Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud

Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud selects key themes in animal studies - animal intelligence, morality, sexuality, suffering, danger, personhood - and explores their development in the Babylonian Talmud. Beth A. Berkowitz demonstrates that distinctive features of the Talmud - the new literary genre, the convergence of Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian cultures, the Talmud's remove from Temple-centered biblical Israel - led to unprecedented possibilities within Jewish culture for conceptualizing animals and animality. She explores their development in the Babylonian Talmud, showing how it is ripe for reading with a critical animal studies perspective. When we do, we find waiting for us a multi-layered, surprisingly self-aware discourse about animals as well as about the anthropocentrism that infuses human relationships with them. For readers of religion, Judaism, and animal studies, her book offers new perspectives on animals from the vantage point of the ancient rabbis.

1. Introduction; 2. Animal intelligence; 3. Animal morality; 4. Animal suffering; 5. Animal danger; 6. Animals as live/stock; 7. Conclusion.

Beth A. Berkowitz is Ingeborg Rennert Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College, New York. She is author of Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (2006, winner of the Salo Baron Prize for First Book in Jewish Studies) and Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, 2012). She is also co-editor of Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation (forthcoming).