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“The Frog is Dangerous” –Animals and Their Agency in Rabbinic Discourses on Medicine and Healing

Mon, December 17, 10:30am to 12:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Waterfront 3 Ballroom

Abstract

The theoretical discussions on animality, animal agency, and human-animal studies that have developed over the course of the last few decades across the disciplines have nudged scholars of ancient history and classics to explore various aspects of human-animal relationships in ancient cultures (e.g., Newmyer 2010, Kalof 2011, Campbell 2014, Fögen&Thomas 2017; Korhonen&Ruonakoski 2017). Only recently, some studies (e.g., by Mira B. Wasserman, Beth Berkowitz, David Shyowitz) have picked up on these questions for the field of rabbinic studies and Jewish cultural history.
Based on and inspired by these developments in current scholarship, this paper shows that human-animal interactions related to medical knowledge and practices play an important role for the pertinent discourse in rabbinic traditions. For heuristic purposes, I will distinguish between different areas, or aspects of animality in Talmudic discussions of healing.
First, animals constitute key agents as transmitters or even causes of diseases and medical conditions, which range from stings or itching sensations caused by animals (e.g., lice) to more severe (blindness, paralysis) or even lethal conditions (caused by snakes, spiders, lizards, scorpions, hornets etc.). Some illnesses were described through symptoms of animal-like behavior imbued with cultural and ideological notions. Moreover, animal imagery serves as a powerful discursive tool of conceptualizing diseases.
Second, in some few instances rabbinic texts present (domestic) animals as recipients of cures or medical assistance. These passages demonstrate how the human-animal symbiosis works as a complex net of mutual dependencies and interactions that connect between economic and ethical dimensions of securing and restoring health, work power and social life.
Finally, in many recipes and therapeutic instructions animal products or animal parts were deployed for various healing purposes, often framed in a ritual-like practice. This can be seen, on the one hand, as an applied use of animals as a type of pharmaceutical-medical technology. On the other hand, I will look into the agency of medicalized animals and animal ingredients that stress the spiritual and material dimensions of the humanimal continuum through ingestion, touch and apotropaic use.

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