This essay is part of a review panel of When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven that took place at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. Read the full panel here.
In responding to Rafael Neis’ book When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven, I write as a scholar of premodern South Asian religious literature focusing on affect, embodiment, and gender and sexuality. Being an outsider to the field means that the finer strokes of Rabbinic law and the like are impenetrable, but it is also a position of privilege for the ways in which it makes readily apparent the broader strokes and interventions of Neis’ project. In this regard, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven serves as something of a model for how to speak to one’s field and how to reach beyond the bounds of disciplinarity and make friends with the unfamiliar. So, while I do not delve into the finer points of Tannaitic taxonomy or the nuances of how the rabbis dealt with the hybridity of the mule, which others are far better equipped to do, I instead focus on the theoretical import of the book.
I want to start by highlighting that When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven weds together philological rigor with theoretical captiousness. Animal, gender, trans studies, and posthumanist approaches go hand in hand with post-Foucauldian history of knowledge and history of science to inform nuanced readings of Tannaitic texts. As I was reading the monograph, I kept trying to center the question: why is work like this important? Or, perhaps more specifically, why is work that makes such conceptual moves important? Neis shows us the answer to this question in several ways. One way is in the introduction and their engagement with Donna Haraway, a scholar without whom Animal Studies and posthumanism would not exist in their current forms. Haraway takes the God of Judaism and Christianity to task for being over-concerned with boundaries and divisions, inaugurated with the creation of man and woman and human and animal in Genesis (3-5). To quote somewhat at length, Neis says, “I believe this characterization, articulated by Haraway, and held more widely by a variety of thinkers in contexts related to nonhumans, is deeply problematic. It takes for granted the notion of fused Judeo-Christianity, at once synonymous with a relatively unmediated Hebrew Bible (a rather Protestant hermeneutical) as well as with the ‘secularisms’ and sciences of modernity (also a Protestant move, arguably), with their avowed humanisms and patriarchal, omniscient ‘god trick.’ This idea, supposedly critical, serves in its own way to flatten and erase” (4) and then later, “It is important to see that the invented ‘Judeo-Christianity’ is not only a tic of right-wing, conservative Christian, and white suprematism’s discourse on reproduction, race, and demography” (5). With this critique on the table in the first pages of the introduction, Neis demonstrates what happens when scholars of religion absent ourselves from broader theoretical conversations within the Humanities and Social Sciences: religion is either made epiphenomenal or becomes a caricature that can be marshaled for different kinds of intellectual and political projects. With regard to Haraway, the nuanced vibrancy of Jewish thought about animal-human relationships is elided.
The book, in re-centering this vibrancy, enacts a refusal of closure by demanding that we remain open to the persistence of heteronormative and androcentric patriarchy alongside queerness, transness, and animality. In the book, we see this simultaneity in the irreducibility of hybridity to the mediation of difference and the policing of boundaries to the preservation of purity. And we really see this in Neis’ refusal to assign Yohanan as non-binary. This methodological unwillingness to tie up categories into neatly arranged bows—this is, after all, a book about categorization—opens up an interpretative space in which binaries become the fodder for dialectical thinking. In Neis’ hands, definitions become the terrain for saying “yes, and…,” and unmarked normative assumptions—of the rabbis or of Donna Haraway—are sites of perpetual return and reexamination.
I am going to go playfully far afield here but I think Neis invites this playfulness so I hope you all will indulge me. As I finished reading this book, a TikTok started circulating of various NFL players and even some European soccer players doing Trump’s iconic jerky dance. Sometimes clips of these players were overlaid with Trump’s preferred dance anthem of the YMCA or even stitched together alongside Trump himself doing the dance. These clips made me laugh and I wondered what Neis would make of this, how would they read this event? While this anecdote feels far afield from the Tannaim at the turn of the common era, it helps illustrate the dialectical persistence of queerness within patriarchy. The "Y.M.C.A." is, of course, a '70s disco song that alludes to gay cruising at gyms. In the music video, members of the group famously perform various types of masculinity—cowboy, police officer, construction worker, and so on. So here we have a president, overtly concerned with his own masculinity and the policing of gender norms and sexed bodies, dancing with pursed lips to a gay anthem that is nothing if not citational of gay culture. His performance is then imitated by another group of men whose job is normative if not violent masculinity itself and, by this, I mean football. Within this cascade of gender performativity, we see how a contemporary iteration of masculinity always already contains queerness within itself. While queerness and cisnormative patriarchy are often understood as culturally constructed binaries, they are also porous, overlapping, and coproduced. As When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven shows us, the Tannaim also contain this multiplicity.
To reveal this multiplicity in the Tannaitic textual corpus requires a certain kind of interpretative exfoliation: bringing contemporary theoretical concepts, insights, and questions to bear on the past. This raises the unenviable specter of anachronism and its oft-deployed adjective anachronistic, a concern that threads through the book. The interpretative protocols of studying the premodern in all of its variances require, at a respectable minimum, attentiveness to historical context and, often, attempts at originalism (legal or otherwise). The Tannaim illustrates that there can be a name and even a category for something that may not exist but, as Neis argues, that does not make it any less real—for example, the siren in the Sifra (chapter 2). If we invert this conceptual move, the absence of a pronoun for “they” in a given historical-linguistic context does not mean that gender non-binary people did not exist and were not conceptually real in that time and place. When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven asserts that to limit interpretation to what appears sayable or knowable at a certain time in history, belies the world making that was once so hegemonically obvious as to not require comment, subaltern life worlds that did not rise to the level of our archives, or, as I gestured to above, the persistence of the unnamable within the named (the specter of queerness that haunts normative masculinity). Here, the bringing to bear of present concerns on the past produces new ways of seeing that make the familiar unfamiliar.
I will end with another of Neis’ conceptual sleights of hand: if bringing the present to bear on the past opens up new ways of thinking and reading, then what happens with the inverse? Neis summarizes Mike Chen by saying “reading with the rabbis might grant us new avenues into the past’s weirdness” (16). “Weirdness” is a term that they come back to a few times throughout the book. So, what does “weirdness” as a concept signal? Reading against the grain, the non-normativity of the rabbis does a different kind of work of departicularizing the present. If the rabbis were engaged in projects of knowledge production that were familiar to the ancient world— and later to Linnaeus, Darwin, etc— then certainly the weirdness of the past works to make the present less preciously and idiosyncratically weird. Neis, in showing us the weirdness of the rabbis, illustrates that there’s nothing new to see here.