Jews and Animals

Abstract

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.