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Mytelka Memorial Seminar – “A People Like a Donkey”: Animalizing the Slave and Enslaving the Animal in Babylonian Talmud

Beth Berkowitz, Barnard College

Wed, 2/12 · 4:30 pm6:00 pm · 203 Scheide Caldwell House

Program in Judaic Studies

The Program in Judaic Studies’ hosting of this year’s Mytelka Scholar, Beth Berkowitz, continues with this seminar on Wednesday, February 12.

Aristotle calls both animals and enslaved people “natural slaves.” Building on this tradition, ancient Romans represented and treated slaves like animals. In this seminar, we’ll explore how one late antique population, the Rabbis, create similar parallels between slaves and animals and to what effect. We’ll go back to biblical narrative to focus on the donkey who accompanies Abraham on his journey to sacrifice his son Isaac, and we’ll trace from Palestinian midrash to the Babylonian Talmud a motif that equates Abraham’s donkey with the youths who accompany him. We’ll look at how the Talmud dispossesses both slaves and animals of genealogy: both are said to lack hayis, or lineage. Through the lens of Orlando Patterson’s notions of social death and natal alienation, we’ll consider the intersections between animalization and enslavement.

All University faculty, researchers, staff, and students are welcome to attend, but space is limited – please RSVP to judaic@princeton.edu. Refreshments will be available.

More about Beth Berkowitz

Beth A. Berkowitz is Ingeborg Rennert Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College. She is the author of Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Oxford University Press, 2006); Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Animals and Animality in the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is co-editor of Religious Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation (Routledge, 2017). She has published articles in the Journal for the American Academy of Religion, Journal of Jewish Studies, Jewish Quarterly Review, Journal of Ancient Judaism, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, AJS Review, and Biblical Interpretation. Her area of specialization is classical rabbinic literature, and her interests include critical animal studies, Jewish difference, and Bible reception history. Her book What Animals Teach Us about Families: Four Biblical Laws and Their Rabbinic Readings, forthcoming with University of California Press, is a study of the four laws in the Hebrew Bible that feature the parent-child relationship in animals.

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