Rachel Neis's investigation into rabbinic ways of seeing participates in, and contributes to, the visual turn in Jewish studies. As such, her monograph should be read alongside the growing list of studies that focus on the visual in Jewish culture (Elliot Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines, 1994; Kalman Bland, The Artless Jew, 2000; Margaret Olin, The Nation without Art, 2002; Steven Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World, 2005; Melissa Raphael, Judaism and the Visual Image, 2009, to name a few salient examples). In concert with these works, Neis's book corrects the long-held view that Judaism—and by extension Jewish culture more broadly—developed an “antipathy toward vision” (2).

Neis's work, however, does more than extend the trajectory outlined by this body of scholarship: it also reframes what is meant by the term “visual.” Many studies of Jewish visuality focus on the production and use of images by Jews. Neis, in contrast, strives for a cultural history of seeing; she concerns herself less with “what [the rabbis] saw and far more in how they saw” (18). For Neis, the study of visuality includes images and the mechanics of seeing, but more expansively, it also treats “the cultural and historical forces that shape the range of phenomena known as seeing” (3). Through this wide-angle lens, the central role played by vision in the reproduction of rabbinic culture comes into focus (6). Vision proved to be a powerful tool for shaping rabbinic subjectivity, because, like their neighbors in the Near Eastern world, the rabbis thought seeing had the capacity to affect both seer and seen (8).

The primary data for Neis's study derive from the rabbinic corpus (ca. third through sixth centuries CE). In chapter 1, she demonstrates the importance of rabbinic texts for constructing a rabbinic visuality. In the same way that images are not limited to visual perception, “written words point to more than just the realms of textuality, verbality, orality, or language” (20). Moreover, Neis rejects the view that objects offer direct access to a rabbinic visual past more so than words; indeed, “words—precisely because of their mediation—do a wonderful job of helping us understand how the sensory made ‘sense’ to people” (22). The remainder of the chapter treats theories of vision in the late antique world. This chapter alone merits serious contemplation by anyone undertaking a study of vision in antiquity.

The book's core considers how visuality works in various rabbinic topics, beginning with God in chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 examines instances of “homovisuality,” cases in which like sees like (54). Neis traces a complex interpretive thicket, beginning with the biblical injunction of a thrice-yearly pilgrimage to see God's face in the Jerusalem temple (Deut. 16:16), in light of the rabbinic reality of a nonexistent temple and, therefore, an invisible God (44). Where the Mishnah and Tosefta perceive danger in attempts to see the divine, the Sifre boldly develops a principle of reciprocal vision, in which the pilgrim not only sees God but also is seen by God (50–51). Like the Sifre, the Yerushalmi attributes seeing to the pilgrim. The Bavli, however, creatively develops the reciprocity of the Sifre: it imagines a visual symmetry between God and a two-eyed, unblemished, male pilgrim physique that mirrors the deity's perfect body (54). Excavating B. Ḥagigah's “play with visuality and its loss,” Neis shows how the tradition substituted the encounter with the rabbinic face for the divine one (69–70), a topic to which she returns more fully in chapter 6.

Chapter 3 treats “heterovisuality,” or cases that emphasize difference between viewing subject and viewed object (102). Neis discusses rabbinic passages about material objects that a biblical pilgrim would have seen, such as the face-bread and the cherubim. Palestinian traditions emphasize the theophanic function of such objects: the pilgrim could hope to visually acquire God's face by gazing upon cult images (82). The more imaginative Babylonian sources construe the cult objects in gendered, even erotic, terms, though the Bavli upsets the gendered expectations of a male subject and a female object (103).

Moving from the theological to the bodily, chapter 4 examines the erotic. As in their treatment of God, the rabbis also gender vision, when considering human desire (115). Neis argues that visual eros was “crucial to the rabbis both for the production of and for the troubling of gender” (117). On the one hand, the rabbis appear to gender sight along a traditional binary: the phallic masculine gaze penetrates a feminine object of vision. For example, discussions about whether a man is permitted to gaze at a woman's genitalia while he recites the Shema reinforce the masculine gaze. On the other hand, debates about visual asceticism subvert the binary. Visual prohibition paradoxically not only increases visual desire but also (especially in the Bavli) leads to a curbed male gaze and reconfigures the rabbis themselves as erotic visual objects to be seen by women and others (168–9).

Chapter 5 considers idols, the visible representations of others’ gods. Like the women in chapter 4, divine images posed a challenge for the rabbis, since they were regarded as visual objects with potentially negative effects on the viewer (171). Neis describes in detail two strategies cultivated by the rabbis in response to the prevalence of idolatrous images in their environment. “Looking away,” which, paradoxically, grants a certain efficacy to the offending image, was commended in some cases as a means to disengage from the idolatrous visual economy (178–9). In other instances, “looking awry” was promoted as a way to engage the offending object visually so as to neutralize its efficacy (186). Both strategies make sense, when we recall that the act of seeing was thought to affect both viewer and viewed (200–1).

Chapter 6 concerns the rabbinic sage as icon of the sacred. The rabbis imagined that, as an icon, the sage's body radiates a visible knowledge (204). Identifying such revelation with Torah and divinity, rabbinic sources construct the sage as the incarnation of divine teaching (207, 239). By means of a “sacred … physiognomics,” the rabbis turn the sight of a sage (his radiance, ugliness, or scarring) into “a visual aid to learning” (212–13). Beyond this instrumental role, however, glimpses of the sage also mediate religious experience: despite concerns that sage veneration might be construed as idolatry, the rabbis consider the sage to embody a vision of God (246). Such a visual piety promoted the reproduction of the rabbinic project, since to see the sage was to become like him (251). A brief concluding chapter summarizes and synthesizes the study's findings.

It is tempting to critique a volume based upon the book I wish the author had written, instead of the book she actually wrote. In this case, I yearn for a text that leads nonspecialists through the complicated world of rabbinic literature and rabbinic visuality. The intricately detailed textual arguments, using discipline-specific terminology, that form the heart of most chapters preclude the use of this book in many undergraduate courses in religious studies or Jewish studies. But Neis did not undertake to write an undergraduate textbook.

Instead, she crafted a masterful and technical study of rabbinic visuality. Her monograph represents careful application of historical-critical, tradition-critical, and philological approaches to rabbinic literature. To give only one example: throughout the book, Neis carefully distinguishes not only various diachronic levels of rabbinic literature, but also the synchronic overlaps and divergences among the Palestinian and Babylonian traditions. It is this intricate, detailed argument that makes her work valuable to specialists of ancient Judaism, as well as to scholars of contemporaneous late antique cultures, with which she engages.

Yet Neis's work does much more than this: it also charts a cultural history of seeing. As I suggested above, the visual turn in Jewish studies has occurred primarily through the study of images and of attitudes toward them. While this reexamination of images has been necessary, it is insufficient. We must also inquire into Jewish visuality: the totality of Jewish cultural practices around seeing. Seeing is, obviously, physical, but it is more than the passive reception of sensory stimuli. As an anthropology of the senses reminds us, seeing (like all sensory perception) is “a cultural, as well as a physical, act.”Footnote ¹ As a cultural act, seeing constitutes an active, selective, constructive activity, a way of ordering and remembering.

Moving easily yet responsibly between body and theology, philology and cultural history, Neis counters a narrative of rabbinic antagonism toward vision by showing how the rabbis not only prohibited harmful looking but also promoted beneficial kinds of seeing, all in service of constructing a rabbinic subjectivity (254, 258). Furthermore, she shows how rabbinic ways of seeing were “embedded in the late-antique visual world”: while distinctively Jewish in terms of ideas, piety, and rituals, rabbinic visual practices were simultaneously continuous with ancient Near Eastern, biblical, Greco-Roman, Christian, and Zoroastrian visual practices (261). By recovering the importance of the visual in the foundational sources of Judaism, Neis contributes to a variegated view of Jewish visuality, thus complicating a one-sided and polemical portrait of Judaism as a religion primarily of the ear.