The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture

Neis, Rachel

doi:10.1017/cbo9781139506380

Cited by 77 publications

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“…The incantation actually describes a form of reciprocal visual encounter that is at the heart of ritual viewing: each protagonist appears to and sees the other. 167 This is Aphrodite after all: the erotic nature of their encounter is hard to deny, but then this supposedly "represents female prolificacy" writ large. The danger to women ("mother's misbehavior") is in the realm of generation, but the eroticism is between the demon and the husband.…”

Section: Demonizing Lilithmentioning

confidence: 99%

When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species

Neis

2023

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This book investigates rabbinic treatises relating to animals, humans, and other life-forms. Through an original analysis of creaturely generation and species classification by late ancient Palestinian rabbis and other thinkers in the Roman Empire, Rafael Rachel Neis shows how rabbis blurred the lines between humans and other beings, even as they were intent on classifying creatures and tracing the contours of what it means to be human. Recognizing that life proliferates by mechanisms beyond sexual copulation between two heterosexual “male” and “female” individuals of the same species, the rabbis proposed intricate alternatives. In parsing a variety of creatures, they considered overlaps and resemblances across seemingly distinct species, upsetting in turn unmitigated claims of human distinctiveness. When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven enters conversations in animal studies, queer theory, trans theory, and feminist science studies to provincialize sacrosanct ideals of reproduction in favor of a broader range that spans generation, kinship, and species. The book thereby offers powerful historical alternatives to the paradigms associated with so-called traditional ideas.

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Section: Demonizing Lilithmentioning

confidence: 99%

When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species

Neis

2023

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“…Rachel-Rafe Neis (2013) has already studied what she termed "homovisuality" in (Roman era) Tannaitic thought, which is practically self-referential witnessing of an event. Sight and eyewitnessing in Talmudic thought are a perception in which seeing an object has a mimetic effect upon the beholder.…”

Section: Crude Reality and The Mimesis Of Truthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infames, Roman Judicial Theatre, and the Mimesis of Process

Dickmann¹

2023

Philosophia

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I argue that the underlying criterion for the list of professions that fall under the Roman legal category of Infamia was not moral, as scholars have argued, but rather aesthetic-ontological. Revisiting Greco-Roman philosophy of mimesis and consulting Edwards's analysis of infames-elite role exchange as well as Hell's research into Roman "judicial theatre," I argue that infames were disqualified from legal testimony because their trades involved professional dramatic mimesis. They were thus conceived to be prone to sacrifice the specificity of events for pre-established aesthetic forms, which undermines the pursuit of truth in a court of law. However, far from excluding mimesis, the Roman court deployed what Hutcheon has called "mimesis of process," which, despite being self-referential, encouraged the depiction of the pure, naked event-what Blanchot (following Levinas) has termed il y aprior to being reduced to pre-established aesthetic, moral, epistemological, and even linguistic forms and ideals.

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“…Rachel Neis og Jane Heath har begge henledt opmaerksomheden på en tendens til forskydning af gudens visuelle egenskaber i skildringen af Guds åbenbaring i de gammeltestamentlige skrifter og i selve kulten i den antikke jødedom. En raekke optrin i skrifterne laegger vaegt på endda dens deltagere: Adgang til templet forudsaetter et intakt legeme, og af alle maend kraeves omskaering(Heath 2013, 135; Neis 2013, 41) Neis (2013). peger på, at denne tendens i senantikken til forskydning af kultens visuelle aspekt fra Gud I Filons Gesandtskabet til Gaius (1961) (forfattet efter 41) kombineres aspekter af generel platonisk mimesiskritik med elementer af jødisk anikonisk kultpraksis.…”

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Ikonoklasten Paulus?

Lederballe Pedersen

2023

Periskop

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This article deals with the first letter written by the apostle Paul, known as the First Letter to the Thessalonians (c. 50 CE), suggesting that by reading the letter as a document in the history of visuality as well as religious statement, it testifies to a dialectic within Paul’s theological anthropology. For the new Christians, Paul advocates the abolishment of cult images, which were ubiquitous in the Roman empire. But concurrent to his iconoclastic argument is an insistence on the members of the Thessalonian church taking on the role as religiously informed images themselves. Thereby, the letter shows Paul’s negative, iconoclastic attitude towards images being contradicted dialectically by the reemergence of an alternative type of image within the very same religious community instructed to disavow religious imagery. The article thus aims to situate the contents of the letter within the visual culture of the Roman empire, drawing on both textual evidence and images expressing the cultural patterns in question.

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The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture

Cited by 77 publications

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When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species

When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species

Infames, Roman Judicial Theatre, and the Mimesis of Process

Ikonoklasten Paulus?

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