans. A. L. Peck; LCL 366; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), 400–21. While this supplement to Simon’s exclusion of species nonconforming offspring may seem surprising, we will soon see that it overlaps with the majority view about similarly appearing offspring in the case of the human parturient in t. Nid. 4:5 (par m. Nid. 3:2), except in the latter case a lower threshold of resemblance is required. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 192 Rachel Rafael Neis camel born of a cow, a cow. The principle is that a creature is always classed as the same kind as the one from which it emerges, even if all appearances are to the contrary. And to reiterate, the principle also emphasizes that the rabbis do not, generally speaking, contemplate these deliveries to be the result of crossspecies mating.38 In other words, this is not a matrilineal principle of speciation per se.39 This is clear for several reasons: firstly, a distinct category for creatures that are considered cross-species offspring or genuine hybrids exists: kil’ayim.40 The rabbis name these offspring as such and discuss these specifically, usually invoking examples of hybrids of similar species (e. g. offspring of donkeys and horses, or offspring of sheep and goats).41 Secondly, this version of the rule of generation, not only reiterates the shorter version in t. Bek. 1:5, it supplements with negation. Like the earlier version it states that kind generates like kind (a version of Aristotle’s anthrōpos anthrōpon gennai), but it also explicitly adds that the opposite cannot occur.42 And, it extends the negation to a variety of different types of kinds, including larger and smaller cattle, and even the human. Finally, immediately after the rule of generation, the Tosefta follows with a runthrough of the widely divergent gestational times and modes43 of a variety of creaturely kinds, including pure, impure, large, small, domesticated, land, and sea creatures, and humans (by comparison to dolphins) in t. Bek. 1:10–11.44 This display of data seems designed to bolster the argument that successful cross38 39 40 41 42 43 44 It is possible that Rabbi Simon’s view may indicate that he does think that this is the result of a cow-camel mating. Pace S. J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 300–1. For a closer examination of the principle of generation as a limit on genuine interspecies generation and in its two contexts in Mishnah and Tosefta Kil’ayim and Bekorot see Neis “Interspecies.” See Lev 19:19 and Deut 22:9–11. The tractates of Bekorot and Kil’ayim distinguish between interspecies offspring – offspring born of two different kinds (kil’ayim) – and cross-species offspring, the de novo delivery which resembles another kind, but is not the result of interbreeding. Tosfeta Kil’ayim 5:3 similarly distinguishes between the two. For additional instances of genuine kil’ayim see t. Kil. 5:5, m. Bek. 2:5, and m. Kil. 8:4. On the use of kil’ayim offspring as firstborn donations see m. Bek. 1:4–5 and t. Bek. 1:13. On Aristotle’s repeated maxim see D. M. Balme, “Anthropos anthropon gennai: Human is Generated by Human” in The Human Embryo: Aristotle and the Arabic and European Traditions (ed. G. R. Dunstan; Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1990), 20–31. t. Bek. 1:11’s viviparous and oviparous generators show the rabbis view eggs that are ostensibly external to the fish’s body as generative material. Note also the discussion of mammalian gestation and delivery (dolphins). t. Bek. 1:10 refers to gestational times, whereas t. Bek. 1:11 refers to three gestational modes among sea creatures (impure fish – breeders, pure fish – egg-layers, dolphins mammals). These echo Aristotle’s distinctions among creatures that are viviparous (live births, e. g., humans and dolphins), oviparous (produce eggs with most development outside of the parent body or ‫)מטיל ביצים‬, and ovoviviparous (produce eggs but retain them inside the female body until hatching or ‫)משריץ‬. On Aristotle’s between oviparity and ovoviviparity among fish see L. Bodson, “Aristotle’s Statement on the Reproduction of Sharks,” Journal of the History of Biology 16 (1983): 391–407. Aristotle and Pliny describe dolphins as viviparous and as suckling their young (see e. g., Aristotle, Generation of Animals 2.732b.15–36 [trans. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science 193 breeding cannot occur, even as it confirms without explaining why it might seem to occur.45 Perhaps the Tosefta’s admission of a body of zoological and biological expertise that is not necessarily rabbinic per se (t. Bek. 1:12) alludes to the difficulty of classifying materials and species, in what can sometimes be a generatively capricious world. Explanatory Vacuums If, per the majority view, there can be species non-conforming offspring that are spontaneously occurring rather than products of interspecies sex, we are left with an explanatory vacuum for how these events come to be. Aristotle, who also admits that cross-species appearing deliveries occur while similarly negating the possibility of successful cross-species breeding except in cases where there are similar gestational modes and periods, does supply an explanation for these events. Put simply they happen due to the failure of male seed to master female matter.46 His examples of species nonconforming offspring and bodily variation focus on humans, but also include some nonhuman cases. The explanatory vacuum left by the Tannaim acknowledges a disruptive unpredictability of expected mimetic outcomes in generation. In this regard Emma Bianchi’s work is instructive: Bianchi has sought to complicate the common interpretation of Aristotle’s explanation for variant reproductive outcomes as solely related to weakened male seed.47 Instead she highlights how Aristotle’s account attends to the potentials of female matter’s aleatory character, in which it is dynamic and unpredictable rather than waiting passively and inertly for male seed to act upon it. A similar sense of unruliness and unpredictability in rabbinic reproductive thought queers linear or expected accounts of “reproduction.” Humans are caught up in this unruliness (per the generation principle) but they also attempt to tame it partly via the physical project of converting animal bodies and products into food and ingesting them, a project co-sponsored by rabbinic knowledge-making and by additional forms of hands-on expertise provided by others. 45 46 47 A. L. Peck; LCL 366; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942], 136–39 and Pliny, Natural History 10.7–9 [trans. H. Rackham; LCL 353; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940], 296–99). On the ways this passage in t. Bekhorot echoes the argumentation and sequence of Aristotle’s Generation of Animals 769b23–26, see Neis, “Interspecies,” 319–20 and Neis, “Reproduction,” 311–312. Aristotle, Generation of Animals 2.738b.28, 184–185; 2.746a.30, 242–143. E. Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 194 Rachel Rafael Neis 3. Human Emission, Gestation, Xenogenesis In this section I investigate the ways that the generative unruliness manifested in the tractate of Bekorot is also displayed in the tractate of Niddah. Here too, we see that rabbinic knowledge-making engages materially with these humanly emitted products, in concert with other actors including the emitters and parturients themselves, other women, and physicians. As with Bekorot’s animal products, Niddah contains assessments of human emissions of liquids and materials that are assessed as generative material, including offspring. And as with Bekorot’s generation principle (t. Bek. 1:9), Niddah implicates humans in species variable outcomes. Women are described as variously expelling pieces of flesh (t. Nid. 4:1, m. Nid 3:1), entities like “species of peel, species of dust, species of barley, species of red flies,” (m. Nid. 3:2, t. Nid. 4:2), “species of fish and locusts, or forbidden creatures and crawling creatures” (m. Nid. 3:3), and “species of domesticated animals, wild animals, or bird” (t. Nid. 4:5). The Tosefta (like the Mishnah) rules on the first two batches of materials as potential menses rather than as potential offspring. It omits the third set of materials (fish and locusts etc.), whereas the Mishnah treats it as potential nidda and the Sifra rules it out as potential offspring (valad).48 Like the Mishnah, the Tosefta inaugurates its consideration of potential human offspring with the cases of deliveries resembling domesticated animals, wild animals, or bird species. Before moving directly to this latter set of materials, I proceed with some observations about material engagement and expertise with respect to human products. Material Engagement with Human Uterine Products As discussed, Tosefta (and Mishnah) Niddah lists solid materials passed by women including things like species of animals, organic entities (e. g. barley, peels), smaller creatures (flies, fish, reptiles, etc.). The Tractate’s materials also range from textured fetal sacs to flattened fetuses, and from placentae to body parts that are blunted or incised.49 And these entities follow similarly vivid descriptions in the previous chapters of fluids that are considered as possible menstruation.50 Materiality is established not just through ekphrasis (which of course in antiquity is not the Cartesian disembodied gaze but rather a potentially haptic one in its own right, one that potentially troubles a clear subject/object visual binary) but also through explicit scrutiny, inspection, and tactile manipulation: this interven48 49 50 Sifra Tazria, Parashah 1:7, Weiss ed., 48a. On the latter see t. Nid. 4:11. M. Nid. 2:6–7. For visual apprehension of blood see Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 94–96, 105– 17 and C. T. Halberstam, Law and Truth in Biblical and Rabbinic Literature, 21–29. On rabbinic “visual epistemology” and “taxonomy of colors,” see M. Balberg, “Rabbinic Authority, Medical Rhetoric, and Body Hermeneutics in Mishnah Nega‘im,” AJSR 35 (2011): 323–46. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science 195 tionism is more pronounced in the Tosefta Niddah than the Mishnah.51 For the first product, a piece of flesh, the Tosefta reports a tradition in which the piece is torn to check for the presence of blood (to see if it is menstrual material). This active treatment of the material contrasts with the Mishnah which merely states that if there is blood with the piece it is niddah and if there is not, it is not. The Tosefta’s test is not only more interventionist, in piercing into the interior of the piece of flesh, it is also more stringent. For the second set of products – entities resembling kinds of peel, barley, dust, red flies – the Tosefta reports a teaching in the name of Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel that she (likely the emitter) ought to crush (‫ )ממעכתן‬the material with spit on her fingernail. Only if it dissolves is it considered niddah. Compare this to the Mishnah’s test: “let her put them in water, if they dissolve she is impure, if not she is pure.” The Tosefta’s recommendations of human handling of uterine material also in the case of the textured fetal sac (shefir meruqam), these are similarly lacking in the Mishnah.52 Notably both m. Nid. 3:2 and t. Nid. 4:2 have a female actor handle the stuff in question. In addition to these examples of material engagement, the Tosefta also recounts three case-reports, two of which mark extra-rabbinic forms of expertise. Thus, we hear of two women who respectively produced material resembling red peels and red hairs (t. Nid. 4:3 and 4), are cross-referred by Rabbi Tsadok to “the sages,” who in turn consult with “the doctors.”53 Given the context, and the language of comings and goings, the terse narration allows us to conjure the speculative possibility that perhaps Rabbi Tsadok, the sages, and the doctors have encountered these products.54 The physicians assess the materials and present diagnoses: in the first case the materials signify that the patient has “an internal wound” and in the second case she has “a growth in her internal organs.”55 These are analogs to the wasp honey case in Bekorot in that these fleshy entities are seemingly ruled out as 51 52 53 54 55 On ekphrasis and other rhetorical techniques in rabbinic texts see Neis, Sense of Sight, 22, 110, 161–65, 202. On tactile viewing see G. Frank, The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 118–23 and Neis, Sense of Sight, 88–89, 120–23, 134, 180, 251–57. Other examples of t. Niddah’s interventions include: t. Niddah 8:2 and t. Niddah 4:17 (an account of autopsies of executed enslaved women in Cleopatra’s court). See t. Nid. 4:12 on tearing a sac and t. Nid. 4:11 on visual scrutiny, oil versus water, and light. While in m. Nid. 3:2 MS Kaufmann vocalizes ‫( ְּׂשע ָֹרה‬barley), Tosefta in MS Vienna describes the woman emitting ‫( שערות אדומות‬red hairs). In contrast to Fonrobert’s “science of blood,” Halberstam argues that in tannaitic sources women are supposed to adhere to “objective standards” and that it is only later in the Bavli that we see rabbis engaging in scientific inspections (Halberstam, Law and Truth, 27–41 and 188). However, in cases of fetuses in the Tosefta, the usage of feminine and masculine forms, and specific stories, seems to imply both women and rabbis (as well as others) handling and making determinations. Note that these two cases seemingly contradict both Rabban Simon ben Gamliel’s and the parallel Mishnah’s instructions to conduct a solubility test to determine if these substances are menstrua. This contradiction is later resolved in the Bavli which adds the words “let her put them in water if they dissolve she is impure” after their diagnoses (b. Nid. 22b). My thanks to Sarra Lev for her insights into this Talmudic passage. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 196 Rachel Rafael Neis menses (and perhaps implicitly as offspring) but are nonetheless conceptualized – and unlike other cases of species nonconforming products, explained – as bodily derivatives.56 We should also note that similar to the Tosefta’s turning to the knowledge of hunters and experts to discern fish intestines and eggs, here too, the rabbis turn to medical knowledge producers to understand women’s uterine products. The Animal in the Human We turn now to the third set of materials that are in the form of larger nonhuman creatures and that are disputedly human offspring (t. Nid. 4:5). She who expels (‫ )המפלת‬something like a kind of domesticated animal, a wild animal, or bird (‫[ )כמין בהמה חיה ועוף‬should sit for the relevant days of childbirth impurity] – the words of R. Meir. And the sages say: as long as it has human form. R. Hanina son of Gamliel said: the words of R. Meir are fitting regarding an animal because the eyeballs of an animal resemble human eyeballs, and the words of the sages regarding a bird, because it does not have something of human form (‫)מצורת אדם‬. (6) There was a case of a woman from Sidon who gave birth to a likeness of a raven (‫דמות‬ ‫ )עורב‬three times, and the case came before the sages, and they said: anything that does not have something of human form is not offspring. (7) The facial form of which they spoke can be one of any facial forms, except the ears … t. Nid. 4:5–757 The rabbis have moved from uterine formations resembling smaller entities to these larger creaturely beings of the land and skies, exemplified by the tripartite rabbinic classification of wild animal, domesticated animal, and bird. The minority view of Rabbi Meir declares that such a delivery is offspring (vālād), but the majority view of the sages requires that the creature have “(something of) human form” for it to so qualify. Thus, the majority in t. Nid. 4:2 (par. m. Nid. 3:2) contradicts Bekorot’s principle of generation (t. Bek. 1:6 and 9, m. Bek. 1:2) in which a delivery is simply classified on the same lines as its parents without any need for partial resemblance to its parent. It specifically contradicts the expanded version of t. Bek. 1:9 that subsumed human/animal scenarios within this rule. When considering tannaitic texts, we only find this expanded version of the generation principle including the human in the Tosefta, in Bekorot and in t. Kil. 5:8. At the same time, as we will see, it is only in Tosefta Niddah that we 56 57 Compare to Pseudo-Aristotle’s distinctions between offspring and “corrupted seed” (see notes 24 and 29). Cf. m. Nid. 3:2: “One who expels (‫ )המפלת‬something like a kind of (‫ )כמין‬domesticated animal, wild animal or bird, whether pure or impure – if it is male she should sit [out the days of impurity] for a male, if female she should sit for a female, if it is not known she should sit for a male and a female: the words of R. Meir. And the sages say: Anything that does not have something of human form is not a valid delivery.” © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science 197 find an attempt to ameliorate the contradiction between the principle of generation that includes animals delivered by humans as offspring and the majority view here in Niddah that only does so if they have some elements of humanness. The majority view’s requirement in Niddah for an otherwise animal or birdlike delivery to have “something of human form” recalls the minority view in t. Bek. 1:9 of Rabbi Simon. Rabbi Simon did not recognize the camel-calf born to a cow as a cow.58 Both the majority view in Niddah and Rabbi Simon in Bekorot deny the radically species-nonconforming delivery as offspring of its birthparent but seem to affirm that a creature that has elements of both its parent species and another species can, if it fulfills minimal criteria for resemblance (“something of human form” or “its head and majority resemble its mother”) qualify as offspring.59 In the human case, since we are dealing with a nonliving emission (or miscarriage), this has purity60 and sacrifice,61 inheritance,62 firstborn redemption, and other consequences.63 In the animal case, this allows humans to ingest the calf. In both human and nonhuman emissions and materials deemed nonfetal (and for humans non-menstrual) additional questions of disposal, purity, and consumption follow.64 Human Exceptionalism/Human Animality As mentioned, Niddah’s apparent inconsistency with Bekorot’s majority view when it comes to human reproductive variation is softened in the Tosefta. The Tosefta scrutinizes the requirement for “something of human form” (t. Nid. 4:7), 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 As argued elsewhere (Neis, “Reproduction,” 289–317), the linguistic and conceptual affinities between m. Nid. 3:2, t. Nid. 4:2 and t. Bek. 1:9 (m. Bek. 1:2, 2:5) mean that one cannot simply write off the human cases of species variation in Niddah as hyperbolic or metaphorical. Cf. the majority’s view does not claim that the animal-like entity delivered by a human is classified as the species that it resembles, which was Rabbi Simon’s conclusion. Purity considerations impact species designation for the animal delivery, corpse impurity for the nonliving human delivery, and menstrual or post-partum impurity for the menstruant or parturient. E. g., in the animal case, if it is a pure kind or a donkey it is subject to the firstborn obligation. In the case of women’s uterine entities, determination as offspring entails childbirth sacrifices by the parturient. E. g., m. Bek. 1:1 on sales of pregnant animals; m. Bek. 8:1 on birth-order based inheritance claims. M. ’Ohal. 7:4, 7:6 and t. ’Ahil. 8:1 consider the precise moment at which a live or dead fetus conveys impurity (see also t. Yebam. 9:4 and 9:5). See V. Noam, “Ritual Impurity in Tannaitic Literature: Two Opposing Perspectives,” JAJ 1 (2010): 65–103. Non-menstrual liquid material could include urine, milk, and genital emissions. On susceptibility to impurity of human and animal milk see m. Makš. 6:7–8. On animal urine and milk, and distinctions between gestational and other sorts of bodily emissions, see b. Bek. 7a. On the purity of human liquid and solid waste see R. Neis, “‘Their Backs Toward the Temple, and Their Faces Toward the East’: The Temple and Toilet Practices in Rabbinic Palestine and Babylonia,” JSJ 43 (2012): 328–68. See t. Nid. 4:10 on skin that “comes out of the skin of the face of a human (’ādām) whether [they are] alive or dead, is pure and permissible for enjoyment (hănā’â); on the “caul” see S. Lieberman, Tosefet Rishonim, 3:265 and b. Bek. 7b. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 198 Rachel Rafael Neis limiting it to human facial features (excluding ears). Under this definition a creature expelled by a human that has some human facial features, but that otherwise appears animal-like, does count as a human baby. The idea that the face and its features are something peculiarly human is shared by Pliny.65 However, the Tosefta goes on to soften even this narrowed minimal requirement by including Rabbi Hanina’s suggestion. Hanina claims that one must concede to Rabbi Meir in the cases of animal-like deliveries, “because the eyeballs of an animal resemble human eyeballs” (t. Nid. 4:5).66 Paradoxically, the very idea of human/animal difference as based in species-particular features is undone via the logic of likeness. The effort to draw humans apart (“from any of them,” t. Bek. 1:9) ends up becoming the grounds for highlighting the ways in which they are already like other kinds. 4. The Generation of Bodies of Knowledge: Beyond Binary Analytic So far, we can discern a fundamental indeterminacy that the human – including of course the rabbinic human – occupies in generative knowledge. On the one hand, we might view the rabbis as elevating (male) humans qua knowing subjects who objectify their “data” (the generative and material outcomes of women and animal bodies). This view is most obviously manifest in the way that the classification of ambiguous uterine or other bodily contents of animals and the distinctions between species are maintained via the logics of killing and consumption by humans in Bekorot.67 On the other hand, zoological and gynecological knowledges were not only paralleled but also intertwined, making humans (alongside animals) objects of knowledge that were themselves effects of material generative processes.68 As I will argue in this section, this dual distinction and implication of humans from and among others materials and species parallels the complex positionality of the rabbis as male, Jewish, knowledge-makers seeking to shape and understand the generative and bodily materials of women and animals. These human/ rabbinic knowers did not stand outside of the knowledges they sought to command: they were materially embedded in these same processes and subject to their vicissitudes. There are thus multiple and intersecting dimensions through 65 66 67 68 See Pliny, Natural History 7.8 (trans. H. Rackham; LCL 352; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940), 510–13; and idem 11.138 (trans. H. Rackham; LCL 353; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940), 518–19. What remains excluded is the bird-like creature delivered to a woman: this creature, affirms Hanina and the case report that follows (t. Nid. 4:6), has nothing of human form. Though nonhuman patterns of killing and ingestion are contemplated in the fish-fish scenarios in t. Bek. 1:7 (m. Bek. 1:2). See m. Ḥul. 4:2–7, m. Bek. 3:1 for combined human-animal considerations about reproduction. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science 199 which we may consider the positionality of rabbinic knowledges about generation, including gender, species, materiality, and empire.69 As feminist science studies scholars have shown us, binary analytic frames that view their data in terms of subject/object; active/passive; powerful/powerless are often hierarchical in overdetermined ways and insufficient for understanding knowledge-making. These insights in part rest in showing how difficult it is to disentangle knowledge-making from its objects. Theoretical physicist Karen Barad demonstrates how political and economic materialist constraints, as much as biomaterial ones, shape the ways that the sonogram summons materialized fetuses into being. She enjoins scholars to recognize the ways in which matter and bodies become legible through material-discursive means.70 Her analysis links techno-biology with classed, racialized, and gendered biopolitics, bringing technicians, scientists, doctors and machines into the picture. Taking her insights to our sources: while dyadic, hierarchical models of power/knowledge do get at important dimensions of the conditions of possible knowledge in late antiquity, they fail to fully capture the dynamic, dispersed, and staggered ways in which knower/known, men/women, culture/nature, empire/province, humans/ animals, impinged upon and mutually constituted each other. The work of Barad, as well as that by scholars such as Judith Butler, Susan Hekman and Sirma Bilge, helps us get beyond binary models of agency/passivity, and dualisms such as subordination/resistance or acting/acted upon, to those in which subjects are simultaneously “constituting and constituted.”71 Feminist new materialists (including Barad) expand agency to incorporate the nonhuman, thus further disrupting agential dualisms that assume humans to be actors and nonhumans to be objects of human action.72 Reading these scholars with rabbinic sources means analyzing the rabbis’ positionality as members of a small provincial sub-elite, styled as men and as people who understood themselves to be bearers of a burgeoning and wide-ranging body of expertise. Our sources emerge at the interstices of multiple movements and moments, congealing as efforts in which gender is negotiated, reproduction is stimulated or suppressed, expertise is contested, over and via the voices and bodies of men, women, rabbis, physicians, shepherds, fetuses, cows, and more. 69 70 71 72 I invoke “positionality” in its sociological usage, “in which people are defined not in terms of fixed identities, but by their location within shifting networks of relationships, which can be analyzed and changed.” (F. A. Maher and M. K. Thompson Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom: Dynamics of Gender, Race, and Privilege [Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2001], 164). K. Barad, “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10 (1988): 87–128. J. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); S. Hekman, “Subjects and Agents: The Question for Feminism,” in Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice (ed. J. Kegan Gardiner; University of Illinois Press, 1995), 194–207 and S. Bilge, “Beyond Subordination vs. Resistance: An Intersectional Approach to the Agency of Veiled Muslim Women,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 31 (2010): 9–28. See references in notes 1 and 2 above. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 200 Rachel Rafael Neis Beyond Dualist Analyses of Gender Dualist approaches to gender allow us to helpfully characterize the rabbis as male knowers (along with doctors), who not only objectify but also, as Gwynn Kessler has argued, elide the very women whose bodies they claim as knowledge, in part by focusing mostly on their contents.73 The iterated “she who expels” (hamapeleṭ) in Tosefta and Mishnah Niddah simultaneously renders women as grammatical frames and uterine containers for what become the objects of rabbinic scrutiny and the products of rabbinic labor.74 At the same time, as we have noted, m. Nid. 3:2 and t. Nid. 4:2 have a female (grammatical) subject submerge or crush what she has expelled. This may betray the rabbinic appropriation and incorporation of women’s (or midwives’) practices already in play, as much as it may signify rabbinic desires to direct them. In other instances of physical manipulation of uterine materials (t. Nid. 4:1, 11, 12), the grammatical subjects are male (singular and plural). But even in those cases it is hard to know whether this means to exclude women who were more proximate to these materials than men. Texts beyond Niddah that refer to obstetrics introduce actors in addition to the female parturient. In m. ’Ohal. 7:4 “they carry her out” during a difficult labor and in m. Ohal. 7:6 we are told that “they” cut up and remove a fetus limb by limb if a woman is going through a difficult labor.75 Both most likely refer to midwives.76 Similar phrasing is used to discuss an animal in “difficult labor” 73 74 75 76 On how rabbinic sources “foreground fetuses simultaneously backgrounding women” see G. Kessler, Conceiving Israel: The Fetus in Rabbinic Narratives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 21; cf. B. Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (trans. L. Hoinacki; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Halberstam, Law and Truth, 38–39 on patriarchal objectification. See C. E. Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), esp. 103–27 on the “science of blood;” H. King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1998), and R. Flemming, Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature, and Authority from Celsus to Galen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Per Kessler and Duden, women recede as objects of male/rabbinic knowledge, though in Tractate Niddah they do come into relief in terms of their im/purity status. This is as long as its majority has not emerged. This arguably contrast with the recession of women in favor of fetuses which is described by Donna Haraway as “…why women have had so much trouble counting as individuals in modern Western discourses. Their bodies’ troubling talent for making other bodies, whose individuality can take precedence over their own, even while the little bodies are fully contained and invisible without major optical technologies … Women can, in a sense, be cut in half and retain their maternal function – witness their bodies maintained after death to sustain the life of another individual” (Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in Immune System Discourse,” Differences: A Journal of Cultural Studies 1 [1]:3–44, at 39). See C. H. Tzuberi, “A House Inside a House: Mishnah ’Ohalot 7:4,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues 28 (2015): 134–46. See m. Shab. 18:3 on calling the midwife (hăkhāmâ) on the Sabbath. On women’s territory and the limits of women’s agency see Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 137–42. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science 201 whose fetus is also removed limb by limb in m. Ḥul. 4:2 by a shepherd.77 Furthermore, m. Ḥul. 4:3 fills in what was implicit in both human and animal scenarios by discussing the impurity consequences for both shepherds and midwives (ḥayâ) inserting their hands into animal and human uteri respectively. Just as Galen’s disparagement of and Soranus’s masculinized criteria for midwives may belie their dependence on midwives’ knowledges, so too do rabbinic texts hint at the ways in which rabbinic knowledge draws from multiple sources including women’s, shepherds’, and others’ traditions and material engagement.78 Beyond Dualist Analyses of Knowledge-Making One way of characterizing rabbinic knowledge-making is as a claim to a totalizing ordering of a Jewish collective and more.79 This often relies on a series of intra-Jewish dualisms including rabbi-knowers/known and rabbi-authorities/ followers. Taking a broader perspective, rabbinic knowledge-making has itself been framed through binary grids of (Roman, or scientific) influence versus rabbinic resistance (or appropriation). More recently, scholars have introduced more multi-dimensional approaches to the various relationships between rabbis and multiple others.80 Indeed, Palestinian rabbinic positionality was notoriously complex, the rabbis being located and constituted within multiple “shifting networks of relationships.”81 In our last example in m. Ḥul. 4:3, we showed how in addition to the Niddah and Bekorot sources, which introduce parturients and experts as knowledge77 78 79 80 81 Both follow the structure of: “if [the woman/the first-time birthing animal] is having a difficult delivery, they/he cuts up [the fetus in her uterus and extract it/it] limb by limb [because her life precedes its life/and throw it to the dogs]. If the greater part had emerged [they do not touch it, for one life does not trump another’s/behold it is buried and she is exempt from the firstborn].” The substantive and structural similarities, and also the substantive differences, are striking. A. Ellis Hanson, “A Division of Labor: Roles for Men in Greek and Roman Births,” Thamyris 1 (1994): 157–202; M. H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Flemming, Roman Women. See C. E. Fonrobert, “Blood and Law: Uterine Fluids and Rabbinic Maps of Identity,” Henoch 30 (2008): 243–66. In that article Fonrobert brilliantly unpacks the multidirectional and layered ways in which uterine blood science operates beyond gender, to further rabbinic conceptions of Jewish (e. g., rabbinic, Samaritan), para-Jewish (e. g., Samaritan) and non-Jewish identity. See M. L. Satlow, “Beyond Influence: Towards a New Historiographic Paradigm,” in Jewish Literatures and Cultures: Context and Intertext (eds. A. Norich et al.; Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2008), 37–53; H. Lapin, Rabbis as Romans: The Rabbinic Movement in Palestine, 100–400 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); also L. Salaymeh, The Beginnings of Islamic Law: Late Antique Islamicate Legal Traditions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), especially 86–98 for a critique of the way “influence” and its concomitant reliance on “origins” are used to understand Islamic law and E. Dench, Empire and Political Cultures in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). On the “influence” paradigm in scholarship on early Jewish science see n84 below. Maher and Thompson Tetreault, The Feminist Classroom, 164. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 202 Rachel Rafael Neis makers and practitioners, the rabbis also consider shepherds together with midwives. We saw earlier that besides relying on women to conduct some of their forensic tests, the rabbis resorted to physicians’ diagnoses. But we may now refine that observation by noting that this also served to detract from a rabbinic monopoly of the “science of blood” and other uterine materials. Tzvi Novick has shown in the case of the rules of ṭ rēfôt that something similar is afoot, with an ambivalent rabbinic movement between assertions of control over and dependence on the zoological expertise of others. In the cases, above, of shepherds’ and midwives’ (and other women’s) interventions, we do not always see the rabbis explicitly ceding expertise. Nonetheless these acknowledged extra-rabbinic presences at the very least signify that people other than rabbis are the ones who handle animal and human materials, whether or not their knowledges are always credited. Thus, even as the rabbis arguably seek to control the means of human and animal reproduction, they are clearly indebted to (even if sometimes wary of) the expertise, experience, actions, and wills (or perhaps, collaboration) of other actors. The incorporation of their knowledges or bodies within the rabbis’ own epistemic regimes, ought not obscure that such moves may be designed to construct rabbinic expertise through rhetorical means.82 But it should equally not obscure the ways that rabbinic texts themselves obscure knowledge and indeed agency of various others. These dimensions of gender and expertise were naturally inflected by ethnoreligious dynamics. To claim Jewish reproductive knowledge in Palestine was to do so in the contexts of Palestinian social formations and Roman imperialism. Certain forms of knowledge, particularly medical knowledges, were ethnoracialized.83 For example, educated Romans tagged doctors and professionalized medical knowledges as Greek, with concomitant ambivalence thereto.84 It 82 83 84 M. Balberg, “Rabbinic Authority, Medical Rhetoric, and Body Hermeneutics in Mishnah Negaim.” See S. Lieberman, “The Natural Science of the Rabbis,” in Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1962), 180–93. On healing practices as “the ways of the Amorites” or “magic” and their relationship to Roman “folk” medicine or “magic” see G. Veltri, “The Rabbis and Pliny the Elder: Jewish and Greco-Roman Attitudes toward Magic and Empirical Knowledge,” Poetics Today 19 (1998): 63–89 and R. Lesses, “‘The Most Worthy of Women is a Mistress of Magic’: Women as Witches and Ritual Practitioners in 1 Enoch and Rabbinic Sources,” in Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World, (eds. K. B. Stratton and D. S. Kalleres; Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2014), 71–107. On Amorite practices related to healing, childbirth, and animal generation see m. Shab. 6:10, t. Shab. 6:4, 17–19, 23. On reading for multiple voices within male-authored medical texts see H. King, “Medical Texts as a Source for Women’s History,” in The Greek World (ed. A. Powell; London: Routledge: 1995), 199–218. It is important to distinguish between moments when the rabbis and others tag certain knowledge as products of particular ethnicities and when we as scholars claim the presence of certain “Greek,” or other “foreign” knowledges in rabbinic sources (and often, then, as influences). Cf. S. Lieberman, “The Natural Science of the Rabbis,” in Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1962), 180–93. See J. Scarborough, © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science 203 is hard to determine what ethno-religious identity is imagined of Niddah’s rôf ’îm or of their knowledges, but notably m. ‘Abod. Zar. 2:2 and t. ‘Abod. Zar. 3:4 forbid (or at least recommend against) accepting healing (rîpûy) from non-Jewish people (cf. t. Hull. 2:21–22).85 In these same chapters of ‘Abodah Zarah, midwives are distinguished in terms of ethno-religious designations as Israelites, idolaters, or Samaritans. While m. ‘Abod. Zar. 2:1 allows non-Jewish women to attend Jewish women in labor and to nurse their infants, t. ‘Abod. Zar. 3:3 only allows them to do so if overseen, because of their suspicion of killing Jews. (This is in contrast to Samaritan women who may assist and nurse and who may be assisted as midwives and wet-nurses by Jewish women; t. ‘Abod. Zar. 3:1). Tellingly, the Tosefta adds that a gentile woman may not cut the fetus out of a Jewish woman’s uterus or administer an abortifacient to her and that one should refrain from entrusting cattle with their shepherds (t. ‘Abod. Zar. 3:4, 3:2). Furthermore, both the Mishnah and Tosefta caution against a Jewish male isolating himself with non-Jews (bloodshed), against a Jewish woman being isolated with them (sex), against leaving one’s animals in non-Jewish inns (sex), and against Jewish women nursing their children or assisting them as midwives (so as not to grow little idolaters; m. ‘Abod. Zar. 2:1). In these chapters, Jewish and non-Jewish men, women, and animals, circulate in various reproductive, non-reproductive, or counter-reproductive combinations.86 This is an instance in which politics, gender, and ethnicity combine in rabbinic efforts to know, claim control over, and ostensibly protect, Jewish reproductive resources.87 The scenarios in ‘Abodah Zarah are illuminating complements to our sources in Bekorot and Niddah. They manifest a rabbinic elaboration of measures intended – at least in part – to proliferate (or construct) Jewish life by safe-guarding its human and nonhuman means of (re)production, in a protective, competitive, collaborative, and even exploitative spirit vis-à-vis non-Jews. And they clearly indicate how multiple (rather than binary) social, gendered, and political factors were at play in rabbinic knowledge-making about human and nonhuman bodies. 85 86 87 “Romans and Physicians,” The Classical Journal 65 (1970): 296–306 on the Roman preference for the medicus paterfamilias; H. Von Staden, “Liminal Perils: Early Roman Receptions of Greek Medicine,” in Tradition, Transmission, Transformation: Proceedings of Two Conferences on Pre-Modern Science Held at the University of Oklahoma (eds. F. J. Ragep and S. Livesey; Leiden: Brill, 1996), 369–418; A. Y. Reed, “Abraham as Chaldean Scientist and Father of the Jews: Josephus, Ant. 1.154–168, and the Greco-Roman Discourse about Astronomy/Astrology,” JSJ 35 (2004): 119–58; G. Veltri, “On the Influence of ‘Greek Wisdom’: Theoretical and Empirical Sciences in Rabbinic Judaism,” JSQ 5 (1998): 300–17. See also m. Yoma 8:4, and y. Yoma 8:4, 45a–b. For a recent reading of Bavli Avodah Zarah through the lenses of animal studies and posthumanist theory see Mira Beth Wasserman, Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud After the Humanities (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). See also Beth Berkowitz, Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018), 185–191. I make no claims about the success of these attempts. I suspect that the rabbinic debate about gentile midwives betrays the fact that Jewish women often did employ them. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 204 Rachel Rafael Neis Related to these considerations of ethnicity/Jewishness as a salient factor in the politics of such knowledges was the presence of Rome. Scholars have shown how crucial were imperial drivers of medical, scientific, and ethno-geographic knowledge-making projects by those such as Galen and Pliny.88 It is hard to think of a more fundamental desideratum for imperial administration than the proliferation of people, animals, and other materials. We can view the rabbinic gynecology, biology, and zoology that emerges through the ritual filters of purity (Niddah, Oholot), regulation of animals and humans for the Temple (Bekorot), species distinctions (Kil’ayim) and animal slaughter (Ḥullin), as part of corresponding rabbinic attempts to account/control for the generation of bodily matter.89 These ritual framings of such generative knowledge, make their biopolitics no less poignant.90 Seth Schwartz’s call to heed the material consequences of two failed Jewish revolts comes to mind: specifically, the small size of the Jewish population in Roman Palestine.91 Reproductive knowledge 88 89 90 91 S. P. Mattern, The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); T. Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); J. König and T. Whitmarsh, eds., Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Flemming, Roman Women. On biopolitics see M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction, (trans. R. Hurley; New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 139 and idem, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (eds. M. Senellart and M. Foucault; London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); cf. M. Ojakangas, “Michel Foucault and the Enigmatic Origins of Bio-Politics and Governmentality,” History of the Human Sciences 25 (2012): 1–14. See W. Scheidel, ed., Debating Roman Demography (Leiden: Brill, 2001); and R. Flemming, “States and Populations in the Classical World,” in Reproduction, 67–80. See Neis, “Reproduction,” 293–98, including references, which argues against the idea that rabbinic science or medicine is subordinate to distinctively “halakhic” concerns and derivative or inferior to Greek and Roman science. I argue that this betrays an anachronistic notion of science in terms of genre and content. More recently, I argued against characterizing and analyzing the plural content of rabbinic texts like the Mishnah as overwhelmingly legal and cautioned against overly theological-anachronistic readings of “(the) halakhah.” See Rachel Rafael Neis, “The Seduction of Law: Rethinking Legal Studies in Jewish Studies,” Jewish Quarterly Review 109 (2019): 119–38. Here, too, I argue that questions about the generation of bodies and bodily material were congruent with rather than secondary to ritual or other framings. See A. Y. Reed, “‘Ancient Jewish Sciences’ and the Historiography of Judaism,” in Ancient Jewish Science and the History of Knowledge in Second Temple Literature (eds. J. BenDov and S. Sanders; New York: New York University Press, 2014), 195–254. Cf. S. T. Newmyer, “Talmudic Medicine and Greco-Roman Science: Crosscurrents and Resistance,” in ANRW II.37.3: 2895–911 and Samuel Kottek, “Medicine in the Talmud,” in Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, ed. Helaine Selin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1997) 714–17. S. Schwartz, “The Impact of the Jewish Rebellions, 66–135 CE: Destruction or Provincialization?,” Revolt and Resistance in the Ancient Classical World and the Near East: In the Crucible of Empire (eds. J. J. Collins and J. G. Manning; Leiden: Brill, 2016), 234–52; also idem, Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 15, 108–10; and idem, The Ancient Jews from Alexander to Muhammad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 85–90. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science 205 must have been particularly pertinant to this small scholastic movement within a minority population. Claiming its mastery was no casual move on its part.92 Beyond Dualist Analysis of Nonhuman Material: Kicking Back Our sources show the materialized effects of the rabbis deploying purity and ritual frames to classify the human and animal material. But despite the stacked odds, as we have shown repeatedly, the line between the human and the nonhuman and indeed, between the human and the “mere” material, was surprisingly thin, or at least unpredictable, at times. The treacly texture of this material means that an account of rabbis qua subject-knowers, and of women/animals and their products as passive knowns or inanimate objects, is insufficient. Whether through ekphrasis, forensic testing, or even forms of use,93 whether or not they rely on the handiwork of non-rabbis, there is no shortage of other kinds of material engagement with the bodily contents of women and animals.94 Recalibrating accounts of agency demands attention to how both human and nonhuman reproductive bodies impinge upon their knowers in material (even if not in determinist) ways. Karen Barad demonstrates the inseparability of scientific observational apparatuses from their objects’ surveillance and seeks to account for the co-constitution of material and discursive constraints whereby “matter comes to matter” in the realm of physics.95 Her work on the increasing use of fetal-imaging technologies attends to the layered links (or “entanglement”) between the biomaterial (from the putative fetus and piezoelectric transducer, to its operators and readers) and its political-social-gendered shaping. Barad’s study provides some obvious analogies to our ancient uterine and bodily materials. Its analysis of the way material bodies and technologies collaborate (or “intra-act”) with complex social and professional practices in giving rise to fetuses is instructive for rabbinic knowledge-making about human and nonhuman bodily materials. As Myra Hird elucidates, “observer and observed are not inherently static in time or space (to make them so is to exact an agential cut).”96 This we might 92 93 94 95 96 Examples of analyses of modern political, racialized, gendered, and imperialist dimensions of health and reproduction are: M. Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); K. Tallbear, “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and the New Materialisms,” in Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World (eds. J. Radin and E. Kowa; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017), 179–202. Though see t. Nid. 4:10 on skin that “comes out of the skin of the face of a human (’ādām) whether [they are] alive or dead, is pure and permissible for enjoyment (hănā’â); on the “caul” see S. Lieberman, Tosefet Rishonim, 3:265 and also b. Bek. 7b. For mockery of rabbinic claims to expertise see y. Nid. 3:3, 50c. K. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (2003): 801–31. M. J. Hird, “Feminist Engagements with Matter,” Feminist Studies 35 (2009): 329–46, 340. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 206 Rachel Rafael Neis relate to the rabbis who, alongside their claims to generative knowledge, collaborate with other humans and indeed nonhumans (voluntarily or not, due to the aleatory nature of generation). Barad describes how the transducer “helps produce and is ‘part of ’ the body it images.”97 The limits and constraints of the sonogram themselves impinge and produce the “fetus” as something legible as such (with all the elisions of other potential bodies that then ensue, including the gestating body). Tannaitic and other ancient apparatuses for observing the contents of women’s and animal bodies were arguably different, involving hands, knives, eyes, sunlight, water, and oil.98 But they were as susceptible to multiple constraints and situatedness, including a different historical context for the sense of sight itself.99 There were different means for observing the contents of the gestating body, whose interior was not susceptible to the kinds of imaging the sonogram produces: hence the prominence of “she who expels” as a way to extract knowledge about the usually hidden innards.100 Barad further argues that “the surveillance of technicians, physicians, engineers, and scientists in their formation as particular kinds of subjects is implicated in the surveillance of the fetus and vice versa.”101 We might similarly point to the ways that the sages and other experts come into their element as subjects, even as they survey putatively generative material. The “agential cut” between surveilling subject and observed object may have been contingent but its effects were material: the one who declares that this impure fish ingested rather than gestated the pure fish goes on to ingest the latter. The rabbis, for example, may have been formed as particular kinds of subjects by virtue of their self-authorized surveillance of the products of human and nonhuman bodies. However, the contingency and perhaps vulnerability of these subjects as humans, themselves products of particular bodies, is thrown into relief by the material and species fluidity that they come to know. 97 98 99 100 101 “The transducer does not allow us to peer innocently at the fetus, nor does it simply offer constraints on what we can see … That is, the marks on the computer screen (the sonogram images) refer to a phenomenon that is constituted in the intra-action of the apparatus and the object (commonly referred to as the “fetus”).” Barad, “Getting Real,” 87–91. Ancient observational apparatuses for fetuses were less mechanical, e. g., the digital exams or at assistance in m. Ḥul. 4:3. Cf. t. Nid. 8:2, b. Nid. 65b-66a for use of a tube to check intrauterine bleeding (see Fonrobert, Menstrual Purity, 137–42) and b. Nid. 21b. Archaeological findings in the Roman empire reveal an assortment of instruments such as speculums and embryo hooks (see R. Flemming, “Gendering Medical Provision in the Cities of the Roman West,” in Women and the Roman City in the Latin West [Leiden: Brill, 2013], 271–93.) See D. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, 14 (1988): 575–99 and Neis, Sense of Sight, esp. 18–40. We note that the opportunity to deduce interiorized contents and processes were precisely enabled by scrutinizing emitted products (see e. g., Soranus’ Gynecology 1.12–13, 17–18; 2.1 [trans. O. Temkin; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, 42–44, 58–62; 69–70.]) Although in animal cases, we read about cutting open slaughtered animals and finding fetuses within (m. Ḥul. 4:5). Barad, “Getting Real,” 103. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science 207 This sense of contingency and slippage between subject and object points to the ways in which the material, whether fetus or nonhuman, whether living or nonliving, “kicks back.” The rabbis and others hover over moments of indeterminacy, where one configuration of blood, bone, and flesh eludes instant legibility, where exposed or expelled contents of a body yields a surprise.102 This unpredictable, sometimes unexplained, aleatory character of bodily contents and reproductive materials suggests how the bodies and material contents of women and animals push back. The Tosefta literally contemplates the fetus (‘ûbbār) kicking and then withdrawing its foreleg from the uterus.103 In a different, but equally embodied example of “looking back,” rabbinic eyes that are all set to scan uterine flesh for “something of human form” are effectively deprived of their objectifying gaze, when it turns out that animals’ eyes already resemble those of humans (t. Nid. 4:7).104 It is in the Tosefta – far more than parallels in the Mishnah – that we start to see the failures of “agential cuts,” as the distinctions between human and nonhuman material come undone.105 Besides t. Nid. 4:7, in t. Bek. 1:9, the human figures uneasily in the early rabbinic knowledge-project as it is simultaneously subject to cross-species vicissitudes, while sponsoring the project of knowing kinds and killing and ingesting of certain kinds. At the same time, we must recognize that crucial differences exist between the cases of bodily products in Niddah and those in Bekhorot. The products emitted by women in Niddah, whether fetal or otherwise, are nonliving, whereas many of the entities emitted by animals –including those in the animal/human interspecies scenario – in Bekhorot are presumptively or explicitly alive (which may then enable humans to kill and ingest them).106 What, indeed happens, when a humanly delivered animal-like creature lives to tell the tale? In our closing section we consider a case in the Palestinian Talmud in which such a creature lives to have tales told about it. 102 103 104 105 106 Similarly, the rabbis hover over moments where indeterminacy reigns, where “fetus” (vālād or ‘ûbbār) is not clearly distinguishable from menstrual material (niddâ) or a growth, and where one species seems to emit another kind. See t. Ḥul. 4:1–3 (MS Vienna, t. Ḥul. 5:1 MS London and editio princeps; par. m. Ḥul. 4:1, 4). On the Black female “oppositional gaze,” see bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 115–31; on “staring back,” disability, and bodily agency see R. Garland Thompson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See also J. Watts Belser, “Reading Talmudic Bodies: Disability, Narrative, and the Gaze in Rabbinic Judaism,” in Disability in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (eds. D. Schumm and M. Stoltzfus; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 5–27. This is together with the observational apparatus that supposedly enacts such distinctions: the eyes. Niddah describes women as expelling (hamapelet) or miscarrying materials that are sorted as niddah, valad, or neither. The term for abortus or stillbirth is nēfel. Bekorot describes animals giving birth or being born (hayoled, yalad, nolad), implicitly including humans per t. Bek. 1:9. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 208 Rachel Rafael Neis 5. Conclusion: Family or Food? The Afterlives of Abortuses The ways that live births of pure animal species are naturalized as a resource than can be converted into food (or sacrifice) and the ways that human offspring are caught up not only in circuits of purity but of human claims to property and kin come together in the Talmud Yerushalmi’s commentary on m. Nid. 3:2’s scenario of a woman expelling a creature that is animal- or bird-like. In the discussion that follows the Amoraim press on the possibility of such a creature going on to live. In the first instance, an Amora questions Rabbi Meir’s assertion that this creature is offspring (vālād) by means of a scenario in which a woman expels a raven-likeness (d mût ‘ôrēb) that goes on to “perch atop a palm tree.” Does one say to him: “come perform the release ceremony for levirate marriage or enter into levirate marriage?” Another Amora points out that such a question can be equally directed to the majority sages’ admission of creatures with “something of human form” as offspring. The Talmud then continues by defining of this “something of human form” requirement: For Rabbi Yosa said in the name of Rabbi Yohanan: If it is wholly human (‫)כולו אדם‬, but its face is animal (‫)ופניו בהמה‬, it is not offspring (‫)וולד‬. But if it is wholly animal (‫בהמה‬ ‫ )כולו‬and its face is human (‫ )ופניו אדם‬then it is offspring (‫)וולד‬.107 Rabbi Yohanan’s definition of “something of human form” refers to the face. This fixation on the face as the site of (human) species determination becomes the crux of the two scenarios that then follow: If he is wholly human, but his face is animal, and he is standing and reading the Torah, they say to him, “Come and get yourself slaughtered (‫)בוא לשחטך‬.” If he is wholly animal but his face is human, and he is standing and ploughing in a field, they say to him, “Come perform the release ceremony or enter into levirate marriage (‫)בוא וחלוץ או יבם‬.108 In all these scenarios, what was dead on arrival in the earlier text is now animated, making the gestational/ingestive distinctions that much more vivid.109 Is this flesh of your flesh? If yes, it is family and thus is enfolded within the kin obligations and generative motivations of the levirate, which is after all concerned with perpetuating the dead sibling’s line. If this is not fruit of your loins, 107 108 109 Cf. t. Nid. 4:7 (all facial features except for ears) and y. Nid. 3:3, 50c (bottom) for debate about (a) what features (‫ )סימנין‬qualify and whether one or all are needed. y. Nid. 3:3, 50c (per MS Leiden). See y. Nid. 3:3, 50c (per MS Leiden): ‫הפילה דמות עורב‬. Cf. t. Nid. 4:6: ‫שהפילה דמות עורב שלשה פעמים‬. The Tosefta has the woman expel (or abort) the raven-likeness three times, the Yerushalmi’s is a living one-time occurrence. For the argument that the Yerushalmi is structured according to the Tosefta Niddah, see T. Meacham, “Tosefta as Template: Yerushalmi Niddah,” in Introducing Tosefta: Textual, Intratextual, and Intertextual Studies (eds. H. Fox, T. Meacham, and D. Kriger; Ktav Pub Incorporated, 1999), 181–220. I attend to these issues in a future venue. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science 209 then it is food, and we may say to him, “come, get yourself slaughtered.” Strikingly, the language here is of š ḥîṭ⸠the ritual slaughter required for killing pure animals to render them permissible for Jewish consumption. How we read these scenarios makes a big difference. We could read them as neutrally applying Rabbi Yohanan’s principle of facial determination. But given the contours of each example, I would argue that it is best to read them as expressing wonderment. In other words, the two cases (or three, including the raven child) press hard on the adequacy of formal tests, such as facial features, as determinative for species classification. The contingency of agential cuts is revealed for what it is. In the first example a being with an animal face is classed as nonhuman. The challenge to this technical determination is heightened by supposing that he performs not only the ostensibly very human activity of standing and reading, but also a supremely Jewish, rabbinic, and gendered activity: he reads the Torah. It seems preposterous to enjoin this Torah student to “come and get yourself slaughtered.” In the second scenario a creature with a human face is at the plow. The idea of inviting him to “come and marry your dead brother’s widow” (also Jewish and gendered) seems intended as manifestly absurd. In these cases, we do not hear responses from the creatures themselves (though at least one of them can recite text). But, notably, they are not only alive, they are animate: perching, standing, reading, plowing, they are each addressed directly in Hebrew as participants in their own destinies. *** “Species, like the body, are internally oxymoronic, full of their own others, full of messmates, of companions. Every species is a multispecies crowd.” Haraway, When Species Meet, 165. This article has traced the content, form, and conditions, of rabbinic knowledgemaking about the generation of material entities. In doing so it has followed the rabbis and other humans as they have sought to discern, deliver, cut, classify and dispose of human and nonhuman generative material. In deploying feminist science studies and feminist new materialisms, I have noted the ways in which the material pushes back against rigid – or even minimal – definitions. The Palestinian Talmud’s technically correct outcomes vacillate between the absurd and the cruel, demonstrating the limits of classification, as well as their stakes. The Torah scholar-animal and the beast of burden-human are paradoxically summoned to insert themselves into their im/proper destiny: knife and stomach, marriage canopy and bed.110 Far from settling things, we are left with 110 This case in its details and scenarios truly enacts Aparecida Vilaça’s insights about how classification can work not only as distinction but also identification between eater and eaten. The kind, or species, of a creature comes into focus as its living body enters the possibility of entering another’s. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954 210 Rachel Rafael Neis an aporia: the species and materially variant are uneasily accommodated into either animal or human realms. Their place in ongoing ingestive or gestational economies is awkward in either scenario. The vestigial attempt to assert human distinctiveness – and thus to settle knowledge – is undermined by moving and composite bodies and body parts that show up both the contingency of rabbinic/ human ways of knowing and their potentially grave consequences. The closing gap between sexual imperatives, sexual taboos, and cannibalism, between ingestion and generation, and between human and nonhuman is revealed for the overlap that it is.111 In their quest to determine the identity of materials nested within the body, the rabbis encountered fish, camels, cows, laboring women, midwives, doctors, and hunters. Classification, theories of generation, explanation (to a limited degree), as well as the aleatory and agentive creatures and materials themselves, all brushed up against rabbinic claims to know. The unpredictable nature of generation: the anomalous outputs of creaturely bodies (from bee larvae to honey, from human fetus to bird-likeness or menses, from cow calf to camel calf) queer linear accounts of same-species, hetero-sexual reproduction.112 This entanglement of human knower with the material objects of its knowledge usher in analytic models beyond dualisms of knower/known, men/women, rabbis/Romans, and humans/nonhumans. 111 112 See Vilaça, “Relations,” 83–106, and D. Labby, “Incest as Cannibalism: The Yapese Analysis,” The Journal of the Polynesian Society 85 (1976): 171–79. The Yerushalmi also compels us, its readers, and the rabbis, its writers, to squarely attend to the ways that liveness and death (another dualism) impinge upon generative knowledge. Neis, “Interspecies,” 10. © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen, 2019 [2020], ISSN 2196-7954