Jews and Animals
- LAST MODIFIED: 26 May 2023
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199840731-0229
- LAST MODIFIED: 26 May 2023
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199840731-0229
Introduction
Jews and animals. The two would seem a fraught pair, just as the pairing of any human group with animals suggests an assault on the dignity of that group. The academic field of critical animal studies challenges the set of associations that makes such pairings fraught, however: human = rational and reflective, versus animal = irrational and instinctive. Critical animal studies historicizes the human/animal binary, reconstructing the process and politics by which the human has been separated from and made superior to the animal. As part of this, critical animal studies looks at how certain human identities—racial, ethnic, religious, gender—are “animalized,” that is to say, they are migrated over to the animal side. When critical animal studies meets Jewish studies, hereafter “Jewish animal studies,” scholars ask how Jews have either been animalized or have animalized others. Scholars ask also how Jews have resisted animalization of or by Jews along with the binary itself, as Jews ask what it means to be human or animal and test the boundary between the two. Like all humans, Jews throughout their history have lived with animals and used them for labor, transport, food, and companionship, among other functions, and so Jewish animal studies looks also at the role of actual animals within the Jewish experience. Animals have always fired the human imagination; Jewish animal studies looks at the roles played by animals within Jewish literary, visual, and material culture. Jewish animal studies looks for the animal also in Jewish reflection on God and in Jewish forms of devotion and piety, in which the animal is often contrasted with the human but sometimes is thought to join the human in collective inter-species worship of God. Finally, Jewish animal studies considers the real-life consequences of the human/animal binary for both animals and humans. Jewish ethics, philosophy, and law asks about Jewish obligation toward other species in light of biblical and rabbinic traditions and the experience of oppression that Jews and animals have in common. Those who engage in Jewish animal studies soon realize that “Jews and animals” is a false dichotomy. Jews are animals. Whether Jews themselves recognize this, and to what effect, is one of the many questions that Jewish animal studies addresses.
Reference Works
Many works offer reviews of scholarship for Jewish studies or for animal studies, but few do for the intersection between. Balberg 2019 and Rosenstock 2019 are review essays of books in Jewish animal studies, while Berkowitz 2019; Cooper 2019; Sherman 2020; and Hirsch-Matsioulas, et al. 2022 offer narrative discussions of scholarship, Sherman focusing on Hebrew Bible, Berkowitz on ancient Judaism, Cooper on modern Jewish literature, and Hirsch-Matsioulas and colleagues on contemporary Israel. See also Judaism and Animals in the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies article Judaism and the Environment.
Balberg, Mira. “לכך נוצרת : על יהודים ובעלי חיים.” Theory and Criticism 51 (2019): 225–235.
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(‘For This You Were Created’: On Jews and Animals). A review essay of Wasserman’s Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals (see Mishnah and Talmud) and Shyovitz’s Remembrance of His Wonders, Balberg’s discussion also speaks more broadly to the study of animals within Jewish culture.
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Berkowitz, Beth. “Animal Studies and Ancient Judaism.” Currents in Biblical Research 18.1 (2019): 80–111.
DOI: 10.1177/1476993X19870386Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Review of scholarship from 2009 to 2019 on animals in ancient Judaism, 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.
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Cooper, Andrea Dara. “Writing Humananimals: Critical Animal Studies and Jewish Studies.” Religion Compass 13.2 (2019): 1–11.
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Weaves together general works in critical animal studies by the likes of Peter Singer, Carol Adams, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway with recent research on animals and animality in Jewish studies. Cooper focuses on literary approaches but with a concern for the way that actual animals “can animate concerns with figural animalities, and vice versa” (p. 1).
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Hirsch-Matsioulas, Orit, Anat Ben-Yonatan, Limor Chen, Yaara Sadetzki, and Dafna Shir-Vertesh. “Human-Animal Studies in Israel: A Field in the Making.” Society & Animals (July 2022): Online.
DOI: 10.1163/15685306-bja10095Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Describes the emergence and evolution of human-animal studies in Israel. Covers work in Israel on animal agriculture, the dairy industry, kosher slaughter, animal rights laws, veganism, companion animals, therapy animals, wildlife, and notions of animal personhood, with attention to the politics of defining the state’s borders and populations. Special focus on the only Israeli journal of human-animal relations, Animals and Society.
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Rosenstock, Bruce. “The Jew and the Animal Question.” Shofar 37.1 (2019): 121–147.
DOI: 10.1353/sho.2019.0006Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A review essay of Geller’s Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews (Geller 2018 [cited under Modern Jewish Literature]), Wasserman’s Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals (Wasserman 2017 [cited under Mishnah and Talmud]), Shyovitz’s Remembrance of His Wonders, and Maya Barzilai’s Golem, considering how the books treat human animality in Jewish texts from Antiquity to contemporary times. Puts the books into conversation with Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the anthropological machine.
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Sherman, Phillip. “The Hebrew Bible and the ‘Animal Turn.’” Currents in Biblical Research 19.1 (2020): 36–63.
DOI: 10.1177/1476993X20923271Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Discussion of contemporary scholarship on animals in the Hebrew Bible. Covers animals in biblical narrative, law and ritual, prophets, poetry, psalms, and wisdom literature, as well as animal life in ancient Israel as it is reconstructed from zooarchaeology. Also addresses scholarship on specific species (the dog, horse, and donkey).
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General Overviews
There is no up-to-date, comprehensive, conventional scholarly treatment of Jews and animals, but Schochet 1984 offers a synthetic discussion of canonical Jewish traditions from the perspective of a Conservative rabbi, and Kalechofsky 1992 is an edited collection with an animal activist orientation.
Kalechofsky, Roberta. Judaism & Animal Rights: Classical & Contemporary Responses. Marblehead, MA: Micah, 1992.
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Roberta Kalechofsky (b. 1931–d. 2022) was a Jewish animal rights activist who in 1975 founded the animal rights publishing house Micah Publications and in 1985 founded Jews for Animal Rights. Kalechofsky edited this volume of forty-one articles by scholars, rabbis, veterinarians, and other Jewish animal advocates on a variety of topics, such as vegetarianism, kosher slaughter, and scientific use of animals.
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Schochet, Elijah. Animal Life in Jewish Tradition: Attitudes and Relations. New York: Ktav, 1984.
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Conservative rabbi Elijah Shochet argues that the Bible “demythologizes” animals while the rabbis “remythologize” them, but Schochet’s broader concern is whether Jewish traditions are cruel or compassionate toward animals. Divided into three sections, one on the Bible, one on classical rabbinic literature, and one on medieval and modern Jewish literature.
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Hebrew Bible
The abundant scholarship on animals in the Hebrew Bible is divided here into the following sections: Theorizing Animals in the Hebrew Bible, Animals in Biblical Law, Animal Sacrifice in the Bible, Animals in Genesis, Animals in the Prophets, Animals in Biblical Wisdom Literature, Animals in the Book of Daniel, and Animal Life in Ancient Israel. Major questions addressed are how ancient Israelites lived with animals; whether they considered animals to have moral culpability, subjectivity, agency, and rights; and how biblical authors used animals to signify foreignness, to both create and to dissolve different kinds of boundaries and to formulate political ideologies.
Theorizing Animals in the Hebrew Bible
Scholarship that reads the Hebrew Bible in a critical theoretical mode shares a postmodern sensibility and an intersectional orientation. It aims to move past the question of whether the Hebrew Bible is to blame for animal exploitation and climate crisis by showing the Bible to be a multivalent and multivocal corpus from which easy conclusions cannot be drawn. Koosed 2014 is an edited collection whose overarching concern is posthumanism. Stone 2017 is a groundbreaking monograph on animal studies and the Hebrew Bible, while Stone 2020 is a short essay on animal studies, feminist theory, and the Bible. Strømmen 2018 reads biblical texts in light of Derrida.
Koosed, Jennifer L., ed. The Bible and Posthumanism. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014.
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An edited volume of essays on the Hebrew Bible and early Christian literature read through the lens of posthumanism, which “points beyond various human-centric ideologies” (p. 3). Animal studies is one strand within posthumanism. Essays relevant to animals and the Hebrew Bible are by Strømmen on Genesis 9, by Pyper on the lion as a metaphor for the monarch, by Stone on Balaam’s ass, and by Sherwood on animal sacrifice.
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Stone, Ken. Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017.
DOI: 10.1515/9781503603769Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
“Few readers of the Bible who are watching for animals will fail to spot them” (p. 2). Stone surely spots them, with the conceptual tools of contemporary animal studies. Chapters on the role of goatskins in producing biblical scrolls and in biblical narrative; dogs in Exodus and the modern Jewish thinker Levinas; sacrifice, Derrida, and Cain and Abel; Balaam’s ass; wild animals; and species extinction.
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Stone, Ken. “Animal Studies, Feminism, and Biblical Interpretation.” In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible. Edited by Susanne Scholz, 542–554. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
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The central question is: “What can animal studies contribute to feminist biblical interpretation?” (p. 542) Discussion of scholarly work that lies at the intersection of animal studies and feminist and gender analysis. Engages Derrida’s notion of carnophallogocentrism, which posits that women and animals are both excluded from Western subjectivity and ethics.
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Strømmen, Hannah M. Biblical Animality after Jacques Derrida. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2018.
DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv3s8sp8Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Central questions are: “What might a biblical inheritance constitute for thinking about animality?” (p. 1) “What does it mean to read the Bible after Derrida?” (pp. 1–2). Note that “biblical” here refers also to the New Testament. Chapters on the aftermath of the flood in Genesis 9 and on lions and animal visions in Daniel, with a focus on themes of killability and sovereignty as they relate to animality.
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Animals in Biblical Law
The scholarship on animals in biblical law centers on the laws regarding animal consumption (Douglas 2005), the goring ox (Finkelstein 1981), the prohibition on cooking a kid in its mother’s milk (Haran 1979), and the Sabbath and sabbatical year (Olyan 2019). Sherman 2015 covers those legal areas and others. Major questions include the nature of human obligation toward animals, whether the Bible attributes to animals moral culpability, and what the laws reflect about the Bible’s broader conception of the divine, the human, and the animal.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 2005.
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First published in 1966 by anthropologist Mary Douglas, this classic work argues that the Hebrew Bible’s regulations for animal consumption reflect biblical composers’ efforts to maintain rigid social boundaries. In light of critique from Bible scholars, Douglas later revised her thesis, but it remains a touchstone for interpreting the Bible’s conception of animals.
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Finkelstein, Jacob J. The Ox That Gored. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 71. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1981.
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A posthumously published ninety-page article on the laws of the goring ox in Exodus 21:12–17, which raises intriguing questions about animal morality and agency. Compares Exodus to other animal tort laws in the ancient Near East and traces the practice of judicial animal trials into medieval and modern times.
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Haran, Menahem. “Seething a Kid in Its Mother’s Milk.” Journal of Jewish Studies 30.1 (1979): 23–35.
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Discusses the enigmatic prohibition in Exodus 23:19, Exodus 34:26, and Deuteronomy 14:21 against cooking a kid in his mother’s milk. Haran reviews the major theories regarding the reason for the prohibition and what exactly it forbids and sides with those who understand it as “intended to outlaw cruelty” (p. 29).
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Olyan, Saul M. “Are There Legal Texts in the Hebrew Bible That Evince a Concern for Animal Rights?” Biblical Interpretation 27.3 (2019): 321–339.
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Aim is to counter characterizations of the Bible’s view of animals that overemphasize the dominionism of Genesis 1:28. Considers whether four biblical laws—the sabbatical year and Sabbath in Exodus 23:10–11, 12; Leviticus 25:2–7, and Deuteronomy 5:12–15 – meet the criterion for animal rights and concludes that they do, especially the two latter passages. Contributes to animal rights debates from the perspective of a Bible specialist.
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Sherman, Phillip Michael. “Animals.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Law. Edited by Brent A. Strawn, 24–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
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Review of laws related to animals in the Hebrew Bible in areas of sacrifice, slaughter, consumption, use, and care. Discusses also Christian and later Jewish developments. Special attention paid to the possibility that the Bible attributes moral agency to animals.
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Animal Sacrifice in the Bible
The scholarship listed here offers fresh perspectives on a practice that has long preoccupied scholars of religion and has generated discomfort and polemics for Jews and Christians. Klawans 2006 interprets ancient Israelite animal sacrifice in light of its shepherding culture. Ruane 2013 looks at the role of gender in the Bible’s animal sacrifice systems. Reed 2014 and Sherwood 2014 both draw upon contemporary animal studies perspectives, Reed on the study of meat culture and Sherwood on philosophical thinking about the question of the animal. See the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies article Sacrifice in the Bible.
Klawans, Jonathan. “Sacrifice in Ancient Israel: Pure Bodies, Domesticated Animals, and the Divine Shepherd.” In A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics. Edited by Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton, 65–80. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
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The aim is to elucidate ancient Israel’s attitudes to animals by analyzing the biblical laws of sacrifice and the broader meaning of shepherding in ancient Israel. Argues that the “key to understanding ancient Israelite sacrifice is to remember the analogy: as God is to Israel, so is Israel to its flocks and herds” (p. 74). Attention paid to supersessionist assumptions and ideas about “the primitive” that have informed reigning theories.
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Reed, Annette Yoshiko. “From Sacrifice to the Slaughterhouse: Ancient and Modern Approaches to Meat, Animals, and Civilization.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 26.2 (2014): 111–158.
DOI: 10.1163/15700682-12341269Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Looks at how modern meat production and the discourse of civilization that surrounds it have informed perspectives on biblical and vedic animal sacrifice. Argues for continuities and parallels between ancient and modern discourses of animal domestication. Advocates for a localized approach to interpreting animal sacrifice.
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Ruane, Nicole J. Sacrifice and Gender in Biblical Law. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139046961Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Explores the significance of the gender of both the human participants and the animal victims in the Bible’s procedures for animal sacrifice. Argues that “each permutation of sacrificial procedure becomes a redefinition of gender and its status” (p. 3), engaging Nancy Jay’s feminist theorizing of sacrifice. Chapters on women sacrificers, the predominance of male sacrificial animals, animal motherhood, the ritual of the red cow, ritual purity, and child sacrifice.
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Sherwood, Yvonne. “Cutting Up ‘Life’: Sacrifice as a Device for Clarifying—and Tormenting—Fundamental Distinctions between Human, Animal and Divine.” In The Bible and Posthumanism. Edited by Jennifer L. Koosed, 247–297. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014.
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In an eclectic discussion that draws upon Agamben, Derrida, Žižek, and Elaine Scarry, Sherwood connects the biblical laws and stories of animal sacrifice to “contemporary anxieties and technologies of ‘life’” (p. 251), such as those raised by the cloning of Dolly the sheep. Argues that sacrifice is about both clarifying and confusing distinctions among divine, human, animal, and inorganic matter.
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Animals in Genesis
The representation of animals in Genesis narratives and especially in the primeval history have played a critical if not outsized role in characterizations of the Bible’s view of animals. White 1967 is the classic essay casting blame on Genesis for the modern exploitative relationship to animals, while Walker-Jones 2017 and Carr 2021 are two of the many responses that complicate White’s characterization of Genesis.
Carr, David M. “Competing Construals of Human Relations with ‘Animal’ Others in the Primeval History (Genesis 1–11).” Journal of Biblical Literature 140.2 (2021): 251–269.
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Brings source criticism to bear on the primeval history in Genesis 1–11. Argues that the non-P strand of the primeval history creates a species-gender-ethnic hierarchy with an implicitly male Hebrew subject at the top, while the P strand, by contrast, is concerned with animal agency and welfare, though in the context of a stark animal/human binary.
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Walker-Jones, Arthur. “Naming the Human Animal: Genesis 1–3 and Other Animals in Human Becoming.” Zygon 52.4 (2017): 1005–1028.
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Argues that in Genesis 1–3, family or kinship is the root metaphor for human–animal relations. Puts paleontologist Pat Shipman’s theory about animal connection into dialogue with biblical stories to conclude that Genesis 1–3 “considers a relationship with other species part of what it means to be human and created in the image of God” (p. 1025).
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White, Lynn. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science 155.3767 (1967): 1203–1207.
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Lynn White argues that religion—his focus is Western Christianity—is to blame for the global climate crisis and that if humanity is to avoid further catastrophe it must transcend ancient cosmologies. White’s boldly stated thesis provoked many attempts to give nuance to the Bible’s understanding of the natural world.
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Animals in the Prophets
Animals play diverse roles in the narrative and poetics of the prophets. Shemesh 2010 and West 2014 both look at animals in the Book of Jonah: the big fish, the repentant animals of Nineveh, the worm, and the final ambiguous words “many animals.” Shemesh’s interest is in animals being used as agents of the divine, while West reads Jonah with perspectives from modern colonial Africa. Foreman 2011 looks at animal metaphors in Jeremiah.
Foreman, Benjamin A. Animal Metaphors and the People of Israel in the Book of Jeremiah. Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011.
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Interprets the animal metaphors used by Jeremiah for the people of Israel and spells out their implications for Jeremiah’s theology. Chapters on general approaches to metaphor, and Jeremiah’s metaphors of pastoral animals, mammals, and birds.
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Shemesh, Yael. “‘And Many Beasts’ (Jonah 4:11): The Function and Status of Animals in the Book of Jonah.” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 10 (2010): 2–26.
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Explores the role of animals in Jonah as agents of God and as partners in repentance with the Ninevites. Features general discussion of animals as divine agents, as living in community with human beings, and as recipients of divine compassion. Argues that the Bible does not manifest a simple anthropocentrism.
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West, Gerald O. “Juxtaposing ‘Many Cattle’ in Biblical Narrative (Jonah 4:11), Imperial Narrative, Neo-indigenous Narrative.” Old Testament Essays 27.2 (2014): 722–751.
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Reads the final verse of Jonah with an approach called “contrapuntal interpretation.” West juxtaposes the final phrase of Jonah with the meaning of cattle for the indigenous Zimbabwean students whom West teaches to explore what a reading of Jonah might look like from the perspective of African cattle culture.
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Animals in Biblical Wisdom Literature
The scholarship on biblical wisdom literature explores the moral, theological, and ethological lessons that animals teach to humans in wisdom literature, and the boundaries to human comprehension that animals define. Scholars explore also the poetics and literary devices in which animals appear. Forti 2008 looks at animal imagery in Proverbs, and Forti 2018 at animals in Psalms. Clines 2013 and Walsh 2017 look at the depiction of wild animals in Job. Millar 2021 contrasts Job’s “animalization” of his detractors with God’s celebration of animals in the final speeches.
Clines, David J. A. “The Worth of Animals in the Divine Speeches of the Book of Job.” In Where the Wild Ox Roams: Biblical Essays in Honour of Norman C. Habel. Edited by Alan H. Cadwallader and Peter L. Trudinger, 101–113. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix, 2013.
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Proposing that Job shows more interest in animals than does any other part of the Bible, Clines notes furthermore that the animals in Job are all untamed, living individually, freely, and without death, and are portrayed as inducing delight. Clines concludes that the animal depictions in Job “remain even in our modern world a notable challenge to our assumptions about humans and their place in the universal order” (p. 113).
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Forti, Tova. Animal Imagery in the Book of Proverbs. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2008.
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Study of the zoological, literary, and conceptual aspects of animal images in Proverbs. Considers how the animal imagery enhances or reinforces the counsels, admonitions, and moral exhortations of Proverbs intended to guide human daily life.
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Forti, Tova. “Like a Lone Bird on a Roof”: Animal Imagery and the Structure of Psalms. University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2018.
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Investigates the role of the animal kingdom in the psalms’ theology. Considers the didactic function of animals and the poetical devices used for them, especially refrains and secondary interpolations.
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Millar, Suzanna R. “Dehumanisation as Derision or Delight? Overcoming Class-Prejudice and Species-Prejudice in Job.” Biblical Interpretation 30.2 (2021): 150–170.
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Looks at Job’s dehumanization of his detractors in Job 30:1–8—he depicts them as vile creatures in the wilderness—and contrasts that with God’s celebration of animals in Job 38:39–39:30. Proposes that God undoes the human-animal hierarchy that Job presumes and challenges the classist, speciesist animalization strategy that Job uses to devalue his opponents.
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Walsh, Carey. “The Beasts of Wisdom: Ecological Hermeneutics of the Wild.” Biblical Interpretation 25.2 (2017): 135–148.
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Contrasts the role of animals in wisdom literature, usually wild animals represented as singular individuals of great diversity, with that in the Torah and Prophets, which are normally domesticated animals in the plural. When wild animals appear in Torah and Prophets, they signify danger; in wisdom, they are sources of guidance or reflect human incomprehension of the world. Aim is to dislodge the anthropocentric tendency in biblical interpretation.
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Animals in the Book of Daniel
Animals play a major role in the Book of Daniel, as observed in Koosed and Seesengood 2014 (p. 183): “Daniel refuses to eat animals (1:8–17); there is an attempt to feed him to the animals (6:10–24); the king turns into an animal (4:28–37), and animals run amok in the final visions (7–12) . . . Beasts—real, cooked, psychological, regal, divine, mythical, and monstrous—wriggle, graze, claw, and growl their way through every chapter of Daniel.” Frisch 2020 discusses the four kingdoms motif in Daniel 7. Koosed and Seesengood 2014 and Remington 2021 focus on this episode as well as those of the transformation of Nebuchadnezzar into an animal in Daniel 4, the lions’ den in Daniel 6, and the apocalyptic animal battle in Daniel 8.
Frisch, Alexandria. “The Four (Animal) Kingdoms: Understanding Empires as Beastly Bodies.” In Four Kingdom Motifs before and beyond the Book of Daniel. Edited by Loren T. Stuckenbruck and Andrew Perrin, 56–80. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2020.
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Focus on the “four kingdoms motif” —one empire gives way to another in a series of four—as it appears in Daniel 7, symbolized by four ferocious beasts. Looks at the imperial politics of the motif and its afterlives in Roman period texts through the lens of contemporary animal studies.
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Koosed, Jennifer L., and Robert Paul Seesengood. “Daniel’s Animal Apocalypse.” In Divinanimality: Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology. Edited by Stephen D. Moore, 182–195. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.
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This jointly authored essay addresses four of Daniel’s encounters with animals, arguing that each displays what Derrida terms “divinanimality,” the exclusion of both the divine and the animal from the human. In light of Agamben and Haraway, the essay proposes that the Book of Daniel’s notion of human killability relies upon a notion of animal killability.
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Remington, Megan. “Animals, Creatures, and Monsters: A Study of Animality and Foreignness in the Danielic Corpora.” PhD diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 2021.
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Dissertation on animals in the Book of Daniel informed by contemporary animal studies, with an interest in intersections between animality and foreignness. Chapters on Daniel 4, Daniel 6 and the Greek Bel and the Serpent (focusing on themes of eating and animacy), Daniel 7 (engaging monster theory), and Daniel 8 (along with the Animal Apocalypse in 1 Enoch 85–90).
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Animal Life in Ancient Israel
“Son of man, can these bones live?” asks Ezekiel 37:3. Yes is the answer from zooarchaeology, which is the analysis of animal remains, the field central to reconstructing animal life in ancient Israel and identifying the animal species mentioned in the Bible. Sasson 2016 begins with zooarchaeology from Bronze and Iron Age southern Levant with this biblical verse and focuses on the animals found most plentifully in the archaeological record: sheep, goats, and cattle. Borowski 1998 offers a broad overview of the different animal species that inhabited ancient Israel and their use by humans. Greer 2019 lays out methods for using zooarchaeology to understand Israelite religion.
Borowski, Oded. Every Living Thing: Daily Use of Animals in Ancient Israel. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1998.
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An archaeologist who specializes in Iron Age agriculture, Borowski in this book uses anthropology, archaeology, and ancient literature to reconstruct the animal life of ancient Israel and the use of animals for food, clothing, work, transportation, and religion. Chapters on the original domestication of animals; ruminants; draft and pack animals; dogs, cats, and pigs; birds, rodents, reptiles, and insects; water animals; and wild animals.
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Greer, Jonathan S. “The Zooarchaeology of Israelite Religion: Methods and Practice.” Religions 10.4 (2019): 254.
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Presents methodology for using zooarchaeology to understand Israelite religion, especially practices related to offerings and sacrifices. Formulates key questions such as whether the space in which bones are found is cultic, whether the remains constitute a deposit and, if so, what type, and whether the context is Yahwistic. Ends with illustration of methods with respect to Tel Dan.
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Joerstad, Mari. “Flora and Fauna of the Hebrew Bible.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Biblical Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
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An annotated bibliography similar to this one but briefer. See especially Animals and Plants in the Life in Ancient Israel and Flora and Fauna in Archaeology.
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Lev-Tov, Justlin. “Animal Husbandry: Meat, Milk, and More.” In T & T Clark Handbook of Food in the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel. Edited by Cynthia Shafer-Elliott, Janling Fu, and Carol L. Meyers, 77–98. T & T Clark Handbooks. London: T & T Clark, 2021.
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Examination of how the ancient Israelites used a variety of domesticated animals for transportation, work, and food. Evidence comes from the zooarchaeological record, biblical literature, and other ancient Near Eastern literatures.
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Sasson, Aharon. Animal Husbandry in Ancient Israel: A Zooarchaeological Perspective on Livestock Exploitation, Herd Management and Economic Strategies. London: Taylor & Francis, 2016.
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Co-director of the San Diego Zooarchaeology Laboratory, Aharon Sasson in this book argues that when ancient Israelites used animals they were concerned primarily with survival and self-sufficient economies rather than with profit, specialization, or trade. Chapters on survival subsistence strategies, remains from Tel Beer Sheba, and ethnographic data from villages in Mandatory Palestine. Substantial technical discussion of GIS methods and animal husbandry models.
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Philo
This section features notable contributions on 1st-century CE Jewish philosopher Philo, with an orientation toward tracing lines of influence on him and the logic of his argumentation. Newmyer 2000 discusses the position Philo takes in his essay “On Animals” on animal inferiority and irrationality. Berthelot 2002 discusses the section on biblical laws related to animals in Philo’s treatise “On the Virtues.” For further bibliography on animals in Second Temple Period Judaism, see Berkowitz 2019 (cited under Reference Works).
Berthelot, Katell. “Philo and Kindness towards Animals (De Virtutibus 125–147).” The Studia Philonica Annual 14 (2002): 48–65.
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Addresses Philo’s discussion of animals in “On the Virtues,” which defends Jews from accusations of misanthropy. Berthelot asks why Philo writes this section, what is the basis of his argument, and what are his influences. Shows that Philo’s logic is a minori ad maius—if Jews are enjoined to be kind to animals, how much more so to humans—and that it comes from a Pythagorean tradition.
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Newmyer, Stephen Thomas. “Philo on Animal Psychology.” In From Athens to Jerusalem: Medicine in Hellenized Jewish Lore and in Early Christian Literature. Edited by Samuel S. Kottek, H. F. J. Horstmanshoff, Gerhard Baader, and Gary B. Ferngren, 143–155. Rotterdam: Erasmus, 2000.
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Discusses one of Philo’s lesser-known works, “On Animals,” which survives only in Armenian translation, and purports to be a conversation between Philo and his grandnephew about whether animals possess reason. Philo’s position is that animals have imperfect and inferior souls, which Newmyer shows to be consistent with his statements elsewhere. Newmyer places the work in the context of contemporaneous Stoic thinking about animals.
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Rabbinic Literature
The scholarship on animals in rabbinic literature is divided here into works that deal primarily with Midrash and works that deal primarily with Mishnah, Tosefta, and the Talmuds.
Midrash
Scholarship on animals in midrash takes up rabbinic notions of piety (Diamond 2003), morality (Aptowitzer 1926, Williams 2017), corporeality (Schofer 2005), disability (Belser 2015), speech (Segal 2019), and eating (Brumberg-Kraus 2014), along with rabbinic literary production (Neusner 2006). Many of the works compare rabbinic ideas with Greek, Roman, and early Christian ones, with forays into medieval Jewish literature. Aptowitzer 1926 considers the schemes of reward and punishment that the rabbis devised for animals. Diamond 2003 looks at the rabbinic narrative motif of the holy man’s ability to tame or kill wild animals. Schofer 2005 is a study of the “beastly body,” or human animality as the rabbis understand it. Neusner 2006 is a comprehensive collection of legal and narrative passages related to animals. Brumberg-Kraus 2014 looks at rabbinic texts that represent eating plants as superior to eating animals. Belser 2015 treats the intersection between rabbinic discourses of animality and disability. Williams 2017 traces an exegetical tradition that God created various insect species, along with the camel, in order to punish humans for eating from the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. Segal 2019 considers the motif of talking animals.
Aptowitzer, Victor. “The Rewarding and Punishing of Animals and Inanimate Objects: On the Aggadic View of the World.” Hebrew Union College Annual 3 (1926): 117–155.
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The touchstone for scholarship on the rabbinic idea “that animals are just as subject to retribution as are human beings” (p. 117), which raises questions about animal moral capacity and the human/animal boundary more broadly. Surveys classical rabbinic passages that describe the rewarding or punishing of animals for their behavior. Discussion is framed by medieval Jewish and Muslim thinkers. (Beware the long footnotes and abrupt ending.)
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Belser, Julia Watts. “Disability, Animality, and Enslavement in Rabbinic Narratives of Bodily Restoration and Resurrection.” Journal of Late Antiquity 8.2 (2015): 288–305.
DOI: 10.1353/jla.2015.0035Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Looks at the parallel created by Genesis Rabbah 95:1 between God’s healing of animals in the World-to-Come, based on a creative reading of the peaceable kingdom of Isaiah 65:25, and God’s reversal of disability in the resurrection of human bodies. Contributes to the study of the intersection between rabbinic discourses of disability and animality.
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Brumberg-Kraus, Jonathan. “‘Better a Meal of Vegetables with Love’: The Symbolic Meaning of Vegetables in Rabbinic and Post-Rabbinic Midrash on Proverbs 15.17.” Jewish Quarterly Review 104 (2014): 46–56.
DOI: 10.1353/jqr.2014.0009Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Study of the symbolism of vegetables in midrash against the backdrop of contemporary Jewish vegetarian activism. Explores late ancient and medieval rabbinic exegesis of Proverbs 15:17, “Better a meal of vegetables where there is love, than a fattened bull where there is hate,” in which the vegetable meal symbolizes concord between God and Israel, between Israel and other peoples, between male friends, and between husband and wife.
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Diamond, Eliezer. “Lions, Snakes and Asses: Palestinian Jewish Holy Men as Masters of the Animal Kingdom.” In Jewish Culture and Society under the Christian Roman Empire. Edited by Richard Kalmin and Seth Schwartz, 251–283. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2003.
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Study of the rabbinic narrative motif of the holy man prevailing over animals represented as dangerous. In some cases, he kills them; in others, he tames them and they serve his needs. Comparative angle with early Christianity.
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Neusner, Jacob. Praxis and Parable: The Divergent Discourses of Rabbinic Judaism: How Halakhic and Aggadic Documents Treat the Bestiary Common to Them Both. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006.
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Uses the subject of animals to explore the relationship between halakhah (law) and aggadah (lore). Offers a comprehensive collection of classical rabbinic sources about animals. Divided into halves, first halakhah and then aggadah, and within each the chapters are divided according to rabbinic literary corpus (e.g., Mishnah, Sifra, etc.).
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Schofer, Jonathan Wyn. “The Beastly Body in Rabbinic Self-Formation.” In Religion and the Self in Antiquity. Edited by Michael L. Satlow, David Brakke, and Steven Weitzman, 197–221. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.
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Study of the midrashic motif of what Schofer calls the “beastly body,” the human body as mortal and porous. Attends to the “ways that rabbis characterize, invoke, care for, and exalt the animal features of their bodies amidst their instructions for the formation of ideal selves” (p. 197). Contributes to understanding the role of animals in rabbinic thinking about human corporeality.
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Segal, Eliezer. Beasts That Teach, Birds That Tell: Animal Language in Rabbinic and Classical Literatures. Calgary, AB: Alberta Judaic Studies, 2019.
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Takes up the topic of speaking animals, drawing upon primary and scholarly sources from classics, ancient Judaism, and rabbinics, with some coverage of medieval Jewish writings. Chapters on Greek philosophy; speaking snakes; speaking birds; and speaking phoenixes, frogs, and cows. Focuses on the question of whether ancient traditions about talking animals were meant to be taken literally and addresses debates among ancient writers themselves on this question.
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Williams, Benjamin. “Gnats, Fleas, Flies, and a Camel: A Case Study in the Reception of Genesis Rabbah.” Jewish Quarterly Review 107.2 (2017): 157–181.
DOI: 10.1353/jqr.2017.0011Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Study of the reception of a tradition in Genesis Rabbah that when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, as a punishment God commanded the earth to bring forth gnats, fleas, flies, and a camel. Why the camel among insects? Williams looks at how medieval and early modern commentaries addressed that question. Contribution to the study of insects and “pests,” which are relatively underrepresented in this bibliography.
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Mishnah and Talmud
Rabbinics scholarship listed here that is focused on Mishnah, its companion corpus the Tosefta, and the two Talmuds includes one reference work (Feliks 1982) but otherwise consists of discourse analysis. Feliks 1982 is the reference work, covering all the animal species mentioned by the Mishnah. Berkowitz 2018 explores key themes in animal studies as they appear in the Babylonian Talmud, and Berkowitz 2022 offers a “bird-centric” approach to the rabbinic treatment of the mother bird commandment in Deuteronomy. Neis 2018a, Neis 2018b, and Neis 2019 propose that parts of early rabbinic literature be read as a form of reproductive biology concerned with the likenesses among and between animal species. Wasserman 2017 and Rosenblum 2021 both explore the role of animals in rabbinic discourse about gentiles.
Berkowitz, Beth A. Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
DOI: 10.1017/9781108529129Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Selects key themes in animal studies—animal intelligence, morality, sexuality, suffering, danger, personhood—and explores their development in the Babylonian Talmud.
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Berkowitz, Beth A. “Birds as Dads, Babysitters, and Hats: An ‘Indistinction’ Approach to the Modern Bird Mitzvah in Deuteronomy 22:6–7.” Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology 26.1–2 (2022): 79–105.
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The goal is to offer a “bird-centric” approach to rabbinic treatment of the mother bird commandment in Deuteronomy 22:6–7. Reads passages from Mishnah and Babylonian Talmud Hullin chapter 12 that portray birds as builders, parents, caregivers, and political rebels, and as living their lives enmeshed with humans.
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Feliks, Yehuda. Ha-Hai ba-Mishnah. Jerusalem: Institute for Mishna Research, 1982.
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In Hebrew. Translated as: “The animal in the Mishnah.” According to Feliks’s accounting, the Mishnah mentions eighty-five species of animals. In this companion to Feliks’s book on plants in the Mishnah, he covers all of the animal species, in alphabetical order, offering for each one a brief description of physical features and behavior, accompanied by a photo. Feliks also recapitulates the Mishnah passages in which the species is mentioned, and he gives the common English and Latin scientific names.
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Neis, Rachel Rafael. “Interspecies and Cross-Species Generation: Limits and Potentialities in Tannaitic Reproductive Science.” In Strength to Strength: Essays in Honor of Shaye J. D. Cohen. Edited by Shaye J. D. Cohen and Michael L. Satlow, 309–327. Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2018a.
DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv9hj775.23Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Reads passages from tractates Niddah, Kilayim, and Bekhorot as a form of rabbinic biological science. Considers two phenomena that “tested the limits of likeness as a key to assigning species” (p. 311): the offspring of cross-species mating (e.g., a mule), and non-species conforming offspring (e.g., a cow delivers a baby that looks like a donkey). Identifies intersections within rabbinic thinking between zoology and human gynecology.
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Neis, Rachel Rafael. “The Reproduction of Species: Humans, Animals and Species Nonconformity in Early Rabbinic Science.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 24.4 (2018b): 289–317.
DOI: 10.1628/094457017X15072727130648Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Explores early rabbinic notions of the human as they are found in laws of menstrual purity and Temple sacrifice in tractates Niddah and Bekhorot. Contextualizes rabbinic conceptions within ancient conversations about reproduction and species belonging. Argues that “even as it disavows genealogical links between humans and animals, rabbinic reproductive biology implicates humans among and as animals” (p. 293).
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Neis, Rachel Rafael. “All That Is in the Settlement: Humans, Likeness, and Species in the Rabbinic Bestiary.” Journal of Jewish Ethics 5.1 (2019): 1–39.
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Study of rabbinic “territorial doubles,” the claim that all land creatures have versions that exist in the wild and at sea. Neis looks at how the early rabbis and their contemporaries conceptualized the human, and connects the ancient conversations to contemporary ones about animal cloning and genetic engineering. Reads rabbinic literature through the lens of feminist science studies, new materialism, posthumanism, and animal studies.
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Rosenblum, Jordan D. “Dolphins Are Humans of the Sea (Bekhorot 8a) : Animals and Legal Categorization in Rabbinic Literature.” In Animals and the Law in Antiquity. Edited by Saul M. Olyan and Jordan D. Rosenblum, 161–176. Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2021.
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Draws on critical animal studies to consider how, for the rabbis when they were composing their laws, animals were good to think with (using Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous formulation). Focuses on rabbinic passages in which non-Jews are depicted as animals or animal-like. Slaughter by a gentile is compared in one passage to slaughter by an ape, and the courtyard of a gentile is compared in another passage to a cattle-pen.
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Wasserman, Mira Beth. Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud after the Humanities. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
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A posthumanism-informed reading of Babylonian Talmud Tractate Avodah Zarah, whose subject is Jews’ relationships with gentiles, centered on the problem of idolatry. Wasserman’s chapter 2, which offers a reading of the Talmud Tractate’s own chapter 2, is the one most relevant to animals. Wasserman looks at the Talmud’s engagement with animals as it explores, in Wasserman’s argument, what it means to be human.
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Medieval Judaism
Scholarship on animals and medieval Judaism spans philosophy, law, Bible exegesis, mysticism, pietism, animal fables, and travel accounts. Kasher 2002 treats Maimonides’s changing thinking about animals. Lawee 2007 and Lawee 2010 trace medieval exegetical traditions about animals in the primeval history on Genesis. Bland 2010 contrasts the human exceptionalism of medieval Jewish philosophy with the playful and subversive blurring of the human-animal boundary in poetry and animal fables, while Bland 2019 focuses on animal fables, though once again comparing their approach to the human-animal boundary with that found in philosophy. Jacobi 2013 is a study of Jewish legal literature related to falconry, the practice of using hawks and falcons for hunting. Shyovitz 2014 looks at the role of animals in the theology of German Jewish pietists. Seidenberg 2015 identifies passages from midrash and kabbalah that imagine animals as partaking in the divine. Malkiel 2016 looks at descriptions of the crocodile in two medieval Jewish travel accounts. Sienna 2022 is a study of “The Epistle of the Animals,” which tells of a contest between humans and animals over who is superior. On animals in medieval visual culture, see Animals in Jewish Visual Culture.
Bland, Kalman P. “Construction of Animals in Medieval Jewish Philosophy.” In New Directions in Jewish Philosophy. Edited by Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson, 175–204. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
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While medieval Jewish metaphysics promoted human-animal dualism and human superiority, other medieval Jewish voices revolted, reflecting on continuities between humans and animals. In his poem on animals awaiting slaughter, 11th-century Anadalusian Shmuel ha-Nagid writes that “they have soul, like you; also heart, like you” (p. 191), while 12th-century Spanish Judah al-Harizi, pondering the innocence of hunted deer, writes that “all creatures are food” (p. 194).
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Bland, Kalman P. “Animal Fables and Medieval Jewish Philosophy.” In Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Its Literary Forms. Edited by Aaron W. Hughes and James T. Robinson, 8–39. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019.
DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvj7wpx5.4Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Argues that Aesopian medieval animal fables are important for understanding medieval Jewish philosophy since they emerged from similar historical circumstances, drew upon the same canonical Jewish stories, and also probed or modeled conduct. In the animal fables, however, “nonhuman animals are envisioned as persons, acting as ethical agents, moved by passions and desires, capable of reasoning, and proficient in speech” (p. 20). Uses Berakhiah ha-Naqdan’s “Wolf at Grammar School” as a case study.
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Jacobi, Leor. “Jewish Hawking in Medieval France: Falconry, Rabbenu Tam, and the Tosafists.” Oqimta 1 (2013): 1–85.
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Argues that Jewish communities of medieval northern France practiced falconry as a form of hunting. Analyzes references to the use of hawks or falcons in medieval Jewish legal and exegetical literature and later citations of it. Also includes visual depictions of falconry. Contributes to the study of birds as well as hunting in Jewish culture.
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Kasher, Hannah. “Animals as Moral Patients in Maimonides’ Teachings.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 76.1 (2002): 165–180.
DOI: 10.5840/acpq200276143Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A study of variations in Maimonides’s teachings about animals, explained here as a product of changes in his thinking over time. Argues that Maimonides is highly anthropocentric in his commentary on the Mishnah, in which he proposes that animals were created for human use. In his later Guide for the Perplexed, however, Maimonides views animals as created for their own sake, and he equates animal and human suffering.
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Lawee, Eric. “The Reception of Rashi’s ‘Commentary on the Torah’ in Spain: The Case of Adam’s Mating with the Animals.” The Jewish Quarterly Review 97.1 (2007): 33–66.
DOI: 10.1353/jqr.2007.0002Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A study of the reception of Rashi’s commentary on the Torah by four Spanish supercommentaries. The case study is of a tradition that Rashi inherited from the classical rabbis that in the Garden of Eden Adam mated with every species of domesticated and wild animal. While the focus is on the development of medieval Jewish exegesis, the discussion sheds light on medieval views of human-animal boundaries.
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Lawee, Eric. “The Sins of the Fauna in Midrash, Rashi, and Their Medieval Interlocutors.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 17.1 (2010): 56–98.
DOI: 10.1628/094457010790954006Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Study of medieval Jewish exegetical traditions that the animals in the flood died as a punishment for sin, and the animals on Noah’s Ark were saved as a reward for righteousness. Attention given to Rashi’s role in transmission, broader medieval views of animals, and other commentators on the sins of the fauna. Situates the analysis within current conversations about animal consciousness and moral status, the human-animal divide, and speciesism.
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Malkiel, David. “The Rabbi and the Crocodile: Interrogating Nature in the Late Quattrocento.” Speculum 91.1 (2016): 115–148.
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Proposes that enthusiasm for empirical knowledge, normally associated with modernity, began in the medieval period, though it was at that point still wedded with scholasticism. Case study is the crocodile, described by two medieval Italian Jewish bankers in travel journals, Meshulam da Volterra and Ovadiah da Bertinoro (of Mishnah commentary fame). Offers a surprising Jewish cultural history of the crocodile, accompanied by visuals, along with Classical, Christian, and Islamic traditions.
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Seidenberg, David. Kabbalah and Ecology: God’s Image in the More-Than-Human World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
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Seeks precedents in midrash, kabbalah, and hasidism for biocentric perspectives. Parts that directly address animals are chapter 4, which considers the conception that animals have souls; chapter 5, which discusses animal ethics in the Torah and rabbinic literature; and chapter 7, which addresses the “more-than-human world” in kabbalah, with a focus on the four animals of Ezekiel’s chariot.
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Sienna, Noam. “Ask Now the Beasts and They Shall Teach You: Qalonymos Ben Qalonymos and His Hebrew Translation of the Epistle of the Animals.” In Iberian Babel: Translation and Multilingualism in the Medieval and the Early Modern Mediterranean. Edited by Michelle M. Hamilton and Nuria Silleras-Fernandez, 105–123. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2022.
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Study of “The Epistle of the Animals” (Iggeret Ba’ale Hayim), a 10th-century Arabic fable introduced and translated into Hebrew by 14th-century Provencal Jewish philosopher Qalonymos ben Qalonymos. The text describes a trial in which the King of the Jinn determines whether humans or animals are superior. Appendix offers a translation of the Introduction.
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Shyovitz, David I. “Beauty and the Bestiary: Animals, Wonder, and Polemic in Medieval Ashkenaz.” In The Jewish-Christian Encounter in Medieval Preaching. Edited by Jonathan Adams and Jussi Hanska, 215–239. New York: Routledge, 2014.
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One might look at Shyovitz’s monograph on German Jewish pietists, but this essay offers an exclusive focus on the role of animals in pietistic and contemporaneous Christian writings. Argues that for the Jewish pietists and their Christian contemporaries “the workings of the animal kingdom reflect the beauty and precision of the natural world, and shed light on the wondrous attributes of the God who created it” (p. 216).
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Modern and Contemporary Judaism
Scholarship listed here on animals and modern and contemporary Jews spans literature, philosophy, and social and political developments. Primary sources addressed by the scholarship are in Yiddish, Hebrew, French, German, Italian, and English.
Modern Jewish Literature
“Humanimal,” “the infrahuman,” “zoopoetics” are some of the innovative terms that scholars of modern Jewish literature have used to describe the depiction of animals and the negotiation of animality found there. Scholarship looks at the role of animals in Jewish wrestlings with their minority status and with violence against them. Pines 2018 considers animality in pre–World War II Jewish writings in German, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Geller 2018 considers animal protagonists in the work of pre–World War II Jewish writers in German, as does Harel 2020, a book on Kafka’s “zoopoetics.” Harel 2019 is a study of the victimization of cows and women in the Hebrew writing of Devorah Baron. Benvegnù 2018 and Sokoloff 2020 both address animals in Jewish literature in the wake of the Holocaust, Benvegnù in the work of Primo Levi, and Sokoloff constitutes a story about the hiding of Jews in the Warsaw zoo. Idelson-Shein 2020 looks at human-animal transformations in early modern Yiddish adaptations of European tales. Ben Yehuda 2022 considers the figure of the dog in Thomas Mann, Kafka, and Agnon, focusing on the theme of language. Intersections between species and gender are central concerns in Harel 2020, Idelson-Shein 2020, and Sokoloff 2020.
Benvegnù, Damiano. Animals and Animality in Primo Levi’s Work. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Springer, 2018.
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Noting the “zoological richness” (p. 9) in the writings of Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish writer, scientist, and Holocaust survivor, Benvegnù offers a study of the animal images and ideas found there. Explores the links among animals, representation, and testimony in Levi’s oeuvre, calling it an “animal testimony” (p. 36). Situates within broader currents in thinking about animals from Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Peter Singer, Marianne DeKoven, and others.
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Ben Yehuda, Omri. “A Man Who Is Not a Dog: Thomas Mann and the Question of the Jew, the Human and the Animal.” Arcadia 57.1 (2022): 121–147.
DOI: 10.1515/arcadia-2022-9034Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Study of the figure of the dog in several works by Thomas Mann, comparing them with works by Jewish writers Kafka and Agnon, in light of both “the Jewish question” and “the question of the animal.” Focus is on language figured by Mann as uniquely European, male, white, and human. The purpose is to shed light on the concept of animality in modern European culture.
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Geller, Jay. Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.
DOI: 10.1515/9780823275618Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A playful analysis of animals in modern Jewish Germanophone literature. Given that Jews for millennia have been debased by being imagined as animals, asks Geller, what is to be made of all the animal characters—“Jew-Animals,” as Geller calls them—in Jewish literature? Discussion of Freud, Heine, Kafka, and the author of Bambi, among others, both the works and the social context.
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Harel, Naama. “Of Cows and Women.” Prooftexts 37.2 (2019): 243–274.
DOI: 10.2979/prooftexts.37.2.03Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Harel observes that animals appear frequently in the fiction of prolific Hebrew-language writer Devorah Baron (b. 1887–d. 1956), who depicted the Lithuanian shtetl. Harel looks at intersections within Baron’s work between animals’ and women’s victimization. While male writers contemporary to Baron connected women and cows in order to lightheartedly objectify both, Baron connected the two in order to empathize with their common reduction to reproductive function.
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Harel, Naama. Kafka’s Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human-Animal Barrier. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020.
DOI: 10.3998/mpub.11325807Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Study of the animal characters in six of Kafka’s stories. Rejecting the approach to Kafka’s animals that takes them to be symbols or allegories, Harel instead offers a “zoopoetics.” Proposes that “Kafka’s fictional creatures undermine the species barrier, creating a liminal human-animal space, which can be described as ‘humanimal’” (p. 13).
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Idelson-Shein, Iris. “Kill the Hen That Crows like a Cock: Animal Encounters in Old Yiddish.” Journal of Jewish Studies 71.2 (2020): 321–344.
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Study of “the ways in which Yiddish narrators expressed their fantasies and concerns surrounding Jewish life in Diaspora, by envisioning strange encounters between humans and animals” (p. 322) in Old Yiddish adaptations of European tales. Observes a “slipperiness of species” (p. 333) in the story of the Princess and the Geese and the story of the Rabbi-Werewolf that Idelson-Shein analyzes. Explores connections among animality, humanity, religion, gender, and class.
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Pines, Noam. The Infrahuman: Animality in Modern Jewish Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018.
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Pines borrows the term “infrahuman” from Derrida to describe the “figural construction of animality conceived as inferior to humanity, where the human–animal distinction is not formulated in essentialist biological, ontological, or racial terms, but rather in discursive terms—that is, in terms that remain culturally, politically, and philosophically negotiable” (p. xv). Chapters on Heinrich Heine, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Bialik and Uri Zvi Greenberg, Franz Kafka, and Agnon and Paul Celan.
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Sokoloff, Naomi B. “The Nazi Beast at the Warsaw Zoo: Animal Studies, the Holocaust, ‘The Zookeeper’s Wife,’ and ‘See Under: Love.’” In The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture. Edited by Victoria Aarons and Phyllis Lassner, 91–109. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
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Draws upon critical animal studies to read a story about the Warsaw Zoo zookeeper and his wife’s aid to Jews during the Holocaust by hiding them in the zoo, as told in David Grossman’s fiction, Diane Ackerman’s work of creative nonfiction, and a 2017 feature film. Interest is in the “ways that representations of nonhuman creatures have helped humans imagine themselves and their own values in relation to the Holocaust” (p. 92).
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Modern Jewish Thought
The heart of animal studies has been in philosophy, with its metaphysical and epistemological concern for what makes humans human and its ethical concern for what humans owe to others. Benjamin 2010 considers “the figure” of the Jew and the animal across a variety of modern philosophical works. The Jewish philosopher who has garnered the most attention on “the question of the animal” other than Derrida (not directly covered here) is Lithuanian-born French Holocaust survivor Emmanuel Levinas (1905–1995), known for his phenomenology of the face-to-face encounter. The two passages most relevant to Levinas’s view of animals are an essay in which he describes his encounter with a dog named Bobby while imprisoned in a Nazi labor camp and an interview in which several graduate students pose to Levinas questions about animal ethics. Atterton and Wright 2019, a collection of essays from a cast of modern philosophers, is the first book-length treatment of the animal in Levinas.
Atterton, Peter, and Tamra Wright, eds. Face to Face with Animals: Levinas and the Animal Question. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019.
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Aim is to find space for animals in Levinas’s ethics and to challenge those who would justify animals’ exclusion. Begins with an editors’ introduction followed by the text of an interview with Levinas about animals. Divided into sections on phenomenology (essays by Alphonso Lingis, Bob Plant, and Peter Atterton), responsibility toward animals (Michael Morgan, Jonathan Crowe, Matthew Calarco, Sophia Efstathiou), and Traditions: Greek/Hebrew/Asian (Katharine Loevy, Brian Shudo Schroeder, Tamra Wright).
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Benjamin, Andrew. Of Jews and Animals. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
DOI: 10.1515/9780748642311Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Concerned with how the “figure” – this word bears important philosophical weight here—of the Jew and the animal, separately and together, feature in the interplay between the universal and the particular in philosophy and painting. Chapters on Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Hegel and Derrida, paintings by Piero della Francesca and Bartolomé Bermejo, “The Fountain of Grace” by the School of van Eyck and Dürer’s “Jesus Among the Doctors,” Agamben, and Pascal.
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Kosher Slaughter Debates
The emergence of industrial slaughter in modern Europe coincided with and contributed to the rise of animal rights movements, which advocated for “humane slaughter.” To that end, European countries began to require slaughterhouses to stun animals with a metal bolt before killing them. When Orthodox rabbis took a strong stand against stunning, saying that animals must be conscious when they are killed according to Jewish laws of shehitah (slaughter), animal protectionists advocated bans on shehitah, declaring it a form of animal cruelty. The resulting public debates over shehitah came to be known in Germanophone regions as the Schächtfrage, or “ritual slaughter question.” The debates offer a sobering portrait of modern animal rights activists, who, in the course of advocating for animals, also promoted anti-Semitism and marginalized Jews. Brantz 2002 considers the shehitah debates in Imperial Germany as a reflection of differences over humanity, animals, religion, science, and law. Efron 2007 argues that fin-de-siècle Swiss and German attacks on shehitah reinstated a form of religiously based anti-Semitism. Judd 2007 offers a comprehensive history of debates about shehitah (and circumcision) in Germany over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Gilman 2011 covers similar territory but in the context of contemporaneous conversations about hygiene and health. Plach 2015 explores kosher slaughter debates in interwar Poland. Skloot 2020 considers one 19th-century German Orthodox rabbi’s ruling that attempts to find a compromise between the dictates of Jewish law and the concerns of animal advocates. A special volume of the Italian Jewish studies journal Rassegna Mensile de Israel Saban 2012 is dedicated to kosher slaughter debates.
Brantz, Dorothee. “Stunning Bodies: Animal Slaughter, Judaism, and the Meaning of Humanity in Imperial Germany.” Central European History 35.2 (2002): 167–193.
DOI: 10.1163/15691610260420656Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A law requiring the stunning of animals before slaughter was advocated by the animal protection movement in Germany in the late 1800s. Religious Jewish communities objected to the law, claiming that it contravened the requirements of shehitah, kosher slaughter. Brantz proposes that the ensuing debates laid bare differences over humanity, animals, religion, science, and law as well as the German national character and the anti-Semitism associated with it.
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Efron, John M. “Most Cruel Cut of All? The Campaign against Jewish Ritual Slaughter in Fin-de-Siècle Switzerland and Germany.” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 52.1 (2007): 167–184.
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Secular assaults on Judaism may seem to have replaced religious ones, but the kosher slaughter debate reintroduced theological opposition to Judaism in fin-de-siècle Switzerland and Germany, proposes Efron. Looks also at Orthodox Jews’ justification of their religious practices through the invocation of science. The anti-shehitah campaign, which failed spectacularly in Germany, was somewhat more successful in Switzerland. Shows how “the slaughter question” reflected “the Jewish question.”
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Gilman, Sander L. “Are You Just What You Eat? Ritual Slaughter and the Politics of National Identity.” In Revisioning Ritual: Jewish Traditions in Transition. Edited by Simon J. Bronner, 341–359. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011.
DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv1kwxf89.16Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Situates 19th-century shehitah debates within European and American arguments about decorum, hygiene, and health. Jewish removal of the blood through the act of slaughter was understood to have a hygienic function, especially in protecting against tuberculosis, with Moses fashioned as “the first bacteriologist” (p. 349). Critics saw shehitah as a symptom of Jewish disease. Looks at longstanding links in Germany between animal rights advocacy and anti-Semitism.
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Judd, Robin. Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843–1933. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.
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Considers the debates in Germany about circumcision and kosher butchering over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Discussion is organized chronologically, ending with the Nazi ban on kosher slaughter in 1933. Judd tracks the political shifts at the local, regional, and state levels that fueled the debates, and how they indexed problems of Jewish difference and anti-Semitism. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted exclusively to kosher slaughter.
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Plach, Eva. “Ritual Slaughter and Animal Welfare in Interwar Poland.” East European Jewish Affairs 45.1 (2015).
DOI: 10.1080/13501674.2015.968826Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Examines the shehitah debates in the Polish Second Republic from 1918 to 1939. Argues that Polish animal protectionists “instrumentalized antisemitism and embraced an exclusionary nationalism” (p. 2). They represented Jews as responsible for holding Poland back from belonging to a civilized Europe. As was the case in other places, Jews defended their approach to slaughter as being more humane, not less, and accused the reformers of anti-Semitism.
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Saban, Giacomo, ed. Special Issue: Gli animali e la sofferenza: La questione della shechità e i diritti dei viventi. Rassegna Mensile di Israel 78.1–2 (2012).
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The volume is divided between philosophical pieces about animal suffering and pieces on the history and current state of kosher slaughter debates. Most contributions are from Italian scholars in Italian.
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Skloot, Joseph A. “Halakhic Flexibility and Communal Unity: R. Marcus Horovitz and the Schächtfrage.” Modern Judaism—A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience 40.3 (2020): 355–375.
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Study of the permissive position taken by Orthodox rabbi Marcus Horovitz of Frankfurt (b. 1844–d. 1910) in a responsum on stunning an animal after slaughter, a practice advocated by animal welfare reformers concerned with the animal’s suffering during the period between slaughter and death. Skloot explores the middle way taken by Horovitz, who neither abandoned existing Jewish law, as some liberal rabbis did, nor ignored the claims of animal protectionists.
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Israel Studies
Hirsch-Matsioulas, et al. 2022 (cited under Reference Works) offers a narrative of animal studies in Israel that culminates in the multidisciplinary approach to human-animal relations found in the wide-ranging scholarship listed in this section. Shir‐Vertesh 2012 is a study of pets as family members in Israeli households. Etkin 2016 offers a historical study of the animals imported to the Tel Aviv Zoo. Kizel and Nadler 2019 looks at the speciesist ideology imparted to Israeli elementary school children in their textbooks. Weiss 2016, Segal 2018, and Alloun 2020 look at the handling of the Israel-Palestinian conflict by Israeli animal rights advocates. Ben-Yonatan 2022 is an ethnography of Israeli kosher slaughterers that focuses on their relationship with Arab coworkers. Salamon 2023 explores the role of animal slaughter and consumption in the Beta Israel Ethiopian Jewish communities of Israel. A special issue of the Israeli journal Teoria Uvikoret from 2019 features a miscellany of Israel-related animal studies.
Alloun, Esther. “Veganwashing Israel’s Dirty Laundry? Animal Politics and Nationalism in Palestine-Israel.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 41.1 (2020): 1–17.
DOI: 10.1080/07256868.2019.1617254Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Argues that the discourse about veganism’s popularity in Israel functions as a form of Zionist triumphalism that reinforces Palestinian exclusion in a practice Alloun calls “veganwashing” (a term she borrows from Aeyal Gross). Alloun’s fieldwork with Jewish animal activists shows, however, ambivalent negotiations with nationalism. Adopting the view that “combating veganwashing by talking about veganwashing is unproductive” (p. 10), Alloun calls for a “politics of listening” to Palestinian animal activists.
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Ben-Yonatan, Anat. “‘The Knife Needs the Intention of the Heart’: The Construction of Ethnic and Moral Boundaries in Israeli Slaughterhouses.” Ethnicities 23.1 (April 2022): 128–150.
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Argues that Jewish-Israeli kosher slaughterers respond to the stigma of association with animal killing by distinguishing themselves from their Arab coworkers. Ben-Yonatan conceptualizes the slaughter knife as a boundary-maintaining object and looks at organizational factors such as the slaughterhouse space and wage structure that divide the ultra-Orthodox Jewish religious kashrut team from “the Arabs,” as their Jewish coworkers often call them.
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Etkin, Elia. “The Ingathering of (Non-human) Exiles: The Creation of the Tel Aviv Zoological Garden Animal Collection, 1938–1948.” Journal of Israeli History 35.1 (2016): 57–74.
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Uses Foucault’s concept of heterotopia to write the history of the Tel Aviv zoo’s animal collection as part of the historiography of British Mandatory Palestine. Looks at the function of animals in the Jewish nation-building project: “Ironically the zoo project, which was based on the captivity of animals, was entangled in a discourse on the liberation of the Jewish people” (p. 64).
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Kizel, Arie, and Sivan Nadler. “בישראל יצוג בעלי חיים בספרי לימוד בבתי ספר יסודיים.” Studies in Education 17–19 (2019): 565–584.
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(Representations of Animals in Textbooks for Elementary Schools in Israel). Study of animal representation in Israeli elementary school textbooks. The “speciesist” message, according to Kizel and Nadler, is that humans should protect some animals in the wild, while other animals are a danger and should be protected against. Domesticated animals, by contrast, are shown to be in a give-and-take contract with humans: humans supply them with shelter, nutrition, and protection, while animals give humans their milk, skin, and flesh.
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Salamon, Hagar. Meat Matters: Ethnographic Refractions of the Beta Israel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023.
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Ethnography of Beta Israel Ethiopian Jews that focuses on the role of animal slaughter and consumption in their community, which is organized into groups who purchase and raise cows, butcher them, and divide them into small and equal chunks of meat distributed through a lottery ritual. Meat became the focus of challenges over their Jewish authenticity that the Beta Israel faced when they immigrated to Israel, argues Salomon.
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Segal, Jérôme. “Le véganisme en Israël: Un engagement peut en cacher un autre.” Les Temps Modernes 699.3 (2018): 208–215.
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Asks about links between anti-speciesism in Israel, Jewish identity, parallels between the Holocaust and industrial slaughter, and the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Like Alloun, draws on Weiss’s notion of veganwashing. Discusses with animal activist Sasha Boojor his protest of Israeli Independence Day barbecues that involved grilling cat corpses recovered from a veterinarian.
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Shir‐Vertesh, Dafna. “‘Flexible Personhood’: Loving Animals as Family Members in Israel.” American Anthropologist 114.3 (2012): 420–432.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01443.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Study of family pets in Israel. Proposes four patterns by which families conceive of companion animals: as “prechild,” child substitute, “semichild,” and different from a child. Argues that couples starting their own human families treated pets as “flexible persons” or “emotional commodities” who were incorporated as family members but could at any moment be demoted. The human does not in these relationships lose its distinction from the animal, argues Shir-Vertesh.
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Weiss, Erica. “‘There Are No Chickens in Suicide Vests’: The Decoupling of Human Rights and Animal Rights in Israel.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22.3 (2016): 688–706.
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Argues that human and animal rights activism in Israel in the late 1990s and early 2000s had a shared foundation, but that subsequently the two movements were decoupled as animal rights advocacy was co-opted by right-wing nationalist politics and the Israeli state. Draws upon the anthropology of everyday ethics and considers the implications of the fieldwork with animal activists for current critiques of human rights and humanism.
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Special Issue: בעלי חיים. Teoria Uvikoret 51 (2019).
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(Animals). Contributions from Novick on Stavit, a kibbutz cow who became a sensation; Blum on tracker dogs in Mandatory Palestine; Shani on Mediterranean flies used as pest control; Pick on the locust in Israeli director Chen Sheinberg’s films; Reich on dogs in a video by Israeli artist Itai Marom; and Bar-Yosef on Israeli writer and artist Nahum Gutman’s encounter with a tiger. (See Balberg 2019 [cited under Reference Works] also in this issue.)
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Ethics, Religion, and Theology
Animal studies scholarship in Jewish ethics, religion, and theology looks at the phenomena of God being worshiped by animals, God being compassionate toward animals, and God being depicted as an animal. The scholarship includes studies of the Hebrew Bible, the rabbinic canon, the Musar movement, and contemporary Jewish practice. Cohen 1959 is a comprehensive study of the concern to prevent animal suffering found in classical rabbinic literature. Linzey and Cohn-Sherbok 1997 is a joint offering of animal theology from a Jewish and a Christian theologian. Nielsen 2007 draws attention to the Bible’s use of animal images for God. Claussen 2011 writes of the significance of animals in modern pietistic Musar virtue ethics. Gross 2012 is a comprehensive treatment of Jewish animal ethics. Gross 2015 considers the category of the animal in religious studies with a focus on Jewish texts and practice. Gross 2017 looks at the concern to cultivate compassion found in the rabbinic opposition to hunting. Wasserman 2019 gives a close reading of the Talmud’s treatment of Noahide law and finds there the resources for a new Jewish animal ethics. Atkins 2020 looks at the belief found in the Hebrew Bible that animals worship and praise God.
Atkins, Peter Joshua. “Praise by Animals in the Hebrew Bible.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 44.3 (2020): 500–513.
DOI: 10.1177/0309089219862824Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Proposes that it was an established ancient Near Eastern belief, found in the Hebrew Bible as well, that animals are able to worship and praise deities. An ancient Egyptian edifice, for example, describes baboons dancing, singing, and shouting for the sun god and visually depicts baboons in poses of worship. Relevant biblical passages include Psalm 148, Psalm 150:6, and Isaiah 43:20.
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Claussen, Geoffrey. “Jewish Virtue Ethics and Compassion for Animals: A Model from the Musar Movement.” CrossCurrents 61.2 (2011): 208–216.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1939-3881.2011.00176.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
According to the Musar movement, a 19th-century Jewish pietistic movement led by Israel Salanter, humans are distinguished from animals by reason and must train themselves to overcome their animal impulses. Salanter’s disciple Simhah Zissel, however, wrote of animals possessing an intuitive understanding of God and of being the recipient of God’s perfect love. Noah, Jacob, Moses, and David become exemplars of compassion for animals.
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Cohen, Noah J. Tsa’ar Ba’ale Ḥayim—The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: Its Bases, Development and Legislation in Hebrew Literature. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1959.
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Synthesis of Jewish texts on tza’ar ba’alei hayim, the Hebrew term for animal suffering. The first half deals with relevant biblical and rabbinic sources, subdivided into relationships between animals and God and relationships between animals and people, while the second half deals with practical application and legislation. Cohen’s aim is explicitly apologetic, which is to deny the charge that in Judaism animals have no rights.
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Gross, Aaron S. “Jewish Animal Ethics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality. Edited by Elliot N. Dorff and Jonathan K. Crane, 419–432. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
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A synthetic discussion of Jewish animal ethics focusing on tza’ar ba’alei hayim (animal suffering). Considers different justifications within classical rabbinic literature for the requirement to prevent animal suffering, some anthropocentric, some more centered on animals, and how that requirement is balanced with human needs. Addresses also vegetarianism, the obligation to provide animals with a good life and death, and the conflict between that obligation and industrial slaughterhouse practices.
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Gross, Aaron S. The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
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Study of the category of the animal in the study of religion with a focus on Jewish classical texts and contemporary practices. Starting point is the scandal at Agriprocessors, a giant kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa, regarding the welfare of both the human workers and the animals there. Most relevant are chapters 1 and 2 on the events at Agriprocessors and chapter 6 on tensions within Jewish culture over its conception of animals.
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Gross, Aaron S. “Animals, Empathy, and Raẖamim in the Study of Religion: A Case Study of Jewish Opposition to Hunting.” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 46.4 (2017): 511–535.
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Study of the concern to cultivate compassion, or rahamim, found in rabbinic opposition to hunting for sport. Uses Ann Taves’s notion of the building blocks of religion to look at the conceptions of empathy and sympathy at work in the Jewish texts. The goal is to “deepen our appreciation of Jewish understandings of humanity, animality, and the relationships ideally ordained between creaturely lives” (p. 512).
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Linzey, Andrew, and Dan Cohn-Sherbok. After Noah: Animals and the Liberation of Theology. London: Mowbray, 1997.
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Animal theology, from a partnership between prolific Christian theologian Andrew Linzey and Jewish theologian Dan Cohn-Sherbok. Aim is showcase “the positive resources available with the Jewish and Christian traditions for a celebration of our relations with animals” (p. 1). Two chapters on Jewish theology, two on Christian, and two that lay out how animals can revitalize Jewish and Christian theology.
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Nielsen, Kirsten. “I Am Like a Lion to Ephraim: Observations on Animal Imagery and Old Testament Theology.” Studia Theologica 61.2 (2007): 184–197.
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Argues that the Hebrew Bible sometimes uses animal images to depict God and that these images have been overlooked. Examples discussed are God’s depiction as a lion in Hosea 5:14 and Jeremiah 50:44, the copper snake in Numbers 21 and 2 Kings 18, the golden calves in Exodus 32 and 1 Kings 12, and the living creatures in the throne vision of Ezekiel 1 and 10.
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Wasserman, Mira. “Noahide Law, Animal Ethics, and Talmudic Narrative.” Journal of Jewish Ethics 5.1 (2019): 40–67.
DOI: 10.5325/jjewiethi.5.1.0040Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Close reading of Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 56a-57a’s treatment of Noahide law, the rabbinic idea that God gave a set of seven laws to Noah that all human beings must follow. Identifies in the Talmudic discussion “a rabbinic debate about what humans share with other species and what sets humans apart” (p. 62). Argues that attention to narrative can “bring the ethical claims, capacities, and significance of animals back into view” (p. 63).
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Eating Animals, Vegetarianism, and Veganism
Jewish culture may be predominantly a meat-eating one, but scholarship in this section shows significant vegetarian and vegan strains within it, along with conflicts and complexities surrounding meat-eating. Brumberg-Kraus 1999 traces a Jewish tradition that restricts meat-eating to a scholarly elite. Shemesh 2006 identifies vegetarian ideologies in Talmudic and later Jewish exegetical literature. Foer 2010 is a mix of memoir, philosophical reflection, and exposé of the animal slaughter industry. Lewando 2015 is a translation of a Yiddish vegetarian cookbook from Vilna, while Jochnowitz 2017 is a study of Yiddish vegetarianism in America in the early twentieth century. Labendz and Yanklowitz 2019 is an anthology of essays on Jewish veganism and vegetarianism. Gross 2019 considers Jewish discomfort with eating animals. See also the section Jewish Vegetarianism in the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies article Food.
Brumberg-Kraus, Jonathan. “Meat-Eating and Jewish Identity: Ritualization of the Priestly ‘Torah of Beast and Fowl’ (Lev 11:46) in Rabbinic Judaism and Medieval Kabbalah.” AJS Review 24.2 (1999): 227–262.
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Focuses on a claim made by 13th-century Bahya ben Asher in his Shulhan shel Arba, a manual on rabbinic eating rituals, that only Torah scholars are fit to eat meat. The claim is based on a reading of Leviticus 11:46, “This is the Torah of beast and fowl.” Brumberg-Kraus explores the history of the reading of Leviticus 11:46 that restricts meat-eating to a Torah-studying elite.
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Foer, Jonathan Safran. Eating Animals. New York: Little, Brown, 2010.
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Writer Jonathan Safran Foer weaves together his grandmother’s story of surviving the Holocaust with his own path as a vegetarian, philosophical reflection on animals, and exposé of the slaughter industry. Biblical traditions, Jewish thinkers, and Foer’s own Jewish experience are interspersed throughout.
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Gross, Aaron S. “The Ethics of Eating Animals.” In Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food. Edited by Jordan D. Rosenblum, Aaron S. Gross, and Jody Myers, 339–350. New York: New York University Press, 2019.
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“How do contemporary Jewish traditions respond to the fraught activity of eating animals, especially in an ethical register?” Gross considers two stories: Safran Foer’s critique of the slaughter industry in Eating Animals, and the primeval history in Genesis 1 and 9. The aim is to explore how Jews negotiate the discomfort that humans experience when they kill and eat creatures that they recognize as bearing similarities to themselves.
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Jochnowitz, Eve. “A Younger World: Vegetarian Writing and Recipes in Yiddish as Political Strategies.” In Tastes of Faith: Jewish Eating in the United States. Edited by Leah Hochman, 45–75. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2017.
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Study of Yiddish vegetarian treatises and cookbooks written in the United States in the early twentieth century, with images reproduced from them. Example is the 1920s New York journal The Vegetarian World, whose first issue had recipes for a Balkan vegetable stew and a pea soup and roast, and began with “The Vegetarian Hymn” with music notation and lyrics. Covers also popular satirical critiques of the Jewish vegetarian movement.
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Labendz, Jacob Ari, and Shmuly Yanklowitz, eds. Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism: Studies and New Directions. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019.
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Anthology of writings by scholars, activists, and rabbis on veganism and vegetarianism among Jews. Contributions include studies of vegetarianism in interwar Europe, the vegetarian Yiddish poet Melech Ravitch, Rav Kook’s vegetarian teachings, and veganism and vegetarianism among Jewish punks, among others.
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Lewando, Fania. The Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook: Garden-Fresh Recipes Rediscovered and Adapted for Today’s Kitchen. Translated by Eve Jochnowitz. New York: Schocken, 2015.
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Vegetarian cookbook, preserved in a Yiddish manuscript, written in 1938 by Fania Lewando, co-owner with her husband of a vegetarian kosher restaurant in Vilna, both of whom died in the Holocaust. Translated by Eve Jochnowitz, with introductions by Jewish food writer Joan Nathan, Efraim Sicher on the biographies of the Lewandos and the history of the cookbook, and Lewando herself. Excerpts from the restaurant’s guestbook include Marc Chagall.
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Shemesh, Yael. “Vegetarian Ideology in Talmudic Literature and Traditional Biblical Exegesis.” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 9.1 (2006): 141–166.
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The aim is “to extract from the Talmudic literature and the traditional commentators those voices that provide support for the vegetarian ideology” even if, Shemesh concedes, “Judaism is not a vegetarian religion” (p. 141). Topics covered are a vegetarian primeval age, why human beings were allowed to eat meat after the flood, manna as a vegetarian diet, reservations about killing and eating animals, and a messianic vegetarian age.
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Comparison between Industrial Animal Slaughter and the Holocaust
One of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s fictional characters calls industrial animal slaughter an eternal Treblinka. Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, James Coetzee’s fictional character Elizabeth Costello, and PETA campaigns also make the comparison. The works listed here in political science, philosophy, history, and literature explore the justness of the comparison between the Holocaust and factory farming along with its rhetorical impact. Patterson 2002, a monograph connecting industrial slaughter with Nazi genocide, is the touchstone. Sztybel 2006 offers a thorough justification on behalf of the comparison. Kim 2011 argues that the PETA exhibitions that compare industrial animal slaughter to the Holocaust and slavery are morally defensible but politically questionable. The author of Woodward 2019 uses the notion of multidirectional memory to argue in favor of the comparison. Evans 2021 looks at the comparison as it is presented in Heidegger and then in Derrida.
Evans, Mihail. “Derrida, Heidegger and Industrial Agriculture: The Holocaust, Suffering and Compassion.” Research in Phenomenology 51.2 (2021): 246–271.
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Offers context for Martin Heidegger’s association of industrial agriculture with Nazi concentration camps, and shows that Derrida’s repetition of it translates and transforms Heidegger. For Derrida, unlike Heidegger, the association takes on an explicit ethical dimension in which the question of compassion and the problem of suffering become central.
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Kim, Claire Jean. “Moral Extensionism or Racist Exploitation? The Use of Holocaust and Slavery Analogies in the Animal Liberation Movement.” New Political Science 33.3 (2011): 311–333.
DOI: 10.1080/07393148.2011.592021Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A political scientist’s consideration of the controversies stirred by two PETA exhibits, “Holocaust on Your Plate,” which compares industrial animal slaughter to the Holocaust, and “Animal Liberation Project,” which compares it to slavery. Point of departure is that dualisms such as human/animal, black/white, and male/female are mutually constituted in an interlocking structure of racism, speciesism, and sexism. The conclusion is that PETA’s exhibits are morally defensible but politically questionable.
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Patterson, Charles. Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. New York: Lantern, 2002.
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Borrows the title from a line in Singer that has become a vegetarian rallying cry: “In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka.” The first two chapters treat the emergence of human supremacy over animals and the transfer of supremacist ideology to stigmatized human groups. The second two chapters look at industrial slaughter. The last two chapters profile Jewish and German animal advocates.
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Sztybel, David. “Can the Treatment of Animals Be Compared to the Holocaust?” Ethics and the Environment 11.1 (2006): 97–132.
DOI: 10.2979/ETE.2006.11.1.97Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A thirty-nine-point comparison between the treatment of animals and the Holocaust, along with consideration of the objections against it. Four categories of comparison are offered: degradation, apparatus, forms of agency, worldviews and discourse. Argues that the comparison is helpful for inspiring reflection on the treatment of animals and that the objection that the comparison trivializes the Holocaust can be refuted.
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Woodward, Natalie. “Eternal Mirroring: Charles Patterson’s Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust.” Journal of Animal Ethics 9.2 (2019): 158–169.
DOI: 10.5406/janimalethics.9.2.0158Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Uses Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory, “memory that draws upon similarities between events in order to memorialize them simultaneously” (p. 158), to support Patterson’s comparison of the Holocaust with animal cruelty. A competitive model of ethics would be ethically inappropriate (e.g., animal cruelty is worse than the Holocaust), but a multidirectional model “allows for more than one history to assert its claim over the present” (p. 161).
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Animals in Jewish Visual Culture
Animals form a vibrant part of Jewish art and visual culture. How to interpret the animals—Are they religious symbols? Are they intended polemically? What might human-animal hybrids mean? What might mythic animals mean?—often becomes a conundrum for scholars. Subjects covered by the scholarship here include an elephant mosaic in an ancient synagogue (Britt and Boustan 2017), the Birds Head Haggadah (Epstein 1997 and Epstein 2011, Horowitz 2004), eschatological images from an illuminated Bible (Gertsman 2022), a hunting scene from a high holiday prayer book (Offenberg 2020), paintings of an eagle grasping hares in eastern European synagogues (Horowitz 2004, Yaniv 2012), and a modern Jewish bestiary (Podwal 2021).
Britt, Karen, and Ra‘anan S. Boustan. The Elephant Mosaic Panel in the Synagogue at Huqoq: Official Publication and Initial Interpretations. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2017.
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Discussion of the “elephant mosaic” panel excavated in the 5th-century CE synagogue at Huqoq in Israel in the mid-2010s. While ancient synagogue mosaics normally depict scenes from the Bible, this scene’s referent is unclear. The dead elephant and dead bull pictured in the bottom register’s war scene is a rich new source for the visual depiction of animals in Jewish Antiquity and their role in human warfare.
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Epstein, Marc Michael. Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
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Explores medieval Jewish visual culture as a means by which Jews affirmatively constructed their identity in the face of Christian assaults and subversively recast Christian motifs. The focus for Epstein is animal symbolism in Jewish texts and iconography such as the frequently appearing hare-hunt, the image of elephants next to the synagogue ark, and the mythic animals of the dragon and unicorn.
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Epstein, Marc Michael. The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
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Discussion and reproduction of four illuminated haggadah manuscripts, one of which is the Birds’ Head Haggadah, from Mainz c. 1300, which depicts “zoocephalic” figures, humans with bird heads, sometimes also with animal ears, and for males, caps or berets, and for females, snoods. Chapter 1 considers the riddle of the bird heads, with attention to how scholars’ readings of the bird heads reflect the assumptions they bring to it.
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Gertsman, Elina. “Animal Affinities: Monsters and Marvels in the Ambrosian Tanakh.” Gesta 61.1 (2022): 27–55.
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Study of the closing scenes in the Ambrosian Tanakh, one of the earliest Ashkenazic books to include zoocephalic protagonists, of Ezekiel’s vision of the chariot and the eschatological feast of the righteous. Considers the book’s emphasis on animality, how the hybrid human-animal images inflect the meaning of the feasting scene, and broader Jewish cultural discourse on the monstrous and marvelous.
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Horowitz, Elliott. “Odd Couples: The Eagle and the Hare, the Lion and the Unicorn.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 11.3 (2004): 243–258.
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Engages explanations of the heads of the birds in the Birds Head Haggadah, including Epstein 1997. Addresses also the scenes on the ceiling of the 17th-century wooden synagogue in Hodorov, Ukraine, one in which a unicorn and a lion are locked in either embrace or battle, and another in which a double-headed eagle grasps a live hare in each of its claws. Traces the visual motifs along with scholarly interpretations.
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Offenberg, Sara. “Beauty and the Beast: On a Doe, a Devilish Hunter, and Jewish-Christian Polemics.” AJS Review 44.2 (2020): 269–285.
DOI: 10.1017/S0364009420000057Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Study of a hunting scene from the Worms Mahzor, an Ashkenazic illuminated prayer book produced in 1272, in which a deer is hunted by a man and his dogs. Argues that the deer is meant to symbolize the Torah, while the hunter is meant to be understood not only as a Christian or Esau but also as Jesus.
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Podwal, Mark. A Jewish Bestiary: Fabulous Creatures from Hebraic Legend and Lore. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021.
DOI: 10.1515/9780271092225Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
The popular medieval bestiary served both as an encyclopedia of the animal kingdom and as a pictorial treatise of moral instruction in which animal behaviors demonstrate virtue. Originally published in 1984 and updated in 2021, this modern Jewish Bestiary from artist Mark Podwal features thirty-five creatures from Jewish traditions, each accompanied by legendary tales and instruction. Podwal goes from the ant, ass, and azazel-goat to the swine, unicorn, and ziz.
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Yaniv, Bracha. “The Hidden Message of the Hares in the Talons of the Eagle.” AJS Review 36.2 (2012): 281–294.
DOI: 10.1017/S0364009412000190Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Study of the image of a crowned two-headed eagle grasping two hares in its talons, found in two synagogues in 18th-century Ukraine. Challenges the relevance of medieval iconography to these synagogues and the interpretation of the hares as Jews protected by God, as some scholars suggest. Argues that the image expressed a hidden message of vengeance against hostile Ukrainians.
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Comparative Work on Animals in Abrahamic Religions
In light of the shared literary traditions and intertwined histories of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, some scholars have turned to comparative work on animals in the Abrahamic religions. Patton 2000 identifies traditions in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in which animals are theological subjects. Cuffel 2007 sees a reinforcing of religious boundaries in medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim literature and iconography featuring animals. Bakhos 2009 surveys Jewish, Christian, and Muslim canonical sources about animals. Gross and Crane 2015 discusses biblical, Jewish, and Muslim texts in which animals call humans to account for their treatment of them. Blidstein 2015 traces Jewish, Christian, and Muslim exegetical traditions on Noah’s rescue of impure animals and links found there among animal nature, human nature, and dietary law. Berkowitz and Katz 2016 is a dialogue between a rabbinics scholar and an Islamic law scholar on Jewish and Muslim texts about human obligations to animals.
Bakhos, Carol. “Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Attitudes towards Animals.” Comparative Islamic Studies 5.2 (2009): 177–219.
DOI: 10.1558/cis.v5i2.177Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Survey of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim attitudes toward animals in ancient and medieval sources. Identifies a dominant human supremacism alongside a tradition that critiques human arrogance and exhorts humans to show compassion to animals. The focus on the fate of the animals in the Noah flood narrative and the Islamic fable “The Case of the Animals versus Man.”
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Berkowitz, Beth A., and Marion Katz. “The Cowering Calf and the Thirsty Dog: Narrating and Legislating Kindness to Animals in Jewish and Islamic Texts.” In Islamic and Jewish Legal Reasoning: Encountering Our Legal Other. Edited by Anver M. Emon, 61–111. London: Oneworld, 2016.
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Dialogue between scholar of rabbinics and scholar of Islamic law about texts that treat human obligations toward animals. Rabbinic texts address helping a person with an overburdened animal and Rabbi Judah the Patriarch’s relationship with animals. Islamic texts are Ibn Qudama al-Maqdisi’s al-Mughni’s treatment of a person’s obligation to feed their animals and a hadith emphasizing the merit of kindness toward animals, with commentary by Muhyi al-Din al-Nawawi.
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Blidstein, Moshe. “How Many Pigs Were on Noah’s Ark? An Exegetical Encounter on the Nature of Impurity.” Harvard Theological Review 108.3 (2015): 448–470.
DOI: 10.1017/S0017816015000279Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
God’s instruction to Noah in Genesis 7:2–3 to rescue seven pairs of all pure animals and one pair of all impure animals raised questions for ancient Jewish and Christian commentators. Blidstein traces the exegetical tradition on Noah’s animals in ancient and medieval texts in Greek and Syriac and parallel Jewish traditions and contextualizes it within Christian, Jewish, and Muslim theories on the relationship between nature and dietary law.
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Cuffel, Alexandra. Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
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Explores gendered bodily imagery in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim polemics. Chapter 6, “Signs of the Beast: Animal Metaphors as Maledictions of Resistance and Oppression” (pp. 198–239), looks at polemical literature, bestiaries, fables, crusade chronicles, illuminated manuscripts, and sculpture to argue that animals were a major vehicle by which Jews, Christians, and Muslims vented their fears of the religious other, who were depicted as “inhuman, unmanly, or the wrong kind of men” (p. 234).
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Gross, Aaron S., and Jonathan K. Crane. “Brutal Justice? Animal Litigation and the Question of Countertradition.” In Beastly Morality: Animals as Ethical Agents. Edited by Jonathan K. Crane, 225–247. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.
DOI: 10.7312/cran17416-013Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Considers cases in which animals accuse humans or challenge human morality in the way a plaintiff challenges a defendant, thus fostering “zoocentric sympathy” (p. 225) and serving as countertraditions of human religiosity. Case one is Balaam’s donkey in Numbers. Case 2 is an early rabbinic midrash featuring animals testifying against humanity. Case 3 is the early Shi’ite “Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn.”
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Patton, Kimberley C. “‘He Who Sits in the Heavens Laughs’: Recovering Animal Theology in the Abrahamic Traditions.” Harvard Theological Review 93.04 (2000): 401–434.
DOI: 10.1017/S0017816000016400Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
According to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which Patton points out are not anthropocentric but theocentric, “animals have their own special, consecrated, differentiated and highly charged relationship to God” (p. 408). Highlights three aspects of that relationship: divine compassion for animals, communication between God and animals, and animal veneration of God. Discusses also animal consciousness, anthropomorphism, and “divine ipseity, namely, the inexhaustible and reflexive creativity of God” (p. 409).
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Species
Organizing animal studies by individual species—dogs, horses and donkeys, and pigs are featured here—brings to light features of the human-animal relationship that thematic or genre-based studies might miss. Each animal species has unique attributes that have left their mark on the Jewish relationship to them. Dogs are known for their provision of companionship and protection, for example, horses for their role in warfare and their reflection of power and wealth, donkeys for their work as pack animals, and pigs, in the Jewish perspective, as the impure animal par excellence.
Dog
Jewish literature from Antiquity paints a largely negative portrait of dogs as bloodthirsty and dangerous with the notable exception of the Book of Tobit, but by modern times the scholarship shows Jews experiencing close companionship and identification with dogs. Stow 2006 is a wide-ranging study of Christian depictions of Jews as dogs. Ackerman-Lieberman and Zalashik 2013 is an anthology on the dog in Jewish history that moves from the Bible to contemporary times. Jacobs 2014 is a study of the dog character that appears in the Book of Tobit. Shacham-Rosby 2016 looks at dog images in medieval haggadahs from Ashkenaz. Andersson 2017 is a study of French writer Hélène Cixous’s account of Fips, her dog when she was growing up in Algiers during the late 1940s. Kahn 2022 is a collection of essays on the pioneering dog trainer Rudolphina Menzel. See also Modern Jewish Thought for scholarship on Levinas’s essay about the dog Bobby.
Ackerman-Lieberman, Phillip, and Rakefet Zalashik, eds. A Jew’s Best Friend? The Image of the Dog throughout Jewish History. Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2013.
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Anthology that explores the relationship between dogs and Jews from ancient times to the present and from the Middle East to Europe and North America. Contributions on the dog cult in Persian Judea; dogs in ancient Jewish literature and life; dogs in medieval Jewish culture under Islam and Christianity; dogs in Yiddish proverbs; the dog trainer Rudolphina Menzel; dogs in Palestine before the Mandate; canine Israeli paratroopers; and contemporary Jewish dog rituals.
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Andersson, Helen. “Traces of a Half-Forgotten Dog: Suffering and Animal Humanity in Hélène Cixous’ Algerian Scenes.” Literature and Theology 31.4 (2017): 420–436.
DOI: 10.1093/litthe/frx030Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Study of French writer Hélène Cixous’s account of Fips, her dog when she was growing up in Algiers during the late 1940s. Andersson explores themes of relationality and corporeality in Cixous’s account. Proposes that Cixous learns from her memory of Fips how to become more human, which entails “an assault on the borders of racialised exclusion and a challenge to the false humanism of the colonial project” (p. 421).
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Jacobs, Naomi S. S. “‘What about the Dog?’: Tobit’s Mysterious Canine Revisited.” In Canonicity, Setting, Wisdom in the Deuterocanonicals: Papers of the Jubilee Meeting of the International Conference on the Deuterocanonical Books, Budapest, 2013. Edited by Géza G. Xeravits, József Zsengellér, and Xavér Szabó, 221–246. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014.
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Revisits the figure of the faithful dog who accompanies the character Tobias on his journey as recounted in the ancient Jewish Book of Tobit, part of the Apocrypha. While dogs had a predominantly negative valence in Jewish Antiquity, Tobit’s presentation is positive. Jacobs reviews evidence from the Hebrew Bible, Qumran, Jubilees, and Philo for positive relationships with dogs in ancient Israel, along with previous scholarly explanations of the dog in Tobit.
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Kahn, Susan Martha, ed. Canine Pioneer: The Extraordinary Life of Rudolphina Menzel. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2022.
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Collection of essays on Rudolphina Menzel (b. 1891–d. 1973), a Viennese-born Jew who was a pioneer in the field of canine psychology. Famous in interwar Europe for her expertise in breeding and training police dogs, Menzel was also a Zionist who emigrated to Mandatory Palestine and organized dog training there for police and military uses and developed the new breed of Canaan dog. Begins with a biographical essay by Kahn.
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Shacham-Rosby, Chana. “Elijah the Prophet: The Guard Dog of Israel.” Jewish History 30.3 (2016): 165–182.
DOI: 10.1007/s10835-017-9262-4Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Argues that inclusion of Elijah in the Passover Seder by the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz is connected to the role they ascribed to him as the “guard dog” of Israel. Traces the canine association with Elijah back to biblical and Talmudic sources and discusses the dog more generally in medieval European iconography. Focuses on medieval haggadahs that depict a barking dog in the scene illuminating “Pour out your fury.”
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Stow, Kenneth R. Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters; Continuity in the Catholic-Jewish Encounter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.
DOI: 10.11126/stanford/9780804752817.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Study of Catholic allegations of Jewish ritual murder, host desecration, and blood libel, centered on the Christian metaphor of the Jewish dog and its accompanying anxiety. Traces the millennia-long association between dogs and impurity, adapted by Catholic doctrine to represent the threat posed by Jews to the body of the faithful. Coverage from Paul and the Church Fathers to modern Catholicism, with a focus on medieval France.
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Equids (Horses and Donkeys)
The entries here skew toward ancient Israel. McKay 2002 offers an ideological critique of the representation of horses and other equids in the Hebrew Bible. Way 2011 is a comprehensive monograph on donkeys in the biblical world, focusing on ritual and symbolism. Cantrell 2011 is a study of horses in ancient Israel with an emphasis on their use in warfare. Evers 2018 and Geller 2019 jump forward to modernity, Evers looking at the appendix of an 18th-century German equestrian manual as a window into relationships between Jews and non-Jews as they played out in the business of horse trading, and Geller looking at horse-human hybrid figures in several works of modern Jewish literature. Sapir-Hen 2020 reviews the archaeological evidence for donkeys in the ancient Levant.
Cantrell, Deborah O’Daniel. The Horsemen of Israel: Horses and Chariotry in Monarchic Israel (Ninth–Eighth Centuries B.C.E.). Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011.
DOI: 10.1515/9781575066479Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Study of horses, chariots, and equestrians in ancient Israel that argues against the prevailing view that there were few horses in Iron Age Israel. Proposes instead that horses “had become so prevalent during the Monarchic period that they fired the poetic imagination of prophets and inspired the poets” (p. 1). Addresses debate about whether certain buildings excavated at Megiddo were stables. The author is herself involved in competitive horse riding and dressage.
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Evers, Renate. “‘Der Vollkommene Pferdekenner,’ 1764: Jewish Horse Traders in the Margraviate of Brandenburg-Ansbach and Their Language at the Threshold of Modernity.” Year Book—Leo Baeck Institute 63.1 (2018): 201–228.
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Study of “Der vollkommene Pferdekenner” (“The complete horse connoisseur”), an equestrian guide published in 1764 by the German nobleman Baron Wolf Ehrenfried von Reitzenstein. The guide features an appendix of Yiddish phrases, words, and sample dialogues used by Jewish horse traders intended to assist non-Jews in their interactions with them. Shows horse-trading to constitute a public space where paths between Jews and non-Jews crossed.
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Geller, Jay. “‘A Horse Is a Horse, of Course, of Course’, or Some Nagging Suspicions about Some Jewish Writers.” Prooftexts 37.2 (2019): 215–242.
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While horses and horseback-riding Jews have left few tracks in Jewish tradition, says Geller (p. 216), human-horse hybrids play a central role in the works of Primo Levi, Bernard Malamud, and Moacyr Scliar. Geller explores the relationship between Jewish identity and the centaurs or talking horses in these works, with a review of the relationship between Jews and horses as well as the figure of the horse in modern Jewish literature.
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McKay, Heather A. “Through the Eyes of Horses: Representation of the Horse Family in the Hebrew Bible.” In Sense and Sensitivity: Essays on Reading the Bible in Memory of Robert Carroll. Edited by Alastair G. Hunter and Philip R. Davies, 127–141. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002.
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An ideological critique of the representation of horses and other equids in the Hebrew Bible, beginning with basic data about the use of the horse family in ancient Israel. Outlines the different literary uses of horses, both figurative and narrative. Argues that with the exception of Balaam’s ass, equines are demeaned in the Bible for their perceived lack of human qualities and the diminution of their own distinctive qualities.
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Sapir-Hen, Lidar. “Human-Animal Relationship with Work Animals: Symbolic and Economic Roles of Donkeys and Camels during the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Southern Levant.” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 136.1 (2020): 83–94.
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Reviews evidence for the interaction of humans with donkeys and camels following their domestication as work animals in the southern Levant, with attention to ritual practices and their social meaning. Gives an overview of human domestication of donkeys. Addresses the practice of deliberate interments of young donkeys, which were likely sacrificed to display social and economic status and reinforce group identity.
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Way, Kenneth C. Donkeys in the Biblical World: Ceremony and Symbol. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011.
DOI: 10.5325/j.ctv18r6r5mSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Comprehensive treatment of donkeys in the world of the Hebrew Bible. The purpose is to explicate the role of donkeys in symbolism and ceremonies of the biblical world. Argues that donkeys held a special status in the beliefs and rituals of the ancient Near East and especially Canaan-Israel. Chapters on ancient Near Eastern literature, biblical literature, and the archaeological evidence.
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Pig
The prohibition on eating pigs has been a defining feature of Jewish identity since Antiquity, both for Jews themselves and as they were viewed by others. Shachar 1974 and Fabre-Vassas 1997 approach the subject from the Christian perspective: Shachar 1974 is a comprehensive study of the judensau, a medieval anti-Jewish visual motif in which Jews are shown sucking at the teats of a sow, and Fabre-Vassas 1997 is an anthropological study of European Christian practices and beliefs related to Jews and pigs. Barak-Erez 2007 is a study of modern Israeli laws that prohibit breeding pigs and possessing and trading pork. Har-Peled 2013 explores the identification of pigs with the Roman Empire in classical rabbinic literature, while Har-Peled 2016 traces the history of the “pig libel” legend in late medieval Europe. Ruane 2015 offers a new explanation for why the Bible considers pigs to be impure. Sapir-Hen 2019 revisits the debate by archaeologists about whether the absence of pig remains in a site indicates Israelite habitation. See also The Pig Prohibition and Other Noteworthy Food Taboos in the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies article Dietary Laws, and The Pig in the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies article Food.
Barak-Erez, Daphne. Outlawed Pigs: Law, Religion, and Culture in Israel. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.
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Traces the course of two Israeli laws that express the historical Jewish abhorrence of pigs, one that permits Israeli cities to ban the possession of and trade in pork, and another that forbids pig-breeding in Israel with the exception of majority-Christian areas. Focuses on the processes that led to the laws, the resistance they provoked, and their reflection of Jewish religion and identity in the modern state of Israel.
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Fabre-Vassas, Claudine. The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians & the Pig. European Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
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Anthropological study of European Christian culture’s understanding of the Jew’s relationship to the pig, especially the Jewish prohibition on eating pigs. The scope is broad, from Antiquity to today, and from Spain to Scandinavia, covering many different practices, beliefs, and stories related to Jews and pigs.
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Har-Peled, Misgav. “The Dialogical Beast: The Identification of Rome with the Pig in Early Rabbinic Literature.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2013.
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Argues that by identifying Rome with the pig, the rabbis made the avoidance of pork a locus of resistance to empire, first the pagan Roman Empire and later the Christian one. The larger goal is to show that cultural identifications with the pig emerged dialogically between Jews and Christians rather than as a one-way imposition by Christians upon Jews in images like the judensau.
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Har-Peled, Misgav. “The Pig Libel: A Ritual Crime Legend from the Era of the Spanish Expulsion of the Jews (15th–16th Centuries).” Revue des Études Juives 175.1 (2016): 107–113.
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According to the “pig libel,” Jews ask a Christian to sell them the heart of another Christian to use in black magic to kill Christians. The Christian deceives the Jews by giving them a pig heart, and when the Jews perform their magic, the pigs of the region die, and the Jewish plot is exposed. Har-Peled traces the history of this anti-Jewish tale in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
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Ruane, Nicole J. “Pigs, Purity, and Patrilineality: The Multiparity of Swine and Its Problems for Biblical Ritual and Gender Construction.” Journal of Biblical Literature 134.3 (2015): 489–504.
DOI: 10.1353/jbl.2015.0035Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A new interpretation of the biblical characterization of pigs as impure that links it to their multiparity, that is, their giving birth in litters. Ruane argues that the biblical composers are uncomfortable with the multiparous pig because pigs do not bear a firstborn male, they highlight female fertility, and they are capable of bearing the offspring of multiple males simultaneously, thus blurring paternal lines.
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Sapir-Hen, Lidar. “Food, Pork Consumption, and Identity in Ancient Israel.” Near Eastern Archaeology 82.1 (2019): 52–59.
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Refers back to a consensus that emerged in the 1990s that the absence of pig remains can be used as an ethnic marker for ancient Israel, and a subsequent challenge that questioned the assumption that Philistines and Canaanites consume pork and early Israelites do not. Here Sapir-Hen revisits the debate, focusing on new faunal data.
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Shachar, Isaiah. The Judensau: A Medieval Anti-Jewish Motif and Its History. London: Warburg Institute, 1974.
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Comprehensive study of the judensau, an anti-Jewish motif in which Jews are shown sucking the teats of a sow. Argues that the motif emerged in 13th-century Germany and that its meaning evolved over the subsequent six centuries in which it flourished in paintings, woodcuts, broadsheets, and other media. Sixty-two pages of images.
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Websites
Many websites dedicated to Jewish culture offer information about Jews and animals, but the sites here are dedicated exclusively to that subject (or nearly so). Animals in Halacha gathers information about animals in Orthodox Jewish law. The DNI Project Mine—Dictionary of Nature Imagery of the Bible: Fauna offers profiles of all the animals mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, grounded in scholarly research. Jewish Initiative for Animals and Shamayim: Jewish Animal Advocacy are Jewish animal advocacy sites. Jewish Vegetarianism is the blog of Jewish vegetarian activist Richard Schwartz.
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Updates ceased in 2018, but this blog is still a useful resource for information about animals in Jewish law as construed within Orthodoxy. Created by an Orthodox Jewish veterinarian. Categories include pets, Passover, kosher slaughter, and vegetarianism, among others.
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DNI Project Mine—Dictionary of Nature Imagery of the Bible: Fauna.
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Dictionary produced by scholars supplying information about the ecological context necessary for understanding the Hebrew Bible. Fauna is divided into subcategories of wild animals, domestic animals, birds, reptiles, insects, fish and amphibians, and hybrid fauna. Entries include literary, pictorial, and material sources.
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Jewish Initiative for Animals.
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Supports Jewish animal welfare activism.
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Schwartz, Richard. Jewish Vegetarianism.
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Created by Jewish animal activist Richard Schwartz, this blog features Schwartz’s prolific writings on many topics related to Jewish vegetarianism, veganism, and animal rights. Also offers an online course, recipes, and relevant links.
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Shamayim: Jewish Animal Advocacy.
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Previously named the Shamayim V’Aretz Institute, “Shamayim: Judaism Animal Advocacy” is a nonprofit that supports animal advocacy and veganism in Jewish communities. The site features a blog, podcasts, webinars, and news related to Jews, animals, and veganism. Offers an option to pose a question about Jewish veganism to organization founder and president Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, whose answer is published on the site.
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- Revelation
- Ritual Objects and Folk Art
- Rosenzweig, Franz
- Russia
- Russian Jewish Culture
- Sabbath
- Sabbatianism
- Sacrifice in the Bible
- Safed
- Sarah Schenirer and Bais Yaakov
- Scholem, Gershom
- Second Temple Period, The
- Sephardi Jews
- Sexuality and the Body
- Shlomo Carlebach
- Shmuel Yosef Agnon
- Shulhan Arukh and Sixteenth Century Jewish Law, The
- Sociology, European Jewish
- South African Jewry
- Soviet Union, Jews in the
- Space in Modern Hebrew Literature
- Spinoza, Baruch
- Sutzkever, Abraham
- Talmud and Philosophy
- Talmud, Narrative in the
- The Druze Community in Israel
- The Early Modern Yiddish Bible, 1534–1686
- The General Jewish Workers’ Bund
- The Modern Jewish Bible, Facets of
- Theater, Israeli
- Theme, Exodus as a
- Tractate Avodah Zarah (in the Talmud)
- Translation
- Translation in Hebrew Literature, Traditions of
- United States
- Vienna
- Vilna
- Warsaw
- Weinreich, Max
- Wissenschaft des Judentums
- Women and Gender Relations
- World War II Literature, Jewish American
- Yankev Glatshteyn/Jacob Glatstein
- Yemen, The Jews of
- Yiddish
- Yiddish Avant-garde Theater
- Yiddish Linguistics
- Yiddish Literature since 1800
- Yiddish Theater
- Zamenhof
- Ze’ev Jabotinsky
- Zionism from Its Inception to 1948
