In this interdisciplinary monograph, Beth Berkowitz analyzes selected legal and homiletic sugyot from the Babylonian Talmud in dialogue with animal studies in order to explore rabbinic thought on animals. Berkowitz stays close to the texts that she studies, while also addressing larger themes in the field of rabbinics, such as selfhood, otherness, and the relationship between Halakhah and Aggadah, among other important issues. The book does not simply dabble in animal studies to address these issues, but is rather a comprehensive dialogue between the Babylonian Talmud and a range of animal studies scholarship. Berkowitz brings the skills of a trained talmudist along with the sensibilities and nuance of a theorist and scholar of animal studies to bear in each of her analyses. The book provides new and insightful readings of the talmudic passages studied along with a useful overview to the field of animal studies, full of copious footnotes containing a varied and annotated bibliography, which should be valuable to the initiated and noninitiated alike. However, as Berkowitz herself noted in a response to a review panel of her book at the AAR/SBL 2018 meeting, the animal studies genealogy she presents in this book tends to be overly masculine, marginalizing the various female pioneers of the field. I note this not to critique Berkowitz, but rather to highlight how insidious gender imbalance and sexism is in the academy and the ways in which it slips into the work of many of those who are actively fighting against it.
The book is arranged topically, probing a different topic of rabbinic thought on animals in each chapter through an in-depth analysis of one talmudic sugya. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to animal studies and to the type of talmudic scholarship motivated by animal studies in which Berkowitz engages. She then provides a brief orientation to the Babylonian Talmud for nonspecialists before commencing her first study. Chapter 2 examines rabbinic views of animal intelligence and the similarities between animal and human intellect and self-awareness. Chapter 3 explores the question of whether the rabbis think that animals have morality and can be held culpable for wrongs that they commit by examining areas of biblical and rabbinic literature where animals stand trial. Chapter 4 asks whether or not animal suffering matters in rabbinic thought, and if so, how widespread such care for animals is within rabbinic literature. Chapter 5 explores the question of dangerous animals in rabbinic literature and the relationship between scapegoating animals, power, gender, and patriarchy. Chapter 6 investigates the limits of objectifying animals, and their resistance to being used as things within the text of the Babylonian Talmud. Finally, Berkowitz discusses the impact of the various studies undertaken in her work on the larger issue of “rabbinic anthropology” and selfhood in late antiquity, showing that animals are both viewed as selves within rabbinic thought, and at the same time are also the instrument or the recipient of rabbinic othering. She concludes that within particular strains of rabbinic thought, animals share elements of selfhood with humans, including the ability to suffer, self-reflexivity, self-cultivation, and sensory abilities.
Berkowitz begins each chapter with a survey of various types of animal studies literature, ranging from ethology to anthropology to literary studies. She then traces the development of rabbinic thought on each area of human/animal relations throughout the chronological layers of biblical and rabbinic tradition, using animal studies scholarship to highlight various elements in these texts. She begins with the Hebrew Bible and proceeds through the shifting and changing viewpoints of the Tannaim, Amoraim, and Stammaim to arrive at a masterful literary presentation of the sugya at hand. Following David Weiss Halivni, she often assumes later misreadings of earlier texts as well as intergenerational interpretative conflict.
Most broadly, this book is an invitation to take joy in learning Talmud as well as the disparate works of animal studies with which Berkowitz engages. The book invites readers to share in Berkowitz's love of animals, even if it doesn't ask them to stop eating animals or using them for human benefit. While Berkowitz makes her own progressive commitments clear in the introduction to the work, she avoids preachiness. She achieves this by moving beyond an apologetic paradigm that seeks to locate already-packaged contemporary environmental or animal-friendly viewpoints within the Talmud, thus avoiding turning the rabbis into champions of the modern environmental movement. In fact, she argues that many voices in the Talmud are strongly anthropocentric. And yet, at the same time, in the process of deconstructing the Babylonian Talmud she unearths surprisingly redemptive moments where the Babylonian Talmud explicitly assumes or entertains animal intelligence, morality, the capability to suffer, and personhood. On occasion, she may have overshot in her effort to move beyond apologetics, in that sometimes she reads these moments and voices as too marginal. However, this is but a minor criticism, for Berkowitz is keenly aware of the plurality of rabbinic and biblical views of animals and their relations to humans, and for the most part she does not privilege any one voice as more central than the others. Without an overabundance of references to Jacques Derrida, she performs expert deconstructive readings of the sugyot she studies and shows how productive this approach can be for the study of Talmud. Her approach to the Babylonian Talmud, along with her larger archeology of the place of the animal in rabbinic literature, should have long-lasting consequences for the field, not only for literary and historical-critical scholarship, but also for Jewish thought and constructive theology and ethics.
