Interspecies and Cross-species Generation:

Neis, Rachel

doi:10.2307/j.ctv9hj775.23

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Readings across the Niddah, Kil'ayim, and Bekhorot tractates of the Talmud suggest that the sages saw humans as part of a continuous biodiverse spectrum, understanding that 'in settled human habitation, wilderness, and the sea, there are creaturely doubles' -centaurs, for example, or sirens -who, although they may appear quasi-human, are most emphatically not. 66 When faced with the unsettling fact that women sometimes give birth to creatures that look like birds and animals (Niddah 4:2), the rabbis required these creatures to look at least somewhat like humans (mi'tsurat ha'adam) in order to be classified as human. 67 Medieval thinkers, in turn, posited that humans, for all their vaunted likeness to the divine, were tethered not only to the heavenly but also to the bestial world through the physiology of their bodies.…”

Section: Elina Gertsmanmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘The Breath of Every Living Thing’: Zoocephali and the Language of Difference on the Medieval Hebrew Page

Gertsman

2023

Art History

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The most remarkable feature of the Hammelburg Mahzor, a fourteenth‐century German High Holiday book, is the inclusion of zoocephalic figures: humans with beastly heads. The purpose of this essay is to explore the semiotics and phenomenology of this specifically Jewish visual idiom, and to suggest that its presence lies at the intersection of language, philosophy, poetry, and history. In the Mahzor, zoocephaly signals distinction that collapses temporalities, tests the limits of alterity, and engages in a sophisticated word–image play that strives to establish visceral connections with the community of the manuscript's users. Hammelburg zoocephali invoke the fragility of the human condition by establishing reverberating relationships between themselves and other inhabitants of the Mahzor's pages: echoes of many, avatars of none. Outwardly monstrous yet emphatically human, these zoocephali prove to be particularly excellent images to think with about the place of Hebrew manuscripts in the long history of medieval visual culture.

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Section: Elina Gertsmanmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘The Breath of Every Living Thing’: Zoocephali and the Language of Difference on the Medieval Hebrew Page

Gertsman

2023

Art History

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Animal Studies and Ancient Judaism

Berkowitz

2019

Currents in Biblical Research

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Animal studies has its origins in philosophy but extends to all fields of the humanities, especially literature, history, and anthropology. The central concern of animal studies is how human beings perceive other species and themselves as one among them. Animal studies in ancient Judaism has generally not been undertaken in a critical mode, with notable and increasing exceptions. This article covers work from the past decade (2009–2019) that deals centrally with animals, from ancient Israel to late antiquity, spanning the Hebrew Bible, apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, library of Qumran, rabbinic literature, and material culture. Topics addressed are animal sacrifice and consumption; literary depictions of animals; studies of individual animal species; archaeology and art featuring animals; animal ethics, theology, and law; and critical theoretical approaches to species difference. The conclusion considers future directions for animal studies in ancient Judaism.

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“All That Is in the Settlement”

Neis

2019

Journal of Jewish Ethics

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While biologists argue about the limits and definition of a species, the urge to cluster and distinguish among the plenitude of life-forms that populates the planet remains. Contemporary anxieties about attempts to clone monkeys and to engineer human-porcine chimeras point to concerns about species boundaries, resemblances, and causing suffering to other creatures. The fears about resemblances (and attendant slippery slope concerns) relate to how humans may be implicated. Such concerns about resemblances among kinds, the boundaries between species, and attempts to uphold distinctions, populated ancient zoological and anthropological thought, including that of the rabbis. While the rabbis drew on tselem elohim to theorize human reproduction and uniqueness, this article traces an alternative zoological vision that integrated humans among other kinds, while explaining resemblances among species with a theory of territorial doubles. This theory of territorial doubles claimed that all creatures—including humans—have versions that exist in the wild and in the sea.

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Interspecies and Cross-species Generation:

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

‘The Breath of Every Living Thing’: Zoocephali and the Language of Difference on the Medieval Hebrew Page

‘The Breath of Every Living Thing’: Zoocephali and the Language of Difference on the Medieval Hebrew Page

Animal Studies and Ancient Judaism

“All That Is in the Settlement”

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