In her innovative and intriguing monograph, Gwynn Kessler analyzes aggadic traditions about the fetus and explores rabbinic conceptualizations of embryology and procreation. Although Kessler's focus is on rabbinic sources, particularly tannaitic texts, she is aware that the rabbinic movement was constantly negotiating its position in the complicated cultural matrix of late antiquity. Thus, she also calls attention to relevant early Christian and patristic sources and Greco-Roman medical texts when rabbinic traditions appear to be in dialogue with them.
Kessler's central contention is that the rabbis frequently personify the fetus as Israel itself. In this ideological and theological discourse, the fetus as Israel is not a passive entity. Rather, fetuses speak as and for Israel; they articulate rabbinic values and convictions; and they are in active relationship with God, their primary source of being. Kessler explores how the rabbis inscribed the core experiences of their own emerging community on the body of the fetus, a being itself in the process of formation. In an era when the identity of the “true” Israel was being contested both inside and outside the Jewish world, rabbinic writings insisted that the essence of “Israelness,” as they understood it, was already present in the fetus. This essence was expressed in both genealogical and ideological terms, as in traditions showing how Exodus and Revelation are continuous events, enacted in the development of each fetus. In this way, according to Kessler, the rabbis demonstrated God's active participation in the continual creation of Israel. As she writes, “Rabbinic narratives about the fetus demonstrate that rabbinic Israel from its origins and down to its foundations, is steeped in genealogy and saturated with covenant—and vice versa” (13).
A complementary theme in Conceiving Israel is how rabbinic narratives that foreground fetuses simultaneously marginalize women. The fetus is an active participant at the Crossing of the Sea and at Sinai; indeed, aggadic teachings maintain that God turned the bellies of pregnant women to glass so that their fetuses could witness these events. The mothers, however are represented as passive vessels. As Kessler demonstrates, hierarchic constructions of gender are evident both in rabbinic theories of procreation and in rabbinic embryology; in both cases, women are said to play no active role. Moreover, the presumed, and often explicit, gender of the fetus in midrashic narratives is male.
Conceiving Israel has four central chapters. Of these, the first two (Chaps. 2 and 3) focus on aggadic narratives about fetuses, whereas Chapters 3 and 4 discuss rabbinic traditions about embryology and procreation. An epilogue addresses contemporary discourses about the fetus, particularly in light of ongoing debates about abortion. Kessler emphasizes that the modern reader must set aside present-day attitudes when seeking to understand rabbinic concerns. She warns, “It would be a failure of our imaginations to read rabbinic narratives about fetuses, and the rabbinic fetus, into our contexts and concerns without at first capturing and then magnifying the ways in which the rabbis drew upon the image of the fetus in their project of conceiving Israel” (135).
This rabbinic endeavor is delineated in the chapter entitled “Covenantal Fetuses,” in which Kessler examines a broad range of sources about the fetus as Israel from the third to the tenth centuries CE. The earliest extant example appears in the Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael (Shirata 1), where Israelite fetuses sing at the crossing of the sea. In the latest tradition, Midrash on the Ten Commandments, fetuses serve as guarantors of their parents so that Israel can receive the Torah (possible precursors to this tradition are also cited). Kessler argues that these and similar midrashim enabled the rabbis to internalize, both literally and metaphorically, the defining covenantal relationship between God and Israel. She notes, as well, that “the fetus links the biblical past, where the Exodus and Revelation occurred to Israel as a collective, and the rabbinic present, where Exodus and Revelation continue to occur to individuals, as the rabbis use the fetus to articulate what constitutes collective Israel” (38). Similarly, Aggadah in which God instructs the fetus on the commandments of the Torah projects the covenant between God and Israel into the future.
Kessler's third chapter, “And the Sons Struggled,” focuses on how fetuses can portray both Israel and the “other.” Aggadic portrayals of Jacob/Israel and Esau/Rome in Rebekah's womb provide a central example of the irreconcilable differences between Israel and the nations of the world. While Jacob/Israel is already circumcised, pious, and studious, Esau/Rome is none of these things (Genesis Rabbah 63:6–8). Kessler writes, “Already in utero, Jacob represents rabbinic Israel as a collective; here rabbinic Israel takes shape in relation to its others, as well as in relation to biblical Israel, and in relations with God” (27). In this chapter, Kessler also explores the possibility of rabbinic and patristic exegetical polemics about prenatal Jacob and Esau, especially in the third-century church father Origen's interpretations of Romans 9:6–13 and in Genesis Rabbah 63.
In “Embryology as Theology” (Chap. 4), Kessler discusses rabbinic acquaintance with Greco-Roman ideas about conception and fetal development and finds significant consonance on these topics, indicative of rabbinic participation in a larger cultural context. However, in her analyses of a number of texts, Kessler shows how the rabbis adapted shared scientific and medical knowledge to assert God's role conception and the development of the fetus. Thus, she suggests, “Midrashic traditions about fetal development and pregnancy are exemplary products of rabbinic imagination born out of a creative integration of Greco-Roman embryology and biblical and rabbinic theology” (83). They convey the rabbinic certainty that just as God forms and fashions the fetus in the womb, so God oversees the destiny of Israel.
Chapter 5, “Reproductive Theology,” explores rabbinic theories of procreation through an analysis of Leviticus Rabbah 14, a Palestinian tradition about how God, man, and woman, in that order, create the embryo. Kessler points out that the rabbis read Leviticus 12:2 as “when a woman conceives and gives birth to male,” rather than “when a woman emits seed and gives birth to a male,” the literal meaning of the Hebrew. She argues that this is because the rabbis wish to emphasize God's paramount role in the creation of the fetus and its care, activities paralleled in the divine work of “creating and caring for the world and Israel” (91). At the same time, insistence on the woman's passivity in procreation is an underlying theme throughout this and most of the related texts that Kessler explores. The one exception is Babylonian Talmud Niddah 31a, a unique tradition that includes woman among the “three partners” who play a role in procreation. Kessler argues that here, too, “multiple hierarchies” are functioning, and the partners are far from equal; what is most important in this tradition, as well, is to affirm the ongoing relationship between God and Israel.
Conceiving Israel is convincing in demonstrating that the rabbis invoked and personified the fetus to reinforce their primary conviction that Israel is defined by its divinely revealed beliefs and practices. Acknowledgment of God's creative and salvific power, devotion to learning, and the observance of commandments are the intrinsic and defining characteristics of Israel. Rabbinic Aggadah about the fetus asserts that these activities already take place in the womb. Although her book is somewhat repetitive, Kessler has made an important contribution to our understandings of rabbinic self-definition, rabbinic views of embryology and procreation, and midrashic constructions of the fetus. She also demonstrates yet another way in which rabbinic tradition marginalizes women—in this case by significantly undercutting their active roles in conception and pregnancy.
