Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science

Abstract

The tractates of Niddah, Bekhorot, and Hullin investigate the generation of material bodies through ritual and status frameworks concerned with purity, dietary rules, sacrifice, property, and kinship. Drawing on insights from feminist science studies and new materialisms, I chart how nascent or emergent bodily materials were parsed in rabbinic science to then be theoretically donated, married, killed, ingested, or otherwise disposed. I show how the rabbis envisaged bodily products along a spectrum, drawing only a thin line between offspring (valad) and other material entities, with determinations of materiality and species factoring into such distinctions. Besides the content of rabbinic knowledge, I consider the conditions in which these knowledges were formulated. Feminist science studies and new materialist analyses of knowledge-making and agency offer approaches that go beyond dualist framings of active, knowing subjects (e. g. rabbinic men, humans, Romans) versus passive known objects (e. g. non-rabbis or women, non-human entities, or non-Romans). These approaches allow us to account for the ways in which rabbinic thinkers, from ca. the second through late fourth centuries, were entangled with and shaped by the “bodies” of their knowledge. Collectively, these approaches to the generation of bodily material and to the production of rabbinic knowledge thereof, make for a late ancient biology that differs from contemporary, “common sense,” Euro-American intuitions about the distinction between living and nonliving, between human and nonhuman, and between knower and known. Furthermore, this biology queers accounts of generation that rely on same-species, hetero-sexual reproduction.