For This You Were Created: On Jews and Animals

This review essay discusses two volumes recently published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. By exposing the role played by animal-related questions in pre-modern Jewish texts, the two books highlight the mutual relation between the study of Judaism and the study of animals, which in recent years has inspired both these fields of knowledge and research. The first book that Balberg reviews is devoted to the Avoda Zara (idolatry) tractate of the Babylonian Talmud, and the other is devoted to the writings of the Ashkenazic hassidim in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Balberg argues that despite the distance in time and the differences in style and objects of investigation between the two books, both offer bold and creative ways of thinking about nonhuman animals – real rather than metaphorical. In doing so, they exemplify how seemingly rigid theological and ideological agendas can give rise to radical ideas regarding the “animal” as an epistemological and ontological category – and, consequently, also as a religious and moral category.