Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud After the Humanities

by Mira Beth Wasserman

In Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals , Mira Beth Wasserman undertakes a close reading of Avoda Zara, arguably the Talmud's most scandalous tractate, to uncover the hidden architecture of this classic work of Jewish religious thought. She proposes a new way of reading the Talmud that brings it into conversation with the humanities, including animal studies, the new materialisms, and other areas of critical theory that have been reshaping the understanding of what it is to be a human being.

Even as it comments on the the rabbinic laws that govern relations between Jews and non-Jews, Avoda Zara is also an attempt to reflect on what all people share in common, and on how humans fit into a larger universe of animals and things. As is typical of the Talmud in general, it proceeds by incorporating a vast and confusing array of apparently digressive materials, but Wasserman demonstrates that there is a whole greater than the sum of the parts, a sustained effort to explore human identity and difference.

In centuries past, Avoda Zara has been a flashpoint in Jewish-Christian relations. It was partly due to its content that the Talmud was subject to burning and censorship by Christian authorities. Wasserman develops a twenty-first-century reading of the tractate that aims to reposition it as part of a broader quest to understand what connects human beings to each other and to the world around them.

Genres: Judaism, Religion

328 pages, Hardcover

Published May 19, 2017

Reviews

[Adriel K · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got connected with Dov Kahane about a sugya (17a) in 2020 (!), and when he understood I was learning masechet Avodah Zarah, he recommended this book, “It changed the way I read the Talmud.” I noted the superlative and don’t take Dov to be the type of person who exudes lightly, but wasn’t looking for extra homework. Adam and I finished Maseschet Avodah Zarah earlier this year (bekiyut) and I think we both felt… confused, about how all these sugyot come together to form something coherent. Learning Shulchan Aruch was not doing the trick. So I started reaching deeper.

I hesitated for a couple weeks before buying, because the price point is academic, and a certain skepticism, but wow: This is the most fun I had reading a book all year. Accessible, insightful, close to the text, dipping into theory in each chapter but only where there is something genuinely interesting to say, without getting lost in jargon. Chapter 1 is a great analysis of the aggadetot, as per Rubenstein, but Chapters 2 and 3 also deal with some of the chewy shakla vetarya, which was my favorite part of the book: it felt like I was getting genuine chiddushim on each page. I literally applauded on reading her analysis of the way the gemara elides whether the Rule of Libation applies to Diluted Wine (p144-145.) When Adam and I learned 36b Rav Yitzchak’s teaching: “They decreed against bread and oil on account of their wine, and against their wine on account of their daughters, and against their daughters on account of another matter, and against another matter on account of another matter,” we immediately jumped to jokes (mixed dancing, etc.) because honestly, how else do you engage with a text that is refusing to be engaged? But MBW compellingly shows that secrecy is the point, and then provides a compelling read about what those matters were after all (p157.) Ditto with the endless number of snakes that show up in this masechet (que the snakes on a plane jokes).

Maybe the reason this book hit so hard is that Talmudics is one of my weakest spots in Jewish academia and so I’m benefiting from not just the incremental advance that MBW is adding to the discourse, but the whole edifice built by Talmudists over the last 30 years. In MBW’s discussion of Rabbi Yitzchak’s I’m seeing Christine Hayes getting cited and I’m thinking, hm, I wish I had read her stuff. But I think something else is going on here: It’s a through reading of a masechet, and so it lends itself to be read alongside the text, and allows for cross-pollination not just with academics but devotional learning in a way that subject matter focused books do not. That’s something that MBW is very intentionally doing: It’s only through an appreciation of the cohesion of the stam (p236) that you can fully realize a project like this. I find myself wondering what would happen if we did an Anchor-bible style, 1-book per tractate through reading from a scholar. It could be fun.

And of course a second reason this was so good is because I had just spend some struggling through AZ. More than once did Adam and I grapple with how best to deal with incredibly difficult sugyot, while taking the rabbinic project seriously and without dismissing the simply “problematic” or “toxic.” It brings the best of the academy – incisive, analytical, without apologetics. The thesis that there is no ontological difference between Jews and non-Jews, between Jews and animals, except submission to the rules of the Torah is profound, compelling and absolutely necessary in such a difficult masechet.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the study of Talmud moves into the secular, academic world, scholars are using other disciplines to discover the worldview of those who produced the talmudic text. For example, in “Jews, Gentiles, and Other Animals: The Talmud After the Humanities” (University of Pennsylvania Press), Mira Beth Wasserman offers a new set of questions about the world of the Talmud through the critical approach of the humanities, which concentrates on the study of human culture. The reason she focuses on Avoda Zara (which she translates literally as meaning “foreign worship”) is because it is considered one of the most controversial tractates of the Babylonian Talmud – one which was censored and changed in Medieval Christian Europe. What Wasserman, who teaches rabbinic literature at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, finds intriguing is that, in reality, Avoda Zara is less interested in idiolatry and more interested in “a much broader set of concerns about the relationships between Jews and non-Jews.”
See the rest of my review at http://www.thereportergroup.org/Artic...