Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species

Rafael Rachel Neis. When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species. University of California Press, 2023.

In my hot-off-the-press book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species, I start with the perhaps obvious, perhaps controversial, premise that we should take ancient worldmaking seriously and “literally.” I advocate what might seem to be an old-fashioned anti-presentism: a critical-historical approach that pushes against continuities of present and past and that (quixotically? naively? conservatively?) seeks to meet the past “in its own terms.” At the same time, I draw upon queerfeminist science studies, disability studies, and gender theory. These latter theoretical approaches bolster critical historical methods. They caution us against taking a set of contemporary Euro-American notions—like animal, human, science, nature, and reproduction—as if they were ultimate categories or metrics. History of science as a subfield asks us to understand the social and cultural conditions that allowed certain kinds of knowledge to flourish and become authoritative, e.g. as “science” or “medicine.” Indigenous science (or Traditional Ecological Knowledge or TEK) and queerfeminist science studies go even further. They call upon us to provincialize dominant knowledge forms, instead recognizing a plurality of ways of knowing.

If we abide by these insights in our encounter with ancient sources, we find a (surprisingly?) queer world in which a human gives birth to a raven, a cow delivers a camel, mud generates mice, and fire begets the salamander. And we refrain from evaluating such events as merely the fantastical products of error or hyperbole or hypothetical. We would see the dangers of foisting a retrospective medical diagnosis upon the raven-child or the camel-like calf as equal parts ethical and epistemic. We are forced to reckon with the historically contingent character of species and the assignmentof species. We encounter a world in which lifeforms are not only brought into being by a male-female dyad engaging in coitus. After all, to imagine this mechanism as the only, or the only sanctioned means of life-making, is to engage in a rather gigantic extrapolation from the reproductive strategies of only a slender minority of beings. Even in in the human case, there was, for the late ancient rabbis, at least one additional party to procreation: God. “Three partners”—a man, a woman, deity—contributed various materials and qualities to the blend of organs, elements, and characteristics that constitute the living human body. The Palestinian Talmud implicitly analogizes the human and its three progenitors to the mule—the paradigmatic rabbinic hybrid (kilayim).

This queerness is not to deny the structural dynamics in the association most idealized for the proliferation of humans—marriage. This ritual-economic association bound two humans but constrained only one of them, the designated woman, in sexual exclusivity. Yet, on some accounts only the designated man was commanded to procreate. Still, marriage was not an invulnerable union by any means: it was not just God who might enter. Other beings—humans, animals, demons, apparitions, objects—might be party to or impact its generative fruit. This diffusion of reproductive relations, this “distributed reproduction,” shows up the “tenuous nature of paternity” and could trigger expressions of “fragile masculinity” (i.e. adultery). These, are particularly human preoccupations. My book asks us not to stop there and to also attend to the tenuous nature of reproduction itself, as well as to the fragility of humanness.

In When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven we listen in on an ancient conversation whose tones are just a bit surprising. Yes, we hear from the “usual suspects,” that is, the “classical” voices of philosophers, “natural” historians, and doctors of ancient Greece and Rome such as Aristotle, Pliny, and Galen. However, we center the first through fifth century Palestinian rabbis, as well as the rabbis, the ritual experts, scribes, artists, and householders of Mesopotamia. This investigation elicits unexpected yields concerning nature, sexuality, gender, reproduction, and speciation, that are outside of the vaunted “classics” canons. The rabbis’ ideas upset, in their tow, cherished ideals often ascribed to the so-called “Judeo-Christian tradition.” They offer a historical riposte to rightwing and far right invocations of “religion” and “nature” (or the “unnatural”) that essentialize gender, sexuality, and race. And they unseat liberal or left critiques of the Judeo-Christian tradition which so often flatten and subsume multiple and diverse forms of Jewishness to a hegemonic Christianity (often taken as implicitly Euro-Protestant).

Rather than untrammeled celebrations of humanity derived from Genesis’s “image of God,” I show how the rabbis linked human and animal processes of reproduction and the classification of various lifeforms, and how these linkages both promoted and deflated human exceptionalism. Certainly, the perception that the human is elevated in Jewish traditions is not without reason. Yet, for the rabbis, biblical schema, while present, were always partial. Indeed, the bible’s creation narrative and its taxonomical account of pure and animal animals, failed for them to fully account for the plenitude of life. The rabbis therefore scrutinized the various entities produced by human and animal bodies and enumerated creaturely kinds well beyond the stenographic lists in the bible. Even while they parsed and elaborated biblical classifications, the Palestinian rabbis grappled with the unpredictability of reproduction, with the multiplicity of reproductive modes, and with the curious resemblances between supposedly different species, including nonhuman and human kinds.

In the course of their writings—scriptural exegeses, narratives, and ritual orderings—the rabbis were intent on classifying creatureliness and exploring the contours of the human. While they may have been implicitly devoted to the notion that the human (and a particular ethnoracialized, gendered, normate human) had a special place in the order of things, they simultaneously blurred its edges. This they did in the context of discussions about reproductive materials and processes, unexpectedly variant offspring, the classification of species, and sorting through the varieties of entities emitted and nested by animal and human bodies. Via these varied disquisitions, the impermeability and intelligibility of the human was, again and again, upset. The human, it turns out, was not only subject to the same kind of reproductive variability as other animals, but it, like other animals, seemingly produced species-variant offspring. Furthermore, and again like other creatures, it was caught up in a web of resemblance that threatened its unique classification. In the face of such phenomena, the rabbis weighed in on how the stuff of life and the making of life could confound expectations about basic questions like who is kin, who is food, and what we owe to those we designate as different.

If this doesn’t unseat our expectations of ancient “religious” ideas of reproduction sufficiently, one of the key arguments in my book is that ancient rabbinic ideas of generation queer the Euro-American modern model of same-species, two-parent, cisheterosexual reproduction – particularly prevalent for thinking about the making of humans. In this sense, my book does not purport to offer ancient answers to modern question. Quite the reverse: ancient sources put into question what we take for granted as obvious answers.  As historians of medicine and science and feminist science studies scholars have shown us, modern “reproduction” focused on narrating a narrowly human process involving entities men and women engaging in very particular kinds of activity seen as resulting in pregnancy and culminating in birth of offspring. The premodern concept of “generation” by contrast referenced a broader and more flexible array of processes by which creatures could proliferate. Rabbinic writings testify to conceptions of generation that involved far more than two “opposite sex” members engaged in copulation.

I tried to approach the writing of this book with a queerfeminist orientation to politics of knowledge production. This is informed as much by punk, DIY, and DIT (do-it-together) sensibilities of zine-making, as it is by feminist science studies and queerfeminist theory. When writing I imagined various publics with interests in these topics. I endeavored to explain all technical terms and tried not to take certain kinds of insider knowledge for granted. All ancient sources are translated into English. I thereby also removed barriers to access for broader publics, including other scholars across a broad array of fields, as well as readers not working in the academy. I hope that sections of the book might speak to people with interests in historical reverberations of reproductive justice, gender studies, animal studies, and religious studies.

The most obviously interdisciplinary and non-traditional content in my book is my inclusion of zines, comics, drawings, and paintings. This is artwork that I made in the course of my longstanding art-based research practice. Some of the images I created exclusively for the book. I have been making artwork and paintings for more many decades, and maintaining a studio practice to a greater or lesser degree for almost that long. In recent years, I have begun making comics and zines. I see these practices and these communities as a kind of critical, activist, queerfeminist counter to the exclusions and gatekeeping of the academy. It has become increasingly urgent for me to translate and broadcast the knowledge I co-create in academia, from its very particular academic forms, into a variety of multi-media and visual idioms. This allows me to share and exchange knowledge outside of the academy, a place that I find not always conducive to creativity. I am grateful that UC Press worked with me in the unconventional project of integrating and translating my handmade images and installations to the page and screen. 

Rafael Rachel Neis, In Which the Animals are Endowed with Excess (from Stuff and Nonsense, a mixed media installation with Mike Chin, 2023)

Outline of Book Chapters

The book proceeds by way of an introduction, epilogue, and five intervening chapters. Interspersed within and between chapters are 16 author-artist images, including comics, zines, drawings, paintings, and photographs of installations on the themes of gender, reproduction, animality, humanness, and hybridity.           

Chapter 1, “Difference,” treats the rabbinic discussion of humans and other animals that deliver creatures that resemble other species. It considers how different rabbinic sources, and other ancient thinkers (Aristotle, Pseudo-Aristotle, Galen, etc.) thought through generative variation and what this said about the limits of the human. This inquiry, in which I stage a conversation between ancient sources and the artist-writer, animal and disability justice activist Sunaura Taylor, presses us to consider our own expectations about humanness, kinship, bodily variation, and the differential value of lives.

In chapter 2, “Multiplicity,” we follow the Sifra—an early rabbinic commentary on Leviticus 11—as it interprets, unfurls, and expands the bible’s brief bestiary into a bustling menagerie of creaturely kinds. Here we find a distinctive school of biblical interpretation (or “midrash”) that is explicitly generative in both formal and substantive terms. Curiously, the Sifra licenses the human encounter with sacred text, as a source for contemplating animal life in all its plenitude. Here we trace a rabbinic practice of care that acknowledges the limits of divine scripture in favor of creaturely flourishing and excess.

Chapter 3, “Menagerie,” pursues the rabbinic “provincial zoology.” The menagerie, as a literal and conceptual device for securing the capture, classification, exploitation, and display of animals, flourished in the context of Roman “zoological imperialism.” The rabbis’ menagerie together with their theory of territorial doubles—according to which a creature has a double in the wild and in the sea—troubles the singularity of species, including the human. I highlight how contagious likeness and untamed multiplicity exceeds the grasp of the menagerie, which has salutary implications for decolonial science and ecological ethics.

The fourth chapter, “Hybrid,” treats a creature whose treatment is overtly moralized in modern and contemporary scholarship: the rabbinic hybrid (kilayim). Here I show how modern eugenic concerns about “intermarriage” and “homosexuality” have been projected onto rabbinic kilayim, with unintended racializing implications. By contrast, I demonstrate that the early rabbis did not castigate the hybrid as a transgressor of the “natural order” (what scholars assume). Instead, the rabbis embraced the bible’s ban on hybridization as a peculiar but inexplicable marker of Jewishness, and as a way to conceptual the human as generated by three actors (woman, man, god). This chapter allows a critical investigation into how the legacies of eugenics and scientific racism of the late eighteenth through twentieth centuries, haunt contemporary scholarly and public discourse.

Chapter 5, “Generation,” puts forward a novel interpretation of two figures found in ancient Jewish Iraqi sources. These are Rabbi Yohanan in a narrative in the Babylonian Talmud (ca. 6th century) and Lilith as invoked and drawn in magical incantations bowls buried in Nippur homes (ca. 3rd-7th centuries). A presumptively cisgender, human-centric, heterosexist, monogamy- and marriage-centric perspective has tended to govern scholarly (and popular) analyses of each of these figures. Instead, I offer nonbinary, species-queer interpretations, arguing that these speak far better to the different generative and erotic possibilities at play in ancient Jewish life-making and kin formations. This chapter has exciting implications for contemporary work in reproductive justice, queerfeminist and transgender theory, and the politics of sexuality and religion.

Neis is a scholar, writer, educator, and artist. A Professor of History and Judaic Studies, they are Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History and hold the Jean and Samuel Frankel Chair in Rabbinics.