<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

*Created from Animals:
Thinking the Human/Animal Difference
in Jewish and Hebrew Literature*

edited by *Anna Lissa*

Issue 23, no. 1 (2023)
Editors

**Cristiana Facchini** (Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna, Italy – Editor in Chief), **Elissa Bemporad** (Queens College of the City University of New York, USA), **Laura Brazzo** (Fondazione CDEC, Italy), **Tullia Catalan** (Università degli Studi di Trieste, Italy), **Gadi Luzzatto Voghera** (Fondazione CDEC, Italy), **Dario Miccoli** (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italy), **Michele Sarfatti** (Fondazione CDEC, Italy), **Guri Schwarz** (Università degli Studi di Genova, Italy), **Marcella Simoni** (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italy), **Ulrich Wyrwa** (Universität Potsdam, Germany)

Editorial Assistants

**Miriam Benfatto** (Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna, Italy – Managing Editor), **Matteo Perissinotto** (Università degli Studi di Trieste, Italy – Managing Editor), **Bianca Ambrosio** (Fondazione CDEC, Italy), **Anna Veronica Pobbe** (Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy); **Chiara Renzo** (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italy), **Piera Rossetto** (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italy)

Book Review Editor

**Miriam Benfatto** (Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna, Italy)

English Language Editor

**Federico Damonte**

Editorial Advisory Board

**Ruth Ben Ghiat** (New York University, USA), **Paolo Luca Bernardini** (Università degli Studi dell'Insubria, Italy), **Dominique Bourel** (Université Paris-Sorbonne, France), **Michael Brenner** (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and American University Washington D.C., Germany and USA), **Enzo Campelli** (La Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy), **Francesco Cassata** (Università degli Studi di Genova, Italy), **Marco Cuzzi** (Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy), **Roberto Della Rocca** (Dipartimento Educazione e Cultura – Ucei, Italy), **Lois Dubin** (Smith College, USA), **Jacques Ehrenfreund** (Université de Lausanne, Switzerland), **Katherine E. Fleming** (New York University, USA), **Anna Foa** (La Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy), **Ada Gigli Marchetti** (Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy), **François Guesnet** (University College London, UK), **Alessandro Guetta** (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, France), **András Kovács** (Central European University, Hungary-Austria), **Fabio Levi** (Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy), **Simon Levis Sullam** (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italy), **Germano Maifreda** (Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy), **Renato Mannheimer** (Istituto Pubblica Opinione, Italy), **Dan Michman** (International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem, Israel), **Michael Miller** (Central European University, Hungary-Austria), **Liliana Picciotto** (Fondazione CDEC, Italy), **Marcella Ravenna** (Università degli Studi di Ferrara, Italy), **Milena Santerini** (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy), **Perrine Simon-Nahum** (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France), **Francesca Sofia** (Alma Mater Studiorum, Università di Bologna, Italy), **David Sorkin** (Yale University, USA), **Emanuela Trevisan Semi** (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Italy), **Christian Wiese** (Goethe-Universität, Germany)

Direttore Responsabile ai sensi della legge italiana (Legge 47/1948), Stefano Jesurum

QUEST. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC
Reg. Trib. Milano n. 403 del 18/09/2009 – P. IVA: 12559570150 – ISSN: 2037-741X
Piazza Edmond Jacob Safra 1, 20125 Milano Italy
tel. 003902316338 – fax 00390233602728
www.quest-cdecjournal.it
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Cover image credit: Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625), *Studies of animals (donkeys, cats and monkeys)*, color on oak wood, 34,2 x 55,5 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jan_Brueghel_(I)_-Studies_of_animals_(donkeys,_cats_and_monkeys).jpg
Contents

FOCUS

*Created from Animals: Thinking the Human/Animal Difference in
Jewish and Hebrew Literature*

Anna Lissa

*Introduction* p. V

Noam Pines

*A Modern Lycaon: Recalling Ovid's Metamorphoses in The Merchant of
Venice* p. I

Pier gabriele Mancuso

Tza'ar ba'ale hayyim: Jewish Animal Rights Advocacy and Vegetarianism,
from Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Ha-Kohen Kook's A Vision of
Vegetarianism and Peace to Jonathan Safran Foer
p. 30

Naama Harel

*Kids for Calves: Children Against Slaughter in Fin-de-siècle Jewish
Literature*
p. 45

Anna Lissa

*Troubling the Boundaries: Human and Animal Spaces in Yitzhak Orpaz's
Nemalim (Ants) and Italo Calvino's La formica argentina (The Argentine
Ant)*
p. 61

Ilanit Ben Dor Derimian

*The Expression of Israeli Southern Periphery's Voices Through the
Symbolism of Domestic versus Wild Animal*
p. 95

Riki Traum

*Man, Interrupted: Abjection, Animality and Agency in Donkey by Sami
Berdugo*
p. 123
## RESEARCH PATHS

### Sharon Vance

*Antisemitism and the Image of Jews and Muslims in Nineteenth Century* p. 150

*French Colonial Algerian Writings*

## DISCUSSIONS

Hillel Kieval, *Blood Inscriptions: Science, Modernity, and Ritual Murder in Europe's Fin de Siècle*

*by Robert Weinberg* p. 178

*by Michal Frankl* p. 185

David J. Kertzer, *Un Papa in guerra. La storia segreta di Mussolini, Hitler e Pio XII*

*by Liliana Picciotto* p. 192

## REVIEWS

Laurent Joly, *La falsification de l'histoire. Éric Zemmour, l'extrême droite, Vichy et les Juifs*

*by Valeria Galimi* p. 204

Liora R. Halperin, *The Oldest Guard: Forging the Zionist Settler Past*

*by Yair Wallach* p. 208

Luciano Allegra, *La povertà degli ebrei. Voci dal ghetto*

*by Davide Mano* p. 212
Alma Rachel Heckman, *The Sultan's Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging*

by **Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli**

p. 215

Chiara Becattini, *La memoria dei campi. La Risiera di San Sabba, Fossoli, Natzweiler-Struthof, Drancy*

by **Elena Pirazzoli**

p. 220
## Introduction*

by *Anna Lissa*

### The Horizontal Relationship

As early as 1838, in his private notebooks, Darwin wrote that he believed true “to consider him [man] created from animals.”<fnref n="1" /> This notion challenged the prevailing religious views of his time, which posited a distinct and separate origin for humans. Later on, in his *On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life*, first published in 1859, he took his readers on a scientific journey into the depths of time, unraveling an unwritten history that encompasses not just humans but also the entire animal kingdom. In a sense, Darwin has constructed a new History of Animals that integrates humans within it, breaking away from the traditional understanding of history as solely belonging to human civilizations. The phrase History of Animals is fragrant with echoes of Aristotle’s teachings, but when applied to Darwin’s scientific endeavor, it encapsulates both the scientific inquiry and the collection of data, reflecting the original meaning of the Greek word *istoria*. It also signifies the unfolding of linear time during which and animals have evolved. In *On the Origin of Species*, Darwin did not express himself about humans. He only wrote the following lines in the “Recapitulation and Conclusions” to the work:

> Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. [...] When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of

<footnote>*I wish to express my gratitude to those who supported this project. I am especially thankful to Paolo Bernardini, with whom the first idea for this issue was hatched, to Cristiana Facchini, who first appreciated the relevance of the subject, and to Matteo Perissinotto, who has followed the many steps and stages of the preparation of this issue with the greatest competence, care, and kindness. I am also grateful to my colleague Maria Gorea who read the first paragraph of this introduction, provided valuable suggestions, and offered inspiring insights.</footnote>

<footnote n="1">¹ Paul H. Barrett, et al., eds., *Charles Darwin's Notebooks 1836-1944* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 300.</footnote>
some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian
system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.<fnref n="2" />

In 1859, Darwin remained prudent concerning the involvement of man in the
process of evolution like all the other living beings, because the Victorian society
of the time was not ready to accept the idea.<fnref n="3" /> In *The Descent of Man, and
Selection in Relation to Sex*, first published in 1871, he demonstrated that humans
are also involved in the larger and longer process of evolution. They had evolved
from “a lower form,”<fnref n="4" /> actually from the *Hominidae* or great apes, and are thus
only a phase of a much complex and general evolution and one limb of a widely
branched tree.

The choice of a quote from Darwin as the title for this collection of articles is
motivated by several reasons. Throughout history, many authors, starting from
antiquity, have presented arguments, primarily from philosophical and moral
perspectives, advocating for the commonality between humans and animals and
questioning the ethical implications of killing and consuming them. Aristotle's
denial of reason (*logos*), reasoning (*logismos*), thought (*dianoia*), intellect (*nous*),
and belief (*doxa*) to animals triggered a philosophical crisis that necessitated
expanding the understanding and the content of perception, which in turn risked
equating perception with belief. This led to a heated debate about the
philosophical definition and boundaries of reason, opinion, and perception in
relation to the human-animal difference.<fnref n="5" /> In this philosophical battleground the
skeptics aimed to challenge Aristotle's doctrines and Stoicism and argued for the
presence of some reason in animals, employing a strictly philosophical method and
set of arguments that resurfaced during the Renaissance, notably in the works of
Michel de Montaigne.

<footnote n="2">² Charles Darwin, *On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life*, published in *From so Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin*, ed. Edward O. Wilson (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 441-766, 759.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Edward O. Wilson, "Introduction to *The Descent of Man*," in *From So Simple a Beginning*, ed. Wilson, 765-766, 765.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ As Darwin himself put it in the title of the first chapter of *The Descent of Man*.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Richard Sorabji, *Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate* (Ithaca-New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), especially chapter 1 “The Crisis: The Denial of Reason to Animals,” 7-16.</footnote>
However, Darwin embarked on a distinct enterprise. In fact, his groundbreaking scientific works repositioned humans within the animal kingdom, highlighting their ancestral connection to the animal world, a lineage that extended far back in time, predating the written history on which our understanding of human existence has traditionally relied. He did so not by resorting to philosophical arguments and reasoning but through modern scientific analysis, examining various forms of evidence. His work served to reposition humans within the animal kingdom, emphasizing their deep ancestral connection to the animal world that stretched back in time long before the advent of written history, which has traditionally been the basis for understanding human existence. Certainly, the concept of humans descending from the great apes implies a shared history with other animals that spans at least two million years. Even better, animals and humans share a common history, and after all, don't they still share that history nowadays? Are not we, the humans, responsible vis à vis of the animals because of the pollution and the climate change that are ravaging the planet we share with them?

We are created from animals. As Derrida states: “L’animal est là avant moi, là près de moi, là devant moi – qui suis après lui.”<fnref n="6" /> I am quoting the original French to preserve the double meaning of the verb *suis* as “I am” and “I follow/come after”:

> If I am (following) this suite then, I move from “the ends of man,” that is the confines of man, to “the crossing borders” between man and animal. Passing across borders or the ends of man I come to surrender to the animal, to the animal in itself, to the animal in me and the animal at unease with itself.<fnref n="7" />

It is indeed widely known that Jacques Derrida's engagement with the subject of animals was sparked by an encounter with his she-cat while he was coming out of the shower. In that moment, he experienced the animal's gaze, the "insisted gaze

<footnote n="6">⁶ Jacques Derrida, *L'animal que donc je suis* (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 28; English translation *The Animal That Therefore I Am*, ed. Marie-Louise Lallet and trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University press, 2008).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Derrida, *The Animal That Therefore I Am*, 3.</footnote>
of the animal, a benevolent or pitiless gaze, surprised or cognizant.”<fnref n="8" /> This unexpected exchange of gazes led Derrida to contemplate the concept of the animal as Other, at the same time—in a game of seeing and being seen—it also prompted him to consider the possibility of an alternative perspective, “the point of view of the absolute other.”<fnref n="9" /> In Derrida’s exploration, he posits an inherent and profound rupture between humans and animals, a rupture characterized by diverse and shifting boundaries. On the other side of this rupture exists a multiplicity of “the living,”<fnref n="10" /> which he expresses using the term “animot.”<fnref n="11" /> This term signifies the multitude of non-human living beings, encompassing various species and forms of life beyond the human realm. Still, “being after, being alongside, being near [près] would appear as different modes of being, indeed of being-with. With the animal.”<fnref n="12" />

Indeed, the study of prehistory continues to reveal new insights about the relationship between humans and animals in early stages of human development. Drawing upon unwritten sources, scholars have made discoveries proving that humans have been with the animals, which played a crucial role in the cultural and social development during that early stage. It is now recognized that the presence of animals was not merely instrumental for human survival, such as through hunting or domestication, but also influenced the evolution of human language, the development of writing and the expression of religious feelings. These significant developments took place approximately 40000 years before present (BP) during the Upper Paleolithic period. During this time, humans primarily lived as hunters and gatherers, and as they began to engage in more complex cognitive processes, they likely started pondering their own existence and their relationship with the natural world. It is reasonable to suggest that early humans, in their nascent thoughts and reflections, conceived of themselves as part of a horizontal and non-hierarchical relationship with other animals, rather than placing themselves at the apex of a hierarchical structure.

<footnote n="8">⁸ Ibid., 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Ibid., 11.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Ibid., 31.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Ibid., 41.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Ibid., 10.</footnote>
In the following pages, I shall focus on a few examples, which are admittedly drawn from different ages and geographic locations, but they also provide some consistent and coherent facts supporting my argument. Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that the interpretive work of unwritten sources leads to conclusions that are far from definitive. I will begin by discussing two interpretations of some cave paintings, which are especially relevant to the topic of human-animal relations and their cultural expression. They date back to the Upper Paleolithic period, approximately between 40000 and 12000 BP, at the end of the Paleolithic age and the beginning of the Neolithic era, coinciding with the extinction of Neanderthals and the emergence of Homo sapiens.

One possible interpretation of these cave paintings is related to the debate about the origin of language, that remains outside the purposes of this introduction. However, I shall refer to Emmanuel Anati’s understanding of paleolithic art not only as an art, but also as an expression of languages that open up new perspectives in order to outline “logical systems of communication and expression deeply rooted in human mind.”<fnref n="13" /> It is widely acknowledged that animals are the main subject of this art, but according to Anati there is more:

> The analysis of the thematic reveals typologies of figures, signs, and graphemes that constitute the “vocabulary” of prehistoric art. They play the same role as words in a sentence. Isolated signs are rare, just as isolated words are rare in discourse. Sets constructed according to systems of association form the syntax; these are “phrases” composed by grouping or sequencing the graphemes depending on canons that reveal universal

<footnote n="13">¹³ Emmanuel Anati, *Aux origines de l'art* (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 19 (all the quotes from this book are translated by the Author). Anati's argument is also supported by analyses of mitochondrial DNA, that date the emergence of the full language faculty to 55000 BP or even to 90000 BP, and by fossils absence-of-evidence and presence-of-evidence arguments. The former date the emergence of language at around 50000 BP and the latter antedating it to 150000-200000 BP, thus including the Neanderthals. Kathleen R. Gibson and Maggie Tellerman, “Introduction to Part II: The Prehistory of the Language: When and Why did Language Evolve?,” in *The Oxford Handbook of Language*, eds. Gibson and Tellerman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 239-249, 240 and 244-245, and annexed sources; Jessica Serra, *Sapiens animalis. Ce que nous partageons avec les animaux* (Gennevilliers: Prisma Media, 2023), 11 and annexed sources.</footnote>
characteristics and constant associations, unrelated to ethnic and linguistic
boundaries or predating their formation.<fnref n="14" />

In prehistoric art, Anati identifies three signs, pictograms, ideograms and psychograms; the most widely used pictograms were zoomorphic or anthropomorphic, also called therianthropes, since paleolithic men were essentially hunters and gatherers and they hunted large animals. Pictograms, as it is well known, convey messages, regardless of a distinctive language. However, it seems possible that the humans who made those paintings already possessed some sort of language and, so to speak, put it in a written form. Furthermore, zoomorphic pictograms were not only the representation of the subjects of the hunt; they also were a representation of “imagined realities” involving “mythological and metaphorical references,”<fnref n="15" /> drawn in paintings that “can be related to sacred history texts that give evidence about the mysteries at the origin of the intellect.”<fnref n="16" /> Another possible explanation of the Upper Paleolithic cave paintings derives its main argument from the history of religions and from the neurosciences. At the core of this interpretation there is the fact that Paleolithic art is above all and “from the beginning to the end [...] an art of animal forms,”<fnref n="17" /> and this latter aspect can be explained “by suspecting some form of shamanism.”<fnref n="18" /> According to this theory, these paintings would be telling the story of a shamanic journey inwards, plunging into the three states of shamanic trance: stage one represents seeing geometric forms; stage two leads to illusioning these forms into objects with culture-specific meaning (religious or emotional); stage three implies plunging into a vortex at whose end are hallucinations with animals, people and so on, coupled with the hallucination of flying or descending into the underworld.<fnref n="19" /> The shamanic association with animals is a very common third stage of the

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Anati, *Aux origines de l'art*, 338.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Ibid., 351.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Ibid., 389.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams, *Shamanes de la préhistoire* (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1996). English translation, *Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves*, translated by Sophie Hawkes (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 41.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Ibid., 81.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Ibid. Concerning the three states of shamanic trance, see Chapter 1 “Shamanism,” 11-30. Concerning the succession of interpretations of Paleolithic art, see Ibid., Chapter 3 “One Hundred Years of Searching for Meaning,” 65-79.</footnote>
shamanic trance, because the animal becomes a spirit-animal bestowing powers to heal, or make rain fall; and, more importantly, this spirit-animal makes the communication with “another world” possible.<fnref n="20" /> The seminal points, allowing the interpretation of Upper Paleolithic cave paintings, deserve to be quoted in full:

First, many images seem to float on the rock face independently of its shape and features. Sometimes the pendant hoofs of animals enhance the appearance of floating because the animals do not seem to be standing on the ground. Secondly, the images of animals are always presented independently of natural surroundings; they are not part of a real landscape of ground, plants, trees, hills, and so forth. It was spirit-animals that mattered, not the world outside the caves. Thirdly. the images were painted or engraved without regard to relative size; for instance, mammoths are sometimes smaller than horses. Lastly, the animals are, for the most part, unrelated to one another: If, say, horses and bison are depicted together, it is not because these species consort; they were placed together for other, non-realistic, reasons [...].

These four features are characteristics of the projected hallucinations of the third stage of altered consciousness.<fnref n="21" />

Thus, the cave paintings tell the story of the shamanic journey inwards and trance, whose third and final stage can include the transformation into a therianthrope. Accordingly, I would like to dwell briefly on one specific therianthrope cave painting: the theriomorph sorcerer/shaman in the cave of Trois frères (Ariège, Pyrenees France), dating back to ca. 14000 BP. This awesome image merges together a male human form with parts of different animals. In several of his books, the cultural historian Joseph Campbell, goes back time and again to the description and interpretation of this very same painting which deserves to be quoted in full. First and foremost, Campbell remarks that the sorcerer towers over the paintings of several animals in the cave of Trois Frères:

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Ibid., 23.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Ibid., 92.</footnote>
Above them all [other animal paintings], predominant – at the far end of
the sanctuary, some fifteen feet above the level of the floor, in a craggy,
rocky apse – watching, peering at the visitor with penetrating eyes, is the
now famous ‘Sorcerer of Trois Frères.’ Presiding impressively over the
animals collected there in incredible numbers, he is poised in profile in a
dancing movement that is similar, [...], to a step in the cakewalk; but the
antlered head is turned to face the room. The prickled ears are those of a
stag; the round eyes suggest an owl; the full beard descending to the deep
animal chest is that of a man, as are likewise the dancing legs; the
apparition has the bushily tail of a wolf or wild horse, and the position of
the prominent sexual organ, placed beneath the tail, is that of feline species
– perhaps a lin. The hands are paws of a bear. The figure is two and a half
feet high, fifteen inches across. [...]. Moreover, it is the only picture in the
whole sanctuary bearing paint – black paint – which gives it an accent
stronger than all the rest. <fnref n="22" />

There have been many interpretations of this painting, starting from Abbé Breuil, who first studied it and classified it as a sorcerer, later considering it a god or spirit,<fnref n="23" /> an interpretation Campbell endorses by stating that the sorcerer is “a manifestation of a god.”<fnref n="24" /> In Campbell’s interpretation, the transformation into an animal, and therefore becoming the Other, implies a way to live in harmony with this Other by de-centering the attention from what is solely human. However, the crucial point is that, if one follows this interpretation, the animals remain the Other, while humans make an intellectual effort “to become linked psychologically to the task of sharing the wilderness with these beings.”<fnref n="25" /> Campbell’s interpretation suggests that humans in the Upper Paleolithic were resorting to sympathetic magic to gain control over their hunting, which assumes a vertical relationship between humans and animals, with humans striving to control animals and harness their power.

<footnote n="22">²² Joseph Campbell, *The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology* 4 vols. (London: Secker & Warburg 1960), vol. I, 309-310.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Ibid., 310 and annexed sources.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Ibid., 311.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Joseph Campbell, *The Hero with a Thousand Faces* (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2004 [1st ed. 1949]), 361.</footnote>
However, the interpretation of this therianthrope painting as the third phase of
the shamanic trance could be the clue suggesting that Upper Paleolithic humans
placed themselves in a horizontal relationship with animals. If they were indeed
performing the shamanic rites to communicate with another world, they must
have recognized that their own powers were insufficient, because they “conceived
their own humanity as one of the multiple manifestations of the forces in action,
on an equal footing with the animals.”<fnref n="26" /> Not only our ancestors were not the
strongest beings of the time; they were also very much aware of the possibility of
becoming a prey. To achieve their goals, they needed to attain a state of wholeness;
thus, they had to become one with the animals, whom they regarded not only as a
source of power, but also as an integral element that completes a whole. Thus,
humans were placing themselves in a horizontal relationship with animals, rather
than in a hierarchical one.

This same horizontal relationship possibly persisted in the human approach to
animals also after the Upper Paleolithic, namely during the period archaeologists
have labeled pre-pottery Neolithic (10000-8000 years BP) in the Fertile Crescent
(including roughly contemporary Southern Turkey, northern Iraq, Israel,
Lebanon and Syria) and more precisely in Göbekli Tepe (Southeastern Anatolian
region, Sanliurfa, Turkey), a site excavated from 1995 by the German archaeologist
Klaus Schmidt and dating back to 10000 BP, when humans were still hunters and
gatherers. The archaeological excavations brought to light several enclosures
consisting of a succession of T-shaped pillars, which were not merely structural
components of a building but rather formed the core of the enclosure.<fnref n="27" /> These
pillars showcased many engravings depicting animals, including large felines—
possibly lions—bulls, aurochs, gazelles, wild boars, snakes—possibly vipers—
foxes, rams, cranes, spiders and possibly even insects—such as the poisonous
scolopendra. Additionally, there were some “abstract” H-form pictograms.
Schmidt suggests that the site had a primarily religious purpose, possibly serving
as a sanctuary, that held immense significance for its builders.<fnref n="28" /> He has proposed

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Serra, *Sapiens animalis*, 21 (Translation of the Author).</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Klaus Schmidt, *Sie bauten die ersten Tempel*, (München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2006), French translation by Thérèse Guiot-Houdart, *Le premier temple. Göbekli Tepe* (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2015), 169 (all the quotes from this book are translated by the Author).</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Schmidt, *Le premier temple*, 147 and 158.</footnote>
a tentative, yet still not final, interpretation of these T-shaped pillars as
anthropomorphic beings, but he remains cautious and refrains from drawing
definitive conclusions. In his interpretive effort, he has linked together the T-
shaped pillars, the animal engravings, and the abstract symbols. Importantly, he
excludes the possibility that these representations were of hunting prey, given that
most of the animals depicted on the T-shaped pillars were not typically hunted.
Then, he returns to the interpretation of Upper Paleolithic cave paintings as
pictograms used in shamanic rituals, for specific purposes and initiation rites. He
draws parallels between these cave paintings and the T-shaped pillars adorned with
animal engravings at Göbekli Tepe. As a result, he concludes:

The message of the signs and images of Göbekli Tepe, when compared to cave paintings, remains just as obscure to us. Nevertheless, these figures are presented in a highly sophisticated and completely unexpected form until very recently. It is certain that they served as mnemonic devices to transmit knowledge of the utmost importance for the culture of their creators over long periods of time. If that were not the case, they would not have taken such care and effort to execute them as we see them, nor would they have provided them with such impressive monumental structures as places of worship.<fnref n="29" />

The most captivating interpretive hypothesis Schmidt outlines is primarily based on postulating some sort of continuity between Upper Paleolithic cave art, the art at Göbekli Tepe art and the subsequent cultures:

It is certain that at Göbekli Tepe, the people of the early Neolithic period had not only monumental architecture but also a significant repertoire of symbols and a sophisticated graphic language through which they could formulate messages for their contemporaries and pass them on to future generations. [...].

The rich and almost exuberant visual world of the early Neolithic, perhaps
still illuminated by the light of campfires from the glacial age, may well

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Ibid., 296.</footnote>
have enriched the culture of the following millennia as well – [...] – with motifs drawn from the timeless heritage of humanity.<fnref n="30" />

When Neolithic people developed their cultural world and expressed their cultural memory<fnref n="31" /> through pictograms, animals were once again with them, surrounding them, and potentially contributing to make them whole beings for their shamanic rites. The discussion as to when this cultural perspective shifted—was it the discovery of agriculture as so many scholars suggest?—will not be addressed here. I shall, however, conclude this paragraph by quoting and discussing two later and written sources, which indicate that humans still preserved some fragmented memory of their connection to animals, although by then they looked at such a descent with an uneasy mind.

The first source is the *Gilgamesh Epic*, with its earliest identifiable Sumerian texts date back to the mid-third millennium BP. <fnref n="32" /> I shall here refer to the later Akkadian version (1200-1000 BP) and focus on Enkidu, Gilgamesh's faithful friend and servant, described as “the wild man brought up by the animals.” <fnref n="33" /> Enkidu appears to be an original character since Sumerian literature bears no trace of him.<fnref n="34" /> This is a story that seems to suggest some awareness, if not of a human lineage from animals, at least of an original commonality with them. A goddess created Enkidu to temper Gilgamesh's uncontrolled energy and strength by becoming his companion in heroic deeds. She molded him from a pinch of clay in the form of a man but with the appearance and behavior of an animal:

All his body is matted with hair,
He is adorned with tresses like a woman:
The locks of his hair grows as thickly as Nissaba's,
He knows not at all a people nor even a country.
He was clad in a garment like Šakkan's,

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Ibid., 302-303.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ On resorting to Jan Assman's idea of cultural memory to interpret Göbekli Tepe monuments, Ibid., 285-287.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² Accordingly, see Andrew R. George, *The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic*, Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Texts, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), vol. I, 4-5.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ Ibid., 20.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Ibid.</footnote>
Feeding on grass with the very gazelles.
Jostling at the water-hole with the herd,
He enjoyed the water with animals.<fnref n="35" />

Despite being brought into existence and mold by a goddess, Enkidu does not bear any resemblance to the divine image. His body is “matted with hair,”<fnref n="36" /> concealed beneath a layer of hair, it resembles that of a man but also evokes the likeness of an animal covered in fur. Furthermore, he does not belong to any specific community or nation but resides among the undistinguished wild herd, which means that he also behaves like an animal. To facilitate his transformation into a complete human, a hunter devises a scheme in which Enkidu engages in a sexual encounter with Šamhat the harlot:

After he was sated with her delights,
He turned his face toward his herd.
The gazelles saw Enkidu and they started running,
The animals of the wild moved away from his person.
Enkidu had defiled his body so pure,
His legs stood still, though his herd was on the move.
Enkidu was diminished, his running was not as before,
But he had *reason*, he [was] wide of understanding.
He came back and sat down at the feet of the harlot,
Watching the harlot, (observing) her features.
Then his ears heard what the [harlot] was speaking,
[as the harlot] said to him, to Enkidu:
‘you are handsome, Enkidu, you are just like a god,
Why do you roam the wild with the animals?
Come, I will lead you to Uruk-the- Sheepfold,
To the sacred temple, the dwelling of Anu and Ištar!
[...] Enkidu said to her, to the harlot:

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Ibid., 545.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Ibid.</footnote>
‘Come Šamhat, take me along

To the sacred temple, the holy dwelling of Anu and Ištar.<fnref n="37" />

The sexual awakening makes possible Enkidu’s transition from his ambiguous blend of human and animal appearance and behavior to a state of humanity. While he loses some of his physical strength, he gains reason and, for the first time, the reader hears him speak and express a desire to acquaint himself with life in the city of Uruk and its religious customs. Consequently, he embraces the ties of human society and forsakes the company of the wild herd. Furthermore, Šamhat reveals to him his true nature, proclaiming, “You are just like a god,” thereby instilling in him an awareness of his own humanity that sets him apart from his animalistic nature. From this point forward, the animal nature becomes a potential risk, something to which humans can be drawn back, sometimes in the aftermath of a great traumatism, as it is the case with Gilgamesh himself. In fact, after the death of Enkidu, he becomes acutely aware that the same fate awaits him too. Gripped by a fear of death, Gilgamesh embarks on a journey through the wilderness,<fnref n="38" /> venturing so far that he is asked: “[(Why is it) your face is burnt [by frost and sunshine,] / [and] you roam the wild [got up like a lion?].”<fnref n="39" />

In a later biblical source, being drawn back into animality is depicted as a divine punishment, as exemplified in the story of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar found in *Daniel* 4: 28-33:

27. The king spoke, and said: “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built for a royal dwelling-place, by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?” 28 While the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven: “O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: the kingdom is departed from thee. 29 And thou shalt be driven from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field; thou shalt be made to eat grass as oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee; until thou know that the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will.” 30 The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar;

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Ibid., 549 and 551.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Ibid., 667.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Ibid., 681.</footnote>
and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was
wet with the dew of heaven, till his hair was grown like eagles' feathers,
and his nails like birds' claws. 31 "And at the end of the days I
Nebuchadnezzar lifted up mine eyes unto heaven, and mine
understanding returned unto me, and I blessed the Most High, and I
praised and honoured Him that liveth for ever; [...]. 33 At the same time
mine understanding returned unto me; and for the glory of my kingdom,
my majesty and my splendour returned unto me; and my ministers and
my lords sought unto me; and I was established in my kingdom, and
surpassing greatness was added unto me."<fnref n="40" />

In the text of *Genesis* 1: 26, man is depicted as being created in the image of God, and only God has the power to alter this status, even if temporarily, as a means to punish the sin of arrogance. However, in the case of Nebuchadnezzar, God does not directly transform him into an animal; rather, He pulls him back towards animal nature and behavior, reminiscent of the origins of Enkidu. It is as if the texts of the Gilgamesh Epic and the Bible were preserving some distant and fragmented memory of humanity's descent from and commonality with animals. In the Gilgamesh Epic, this commonality is portrayed as something that must be left behind and transcended in order to become a part of human society. In the Hebrew Bible this memory has taken on a more unsettling connotation, since reverting to animalistic nature is the result of sin and subsequent divine punishment, something to be strenuously avoided through great spiritual effort. At this point, humanity and animality have undeniably parted ways. Due to space constraints in this introduction, it is not possible to trace and discuss all the phases and stages of the debate about human-animal difference in Western culture. However, before moving on to presenting the essays published in this issue, it is worth briefly addressing the relatively new field of Human-Animal Studies, also known as Animal Studies. This field offers insights into how it approaches the question of human-animal difference and the fresh perspectives it brings to the

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ English translation The JPS Bible is available at https://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pto.htm.
Accessed June 5, 2023. Accordingly, see also Peter Joshua Atkins, *The Animalising Affliction of Nebuchdnezzar in Daniel 4 Reading across the Human-Animal Boundary* (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), Chapter 3 “The Question of Metamorphosis in the Text of Daniel 4,” 53-108.</footnote>
table, especially in relation with Jewish Studies and Jewish and Modern Hebrew
Literature.

The Reception of Human-Animal Studies in Jewish Studies and in Jewish and
Hebrew Literature: An Overview of Current Scholarship

Nowadays, there are multiple definitions of Human-Animal Studies that
primarily focus on the interaction between humans and animals, as well as the
social and cultural construction of animals<fnref n="41" /> in the past, present, and potentially
the future. <fnref n="42" /> This field of study, particularly the subfield known as Critical
Animal Studies, also examines how the human-animal hierarchy is perpetuated in
human relationships, leading to the perpetuation of inequalities. <fnref n="43" /> Specifically, it
explores questions such as how and why animals are represented and
conceptualized in diverse ways across different human cultures and societies
worldwide, and how they are imagined, experienced, and given significance. <fnref n="44" />
This intersection is particularly relevant to literary studies. Human-Animal
Studies draws upon various disciplines, including sociology, philosophy, history,
and literature, to provide depth and understanding to the questions it deals with.
As Margo DeMello puts it “HAS scholars are drawn from a wide variety of distinct
disciplines (interdisciplinary), and HAS research uses data, theories, and
scholarship from a variety of disciplines (multidisciplinary).”<fnref n="45" />

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Human-Animal studies are “an interdisciplinary field that explores the spaces that animals occupy in human social and cultural worlds and the interactions humans have with them. Central to this field is an exploration of the ways in which animal lives intersect with human societies.” Margo DeMello, *Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies* (New York-Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2021, [1st ed. 2012]), 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² “Animal Studies engages the many ways that human individuals and cultures are now interacting with and exploring other-than-human animals, in the past have engaged the living beings beyond our own species, and in the future might develop ways of living in a world shared with other animals.” Paul Waldau, *Animal Studies: An Introduction* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ Dawne McCance, *Critical Animal Studies: An Introduction* (Albany: State University of New York, 2013).</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Garry Marvin and Susan McHugh, eds., *Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies* (London-New York: Routledge, 2014).</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ DeMello, *Animals and Society*, 7.</footnote>
Two points deserve to be highlighted. Firstly, the field of Human-Animal Studies finds its precursors and maîtres à penser among philosophers and historians who emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Notable works include Peter Singer's *Animal Liberation* (1975) and Tom Regan's *The Case for Animal Rights* (1983, 2004). These influential texts, accompanied by critical contributions from sociology, anthropology, psychology,<fnref n="46" /> and cultural studies,<fnref n="47" /> have supported the development of Human-Animal Studies. Thus, the origins of this field can be traced back to philosophical, historical, sociological, and anthropological reflections, that can go together with an enhanced sensitivity for these themes extending to activism for the protection of animal rights.<fnref n="48" /> These approaches start from the assumption that “being an animal in human society has little to do with biology and almost everything to do with human culture,”<fnref n="49" /> and that scholars, when attempting to define what is human and what is animal, should aim to deconstruct the societal and cultural construction of animals.<fnref n="50" /> In the late 1990s and early 2000s, literary disciplines joined the conversation and started exploring the question of animals, with a focus on challenging the distinction between humans and animals and shifting the centrality away from human beings in various ways—such as de-centering the focus to the value of animal being, downplaying human prominence, blurring the boundaries, and questioning the assumptions involved.<fnref n="51" />

However, moving on to the second point, when it comes to defining what falls within the realm of human and animal, the integration of perspectives from the hard sciences becomes crucial, even within the field of literature. For instance, the advancements in neuroscience studying language development among animals have brought forth new insights. The concept of consilience, which aims to reconnect the humanities and the hard sciences, was proposed by Edward O.

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Ibid., 7-9 and annexed bibliography.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Annie Potts and Philip Armstrong, “Interbreeding Cultural Studies and Human-Animal Studies,” in *Teaching the Animal: Human-Animal Studies across the Disciplines*, ed. Margo DeMello (Brooklyn: Lantern Books, 2010), 3-9.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ DeMello, *Animals and Society*, 7 and 18.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ Ibid., II.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ In DeMello’s formulation: “to unpack the various layers of meaning that we have imposed onto animal bodies and try to see the animal within.” Ibid., 17.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Kenneth Shapiro, “Human-Animal Studies: Remembering the Past, Celebrating the Present; Troubling the Future,” *Society and Animals* 28 (2020): 797-833, 808.</footnote>
Wilson, a myrmecologist and the founder of sociobiology, in the late 1970s. Sociobiology explores the biological foundations of social behavior,<fnref n="52" /> seeking “to grasp human nature objectively, to explore it to the depths scientifically, and to comprehend its ramifications by cause-and-effect explanations leading from biology into culture.”<fnref n="53" /> According to this viewpoint, human nature emerges from the interplay between genes and culture. Hence, both the sciences and humanities share a common challenge:

> We know that virtually all of human behavior is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission. The question remaining is how biology and culture interact, and in particular how they interact across all societies to create the commonalities of human nature. What, in final analysis, joins the deep, mostly genetic history of the species as a whole to the more recent cultural history of its far-flung societies? That, in my opinion, is the nub of the relationship between the two cultures. It can be stated as a problem to be solved, the central problem of the social sciences and humanities, and simultaneously one of the great remaining problems of the natural sciences.<fnref n="54" />

This approach is not reductionist but interactionist,<fnref n="55" /> recognizing that “the knowledge of the genes or even the circuitry of the brain alone” cannot fully predict the complexity of human evolution, which “can only be adduced by joining the relevant data of cognitive psychology, the social sciences, and the humanities with those of biology.”<fnref n="56" /> More recently, Roberto Marchesini, who

<footnote n="52">⁵² Edward O. Wilson, *Sociobiology: the New Synthesis 25th Anniversary Edition* (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2000 [1st ed. 1975]), 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ Edward O. Wilson, “Sociobiology at Century’s End,” introduction to Wilson, *Sociobiology*, v-viii, vii. The introduction has been written in 1999.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ Edward O. Wilson, *Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge* (New York: Rand House, 1998), 137. See also Edward O. Wilson, “Foreword from the Scientific Side,” in *The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative*, eds. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2005), vii-xi, viii.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ Wilson, “Sociobiology at the Century’s End,” vi.</footnote>

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ Ibid., x.</footnote>
has a background in veterinary medicine, offers a theoretical definition of Human-
Animal Studies as “a significant event within the analysis of human-animal
relationships, fully integrated into the exploration of animal alterity initiated by
Darwin’s evolutionary theories and continued through research in behavioral and
cognitive sciences and animal bioethics.” This definition adds a historical depth to
the field, tracing its origins back to the nineteenth century when Darwin published
*On the Origin of Species*. Additionally, as Marchesini emphasizes, Human-
Animal Studies is a multidisciplinary field that bridges the natural sciences and
humanities.<fnref n="57" />

The field of Human-Animal Studies (HAS) began to flourish in the late 1970s and 1980s primarily in English-speaking countries and has since gained significant momentum. Many introductions, handbooks, and companions to Human-Animal Studies have been published, showcasing its growth, diversification, and establishment as an academic discipline.<fnref n="58" /> Today, the field is increasingly

<footnote n="57">57 Roberto Marchesini, “Animal Studies,” *Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani*, IX Appendice (2015), accessed June 3, 2023, https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/animal-studies_%28Enciclopedia-Italiana%29 (Translation of the Author).</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ They have begun to appear from the 2010s and onwards: DeMello, ed., *Teaching the Animal*, DeMello, *Animals and Society*; Aaron Gross and Anne Vallely, eds., *Animals and the Human Imagination: A Companion to Animal Studies* (New York-Chichester-West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2012); Waldau, *Animal Studies*, Marvin and McHugh, eds., *Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies*, Linda Kalof, ed., *The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach, and Ron Broglio, eds., *The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies* (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018); Mieke Roscher, André Krebber, and Brett Mizelle, eds., *Handbook of Historical Animals Studies* (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2021); Matthew R. Calarco, *Animal Studies: The Key Concepts* (London-New York: Routledge, 2021). Concerning the state of the art in France, see the excellent work by Anne Simon, *Une bête entre les lignes. Essai de zoopoétique* (Marseille: Wildproject, 2021), as well as the website managed by the research team she directs https://animots.hypotheses.org/ (accessed June 3, 2023) that provides an overall picture of the research activities in French Universities as well as a network of research institutes on the subject. Another seminal publication in French is Emilie Dardenne, *Introduction aux études animales* (Paris: PUF, 2020, [2nd ed. 2022]). Emilie Dardenne has also conceived and launched a Diplôme Universitaire Animaux et societé, at the University Rennes 2 for the academic year 2019-2020, https://www.univ-rennes2.fr/article/animaux-societe-formation-unique-france (accessed June 3, 2023). See also Louisa Mackenzie and Stephanie Posthumus, eds., *French Thinking about Animals* (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015). In Italy, it is important to mention the following influential works: Giorgio Agamben, *L'aperto, l'uomo e l'animale* (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002); Roberto Marchesini, *Fondamenti di zooantropologia*, vol. 1 *La zooantropologia teorica* (Bologna: Apeiron, 2014), vol. 2 *La zooantropologia applicata* (Bologna:</footnote>
recognized worldwide, with dedicated courses and positions available in universities and institutions.<fnref n="59" />

In Israel, Human-Animal Studies was established in 1996 by Professor Joseph Terkel from the Zoology Department of Tel Aviv University, who founded the Animals & Society Unit with a particular focus on Animal Assisted Therapy and the broader issue of human-animal relations.<fnref n="60" /> This research unit organized an annual conference and participates in various other conferences, hosting their own panels. They also published an academic journal titled *Hayot we-hevrah (Animals and Society)* until November 2016. In an article discussing the state of the field in Israel, Hirsch-Matsioulas and other authors highlighted that Israel is a nation with a significant emphasis on veganism and animal rights. However, Human-Animal Studies has not (yet?) fully flourished as an independent discipline within Israeli academia. The Animals and Society Unit, which operated independently, ceased to exist as a separate entity between 2013-2015. It then joined the Israeli Anthropological Association, under whose auspices it continues its work.<fnref n="61" />

Actually, the Israeli emphasis on veganism and animal rights possibly stems also from *tza'ar ba'le hayyim*, (literally, animal sorrow or animal suffering), an issue the Jewish tradition has long addressed to condemn cruelty towards animals. This moral imperative has led to appeals for vegetarianism throughout the 20th century.<fnref n="62" /> Consequently, *tza'ar ba'le hayyim* can be viewed as a moral concern,

Oasi Alberto Perdisa, 2005); Roberto Marchesini and Sabrina Tonutti, *Manuale di zooantropologia* (Roma: Meltemi, 2007).

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ For an overview of the growth of the field with facts and figures until 2010 see Kenneth Shapiro and Margo DeMello, “The State of Human-Animal Studies,” *Society and Animals* 18, no. 3 (2010): 307-318; Concerning the degree programs offered worldwide see Shapiro, “Human-Animal Studies,” accessed June 5, 2023, https://www.animalsandsociety.org/resources/resources-for-students/degree-programs/. Generally speaking, the webpage of the Animals and Society Institute remains a primary instrument of information https://www.animalsandsociety.org/. Accessed June 3, 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ For all the facts and figures see Orit Hirsch-Matsioulas, Anat Ben-Yonatan, Limor Chen, Yaara Sadetzki, and Dafna Shir-Vertesh, “Human-Animal Studies in Israel: A Field in the Making,” *Society and Animals* (2022), 1-20.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Hirsch-Matsioulas and others, “Human-Animal Studies in Israel,” 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² Concerning this issue, I refer the reader to two articles published here: Piergabriele Mancuso, “*Tza’ar ba’ale hayyim* Jewish animal rights advocacy and vegetarianism, from Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Ha-Kohen Kook’s *A Vision of Vegetarianism and Peace to Jonathan Safran Foer*,” and annexed sources, and Naama Harel, “Kids For Calves: Children Against Slaughter in Fin-de-siècle Jewish Literature,” especially pp. 47-49, and annexed sources.</footnote>
paving the way and facilitating the reception and acceptance of perspectives from Human-Animal Studies within the realm of Jewish Studies and Jewish and Hebrew literature. The alignment of these fields with the ethical considerations of animal welfare adds coherence and relevance to the exploration of human-animal relationships. Furthermore, it is important to note that the presence of animals has long been recognized and explored within the field of Jewish Studies, with several significant works that may not strictly align with the methodologies of Human-Animal Studies but nonetheless contribute to the understanding of the human-animal relationship. These works span various disciplines including art history, cultural history, and philosophy.<fnref n="63" />

As for the intersection of Human-Animal Studies and Jewish Studies, there is a notable publication that deserves attention: *Human Beings and Other Animals in Historical Perspective*, was published in 2007 by the Animals & Society Unit of the University of Tel Aviv, as previously mentioned.<fnref n="64" /> This collaborative work delves into the historical perspectives and approaches towards animals in thought, literature, and art. The book is organized into four parts: a comprehensive macro-historical introduction, the treatment of animals in Antiquity (including Greece,

<footnote n="63">⁶³ See for example Marc Michael Epstein, *Dream of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature* (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1997); Pillip Ackerman-Lieberman, and Rakefet Zalashik, eds., *A Jew's Best Friend? The Image of the Dog throughout Jewish History* (Brighton-Portland-Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, 2013); Yaacov Shavit and Yehudah Reinharz, eds., *Hamoriyut – Massa‘ be-‘iqvot ha-hamor. Mitologiyah, allegoriyah, mitos we-cliché* (*The Donkey: A Cultural History. A Journey through Myth, Allegory, Symbol and Cliché*) (Jerusalem: The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2014); Jay Geller, *Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews* (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). As far as Jewish philosophy is concerned, it is impossible not to mention the seminal contributions of Kalman P. Bland. Kalman P. Bland, “Construction of Animals in Medieval Jewish Philosophy,” in *New Directions in Jewish Philosophy*, eds. Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 175-204; Bland, “Animal Fables and Medieval Jewish Philosophy,” in *Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Its Literary Forms*, eds. Aaron W. Hughes and James T. Robinson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019), 8-39; Bland, “Human-animal Dualism in Modernity and Premodern Jewish Thought,” in *Light against Darkness; Dualism in Ancient Mediterranean Religion and the Contemporary World*, eds. Armin Lange and others (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 277-282; Bland, “Cain, Abel, and Brutism,” in *Scriptural Exegesis: The Shapes of Culture and the Religiovus Imagination. Essays in Honour of Michael Fishbane*, eds. Deborah A. Green and Laura S. Lieber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 165-185.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ Binyamin Arbel, Yosef Terkel and Sofia Menache, eds., *Bne adam we-hayyot aherot badespeqlariya ha-historit (Human Beings and Other Animals in Historical Perspective)* (Jerusalem: Karmel, 2007).</footnote>
Rome, and the Ancient Near East), the examination of animals within monotheistic cultures, including a dedicated article on the Renaissance, and finally, the exploration of human-animal relationships in modern Western culture.

The exploration of otherness and its construction, blurring, and potential rejection establishes a captivating link between Jewish Studies and Human-Animal Studies. This connection arises from the recognition that both fields engage with questions surrounding the boundaries of identity, the categorization of beings, and the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. The study of otherness in Jewish Studies involves examining the ways in which Jewish thought, culture, and literature grapple with notions of difference, marginalization, and alterity. Similarly, Human-Animal Studies explores the complexities of human-animal relationships, the social and cultural construction of animals, and the implications for ethics and social justice. By recognizing the parallels between these two fields, scholars have discovered fruitful avenues for interdisciplinary dialogue and inquiry. They explore how the construction of otherness intersects with the delineation of human and animal identities, challenging established boundaries and inviting critical reflection on the hierarchical relationships between humans and animals.

Consequently, it is not surprising that many studies in this area explore both themes and employ diverse methodological approaches. From a philosophical perspective, Andrew Benjamin delves into the interplay between the figures of the Jew and the animal in the Western philosophical tradition, examining their relationship to notions of universality.<fnref n="65" /> Ken Stone demonstrates the relevance of animals and perspectives from Human-Animal Studies in enhancing biblical interpretation. He explores various aspects of animal presence in the Hebrew Bible, including the physicality of animals, domesticated animals with a particular focus on dogs and their liminal status in biblical texts, sacrificial practices, animal ethics, and the conceptualization of wild animals.<fnref n="66" /> Hannah M. Strømmen draws inspiration from Jacques Derrida, whose exploration of the animal question

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ Andrew Benjamin, *Of Jews and Other Animals* (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).</footnote>

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ Ken Stone, *Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018).</footnote>
guides her in examining how the Bible portrays the relationships between humans, animals, and the divine.<fnref n="67" />

Two recent works have shed light on the anthropocentric nature of Talmudic texts, revealing how they shape and define the relationships between humans and non-humans. The first work focuses specifically on the Babylonian Talmudic tractate Avodah Zarah, examining how it addresses the intricate dynamics between Jews and non-Jews within a Talmudic framework that intertwines human, animal, and spiritual realms. This study reveals how the Talmudic anthropology blurs the boundaries of humanity and explores the interconnectedness of these different categories.<fnref n="68" /> The second work takes a broader approach, delving into the entirety of the Babylonian Talmud to uncover hidden animal subjectivities embedded within the text. By bringing these overlooked perspectives to light, the study offers fresh insights into the attitudes and approaches of the Rabbis towards animals. It seeks to challenge conventional interpretations and provide a nuanced understanding of the Talmudic engagement with the non-human world.<fnref n="69" />

The scholarly attention devoted to the presence of animals in Jewish Studies can be acknowledged even prior to the emergence of Human-Animal Studies, and this observation holds even more significance in the field of Jewish and Modern Hebrew Literature. Within this domain, numerous articles and book chapters have been dedicated to exploring the representations and symbolic meanings of animals in literary texts, often taking on metaphorical or allegorical dimensions. Notably, there have been extensive interpretations proposed for two *animaux celèbres*: Mendele Mokher Sefarim's mare and Agnon's dog Balak.

As far as the intersection of the fields of Human-Animal Studies and of Jewish and Hebrew literature is concerned, Noam Pines and Naam Harel have both made a

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ Hannah M. Strømmen, *Biblical Animality after Jacques Derrida* (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2018). Concerning the Hebrew Bible and Human-Animal studies see also Philip Sherman, “The Hebrew Bible and the Animal Turn,” in *Currents in Biblical Research* 19, no. 1 (2020): 36-63.</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ Mira Beth Wasserman, *Jews, Gentiles, and other Animals: The Talmud after the Humanities* (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).</footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ Beth A. Berkowitz, *Animals and Animality in Babylonian Talmud* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).</footnote>
significant contribution,<fnref n="70" /> with each publishing a monograph on the subject. Noam Pines explores the relations between humans and animals in Jewish literature in his book *The Infrahuman—Animality in Modern Jewish Literature*. He introduces the concept of “the infrahuman” as a figurative construction that albeit remaining “suspended and unresolved,” highlights the complex interplay between figure and experience in relation to Jewish identity. This construction of the infrahuman extends beyond the Jewish context and is associated with figurative representations of animality, “a theological figure of exclusion from a state of humanity and Christianity alike.”<fnref n="71" /> Pines examines the works of various authors, including Mendele Mokher Sefarim, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Franz Kafka, Agnon, Paul Celan, and Heinrich Heine, through this interpretive lens. Naama Harel takes a different approach, focusing specifically on Franz Kafka’s animals. She challenges the notion of specific allegorical interpretations and instead employs a zoopoetic approach that critically examines the dynamics between humans and animals and explores the nonhuman animal experience.<fnref n="72" /> Harel emphasizes Kafka’s species fluidity, which undermines the

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Naama Harel, “Antropomorfism bein mada’ le-sifrut” (Anthropomorphism: Between Science and Literature), *Animals and Society: The Israeli Journal for the Connection between People and Animals* 25 (2003): 88-98; Harel “Shuvan shel ha-hayyot ha-ne’edarot: Astrategiot qeri’ah le-alternativiot be-meshale hayyot” (“The Return of the Absent Animals: Alternative Reading Strategies in Animal Stories”), *Animals and Society: The Israeli Journal for the Connection between People and Animals* 32 (Winter 2006): 58-66; Harel, “The Animal Voice behind the Animal Fable,” *Journal for Critical Animal Studies* 7, no. 2 (2009): 9-21.; Harel, “De-allegorizing Kafka’s Ape: Two Animalistic Contexts,” in *Kafka’s Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings*, eds. Marc Lucht and Donna Yarri (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers 2010), 53-66; Harel, “Hemlah ke-lefi ba’le hayyim ba-sifrut ha-tehiyyah” (“Compassion for Animals in the Renaissance of Hebrew Literature”), *Hador: The Hebrew Annual of America* 5 (2012): 60-70; Harel, “Of Cows and Women: The Animalization of Victimized Women in Devorah Baron’s Fiction,” *Proof texts* 37, no. 2 (2019): 243-274; Harel, “Diyoqan ha-rahmaniyyah ke-ne’arah tze’irah: O ha-kelev ha’ivri ha-rishon” (“A Portrait of a Compassionate Young Girl, or the First Hebrew Dog”), *Criticism and Interpretation* 46 (2020): 235-252; Noam Pines, “Life in the Valley: Figures of Dehumanization in Heinrich Heine’s *Prinzessin Sabbat*,” *Proof texts* 33, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 25-47; Pines, “The Love of a Dog: Melancholia in David Vogel’s Before the Dark Gate,” *Jewish Studies Quarterly* 23, no. 2 (2016): 168-190; Pines, “A Radical Advocacy: Suffering Jews and Animals in S.Y. Abramovitsh’s *Di kliatshe*,” *Jewish Social Studies* 23, no. 2 (2018): 24-47.</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ Noam Pines, *The Infrahuman: Animal Poetics in Modern Jewish Literature* (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2018), xii.</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² Naama Harel, *Kafka’s Zoopoetics: Beyond the Human-animal Barrier* (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020), 10.</footnote>
human/animal binary and creates a liminal space described as “humanimal.”<sup>73</sup> These works by Pines and Harel contribute to the broader development of Human-Animal Studies in the context of Jewish and Hebrew literature, expanding our understanding of the intricate relationships between humans and animals and challenging traditional interpretations.

In summary, the intersection of Human-Animal Studies with Jewish Studies and Jewish and Modern Hebrew literature highlights two key aspects: the examination of the otherness of animals in a universal context, challenging anthropocentrism, and the exploration of animal otherness in relation to Jewish otherness. With this in mind, the focus of this collection of articles is to assess the perception of the human-animal difference, or rather the blurred distinction, within Jewish and Hebrew literature.

## The Success of the Donkey, the Persistence of the Ants, the Wickedness of the Wolf and the Defenseless Calves

While introducing the essays featured in this issue of *Quest*, it is evident that at least three of them delve into animals that hold an ancient, extensive, and esteemed literary legacy—the donkey, the ants, and the wolf. These creatures have played a significant role in shaping our understanding of human and animal nature, often portraying humanity in contrast to animality.

As a whole, the essays in this collection exhibit a tendency towards a discourse that combines universality and cultural specificity, with potential for comparative literature analyses. They not only explore the cultural construction and deconstruction of humanity in opposition to animality but also examine the establishment, definition, and subsequent blurring of human and animal spaces, as well as the dynamics of center and periphery, particularly within the Israeli context. I shall present them here in chronological order, commencing with Noam Pines' exploration of *The Merchant of Venice* and concluding with Ilanit ben Dor Derimian and Riki Traum Avidan's essays on Sami Berdugo's novel *Hamor* (*Donkey*, 2019).

<footnote n="73">73 Ibid., 13.</footnote>
Pines’s essay delves into the portrayal of “wolfish” attributes associated with Jewish identity in Shakespeare’s *The Merchant of Venice*, specifically focusing on the character of Shylock. The analysis highlights Shylock’s fluctuation between dog-like, currish, and distinctly wolfish features. Pines argues that by representing Shylock with animalistic qualities, the concept of animality itself becomes unstable, drawing from two different notions of animality rooted in Christian typology and mythical natural history. The intertwining of these ideas carries political, legal, and theological implications.

Moving on, Mancuso’s article revisits the *tza’ar ba’le hayyim* (animal suffering) concept, extensively discussed in Jewish tradition, and examines Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Ha-Kohen Kook’s writings published between 1903 and 1910 in Germany and Switzerland. Kook proposes that meat consumption should be considered only temporarily permissible, advocating for vegetarianism as a preferred choice that “theurgically” aligns with the prophetic vision of a Messianic age characterized by harmony and coexistence among all living beings. Beyond addressing animal suffering, Kook’s arguments aim to safeguard all creatures from unnecessary exploitation. Mancuso demonstrates the significant influence of Kook’s ideas across various branches of Judaism, as his perspective on Jewish vegetarianism offers a more suitable option for adhering to Jewish teachings and principles. A thematic connection arises between Mancuso’s and Naama Harel’s essays, as Harel explores the theme of animal suffering as well. She analyzes several Jewish literary works from the early twentieth century, including Mordecai Ze’ev Feierberg’s “The Calf” (“Ha-’Egel,” 1899), Mendele Mocher Seforim’s “The Calf” (“Dos Kelbl,” 1902), and Sholem Aleichem’s *Motl the Cantor’s Son* (*Motl Peyse dem khazns*, 1907). These works depict children who, unlike adults burdened with anthropocentric biases, exhibit empathy for animal suffering and take an anti-slaughter stance. Harel highlights how these literary portrayals challenge prevailing anthropocentric perspectives.

Moving forward, Anna Lissa’s essay takes a comparative approach, analyzing Yitzhak Orpaz’s novella *Nemalim* (*Ants*, 1968) and Italo Calvino’s novel *La formica Argentina* (*The Argentine Ant*, 1952). Lissa highlights the inherent otherness associated with insects, a radical otherness that typically excludes possibilities of empathy and often portrays insects, including ants despite their extensive literary history, as pests. Using a Human-Animal Studies perspective and
emphasizing the consilience between humanities and sciences, Lissa explores the blurring of boundaries between humans and ants and its relationship to the blurring of human and animal spaces.

Shifting focus, Ilanit ben Dor Derimian and Riki Traum Avidan offer distinct interpretations of Sami Berdugo’s novel *Donkey*. In her essay, Derimian adopts an ecocritical and anthropological viewpoint, examining the various nuances between domestication and wildness. She explores the human-animal distinction and the dynamics of center and periphery in Israel, with the Negev desert representing the periphery. Through the cultural representation of the donkey, Derimian illustrates social change and the reconstruction of local identity. In her essay, Riki Traum Avidan analyzes the donkey as a political metaphor in Berdugo’s novel. She explores the transformation of the donkey from an object to a subject, and argues that the boundaries between the main character and the donkey collapse, liberating a desire for life and affirmation, referred to as “bare life.” Traum interprets the novel as a challenge to fixed boundaries between human and animal, as well as established and fixed sexual identities. The relationship between the main character and the donkey also reflects the problematic dynamics between center and periphery in the Israeli context, with ecological and ecopolitical implications.

In summary, this collection of essays reaffirms the significance of the Human-Animal Studies approach in the realm of Jewish and Modern Hebrew literature. This approach opens up new avenues for interpreting and comprehending both old and contemporary texts, not only as Jewish and Hebrew works but also as contributions to the universal literary heritage. Ultimately, this collection highlights the ongoing relevance of exploring the human-animal dynamic in literature and the interconnectedness of various fields of study.

Finally, as some old manuscripts’ colophons state:

> may no harm befall the authors, not today and not ever,
> until the donkey ascends the ladder
> that Jacob dreamt about.<fnref n="74" />

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Accordingly, see https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2020/03/until-the-donkey-ascends-the-ladder-hebrew-scribal-formulae.html. Accessed, June 3, 2023.</footnote>
**How to quote this article:**

Anna Lissa, “Introduction,” in “Created from Animals: Thinking the Human/Animal Difference in Jewish and Hebrew Literature,” ed. Anna Lissa, *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC* 23, no. 1 (2023), DOI: 10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13900
# A Modern Lycaon: Recalling Ovid's *Metamorphoses*
in *The Merchant of Venice*

by Noam Pines

## Abstract

The article examines the role of “wolvish” characteristics and their association with Jewish identity in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Scholars have long noted the tendency of non-Jewish characters in the play to identify Shylock as canine. But this canine character, although fixed in its essence to Shylock, never remains the same, fluctuating between the various designations of “dog,” “cur,” and “wolf.” The essay argues that whereas the “dog” and “cur” designations function as manifestations of Christian typological thinking, the description of Shylock as a “wolf” belongs in a mythic view of humans and their place in the world. Thus, in The Merchant of Venice it is not only the human-animal distinction that remains unstable, but also the category of the “animal” itself. At stake is the accommodation of two different conceptions of animality: one belonging in Christian typology, and the other rooted in a mythical natural history. The distinction between these different categories, far from being trivial, has political, legal, and theological implications.

## Shylock as a Wolf

### A State of “Nature”

### Conversion and Exception

#### Shylock as a Wolf

Since his appearance in *The Merchant of Venice* in the late sixteenth century, Shylock has remained a paradigmatic “Jewish” figure that continues, even today,
to haunt the Western cultural imagination. Shylock is a distinctly “modern” figure
in the sense that, as a Jew, he lives among the Gentiles without renouncing his
religious faith and ethnic identity. This state of affairs, not generally available to
Jews in medieval Europe, is presented in the play as the outcome of Venetian civil
law which protects the commercial rights of both parties in a business transaction,
whether they be citizens or legal aliens. As Julia Lupton noted, when two parties
sign a bond or contract in the “limited yet economically essential public space
defined by ‘trade and profit’,”<fnref n="1" /> it does not matter whether they are Jewish or
Christian, Venetian or foreign. In this sense, Venetian civil law functions in the
play as a distinctly modern institution, an early form of capitalism in which the
legality of the business contract overrides the authority of sovereign decision.
Thus, although Shylock’s civic liberties remain sharply circumscribed in the
Venetian polity—he is neither a citizen nor a legal resident—his money lending
activities nevertheless place him at the heart of Venetian economy, albeit as a barely
suffered foreign element.<fnref n="2" /> In this context, Shylock’s unusual yet perfectly legal
demand to be paid his bond in human flesh poses an unprecedented challenge for
the Venetian polity: namely, how to suppress the cannibalistic potential inherent
in capitalism itself, and personified by the “Jew” with his unreasonable demands
and merciless business ethics. When considered in these terms, “Jewish”
moneylending in *The Merchant of Venice* does not only portend the subversion
of Christian morality by new economic means. The problem that Shylock poses
for the Venetian polity is fundamentally a political one, since by virtue of a
contractual bond that grants him the right of decision over the life of a Venetian
citizen, the “Jew” effectively undermines the sovereign power of the State. To be
sure, Shylock’s cannibalistic contract does not invalidate capitalism as such, but
instead it exposes and isolates the dangerous elements inherent in nascent capitalist
economy. As David Nirenberg observed, throughout the sixteenth century parties
to such contracts were free to specify any mutually agreed-on penalty for
nonperformance, with the result that “such bonds enabled penalties independent
of—and sometimes grossly incommensurable with—the value of the debt.”<fnref n="3" /> Thus

<footnote n="1">¹ Julia R. Lupton, *Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 88.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Ibid., 75.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ David Nirenberg, *Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition* (New York: Norton, 2013), 284-285.</footnote>
the debt contract raised difficult questions concerning economic and political life
in Shakespeare’s time:

Are there limits to the freedoms, the autonomies of soul and body, that
can be alienated through contract? What legal practices, what ways of
writing and reading contract and law, can help us determine these limits?
[...] Shakespeare pushed these questions to their limits, not only by staging
them as “Jewish questions” but also by posing the legal alienation of self
in the extreme form of a carnivorous contract, one that explicitly equates
three thousand ducats of Shylock’s gold with (on default) one pound of
his Christian debtor’s flesh.<fnref n="4" />

Shylock's carnivorous contract is evidently “Jewish” because, not unlike the rite of
circumcision, it introduces a covenant for which one is required to pay with one's
own flesh.<fnref n="5" /> In this sense, Shylock's contract functions as a “limit case” of
capitalism: a way of exploring the extreme implications of a society based on
exchange.<fnref n="6" /> More fundamentally, however, Shylock's business contract only makes
use of capitalism in order to attain a goal that has little to do with economic profit.
Instead, Shylock's insistence on the written word of the bond is presented in the
play as part of a “Jewish” vengeful, cannibalistic desire for Christian flesh—a desire
that, as Kathleen Biddick noted, belongs in the “bundles of fantasies that bind
‘Christian-ness’ to supersessionary notions” and that have determined the role of
the “Jew” in the Christian typological imaginary.<fnref n="7" /> By Shakespeare’s time, the
representation of Jews as cannibals lusting for Christian flesh and blood already
had a long cultural history, with allegations of Jewish cannibalism surfacing in
Europe during the course of the thirteenth century. These allegations centered on
the so-called “Jewish” practice of ritual murder of children, more commonly
known as the “blood libel,” which engaged the attention of the highest authorities

<footnote n="4">⁴ Ibid., 285.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ For a discussion of circumcision in *The Merchant of Venice*, see also James Shapiro, *Shakespeare and the Jews* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 113-130; Lupton, *Citizen-Saints*, 87-101.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Nirenberg, *Anti-Judaism*, 286.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Kathleen Biddick, *The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History* (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 1-21.</footnote>
in Europe at the time, and helped transform the perception of Jews, as Robert
Chazan noted, “from a theologically significant minority into a mortal danger,
against which the Christian majority had to organize in self-defense.”<fnref n="8" /> In an
important study, Kenneth Stow has shown how the “Jewish” cannibalistic threat
to Christian society came to be closely associated in the Christian typological
imaginary with the figure of the dog. According to Stow, the dog-figure was often
invoked in reference to the desecration of the eucharistic Host. Referring to Jesus’
words in Matthew 15:26, “it is not meet to take the children’s bread and cast it to
the dogs,” early Christian commentators interpreted the verse as heralding a
supersessionary fulfillment in which the historical roles of “dogs” and “children”
were reversed. However, as Stow points out, the historical reality of supersession
was not simply to be asserted, but also tirelessly defended against the
encroachments of the “Jewish” dogs who were bent, in a figure of typological
reversal, on reclaiming both the “bread” and the title of being the “children” for
themselves.<fnref n="9" /> By the late Middle Ages, this exegetical figure of the “Jewish” dog
stealing the bread of Christian children had come to be understood in eucharistic
terms as a desecration of the Host and the cannibalistic murder of Christian
children. And with particular relevance to *The Merchant of Venice*, Stow notes
that the payment of interest or penalty on contractual bonds was often equated in
the Christian typological imaginary with eucharistic martyrdom. Jewish
moneylenders were perceived as “dogs” stealing anew the eucharistic food of the
“children” and “sucking” the blood of the Christian community which stood for
the collective *Corpus Christi*.<fnref n="10" /> As a figure of typological reversal, “Jewish”
moneylending was thus perceived as an attempted inversion of the supersessionary
fulfillment of the historical roles of “dogs” and “children.” Nevertheless, as we will
see, the frequent designations of Shylock as an “inexecrable dog” and “stranger
cur” in Shakespeare’s play are not confined to the realm of theological allegory. To
begin with, the reference to dogs generally appears in Shakespeare’s work in
negative connotations. As Laurie Shannon noted, the dog serves as Shakespeare’s

<footnote n="8">⁸ Robert Chazan, *Reassessing Jewish Life in Medieval Europe* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 177.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Kenneth Stow, *Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Ibid., 28.</footnote>
“likeliest figure for revulsion and violent ejection from human company. [...] To be a dog is to suffer imminent condemnation or precipitous ejection from a community.”<fnref n="11" /> As a social metaphor, the dog does not function in Shakespeare’s work as a figure for friendship or companionship—a relatively modern notion that gained hold with the emergence of pet-ownership in early modern England. Rather, as Bruce Boehrer pointed out, at stake is in an older and more deeply engrained identification of dogs “with slaves and other abject individuals, and the association of dogs with predatory outsiders.”<fnref n="12" /> This dual role of the dog as a “tamed foe,” who serves both as an Opponent and Helper of the Christian faith, found its equivalent in the identification of “Jews” as witness-people whose hostile energy is harnessed for the defense of the Church. As Leonid Livak observed, “this trope treats dogs and wolves as two faces of the same animal, who can symbolize either a shepherd or a foe of Christ’s flock.”<fnref n="13" /> Shylock, too, is generally considered among scholars in terms of the transition from “dog” to “wolf.” For example, Boehrer argued that the invectives against Shylock refigure him “not as domestic slave but rather as interloping carnivore; hence the smooth transformation of ‘dog’ into ‘cur’ into ‘wolf.’”<fnref n="14" /> Similarly, Shannon noted that “the discourse of currishness in *Merchant* [...] [figures] a hostile insider, a quasi-citizen and familiar who turns predator within the community. [...] This currishness makes [Shylock] not just any dog, but a malicious one, and therefore no ordinary dog, but one to be prosecuted by the state.”<fnref n="15" /> More recently, Jay Geller wrote that

because Jews were often found within the Gentile polis, they were more associated with those domesticated cousins of wolves, dogs. Not the good dogs—the noble hunting dogs that accompanied the aristocracy or that guarded the boundaries of the polis—but the bad dogs: shameless, servile,

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Laurie Shannon, *The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 241-243.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Bruce Boehrer, “Shylock and the Rise of the Household Pet: Thinking Social Exclusion in The Merchant of Venice,” *Shakespeare Quarterly*, no. 2 (1999): 152-170, 163.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Leonid Livak, *The Jewish Persona in The European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 75.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Boehrer, “Shylock and the Rise of the Household Pet,” 163.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Shannon, *The Accommodated Animal*, 244-245.</footnote>
and salacious curs. But the Jewish dog at times betrays the rapacious
cruelty characteristic of another canid, the omega wolf.<fnref n="16" />

These interpretations grasp Shylock's transition from "dog" to "wolf" as a
hallmark of his "Jewish" identity. However, they also tend to overlook the terms
in which Shylock's cannibalistic tendencies are actually described in the play. As
we will see, at stake in the identification of Shylock as a wolf is not simply a
theological metaphor for "Jewishness," but an index to an alternate prehistory—
to a natural-historical account that invokes Pythagorean metempsychosis rather
than Christian typology. Here, then, is the key passage in which Gratiano, a
character with a reputation for speaking "an infinite deal of nothing" (1.1.121),
describes Shylock's "wolvish" ancestry:

O, be thou damn'd, inexcrable dog!
And for thy life let justice be accused!
Thou almost makest me waver in my faith
To hold opinion with Pythagoras,
That souls of animals infuse themselves

Govern'd a wolf, who hang'd for human slaughter,
Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,
And, whilst thou lay'st in thy unhallow'd dam,
Infused itself in thee; for thy desires
Are wolvish, bloody, starved, and ravenous. (4.1.130-140)

When reading this passage, let us first note that while he formally disavows the
Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration of souls, Gratiano nevertheless follows its
internal logic to make the audacious claim that the spirit of a wolf has reincarnated
in the body of a "Jew." Of course, the natural-historical account that he presents
is invoked as a triviality, since it is based on the decidedly false (pagan) notion of
metempsychosis or transmigration of souls—a notion that, as Gratiano admits,

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Jay Geller, *Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews* (New York, Fordham University Press, 2018), 200.</footnote>
contradicts the tenets of Christianity. Nevertheless, this impossibility is considered
in poetic detail and with syllogistic precision. Shannon accordingly notes that
“early moderns loved to mock the Pythagorean argument for a transmigration of
souls up and down the scale of being, according to a judgment or verdict on the
morality of one’s life. But like Gratiano, and despite their scandal or merriment,
they could not shake the metaphorical power of Pythagoreanism to describe the
animated universe they observed. Its apt imagery expressed a cosmos in which the
dynamic operations of justice reach well beyond the confines of a human
community.”<fnref n="17" /> Despite its incompatibility with Christian beliefs, the pagan
doctrine of metempsychosis is invoked in the play as a natural-historical
explanation for Shylock’s cannibalistic appetites. According to this explanation,
the soul of a murderous wolf has infused itself into Shylock’s body while he was
still in the womb, foreshadowing his desire for human flesh as an adult. To be sure,
at stake is not merely a negative metaphor for “Jewishness,” but a natural history
that disrupts the traditional typology of the “Jew.” The polemical force of
Pythagoreanism in the above quoted passage undermines precisely what Boehrer
has called “the smooth transformation” of Shylock from “dog” into “cur” into
“wolf.” Whereas the “dog” and “cur” figures function primarily as manifestations
of typological thinking, Gratiano’s description of Shylock as a wolf explicitly
belongs in a mythic view of humans and their place in the world. We will examine
the ways in which the peculiar conjunction of Pythagoreanism and wolfishness
provides a natural history of the “Jew,” but before doing so, we must first clarify
why the notion of metempsychosis remained incompatible with established
Christian views, and consequently, what role the figure of the wolf played in this
constellation of thought. Simply put, the pagan doctrine of the transmigration of
souls was incompatible with the Christian view because it assumed a continuum
of life that linked humans and animals.<fnref n="18" /> Such a continuity was already denied by
early church fathers, and subsequently found its authoritative refutation in
Augustine’s *City of God*, where he argued that the existence of human-animal
hybrids such as werewolves was a theological impossibility. According to
Augustine, since human beings are created in the image of God, and animals are

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Shannon, *The Accommodated Animal*, 246.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Joyce E. Salisbury, *The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages* (New York: Routledge, 2011), 141.</footnote>
not, the transformation from human to animal and vice versa would imply a shift
from one ontological category to another. Therefore, Augustine argued that in
accounts of bodily transformation what people really experienced was either an
illusion or a phantom produced by a demonic effect.<fnref n="19" /> Augustine’s distinction
between illusory and actual change was influential, and subsequently came to
inform the church’s position on the question of the human-animal divide. As
Dennis Kratz put it, “so monstrous are the implications of a man whose human
soul has been replaced by an animal soul, that to attribute such a transformation
even to God is irreconcilable with the central Christian doctrine of divine charity.
At issue are the fundamental concepts of rationality, sin and salvation.”<fnref n="20" /> And yet,
this is precisely how Gratiano describes Shylock, as a wolf reincarnated in the body
of a “Jew.” By doing so, Gratiano invokes the specter of a world without grace, a
mythic world in which a continuum of life does indeed link “Jews” and animals.
At stake, of course, is not just any animal, but a wolf, because according to
Gratiano it is the carnivorous appetite of a wolf that has “transmigrated” to
Shylock from a previous life. Thus, Shylock’s “wolvish” appetite for human flesh
forms the crucial nexus in which the natural-historical account constellates non-
synthetically with a typology of “Jewish” cannibalism in *The Merchant of Venice*.
To be sure, there was nothing new about Gratiano’s invocation of the wolf-
metaphor for the degradation and bestialization of human beings. There was a
long-standing literary tradition that ascribed a host of negative associations to
wolves, and Christian thought was informed in this regard by a wide range of
sources, most notably from the Bible and the writings of church fathers, as well as
from pagan writers such as Pliny, Ovid, and Petronius.<fnref n="21" /> Throughout the Middle
Ages, the bestial violence of the wolf exerted a strong influence on the Christian
imagination, and in medieval bestiaries the wolf was typically depicted as a figure

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Augustine, *City of God*, 18.8. See also Dennis M. Kratz, “Fictus Lupus: The Werewolf in Christian Thought,” *Classical Folia* 30 (1976): 57-80, 61-62. Caroline Bynum rightly observed that Augustine did not oppose all metamorphosis, and scholars have tended to confuse his position on human-animal transformation with his attitude toward any kind of metamorphosis. Caroline Bynum, “Metamorphosis, or Gerald and the Werewolf,” *Speculum* 4 (1998): 987-1013, 1007, n. 89.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Kratz, “Fictus Lupus,” 67.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Ibid., 57-80. Kratz cites an example from *Ezekiel 22:27* in which the comparison with wolves emphasizes the ravenous greed of the lords of Jerusalem: “Its officials within it are like wolves tearing the prey, shedding blood, destroying lives to get dishonest gain.”</footnote>
of rapacity, the image of the devil himself: the devil bears the similitude of a wolf: he who is always looking over the human race with his evil eye, and darkly prowling round the sheepfolds of the faithful so that he may afflict and ruin their souls.<fnref n="22" /> In the traditional Christian worldview, the association with wolves thus appeared as a figural representation of the human capacity for evil. But in Shakespeare's play Shylock is not simply depicted as a wolf, but as a wolf “hang'd for human slaughter”—an identification that for Shakespeare's contemporaries touched upon a particularly haunting set of cultural associations. Aside from the traditional depiction of the wolf as a figure of rapacity, Gratiano refers to the practice of hanging wolves for crimes, a practice that by Shakespeare's time was outlandish, since at that point England had been entirely free of wolves for centuries.<fnref n="23" /> Nevertheless, the custom of hanging dogs was still alive both in England and on the Continent for various legal offenses (primarily manslaughter and bestiality). As Boehrer notes, “by replacing the hanged dog of England's countryside with the figure of a wolf, Shakespeare revises common English experience, transforming it into a spectacle of strangeness which emphasizes Shylock as both foreign and bloodthirsty.”<fnref n="24" /> To be sure, this “spectacle of strangeness” is more than just a quaint anachronism. As Boehrer suggests, it serves as an uncanny reminder of a forgotten prehistory: namely, “the expulsion of wolves from England [...] parallels and prefigures the expulsion of England's Jews, accomplished in 1290 by Edward I.”<fnref n="25" /> In this sense, the mythic figure of the wolf in Gratiano's speech encapsulates a repressed historical experience: namely, the experience of exile and banishment from the human community. Shylock is exposed to such abandonment by the law during his appearance at the Duke's court. After Portia successfully argues her case that Shylock has plotted against the life of a Venetian citizen, the right of judgment and mercy that under Venetian law lay in the hands of the litigant, is wrenched from Shylock and delivered to the Duke of Venice, whose political sovereignty is suddenly reaffirmed. Toward the end of the play, Shylock is divested of the various legal, social, and civil ties that

<footnote n="22">²² *The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century*, trans. Terence Hanbury White (Madison: Wisconsin, 2002), 59.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Boehrer, “Shylock and the Rise of the Household Pet,” 164.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Ibid., 165.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Ibid., 164.</footnote>
bound him as a legal alien to Venetian civic life. Yet despite his exclusion, he
remains bound to Venetian law in a relation of abandonment, standing before the
law as “bare life.”<fnref n="26" /> Scholars have responded to such a political-theological reading
of the play by refining the terms in which Shylock’s exclusion from the human
community is formulated. As Shannon argues,

the notion of Shylock as simply dehumanized by the play depends partly
on a modern sense of animals as wholly outside the law or political
community rather than as the subjects of law they could be in the early
modern imagination. [...] The proximity between answerable animals and
this ‘stranger cur’ in Venice places them all inside the multikinded,
justiciable cosmos to which it testifies.<fnref n="27" />

Thus, Shannon argues against Agamben’s theorization of “bare life” as a state of exclusion and banishment from civic life, since in late medieval and early modern Europe animals “were not only at large in cities but also habitually cognizable to the law in its formal and informal expressions.”<fnref n="28" /> According to this line of interpretation, the designation of Shylock as a wolf does not necessarily mean that he is thereby bestialized or placed outside the law, but rather, “like a ‘malicious’ animal, the measure of Shylock’s marginal social inclusion registers in his ability to make himself vulnerable to process” by triggering liability under criminal law.<fnref n="29" /> Shannon’s points are certainly valid, but her reading of Shylock’s wolfishness nevertheless appears to be overdetermined by the juridical context in which it is framed. Consequently, the reference to the implicit correlation between wolves and “Jews” in Gratiano’s speech—namely, to the repressed historical memory of eradication, banishment, and exile—is marginalized in her account. Yet insofar as this repressed memory remains a haunting presence in the play, Shylock’s “Jewish” life is reduced in some measure to a “bare life” with respect to the law. As we will see, since this “wolfishness” becomes a problem for the Venetian state, Gratiano’s

<footnote n="26">²⁶ For the concept of “bare life” in relation to the figure of the wolf in medieval thought, Giorgio Agamben, *Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life*, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 104-111.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Shannon, *The Accommodated Animal*, 247.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Ibid., 243.</footnote>
speech offers the stark realization that primordial cannibalistic forces have
returned to haunt the free capitalist market—and they remain unchecked in their
new, modern guise.

A State of “Nature”

Notwithstanding the claims of eucharistic theology to explain the cannibalistic tendencies of “Jews,” Gratiano invokes in his speech a different tradition: namely, the mythic identification of cannibalistic appetites in human beings with a “wolfish” nature. Undoubtedly, the *locus classicus* of this tradition is found in the tale of Lycaon, the mythic king of Arcadia who was transformed into a wolf by Zeus because of his cannibalism. Although the story appeared in several antique sources, the most popular version remained the one reported by Ovid in the first book of the *Metamorphoses*. According to Ovid, Lycaon was a murderous king who, in an attempt to discredit Zeus, served him a feast of human flesh. Zeus, however, was not tricked and as a punishment for Lycaon’s deeds, he was banished from his kingdom and subsequently transformed into a wolf:

Lycaon himself fled in terror, and when he reached the silence of the
countryside, he began to howl—he was trying to speak but he could not:
his madness had been gathered in his mouth. His lust for slaughtered flesh
made him attack flocks of sheep: He still loved to guzzle blood. His
clothing turned to fur, his arms to legs: He was changed into a wolf, but
kept some signs of his original form. The same grayness is there, the same
violence in his face, the same glowing eyes, the same vicious look.<fnref n="30" />

Caroline Bynum noted that Lycaon is not only an impious tyrant who attempts to morally corrupt his people by inciting them against the gods; he is also a transgressor who breaks the primal taboo on cannibalism: “the two vices are both boundary crossings, mirroring each other and mirrored in the tyrant’s subsequent

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Ovid, *Metamorphoses*, trans. Michael Simpson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 14.</footnote>
transformation. Lycaon violates both the division between human and god, by
preparing to kill Jove, and the boundary between human and human, by killing a
hostage for cannibalism; hence his own species boundaries are violated by the
metamorphosis into wolf."<fnref n="31" /> In other words, Lycaon does not transform into an
ordinary animal. Rather, he becomes the very image of beastly savagery with his
"madness [...] gathered in his mouth." The lust for human flesh emerges in this
case as an appetite naturally shared by both depraved people and wolves. As
Bynum observes, "this wolf-person as *imago* is *imago* not of humanity's proper
exemplar, the gods, but of a corruption, a bestiality, that is what Lycaon is."<fnref n="32" />
Lycaon's cannibalistic "bestiality" entails the suspension of the divine law of the
gods, marking a natural-historical regression to a pre-mythical state. Lycaon's
moral "corruption" is hurled as a challenge at the cosmic order in an attempt to
reclaim a forgotten prehistorical world. Accordingly, the mythic punishment for
such a transgression is a loss of humanity and banishment from human society, as
Lycaon is condemned to a solitary predatory existence. His madness, however,
stands in sharp contrast to subsequent depictions of werewolves in medieval
Christian literature, where these monstrous hybrids retain their human
consciousness, morality, and rationality despite their bodily transformation.
Rather than signaling the devolvement of humans into beasts, werewolves in
medieval romances such as the *Lay of Bisclavret, Arthur and Gorlagon*, or
*Guillaume de Palerne* were portrayed as victims, cursed heroes who had been
changed into wolves, often through the plots of evil women, and ultimately
restored to their original human shape. These figures are "sympathetic"
werewolves that exemplify the non-essential nature of metamorphosis, thereby
avoiding the prospect of interchangeability of human and animal souls.<fnref n="33" /> In this
sense, medieval werewolf stories implied a rejection of two interrelated aspects of

<footnote n="31">³¹ Caroline Walker Bynum, *Metamorphosis and Identity* (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2001), 169.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² Bynum, *Metamorphosis and Identity*, 170; Leonard Barkan, *The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism* (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 24-27.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ Kirby F. Smith, “An Historical Study of the Werewolf in Literature,” *PMLA* 9, no. 1 (1894): 1-42; Kate Watkins Tibbals, “Elements of Magic in the Romance of William of Palerne,” *Modern Philology* 1 (1903-1904): 355-371; Charles W. Dunn, *The Foundling and the Werewolf: A Literary-Historical Study of Gauillaume de Palerne* (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960), 116-18; Kratz, “Fictus Lupus,” 69-71.</footnote>
Pythagorean metempsychosis that were incompatible with the Christian worldview: namely, that God can divorce a living person from the possibility of redemption; and that a human being can commit a sinful act for which he is not responsible.<fnref n="34" /> Nevertheless, in Christian theology the possibility of divorcing a person from the prospect of redemption was not altogether inconceivable. According to Paul, all of created nature is defined precisely in terms of its exclusion from the promise of righteousness; that is, from the prospect of a life according to the law. In *Romans* 8:19-21, Paul referred to the relation between creation and redemption in these terms: for the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to futility, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. In other words, creaturely life cannot attain redemption by its own means, but remains essentially dependent on the believers who possess the “first fruits of the Spirit” (*Romans* 8:23). Standing in a non-relation to the law, created nature is personified in Paul’s thought: it groans under the burden of futility, under the weight of a bare, earthly life without hope of salvation. By manifesting a “wolfish” spirit, Shylock’s actions are framed in Shakespeare’s play within a creaturely world that remains excluded from the sphere of justice and law. In these terms, Antonio acknowledges that any attempt to reason with the “Jew” to show mercy is futile:

> [one] may as well go stand on the beach
> And bid the main flood bate his usual height;
> You may as well use question with the wolf
> Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb. (4.1.72-5)

As a wolf, the “Jew” exhibits the characteristic futility of creaturely life. Yet Venetian civil law allows this fallen existence to articulate itself juridically and to even possess certain legal rights within the civic community. When Shylock takes Antonio to court for breach of contract, he wields sovereign power over Antonio’s life, and thereby introduces a legal avenue by which the civic order can devolve, by

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Kratz, “Fictus Lupus,” 78.</footnote>
purely legal means, into a lawless state in which members of the community
engage in reciprocal acts of violence with no governing authority to hold them in
check. This is effectively a state of civil war, and thus Shylock's cannibalistic
contract creates a "miniature state of emergency, a situation in which someone—
in this case, the Duke—must step above the merely civil law and make a decision
concerning life and death, reinstituting a moment of political theology within the
legal regime of Venetian constitutionalism."<fnref n="35" /> Since Venetian constitutionalism
prevents the Duke from stepping above the law when business transactions are
involved, the decision over Antonio's life initially remains in the hands of Shylock.
That is why Portia, who masquerades as Antonio's lawyer, makes her argument
for mercy by appealing to Shylock, not to the Duke.<fnref n="36" /> Antonio, too, readily
recognizes this problem:

The Duke cannot deny the course of law;
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,
Will much impeach the justice of the state,
Since that the trade and profit of the city
Consisteth of all nations. (3.3.29-34)

Shylock is, of course, likewise aware of this overriding constitutional bind, and he
does not fail to remind the Duke that withholding his legal compensation would
jeopardize the unique status of Venetian civil law:

I have possessed your Grace of what I purpose,
...To have the due and forfeit of my bond.
If you deny it, let the danger light
Upon your charter and your city's freedom! (4.1.36-39)

Thus, both Antonio and Shylock agree that “the justice of the state” must be
maintained at all costs, even at the price of Antonio’s life. But when this justice is

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Lupton, *Citizen-Saints*, 96.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Ibid., 88-89.</footnote>
abused by the “Jew,” what measures can the State take to protect the lives of its
citizens? This is the point in which the figure of the wolf is invoked in the play.
Simply put, the problem that Shylock poses for the Venetian state with his
business contract is not only an ethical one, but more fundamentally, it is a
political problem. This is because Shylock’s contract undermines the power of the
State to maintain peace and order within the boundaries of the civic community.
As Gratiano declares, Shylock’s existence within Christian society violates the
principle of justice: as a “dog” or a “cur,” Shylock may fall within the premises of
the “multikinded, justiciable cosmos” of early modern law; but as a wolf, he stands
“before” the law as “bare life” on the brink of extinction and banishment. The
point is that the “Jew” poses a grave threat to emerging forms of social and
economic organization, and this threat cannot simply be resolved by conventional
legal means (namely, by civil law). Indeed, Shylock’s case seems to call for the very
same measures that were employed back in the day against marauding wolves—
namely, the eradication of the threat to the community through the direct
intervention of the political sovereign. By designating Shylock as a wolf “hang’d
for human slaughter,” Gratiano is drawing on an old political mythologeme:
namely, that of the werewolf as the figure of a man who has been banned from the
human community. According to Agamben, medieval German and Anglo-Saxon
legal codes were “founded on the concept of peace (*Fried*) and the corresponding
exclusion from the community of the wrongdoer, who therefore became *friedlos*,
without peace, and whom anyone was permitted to kill without committing
homicide.” Notably, these “Germanic and Anglo-Saxon sources underline the
bandit’s liminal status by defining him as a wolf-man,” thereby marking his life as
a life that “is not a piece of animal nature without any relation to law and to the
city. It is, rather, a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and
man, *physis* and *nomos*, exclusion and inclusion.”<fnref n="37" /> A few decades after
Shakespeare, Thomas Hobbes will conceptualize this “peaceless” existence under
the rubric of a pre-social “state of nature” in which people treat each other like
wolves: *homo hominis lupus*. For Hobbes, this naturally violent and lawless
existence justifies the absolute power of the sovereign, who, in order to maintain
internal peace, must assume monopoly over all means of violent coercion within

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Agamben, *Homo Sacer*, 104-105.</footnote>
the political community.<fnref n="38" /> Similarly, in *The Merchant of Venice*, the restoration of the Duke’s sovereign power occurs at the intersection of the boundaries between civil and criminal law. To be sure, Shylock’s contract undermines the foundational principle of political sovereignty by legal means, but the real problem lies in Shylock’s insistence on a narrow or literal interpretation of the law, which he posits in direct opposition to the foundational principle of political sovereignty—namely, to maintain “peace” within the boundaries of the civic community. In this sense, Shylock’s adherence to a legalistic notion of justice—as opposed to a more flexible interpretation of the law informed by the doctrine of Christian mercy—proves to be a mere extension of his “wolfish” appetites. Devoid of mercy, Shylock insists on the bare literality of “bond” and “justice” without being able to provide any reasonable justification for his refusal to receive monetary compensation for Antonio’s flesh:

You'll ask me why I rather choose to have
A weight of carrion flesh than to receive
Three thousand ducats. I'll not answer that,
But say it is my humor. Is it answered?
What if my house be troubled with a rat,
And I be pleased to give ten thousand ducats
To have it baned? What, are you answered yet? (4.1.41-47)

In the absence of a governing Christian principle of mercy, Shylock's contractual demand can only be justified as retribution for personal injuries that he suffered at the hands of Antonio. When asked by Salarino what possible use he could have with Antonio's flesh, Shylock answers:

To bait fish withal; if it will feed nothing else,
it will feed my revenge (3.1.52-53)

and elsewhere he confirms that

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Thomas Hobbes, *On the Citizen*, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3-6; Thomas Hobbes, *Leviathan* (London: Penguin, 1982), 133-175.</footnote>
if I can catch [Antonio] once upon the hip,
I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him. (1.3.46-47)

Shylock's insistence on a literal interpretation of the law to "feed" his revenge corresponds to the typology of a "Jewish" vengeful plot against Christian society. Although by Shakespeare's time medieval tales of "Jews" poisoning wells and desecrating hosts have long passed into the realm of legend, the belief in the fundamentally antagonistic attitude of "Jews" toward Christian morality, justice, and established forms of social and political organization remained intact. In the Elizabethan period, this "Jewish" attitude of revengeful hostility was epitomized in the practice of moneylending. At that time, the legal constraints on moneylending were undergoing a rapid revision with the introduction of the usury statute of 1571 that legalized the lending of money at an interest rate of 10 percent. The crime of usury remained in force, but its meaning was changed to include only those individuals who charged excessively high rates of interest (incidentally, a crime of which Shakespeare's own father had been accused).<fnref n="39" /> With the rapid habituation of moneylending at interest among Elizabethans, there was an increased need to distinguish Christian attitudes and practices toward commerce from so-called "Jewish" business ethics, that is, with what Elizabethans identified as "Jewish" practices, since at that time no Jews were living in England.<fnref n="40" /> As James Shapiro noted, "English depictions of Jews as usurers during this period when the concept of lending money at interest was undergoing such rapid and startling revision strongly suggest that such representations were in part

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Shapiro, *Shakespeare and the Jews*, 98-99; Charles R. Geisst, *Beggar Thy Neighbor: A History of Usury and Debt* (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 58-96.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ The presence of Jews in England during Shakespeare’s time remains a matter of academic debate, with scholars such as James Shapiro and Janet Adelman arguing that Jews were present in small numbers in sixteenth-century England. Others, most notably David Nirenberg, have argued to the contrary that Adelman and Shapiro “are misguided in their confidence in the ‘Judaism’ of the few-dozen descendants of Spanish and Portuguese converts they discover living in Shakespeare’s London—none of whom confessed to being anything but Christian [...] [And] more important, their insistence that Christian anxieties about Judaism depend on the existence of ‘real Jews’ ignores the ability of Christian thought to generate Judaism ‘out of its own entrails’.” Nirenberg, *Anti-Judaism*, 271-2; Janet Adelman, *Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice* (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008), 4-12.</footnote>
projections: Jews enabled the English to imagine a villainous moneylender whose fictional excesses overshadowed their own very real acts of exploitation.”<fnref n="41" /> To be sure, Shapiro’s evocation of Shylock as a “villainous moneylender” falls squarely within the parameters of typological thinking. As we have seen, payment of interest or penalty on contractual bonds was often equated in the Christian typological imaginary with eucharistic martyrdom. Accordingly, Shylock’s insistence on the “legal” or literal meaning of the “pound of flesh,” rather than on its figurative or “spiritual” significance, implies a “Jewish” refusal to look beyond the meaning of the written word to the spirit behind the letter. As a representative of the dead letter of the law, Shylock appears to the Duke as a

stony adversary, an inhuman wretch,
Uncapable of pity, void and empty,
From any dram of mercy. (4.1.4-6)

Salerio, too, describes Shylock in similar terms:

Never did I know
A creature that did bear the shape of man
So keen and greedy to confound a man.
He plies the Duke at morning and at night,
And doth impeach the freedom of the state
If they deny him justice. Twenty merchants,
The Duke himself, and the magnificoes
Of greatest port have all persuaded with him,
But none can drive him from the envious plea
Of forfeiture, of justice, and his bond. (3.2.286-295)

Here we can see how Shylock's insistence on the bare literality of the contractual bond echoes Paul's description of the Jews as "Israel after the flesh" and the entire Pauline trope of the distinction between letter and spirit. However, in Shakespeare's play this characteristic "Jewish" insistence on the literality of the law

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Shapiro, *Shakespeare and the Jews*, 99.</footnote>
is not only un-Christian; it is also markedly inhuman. To be sure, Shylock does
not insist on the “justice” of the dead letter for moral or religious reasons. Neither
are financial considerations at stake, because Shylock clearly recognizes that the
legal demand for a pound of flesh contradicts capitalist exchange value. Instead,
Shylock’s insistence on the dead letter of the law stems from his cannibalistic
desires. As he states:

I crave the law,
The penalty and forfeit of my bond. (4.1.213-4)

It is this perverse desire for human flesh—masquerading as a legal process—that
renders Shylock an “inhuman wretch” and “a creature that did bear the shape of
man.” As a wolf in human guise, Shylock is a far cry from the “sympathetic”
werewolf of medieval literary traditions. His cannibalistic appetites recall those of
his predecessor Lycaon: a murderous tyrant whose craving for human flesh
ultimately brings about the dissolution of the civic order. In this sense, we can say
that when Shakespeare’s characters conceive of the otherness of the “Jew,” they are
not confined to the premises of typological thinking. Despite differences in social
stature and temperament, there is an implicit agreement among the non-Jews in
the play—Gratiano, Antonio, the Duke, Salerio—regarding Shylock’s
fundamental inhumanity. Shylock is an “inhuman wretch” whose spirit is
“wolvish, bloody, starved, and ravenous”; he is merciless and unreasonable as a
prowling wolf; a “ creature” that confoundingly bears the shape of a man. These
examples suggest that Gratiano’s Pythagorean tale of metamorphosis, far from
serving as a trivial digression in the play, is key to understanding the way in which
“Jewish” identity is conceived in it. To put the matter differently, Gratiano’s
natural-historical account of Shylock’s “wolfish” origins is not invoked in the play
as a philosophical or theological notion. It is, rather, a political myth whose
purpose is to justify and facilitate a sovereign decision on Shylock’s life. This
decision amounts to Shylock’s civic death: a state in which he remains utterly
exposed to the “mercy” of the Duke as “bare life.” In this respect, Shylock’s
“villainous” acts ultimately provide justification for the doctrine of absolute
political sovereignty. The play attempts to limit emerging capitalist forms of
economic rapacity by transferring their potential threatening power of physical
violence (achieved by means of a business contract) to the political theology of
absolute monarchy. However, by designating Shylock as a wolf, the play does not
only provide a *political* distinction between a criminal under civil law (a “cur”) and
an enemy of the State (a “wolf”). It also mobilizes a *theological* distinction
concerning the absolute difference of “spirits” between Christian and “Jew”—as
demonstrated by the account of Shylock’s “wolfish” ancestry. This indelible
difference in “spirits” facilitates the exclusion of the “Jew” from the law’s
protection (while assuming that even “dogs” and “curs” possess certain legal rights
within the Venetian polity). And although Christian theology did assume a
fundamental difference in “spirits” between Christians and “Jews,” this difference
was conceived in terms of the typological distinction between spirit and letter,
rather than as a natural history. In other words, for Paul, “Jewishness” is not a
naturally inherited trait, but is predicated on a certain interpretation of the law.
Significantly, this “carnal” or literal interpretation is not a fixed relation to the law,
but a contractual one. As such it can be overcome by a “circumcision of the heart,
by the Spirit, not by the written code” (*Romans* 2:29). As opposed to the Jewish
rite of circumcision, which leaves a permanent mark inscribed on the Jew’s body
as a sign of his exclusive ethnic and religious affiliation, the purview of “spiritual”
circumcision through baptism is universal and can be attained by Jews and non-
Jews alike. In this sense, Gratiano’s speech serves as a site in which two
incompatible representations of “Jewish” identity—the natural-historical and the
figural-typological—coincide non-synthetically. By formulating a Pythagorean
account of the insurmountable difference of spirits between Christian and “Jew,”
Gratiano advances the un-Christian view that Shylock is human in outer form
only, but not in spirit. This mythical configuration is superimposed on the
familiar typology of a “Jewish” adherence to the literal interpretation of the law—
by establishing itself as the primordial “natural” cause of the “Jewish” insistence
on literality. Gratiano’s description of Shylock’s wolfish origins is thus at bottom
an allegorical operation that recovers a hidden meaning (“wolfishness”) by
declaring the phenomenal human appearance of the “Jew” to be pure surface.
Consequently, Shylock’s humanity is preserved in the play only as a *semblance*, an
empty image-being. Its allegorical designation is none other than the specter of a
prehistorical “state of nature” in which people treat each other like wolves: *homo
homini lupus*.
Conversion and Exception

In his discussion of Shakespeare’s “Jewish Questions,” David Nirenberg noted the ambiguity that underlies Shylock’s humanity when he wrote that despite his conversion at the end of the play, Shylock remains “in some sense ontologically alien” to Christianity.42 But Nirenberg does not specify in what sense this difference is to be understood. He consequently fails to note that the determination of ontological otherness of the “Jew” in *The Merchant of Venice* does not rely exclusively on a typological distinction between letter and spirit, but on a natural-historical account superimposed on the traditional typology of the “Jew.” Janet Adelman identified this non-contractual difference as a “proto-racial distinction” that emerges as a recurring motif in Shakespeare’s play: “Although “Jew” might function primarily as a religious category when it is opposed to “Christian,” it becomes an incipiently racial category when it is opposed to “gentle/gentile.” In that opposition, “gentile” invariably functions as a marker of those races or nations that are not Jewish.”43 Thus, Shylock’s insistence on the bare literality of “bond” and “justice” marks not only his allegiance to a “Jewish” literal interpretation of the law; it also serves as a mark of his indelible racial alterity, his un-“gentle” spirit. As Adelman notes, “the persistent association of [Shylock’s] hard-hearted Jewishness with natural phenomena—the wolf, the sea, the stone—has the effect of naturalizing it in him, making it fixed and immutable.”44 Focusing on Antonio’s sarcastic remark:

> Hie thee, gentle Jew
> the Hebrew will turn Christian; he grows kind (1.3.173-174)

Adelman argues that this formulation “illustrates the process of racialization as a response to the prospect of Jewish conversion”:45 Though a Jew might conceivably turn Christian, a Hebrew by definition cannot turn gentile. And this appeal to the realm of inalterable “natural” differences is signaled by the tricky word “kind,”

<footnote n="42">42 Nirenberg, *Anti-Judaism*, 275.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">43 Adelman, *Blood Relations*, 75.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">44 Ibid., 78.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">45 Ibid.</footnote>
which undercuts Shylock's apparent turn to kindness by invoking exactly that inalterable realm. Like his nation (*gens*), his nature (*kind*) is reassuringly fixed: this Hebrew will never become gentle/gentile, will never lose his Jewish obduracy, the stony-heartedness that allows Christians to recognize him; he will never change his nature and “grow kind.” And whether or not he is forced to convert, he can never join the kind of the Christian: even at the end of the play, he remains “the rich Jew” (5.1.291).<fnref n="46" />

It is thus possible to identify two strands of anti-Jewish thought at work in *The Merchant of Venice*: the first casts Shylock as a personification of the negative image of the “Jew” in the Christian typological imaginary; the other affirms the absolute, non-contractual difference of “spirits” between Christian and “Jew” as the product of a distinct natural-historical development. As we have seen, this “natural” difference is epitomized in the play by the tendency of non-Jewish characters to identify Shylock as canine. But this canine character, although fixed in its essence to the “Jew,” never remains the same, fluctuating between the various designations of “dog,” “cur,” and “wolf.” The distinction between these canine figures, far from being trivial, has legal as well as theological implications. However, among scholars there is a tendency to subsume these different canine designations under the single rubric of the nonhuman “animal.” For example, Paul Yachnin identifies the characterization of Jews as nonhuman as a prevalent feature of Shakespeare’s historical culture. According to Yachnin, this was a culture in which the boundary between human and animal was not distinctly drawn:

> The characterization of Jews as nonhuman belongs to the play as a whole. That is the case because Shakespeare's culture is one for which not all creatures that bear the shape of a man are men. While is a fundamental principle of modern political culture that all persons are entitled to the recognition of their human dignity, it was not so to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Shakespearean characterization is based, in this view, not on an ideal of equality among human creatures but rather on an idea that humans are strung out along a hierarchy of capabilities and entitlements

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Ibid.</footnote>
that coordinates to differences of sex, ethnicity, race, religion, and social
rank (or breeding or blood). That means that some characters in
Shakespeare are far closer to animality than are other characters.<fnref n="47" />

Although Yachnin is certainly right in emphasizing the permeability and
instability of the “human/animal threshold”<fnref n="48" /> in *The Merchant of Venice*, he fails
to take note of the porousness of the category of the “animal” itself. At stake is not
simply the inherent instability of the human-animal distinction, but the
accommodation of two different conceptions of animality: one belonging in
Christian typology, and the other rooted in a mythical natural history. The tension
between these views is not resolved in the play. Instead, it is “spatialized” in the
empty image-being, the *semblance*, of Shylock’s human appearance. This human
semblance, despite its negligible ontological status, plays an important role in *The
Merchant of Venice*, not only because it contains and obfuscates the tension
between typology and natural history, but also because it serves as the means by
which Shylock—a veritable wolf—can express himself on the public stage in the
Venetian court of law. Like a number of other “animal-people” in Shakespeare’s
plays, Shylock seeks to gain a public voice and a public audience without casting
off his animal “nature.”<fnref n="49" /> Thus, as Yachnin notes: “However marked is his
appearance in court by obduracy, impertinency, and the threat of violence,
Shylock is noteworthy because he seeks a public rather than a private revenge
against his enemy Antonio.”<fnref n="50" /> According to Yachnin, Shylock is “noteworthy”
because his very appearance in court defies the ancient consensus that animals are
neither public nor political. Since Aristotle’s designation of humans as *zoon
politikon*, a firm line has been drawn between humans and animals on the basis of
the exclusive human capacity for speech, moral judgment, and political action.<fnref n="51" />
But Shylock’s public demand for a pound of flesh in a court of law is also notable
for another reason: in contrast to the blood libel charges, which depicted “Jewish”

<footnote n="47">47 Paul Yachnin, “Shakespeare’s Public Animals,” in *Humankinds: The Renaissance and Its Anthropologies*, eds. Andreas Höfele and Stephan Laqué (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 185-198, 192.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ Ibid., 193.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ Ibid., 185.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Ibid., 194.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Ibid., 185.</footnote>
cannibalism as secretive acts, in Venice Shylock can execute his cannibalistic plot legally and in broad daylight by virtue of a contractual bond that grants him sovereign power over the life of a Venetian citizen. To be sure, although Shylock receives a public hearing—he is, after all, a *talking* animal—he is not thereby rendered a *political* animal. On the contrary, Shylock's business contract and his refusal to accept compensation for Antonio's flesh demonstrate that his goal is to undermine the founding principle of political sovereignty and devolve the Venetian civic order to a prehistorical “state of nature.” The play spells out the implications of typological reversal in political terms: namely, as a regression to a pre-social state in which people treat each other cannibalistically, like wolves. But—and this point is crucial—the characters in Shakespeare's play make the claim about Shylock's wolfishness by resorting to an alternative prehistory. They invoke the mythic framework of a distinct natural-historical development rather than employing the typology of a contractual difference between Christian and “Jew.” By explicitly or implicitly endorsing the claim of Shylock's “natural” otherness, Shakespeare's characters engage in a revision of the figure of the “Jew” as a typological representation of Christianity's prehistory. From the perspective of political theology, “Judaism” appears as the lawlessness of a prehistorical or pre-social state. However, the characters in Shakespeare's play insist that this condition is not contractual but “natural.” This “nature” is fixed, so that Shylock's spiritual constitution is essentially different from that of the Christian, and it is a difference that no act of conversion can undo. In this context, Adelman rightly argued that the emergence of such a fixed category of “proto-racial difference” in Shakespeare's play is linked to a

set of anxieties about sameness and difference, nature and nations [...]—
anxieties for which racialized thinking provided an easy remedy, whether
or not racial categories were fully in place in the early modern period. By
the time of *Merchant*, Christian societies had been worrying about the
instability of Jewish difference for generations.”<fnref n="52" />

<footnote n="52">⁵² Adelman, *Blood Relations*, 78-79.</footnote>
As Adelman points out, these anxieties historically surfaced in the aftermath of mass conversions that took place in Spain throughout the sixteenth century:

> Although one theological justification for hatred of Jews had always been their stiff-necked refusal to convert, it turned out that massive conversion brought on its own problems. In sixteenth-century Spain, the danger was not that Jews would remain an isolated community refusing Christian grace but that they would convert and infiltrate Spanish society at all levels, becoming indistinguishable from their Spanish hosts as they entered into the mainstream. For conversion threatened to do away with the most reliable signs of difference, provoking a crisis in a very mixed society obsessively concerned with purity of lineage.<fnref n="53" />

Transposed into the terms of our analysis, Adelman's description suggests that Gratiano's account of Shylock's wolfish origins is invoked in response to the erosion of traditional categories of typology and eucharistic theology in the early modern period. In the Christian typological imaginary, "Jews" were traditionally identified as manifestations of Christianity's prehistory, but state-enforced conversions threatened to collapse this typological difference—with the increased assimilation of converted Jews into Christian society. Shakespeare's play registers the tensions surrounding the crisis of state-enforced conversions by locating Shylock's own conversion in a Venetian court rather than in a church. Against this background, the characters in Shakespeare's play continuously assert the fixed "natural" difference between Christian and "Jew," whether by blood,<fnref n="54" /> spirit, or a shared humanity. In this context, the allegory of Shylock as a wolf in human guise assumes an implicit political resonance: namely, it points to the suspicion that converted Jews who had assimilated into the mainstream of Christian society continue to work against this society from within, by means of civil law. As we have seen, the play advocates the political theology of absolute monarchy in response to this threat. In this sense, Shylock's legal demand for a pound of flesh triggers what Carl Schmitt has called a "state of exception," in which a given

<footnote n="53">⁵³ Ibid., 79-80.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ See Adelman’s discussion of Jessica’s conversion in *Blood Relations*, 66-98.</footnote>
political system can no longer guarantee the security of the legal order. According
to Schmitt, the exception is that "which is not codified in the existing legal order,
[and] can at best be characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the
existence of the state, or the like. But it cannot be circumscribed factually and made
to conform to a preformed law."<fnref n="55" /> Under these circumstances, the sovereign must
suspend existing laws in order to save them. And that is precisely what takes place
in the court scene in *The Merchant of Venice*. Shylock is divested of the various
legal, social, and civil ties that bound him as a legal alien to Venetian civic life. In
this sense, the Duke's "merciful" offer to pardon Shylock's life (that is, to grant
Shylock the mercy that he never extended to Antonio) serves as a mere façade
behind which Shylock's state of exclusion from the Venetian polity is perpetuated:

That thou shall see the difference of our spirits,
I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it:
For half thy wealth, it is Antonio's;
The other half comes to the general state,
Which humbleness may drive unto a fine. (4.1.384-388)

The Duke’s sovereign act of Christian “mercy” reduces Shylock’s status within the polity to the simple reality of his “bare life”: Shylock is not only denied a civic or legal affiliation, but he also forfeits his financial means, thereby remaining excluded from all civil ties to Venetian society. And Shylock understands this point all too well. In his downfall, he exposes the violence that underlies sovereign decision:

Nay, take my life and all; pardon not that:
You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live. (4.1.390-393)

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ Carl Schmitt, *Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty*, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 6.</footnote>
At this point, Antonio’s intervention is required to restore Shylock’s civil affiliations, and he “mercifully” offers to rescind the money owed him by Shylock on condition that Shylock convert to Christianity and that his remaining wealth will pass after his death to his converted daughter and Christian son-in-law. Antonio’s offer mitigates the Duke’s decision by restoring Shylock to the circle of Venetian civil life. And Shylock, in turn, is forced to accept Antonio’s offer upon pain of death, as the Duke declares that

[Shylock] shall do this, or else I do recant
The pardon that I late pronounced here. (4.1.407-8)

Far from establishing itself as a “spiritual” or religious transformation, conversion thus appears in Shakespeare’s play purely as an instrument of political power. As Yachnin noted, it becomes “a way for rulers to exercise control over the inward as well as the outward lives of their subjects.”<fnref n="56" /> Shylock’s conversion accordingly takes place in a “state of exception,” when Shylock is reduced to “bare life.” This reduction of the legal person to a state of “bare life” serves in the play as a kind of legal-existential precondition for Shylock’s reentry into Venetian society—facilitating a political reenactment of a theological scene of “redemption” by means of state-enforced conversion. To be sure, Shakespeare leaves us with little doubt as to the authenticity and “spiritual” worth of such a conversion, as demonstrated by Shylock’s last words in the play:

> I pray you, give me leave to go from hence;
> I am not well: send the deed after me,
> And I will sign it. (4.1.392-5)

In his compliance with the Duke’s decree, the “wolfish” spirit in Shylock is broken, and the danger that he poses for the Venetian polity is removed. In his last words

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ Yachnin likewise notes that conversion “served as a justification of wars of conquest that were said to be dedicated to converting whole new populations to Christian rule or, through the period of the Reformation, to the true form of Christian rule.” See Paul Yachnin, “Shylock, Toleration, Conversion” in *Imagining Religious Toleration: A Literary History of an Idea, 1600–1830*, eds. Alison Conway and David Alvarez (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019): 18-34, 25.</footnote>
in the play, Shylock no longer voices any threats or complaints, yet his conversion
by no means implies an acceptance of a new faith. On the contrary, Shylock states
that he is “not well” and must depart. His statement is not an indictment of
absolutist monarchy, but rather a *testimony* of the operation of sovereign power
in a “state of exception.” As Eric Santner argued, under such conditions the subject
is reduced to a creaturely estate.<fnref n="57" /> Or, in other words, Shylock is rendered
*creaturely* because he stands in a non-relation to the law. In order to “redeem” his
social and political status within the Venetian polity, he must first stand “before”
the law as a creature condemned to the futility of natural history. At any rate,
Shylock’s conversion does not release him from his previous identification as a
“Jew”: namely, as one who fails to internalize the “spirit” of the law. Yet in his
reduction to creaturely life, Shylock also expresses a “natural” messianic impulse:
the anguished anticipation of all creation to be redeemed from bondage to death
and futility. In this sense, Shylock’s “I am not well” corresponds to what Paul
Celan, in his “Meridian” speech, called a “counterword” [*Gegenwort*]: namely,
the poetic phrase that bears witness to the unbridgeable gap between experience
and expression, physis and meaning.<fnref n="58" /> As a *talking* animal, Shylock partakes in
 creaturely life and yet is able to express himself in human language. In his downfall
at the public forum of the Venetian court, he emerges as a representative figure; an
“advocate for all creatures, and at the same time their highest embodiment.”<fnref n="59" />

Noam Pines is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Jewish Thought in the State University of New York at Buffalo. His book, *The Infrahuman: Animality in Modern Jewish Literature*, came out with SUNY (State University New York) Press in 2018.

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ On the relation between sovereign power and creaturely life, see Eric Santner, *On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1-42.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ Noam Pines, *The Infrahuman: Animality in Modern Jewish Literature* (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), 124-125.</footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ Benjamin described certain characters in Leskov's stories in these terms. See Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in *Selected Writings*, vol. 3, 1935-1938, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 158; translation modified.</footnote>
**Keywords:** Shylock, Wolf, Political Theology, Typology, Animal Studies

**How to quote this article:**

Noam Pines, “A Modern Lycaon: Recalling Ovid’s *Metamorphoses* in *The Merchant of Venice*,” in “Created from Animals: Thinking the Human/Animal Difference in Jewish and Hebrew Literature,” ed. Anna Lissa, *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC* 23, no. 1 (2023), DOI: [10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13897](https://doi.org/10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13897)
*Tza'ar ba'ale hayyim: Jewish Animal Rights Advocacy and Vegetarianism, from Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Ha-Kohen Kook's *A Vision of Vegetarianism and Peace* to Jonathan Safran Foer*

by *Piergabriele Mancuso*

**Abstract**

Tza'ar ba'ale hayyim is one of the fundamental principles in Jewish law, enunciated in the Bible and then accepted as a mandatory norm in Talmudic tradition, banning any form of unnecessary pain on animals, and requiring people to minimise physical and psychological animal burden, especially, but certainly not exclusively, in ritual slaughtering. Over the hundred years, following the development of meat industry aiming to maximise profits to the detriment of animal's fundamental rights, and with a dramatic impact on the natural environment, several rabbinical authorities have interpreted this principle in broader terms, recommending people to opt for vegetarian diets that are not only morally preferable, but also ethically more recommendable as environmentally more sustainable. The aim of this paper is to offer a succinct view on the meanings and interpretations of Jewish vegetarianism, from its biblical inception, through the rabbinical debate, to more recent interpretations among religious and secular authorities.

**Animal Suffering: Not an Opinion, and Not an Option**

**The Theoretical Core of Jewish Vegetarianism**

*Tza'ar: Certainly Not for Fun*

*We-nishmartem le-nafshotekhem: For the Sake of the Living Body, and of the Planet*
Animal Suffering: Not an Opinion, and Not an Option

Tza'ar ba'ale hayyim, literally “the suffering of living creatures,” is one of the most
important Jewish ethical and moral concepts and a fundamental principle—
together, for example, with the prohibition on making two species of animals
work together (Deut. 22, 10), or removing the eggs from a nest in the presence of a
mother bird (Deut. 22, 6-7)—concerning the treatment of living creatures,
banning any infliction of unnecessary pain on animals. Not a commandment of
Biblical origin but the outcome of rabbinical interpretations on the Torah
(Exodus 23, 5, “When you see the ass of your enemy lying under its burden and
would refrain from raising it, you must nevertheless help raise it”) tza'ar ba'ale
hayyim is a concept of Jewish law whose premise is that since suffering inflicted on
animals by human beings cannot be avoided completely (the rule of human beings
over animals being a divine concession), any form of animal exploitation by
humans is permitted if performed for legitimate (not for sporting, recreational or
entertainment) purposes and as long as no unnecessary pain is inflicted. Tza'ar
ba'ale hayyim—causing no unnecessary pain—is certainly not just a moral
recommendation but a binding principle in Jewish law, a biblical norm—though
formulated by the rabbis—whose application would then justify the violation of
the norms of Sabbath, similarly to piquah ha- nefesh, the obligation of saving one's
life.<fnref n="1" />

If on the one hand the theoretical principles and the purposes of this norm are
certainly clear (reducing or at least minimising an animal's pain), what remains to
be defined is “pain,” if refers purely and exclusively to the physical suffering
inflicted upon the animal when it is being slaughtered, or if it includes the forms
of physiologic distress than an animal might experience while alive. Should the
latter be the case, virtually nothing coming from the modern meat industry could
be considered kosher, since rabbinical control is temporarily limited to the final
moments of the animal's life, when it is ritually slaughtered, a cruel but relatively
short moment. Many Jews and more recently rabbinical authorities are taking

<footnote n="1">¹ For an analysis of tza'ar ba'ale hayyim, see Richard H. Schwartz, *Judaism and Vegetarianism* (New York: Lantern Book, 2001, 15-39; Jacob Ari Labendz and Shmuly Yanklowitz, eds., *Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism: Studies and New Directions* (New York: SUNY Press, 2019), 243-248.</footnote>
stricter stances on this issue. They are considering *tza'ar ba'ale hayyim* by looking at the entirety of the animal's life—from conception to death—an increasingly shorter period spent in cramped pens, deprived of natural light and forced to grow, often with no possibility of wandering in an open space with other animals, running, or mating. Are we really abiding by the rabbinical rules of minimising a creature's pain when we try to do so only in its final moments?

*Tza'ar ba'ale hayyim* was limited to the pain inflicted while the animal is being exploited for legitimate purposes or *le-shem shamayyim* (for the sake of heaven), in the fulfilment of religious duties (like using skin and leather to make tefillin/phylacteries). At the time of the Sages, one may argue, intensive farming and similar forms of “industrial” exploitation did not exist, and consumption of meat was certainly not as common as it is today. What would the Sages say about the modern chicken industry, for example, where the animals are systematically and indiscriminately mutilated, overfed, subjected to ever faster rhythms of sleep-wakefulness in order to increase their egg production? Where, consequently, they live less than a tenth of their natural life before being jammed into cages and transported to slaughter?

According to Rabbi Richard H. Schwartz, an authority on the Jewish vegetarian movement, there is no way to reconcile the production system of the modern food industry with Jewish law, especially the principle of *tza'ar ba'ale hayyim*, and he suggests fellow Jews to adopt a vegetarian diet:

> The conditions under which animals are raised today are completely contrary to the Jewish ideals of compassion and avoiding tsa'ar ba'alei chayim [...]. Whereas the Torah mandates consideration for animals by prohibiting the yoking of a strong and weak animal together, veal calves spend their entire lives standing on slats, their necks chained to the sides, without sunlight, fresh air, or exercise [...]. Hence, in view of the horrible conditions under which most animals are raised today, Jews who eat meat raised under such conditions seem to be supporting a system contrary to basic Jewish principles and obligations.<fnref n="2" />

<footnote n="2">² Schwartz, *Judaism and Vegetarianism*, 39.</footnote>
Schwartz’s reasoning may seem a bit too consequential, putting too much
emphasis on an element that most rabbinical authorities would certainly not
consider serious enough to ban meat from Jewish households. How many
observant Jews would give up meat knowing that the animals that they are eating
had been physically and mentally mistreated *before* being ritually slaughtered? (I
suppose a tiny minority, unless the *shehita* has not been performed properly, in
which case only *that* specific piece of meat would be momentarily thrown away).<fnref n="3" />
Paraphrasing some old ads, you don’t need to be Jewish to be vegetarian, and
vegetarianism is not part of traditional Jewish religious values,<fnref n="4" /> but if you are
Jewish and want to become vegetarian, such a choice would certainly not clash
with Jewish tradition and *halakhah* that would, on the contrary, offer valid reasons
to consider it a perfectly ethically Jewish choice.

It is not the purpose of this paper to answer the numerous ethical and nonetheless
halakhic questions concerning the different types of Jewish dietary habits, but
rather to identify the ideological and theoretical principles that make
vegetarianism and concern for animal welfare, Jewish values too. Instead of trying
to cover the totality of such complex ethical issue, we will focus on two authors
and sets of writings. Although chronologically, geographically, and culturally
quite far from each other, they share the ethical *fil rouge* of vegetarianism: Rav
Abraham Yitzhak Ha-Kohen Kook (1865-1935), one of the most important
rabbinical authorities and leading spiritual figure in Israel, the “father” of Jewish
vegetarianism, and Jonathan Safran Foer (1977), a Jewish American writer and
novelist, the author of *Eating Animals* (2009) and *We Are the Weather: Saving the
Planet Begins at Breakfast* (2019), two worldwide bestsellers and the most detailed
and astute investigations yet of the moral-ethical meaning of a meat-based diet.
Foer does not make use of Kook’s exegetical tools—mostly analysis of biblical and

<footnote n="3">³ As in the case of the “kosher meat scandal” at Agriprocess, on which see below.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Today, it would be unreasonable, other than politically incorrect and for some even offensive, to propose those ads. They consisted of a number of portraits of people that at that time would be considered non-Jewish (a Native American, a black boy and an Asian baby, an Italian-looking-like policeman, and so on) holding or chewing a sandwich made by the company Levy's (a traditionally Jewish surname). On the top and lower ends of the ads was written "You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's real rye"; Stephen Coles, "Levy's ad campaign: "You don't have to be Jewish" (1961-70s)," *Fonts In Use*, September 12, 2016. Accessed June 2, 2023. https://fontsinuse.com/uses/14355/levy-s-ad-campaign-you-don-t-have-to-be-jewis.</footnote>
rabbinical sources—and Kook is in no way concerned with the environmental issues deriving from industrialised meat production. They arrive at similar conclusions, though, questioning not so much the legitimacy of eating meat, as its supposed necessity. While for Kook, reducing the consumption of meat would result in spiritual elevation, almost theurgically hastening the coming of the messianic times, for Foer turning vegetarian means eliminating an industrial system of food production that causes one third of the overall global warming. We, overfed, oversized Western people, Foer adds, not only no longer need meat to survive but, in contrast, we should give it up, as much as we can and as soon as possible. For the planet, four ourselves, and also to abide by the rule of *tza'ar ba'ale hayyim*.

## The Theoretical Core of Jewish Vegetarianism

If asked about the reasons for and principles behind Jewish vegetarianism, most vegetarian Jews would probably appeal directly to the Bible, claiming that human beings were created vegetarians and that eating was a divine concession, not an obligation. “God’s initial intention was that people be vegetarians,” affirms rabbi Schwartz in the opening chapter of his book. He then gives a long list of commentators and exegetes endorsing this proposition, clearly to show how vegetarianism is inherent to Judaism and perfectly consistent with Jewish tradition, quoting from Rashi (1040-1105), Ibn Ezra (1092-1167), Maimonides (1135-1214) and Joseph Albo (15th century), through Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888), to Moses Cassuto (1883-1951)<fnref n="5" /> and Rabbi Kook.

Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Ha-Kohen Kook (1865-1935) is considered the most important rabbinical authority in the study of Jewish vegetarianism as a positive ideal from the Torah. His writings on Jewish vegetarianism published in Germany and in Switzerland between 1903 and 1910 were gathered and edited in 1973 by Rabbi David Cohen (1887-1973), one of his most illustrious pupils (“Nazir of Jerusalem”) but published only in 1983 under the title *A Vision of Vegetarianism*

<footnote n="5">⁵ “You are permitted to use the animals and employ them for work, have dominion over them in order to utilize their service for your subsistence, but must not hold their life cheap nor slaughter them for food. Your natural diet is vegetaria,” quoted in Schwartz, *Judaism and Vegetarianism*, 1.</footnote>
*and Peace*. It was undoubtedly an evocative but misleading title, as vegetarianism is but a portion of a much wider analysis of the ideal relationship among God, the human being, and other forms of animal life. The premise of Kook's analysis is that eating meat was just a temporary concession that human beings were granted after the Flood. Because of their spiritual decadence and being unable to control their physical and emotional impulses, shedding the blood of animals would have resulted in far more ethically degraded behaviour.

For the average human being, eating meat is a minimum ethical concession, a sort of physical and ethical-moral relief valve to overcome natural impulses:

> With the coming of the permission to eat meat, after the sacralization of the mitzvot by the giving of the Torah, [the Torah] qualifies [the permission], as suggested by the words, "[when] you say, 'I shall eat meat', for you urge to eat meat, you may eat whenever you wish. There is here a wise yet hidden rebuke and a restrictive exhortation, namely, that as long as your inner morality does not abhor the eating of animal flesh, as you already abhor [the eating of] human flesh [...] then when the time comes for the human moral condition to abhor [eating] the flesh of animals, because of the moral loathing inherent in that act, your surely "will not have the urge to eat meat," and you will not eat it.<fnref n="6" />

Kook—a strictly halakhic man—never denied the juridical and moral legitimacy of eating meat, emphasizing, however, how restrictively this was conceded, the kashrut imposing several limitations whose main aim is to alleviate the animal's suffering. If Kook found vegetarianism preferable, and certainly not incompatible with halakha, why was he not vegetarian? Because Kook sticks to the well-established kabbalistic-mystical Lurianic concept of “elevation of the holy sparks,” according to which the elevation of the holy sparks/components contained in meat would be possible only if those who have already achieved a higher spiritual condition eat and use their energies for religious purposes, to perform mitzvot and

<footnote n="6">⁶ Rav Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, *A vision of vegetarianism and peace*, edited by Rabbi David Cohen, translated, with additional notes, by Jonathan Rubenstein (from his unpublished rabbinic thesis, n.p., n.d.), accessed June 2, 2023, https://www.jewishveg.org/AVisionofVegetarianismandPeace.pdf.</footnote>
to study the Torah.<fnref n="7" /> It follows that the *am ha-aretz*, the average person should refrain from eating meat, as the sparks of holiness contained in it, once consumed, would not attain any higher spiritual position. This seems in contradiction with Kook's previous position on meat consumption as minimal ethical concession to prevent a moral and ethical downfall. This is what prevents Kook from embracing a coherent vegetarian ideal and turning it into a consistent form of religious orthopraxis. While waiting for the messianic times it is the kashrut that through its elaborate regulations raises "the consciousness of the Jewish people [...] with the aim of eventually guiding them back to the vegetarian regimen originally instituted by God in Genesis 1:29."<fnref n="8" /> With the coming of the Messiah all these discrepancies will be resolved. With the coming of the Messiah, all living beings—human and animal—will have attained a higher spiritual and moral consciousness:

> When humanity arrives at its goal of happiness and complete freedom, when it reaches that high peak of wholeness which is the pure knowledge of God and the sanctification of life fulfilled according to its nature, then the age of "the prompting of the intellect" will arrive, like a structure built on the foundation of "the prompting of the Torah," which is prior for the whole of humanity. Then human beings will recognize their relationship with all the animals, who are their companions in creation, and how they should properly be able, from the standpoint of pure morality, to combine the standard of mercy with the standard of justice in particular relation to [the animals], and they will no longer be in need of extenuating concessions, like the concessions [referred to in the Talmud by the phrase]: "The Torah speaks only of the evil inclination;" rather, they will walk the path of absolute good. "I will make a covenant for them with the

<footnote n="7">⁷ Richard H. Schwartz and David Sears, "The Vegetarian Teachings of Rav Kook," in Labendz and Yanklowitz, eds., *Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism*, 217-231, 220. It's outside the scope of this short paper, it is still worth mentioning the position taken on this issue by the 19th century Lithuanian Musar movement, on which see Geoffrey D. Claussen, "Musar and Jewish Veganism," in Labendz and Yanklowitz, eds., *Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism*, 195-216.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Schwartz and Sears, "The Vegetarian Teachings of Rav Kook," 218.</footnote>
beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the
ground; I will also banish bow, sword, and war from the land [...].<fnref n="9" />

If Kook had been aware of the environmental consequences of modern super-
intensive farming, and especially of the inhumane treatment inflicted upon
millions of animals slaughtered for the meat industry—some critics argued—he
probably would have taken a more straightforward stance on vegetarianism. In
Kook’s time, nothing that characterised the modern food industry existed: the
physical and psychological distress of an animal was confined to its last few
moments. If the aim of tza’ar ba’ale hayyim is to reduce the pain inflicted on an
animal especially at the time of slaughter, how ethically and halakhically legitimate
is the consumption of meat from animals forced to suffer from birth until death?
In Kook’s “vegetarian” theory, meat is consumed to support the human body, and
the death of animal is cruel but necessary. But what, however, if animal life is taken
for gluttony, or, worse, for frivolous reasons like sport and leisure? This underpins
the ethical legitimacy of meat consumption and is bringing a growing number of
rabbinical authorities to adopt and recommend kosher meat-free diets.

***Tza’ar: Certainly Not for Fun***

Soon after World War II, Kook's writings generated a lively debate among Jews, secular thinkers, and rabbinical authorities, some of whom felt morally and environmentally obligated to rectify the human being/animal relationship, overcoming the boundaries of speciesism and reconsidering the meaning of the biblical idea of God having given man dominion over Creation. Such ideas moved across Jewish denominations, from reform, through modern orthodoxy to

<footnote n="9">⁹ Kook, *A Vision of Vegetarianism and Peace*, 12; Schwartz and Sears, “The Vegetarian Teachings of Rav Kook,” 222-224, argue that Kook would have probably rectified his position on meat and vegetarianism, if he only knew about the environmental consequences and especially the brutalities committed against millions of animals every day in the modern intensive farms and food industries: “One can only wonder what his view would have been today if he were aware of the diseases, soaring medical costs, increasing environmental hazards, widespread hunger, cruel treatment of animals.”</footnote>
Chassidism.<fnref n="10" /> Unlike other forms of pro-animal advocacy that fiercely opposed any form of animal-based diet, Jewish vegetarianism and pro-animal welfare never claimed moral superiority or indisputable truth, defining itself as an easier way to grow spiritually in accordance with the teachings and main ideological tenets of Judaism.

Exploiting animal *le-shem shamayim* or for any other purpose concerning the physical and mental welfare of human beings is legitimate, provided that necessary measures are taken to alleviate animal suffering. What, however, is *tza'ar* when inflicted for a non-vital, but still socially largely accepted and historically grounded reason? A very important precedent is offered by a *she'elah* (answer to a religious legal question) that Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef—a leading rabbinical authority and Rishon le-Tzion (chief rabbi) of Israeli Sephardic Jews since 1973—issued on the legitimacy of bullfighting.

In 1986 a group of orthodox rabbis was invited to an international conference in Spain where they would attend a corrida, a bullfight, a fundamental element of Spanish and Iberian culture. Asked about the legitimacy of bullfight, Ovadiah Yosef did not hesitate to condemn it as the expression of “a culture of sinful and cruel people,” a gruesome event based on maximum exploitation of animal suffering, standing in stark contrast and direct opposition to the principle of *tza'ar ba'ale hayyim*.<fnref n="11" /> Making the animal suffer—unnecessarily, from a halakhic standpoint—and even deliberately prolonging it—argued Yosef—is not an ancillary event in bullfight, something that can be limited or even eliminated, but a quintessential component of the show.

Yosef forbade Jews from taking part in a bullfight, directly either as bullfighters or as part of the staff or indirectly as part of the audience. This latter role would contribute to the public transgression of a fundamental Jewish value, *moshav letzim* (from Psalm 1:1, “the company of the insolent”).<fnref n="12" /> Whereas the main

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ David Sears, *Compassion for Humanity in the Jewish Tradition: A Source Book and the Path of Baal Shem Tov: Early Chassidic Teachings and Customs, Northvale, N.J., Jason Aronson, c1998*.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ “Bullfighting and Visiting a Zoo by Rabbi Chaim Jachter,” *Torah Academy of Bergen County* 11 (2001/5762), accessed June 2, 2023, https://www.koltorah.org/halachah/bullfighting-and-visiting-a-zoo-by-rabbi-chaim-jachter.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² For more information on Yosef's condemnation of bullfighting and other related matters (hunting and visiting zoos), see “*Tza'ar Baalei Chaim* –Is It Permitted to Watch a Bullfight? A</footnote>
problem here is the total lack of measures to alleviate the pain of an animal—
exacerbated by the spectacularizing of its death—what makes a corrida an
illegitimate form of animal exploitation is its complete needlessness.

Having taken note of Yosef's decision on bullfighting—one of the cruelest forms
of animal exploitation—some rabbinical authorities started looking at animal
exploitation from a much wider standpoint, looking at the totality of the animal's
tortured existence. While kosher in strictly halakhic terms, how Jewishly ethical is
to eat meat of animals that were confined to cramped cages that did not allow them
to move, and that were overfed or forcibly impregnated? At the time of the Sages,
today's meat industry was inconceivable. Even when properly executed, shehitah,
as any form of inflicted death, is painful for the animal, especially when performed
in an industrial environment where animals are terrorized by being forced to
watch other animals being slaughtered.<fnref n="13" />

Rabbi Asa Keisar—Israel’s “national voice for veganism as a religious ideal”—has no doubts about this issue: modern methods of breeding and farming are simply incompatible with the criteria of dignity and respect codified by the Sages. While not denying the legitimacy of eating meat, Keisar underlines how this is just a concession, something that is permitted but not required. His manifesto, *We-lifney ‘iver* (Before the Blind)<fnref n="14" />—a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the most important biblical and rabbinical sources — has circulated widely in Israel, reaching orthodox yeshivot/rabbinical schools and secular milieus. It has also

<footnote>Responsum of Harav Ovadiah Yosef, zt”l, based on Yechaveh Da’at 3:61,” *Olami Resources*, accessed June 2, 2023, [http://nleresources.com/kiruv-and-chinuch/nle-gemara/permitted-watch-bullfight/#.YrlwIyoRrrc](http://nleresources.com/kiruv-and-chinuch/nle-gemara/permitted-watch-bullfight/#.YrlwIyoRrrc). Interesting to note that, while openly condemning hunting, especially when practiced for recreational purposes, Yosef allowed the visit to zoos, whose animal variety and diversity would teach visitors about G-d’s greatness.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ A very accurate study on the physiology of animal pain when ritually slaughtered is offered by Sara Rota Nodari and Stefano Cinotti, “Stato delle conoscenze sul dolore animale nella macellazione ebraica,” in “Gli animali e la sofferenza. La questione della schechità e i diritti dei viventi,” eds. Laura Quercioli Mincer and Tobia Zevi, *La Rassegna Mensile di Israel* 78, no. 1-2 (2012): 181-191.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ From Lev. 19, 14 “You shall not insult the deaf, or place a stumbling block before the blind. You shall fear your God” [emphasis mine]. The book was published in 2016, with a second expanded edition that appeared in 2018, *We-lifney ‘iver ha-shalem*. The text can be downloaded for free from Rabbi Keisar’s website at: [https://asakeisar.com/en/](https://asakeisar.com/en/), accessed June 2, 2023. The book was endorsed and approved by leading rabbinical authorities such as Rabbi David Rosen, former Chief Rabbi of Ireland, Rabbi Moshe Zuriel, Rabbi Daniel Sperber, and Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo.</footnote>
sparked a lively debate also among ultra-Orthodox Jews. A vegetarian, or even better a vegan diet involving absolutely no form of animal exploitation—Keisar affirms—should undoubtedly be preferred, and use of animal products be totally avoided, unless necessary for the fulfilment of religious duties (including saving one’s life), and unless they are processed according to proper kosher methods. If we consistently stick to Maimonides’ principle that “there is no difference between the grief of a human and the grief of an animal,” and ask ourselves what justifies treating animals in ways that would be horrific if done to humans, we can see the ethical and moral discrepancy that is created when one accepts this model of production.<fnref n="15" />

According to Rabbi Simchah Roth—another prominent figure in the rabbinical pro-animal front—*shehitah*, like the whole of the slaughtering practices aiming to minimize the pain of the animal, should no longer be considered acceptable methods of terminating an animal's life, especially compared to other forms of non-ritual slaughter in which death is inflicted quickly. Aiming to optimize the times of production and then to offer a competitive product, the meat industry applies systems of production that according to Rabbi Roth are totally incompatible not only with *tza'ar ba'ale hayyim* but with the core aims of ritual slaughter that should take place in a physical environment that minimizes the animal's awareness of its impending death. This is unavoidable in the meat industry where the animals, adds Roth, like links in a production chain, are aligned, pushed, and killed in an appalling carouse of death. The recent scandals that involved a considerable portion of North America's most important kosher meat industries might be explained exactly in these terms, as the obvious and unavoidable outcomes of massive production of meat.<fnref n="16" /> While in the past the consumption of meat was occasional, now, adds Roth, this can no longer be considered a necessity (and therefore justifiable as part of *tza'ar ba'ale hayyim*), but a choice, or rather, a wrong option, especially given the lack of natural resources

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Rabbi Keisar summarizes this in a short video, *Asa Keisar - Cruelty to animals*, accessed June 2, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N1TIM1ZcwU.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ I am referring here to the scandal that involved Agriprocessors, the biggest meat industry in the world, where abuse of animals was so routine to turn kosher meat unkosher. See Aaron Gross, “When Kosher Isn’t Kosher,” in *Tikkun* 20, no. 2 (2005): 52-55. Worth mentioning is finally Foer’s investigation on the kosher meat industry, *If This Is Kosher...*, accessed June 2, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WviIO10AYMo.</footnote>
and dramatic worsening of environmental conditions caused by intensive farming, as well as in consideration of the numerous health issues caused by meat-based diets.<fnref n="17" /> It is not for ethical and environmental reasons, according to Roth, that one should “egoistically” give up meat but rather for the sake of one’s health.<fnref n="18" />

**We-nishmartem le-nafshotekhem: For the Sake of the Living Body, and of the Planet**

As shown by recent scientific research, meat production and intensive farming are both responsible for the current environmental crisis, contributing at least to one third of all global warming. If every human is required to protect and respect his or her own body—a microcosm of God's creation—according to the principle of transmittance (lit. "for your own sake, therefore, be most careful," Deut. 4, 15), one also protect and respect the environment, a common good from which all have the right to benefit.

Should the masters of the Palestinian and Jerusalem Talmud be living today—in a time of food and nutrient overabundance, at least in the Western world—

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ For more information on Simchah Roth's call for vegetarian and vegan diets, "An Interview of Rabbi Simchah Roth," JVC, accessed June 2, 2023, https://www.jvs.org.uk/2013/08/24/an-interview-of-rabbi-simchah-roth/. Roth's call for vegetarianism among Jews echoes what Peter Singer wrote in his pioneering book on animals' rights, *Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals* (New York Review-Random House, New York, 1975). The quotation here is from the 2009 Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition, 233-234: "[...] meanwhile, those who do not wish to eat meat slaughtered contrary to the current teachings of their religion have a simple alternative: not to eat meat at all. In making this suggestion, I am not asking more of religious believers than I ask of myself; it is only that the reasons for them to do it are stronger because of the additional suffering involved in producing the meat they eat."</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ This is how Roth summarizes why Jews should opt for a vegetarian or vegan diet: "Modern mass-slaughter of animals constitutes cruelty to animals [צער בעלי חיים] which is forbidden by the Torah; consumption of animal products contravenes the command of the Torah to maintain ourselves in good health [נפשותיכם]; religious Jews should stop eating animal products (meat, eggs, milk etc) in order to lessen greatly the damage we are doing to the planet [שלא תקלקל ותחריב את עולמי]; if religious Jews adopt a vegan diet, they will be greatly contributing to promoting rightousness and justice in the world [צדק צדק תדף] and to a hastening of the messianic age, Rabbi Simchah Roth, "Why an observant Jew should follow a plant-based (vegan) diet," *The Virtual Bet Midrash*, December 19, 2010. Accessed June 2, 2023, http://www.bmv.org.il/v/vegan.html#02.</footnote>
wouldn't they be recommending a meat-free diet?<sup>19</sup> Probably not, as intensive farming and meat production is not the leading factor in the general environmental dramatic changes, and banning meat would probably lead to widespread unrest among observant Jews. While probably not so easily justifiable in strict legal-halakhic terms, a ban on meat can certainly be ethically understood, a vegetarian diet not only fully complying with the principle of respecting animal life and avoiding unnecessary suffering (*tza'ar ba'ale hayyim*), but also morally aligning with the notion of *we-nishmartem le-nafshotekhem*, the prohibition to harm ourselves. If not ethically for ourselves and for the benefit of our own body, becoming vegetarian should be more than ever before an urgent moral issue.

In 2009, *Eating animals* offered a critical analysis of what it means to eat animal products in an industrialised world, unveiling dramatic truths about the conditions in which animals live and die in the intensive farming system. If what we eat means something and our choices mirror our ethical positions, eating meat from the food industries and intensive farming means accepting, and tacitly supporting a system in which the animal is conceived and treated like an object, a link in an industrial chain. As a young Jew escaping Nazi occupation, Foer's grandmother refused non-kosher meat that a merciful Russian farmer offered her, despite the exceptional circumstances and the fact that it could save her life:

> A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”

> “He saved your life.”

<footnote n="19"><sup>19</sup> Difficult to say, and clearly a rhetorical question. It is interesting to know, for example, that an extremely dangerous habit like smoking - whose threats to human health have scientifically been proved and are nowadays universally well known - even though banned by rabbinical authorities, is still part of everyday life of many observant Jews, especially in the ultra-Orthodox milieus. The Rabbinical Council of America issued the ban in 2006 and it is available online at the following link: http://www.rabbis.org/pdfs/Prohibition_Smoking_Full_Translation.pdf [22 September 2022]. The ban was “inter-denominational,” similar bans have been issued also by Conservative and Reform rabbis, on which see https://responsaftoday.com/en/smoking-in-jewish-law/ [22 September 2022]. A significantly more lenient - and I would personally say also ambivalent - position is taken by Chabad authorities: https://www.chabad.org/therebbe/letters/default_cdo/aid/2084783/jewish/Why-Dont-the-Rabbis-Ban-Smoking.htm; last, but certainly not least, see rabbi Alberto Somekh's, “Vietato Fumare,” *Morashà*, February 7, 2017. Accessed June 2, 2023, https://morasha.it/vietato-fumare/.</footnote>
“I didn’t eat it.”
“You didn’t eat it?”
“It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?”
“What, because it wasn’t kosher?”
“Of course.”
“But not even to save your life?”
“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”<fnref n="20" />

The point here is that abiding by the rules of kashrut and other biblical-rabbinical
norms, is not to overcome the boundaries and limits of a “self” defined by a set of
non-negotiable values. What we are facing today is a similar dilemma, one defined
by completely opposite terms: though we understand that meat does not grow on
trees and that what makes meat so affordable today is a production system based
on massive deforestation and over-exploitation of animals and natural resources,
our priority remains the satisfaction our most immediate needs, even to the
detriment of our own existence. The rules of kashrut whose primary aim is to
minimize animal pain, cannot be reconciled with this production system, as
shockingly shown in the Agriprocessor scandal, where production was optimized
at the expense of animal welfare and, paradoxically as it might seem, in complete
disregard of rabbinical and kashrut rules. As Foer explained in *We Are the
Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast* (2019), we live in a time of glaring
idiosyncrasies and contradictions, one side being perfectly aware of what must be
done, but acting as if in a time of war; instead of turning lights off and rationing
food, we keep the lights on and eat whatever we want. Medical and environmental
data have expressed a unanimous verdict: eating meat is not only no longer
necessary for the vast majority of Western people, at least, but also a leading factors
in our own physical and general environmental crisis. We should give up meat
now. If not now, when?

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Jonathan Safran Foer, *Eating Animals* (London: Penguin Books, 2018), 16-17.</footnote>
**Piergabriele Mancuso** studied at Venice University Ca' Foscari and in London, UCL, where he got a PhD in Jewish studies with a thesis on *Shabbatai Donnolo's Sefer Hakhmoni*, one of the earliest medieval Hebrew texts and commentaries on *Sefer Yetzirah*. A trained musician with a degree in viola, he teaches at Boston University (Abroad Programs) since 2007, and in 2013 he was appointed director of the Eugene Grant Jewish History Program at the Medici Archive Project, Florence. Together with Enrico Fink he is the co-founder and academic director of the Online Thesaurus of Italian Jewish Music, an online Jewish musicology and ethnomusicology thesaurus, http://jewishitalianmusic.org.

**Keywords:** Tza'ar ba'ale hayyim, Ritual Slaughtering, Kosher Meat Industry, Rabbi Abraham Yitzhak Ha-Kohen Kook, Jewish Vegetarianism

**How to quote this article:**

Piergabriele Mancuso, “*Tza’ar ba’ale hayyim:* Jewish Animal Rights Advocacy and Vegetarianism, from Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Ha-Kohen Kook’s *A Vision of Vegetarianism and Peace* to Jonathan Safran Foer,” in “Created from Animals: Thinking the Human/Animal Difference in Jewish and Hebrew Literature,” ed. Anna Lissa, *Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History*. Journal of the Fondazione CDEC 23, no. 1 (2023), DOI: 10.48248/issn.2037-741X/13902
# Kids for Calves: Children Against Slaughter in Fin-de-siècle Jewish Literature

by Naama Harel

## Abstract

Several canonical works of Modern Jewish literature, written in Hebrew and Yiddish at the turn of the twentieth century, distinctly depict an anti-slaughter stance. Jewish approach to animal slaughter has been largely ambivalent, from the biblical creation story in Genesis 1, where human nutrition was limited to plants only, to various restrictions on the practices of killing and consuming animals—in many cases, due to the religious obligation to care for animals (tzaʻar baʻale hayyim). In this article, I seek to critically analyze three literary works, in which the anti-slaughter stance is voiced by children protagonists: Mordecai Ze'ev Feierberg's "The Calf" ("ha-'Egel," 1899), Mendele Mocher Seforim's "The Calf" ("Dos Kelbl," 1902), and Sholem Aleichem's Motl the Cantor's Son (Motl Peyse dem khazns, 1907). These stories will be examined in the light of the religious ambivalence toward animal slaughter and contextualized within relevant socio-historical conditions.

## Introduction

### Jewish Ambivalence towards Animal Slaughter

#### Feierberg's Calf

#### Abramovitsh's Calf

#### Sholem Aleichem's Calf
Introduction

Children’s special kinship with animals is often explained by the fact that the former have
not been fully indoctrinated into anthropocentrism yet.<fnref n="1" /> In *Totem and Taboo*, Freud
maintains that “children show no trace of the arrogance, which urges adult civilized men
to draw a hard-and-fast line between their own nature and that of all other animals.
Children have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals.”<fnref n="2" /> The theme
of child-animal bond is common throughout Western literature, depicted in classical
works such as Rudyard Kipling’s *The Jungle Book* (1894), Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’
*The Yearling* (1938), Eric Knight’s *Lassie Come-Home* (1940), and Fred Gipson’s *Old
Yeller* (1956), which all have famous cinematic adaptations as well. This theme also
abounds in Jewish literature written in Hebrew and Yiddish at the turn of the twentieth
century.<fnref n="3" /> Yet unlike typical Western narratives, the Jewish stories, which take place in pre-
World War II East European provincial towns (shtetls), focus on neither pets nor wild
animals, but rather distinctly revolve around animals for consumption, taking a distinct
anti-slaughter stance.

Historical studies have described a growing sensitivity toward animals in the Western World since the early modern period, which also coincided with decreased daily contact between humans and animals, due to the forces of urbanization and industrialization. Slaughterhouses were relocated outside of city centers, partially for economic reasons, yet also as modern societies were no longer capable of bearing vicious scenes of slaughter.<fnref n="4" /> This process of separation between humans and animals did not take place among Jews

<footnote n="1">¹ Matthew Cole and Kate Stewart, *Our Children and Other Animals: The Cultural Construction of Human-Animal Relations in Childhood* (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014), 37-54; Carmen Dell’Aversano, “The Love Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken: Queering the Human-Animal Bond,” *Journal for Critical Animal Studies* 8, no. 1 (2010): 73-125, 82; Anna Feuerstein and Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo, *Childhood and Pethood in Literature and Culture: New Perspectives in Childhood Studies and Animal Studies* (New York: Routledge, 2017), 2; Erica Fudge, *Animal* (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 70-74.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Sigmund Freud, *Totem and Taboo*, trans. James Strachey (London: Routledge, 2001), 147.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ It is important to note that literary works, whose protagonists are children, should not necessarily be considered children’s literature. The Jewish works discussed here, which are written from a child’s perspective, were not written for children.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Josh Berson, *The Meat Question: Animals, Humans, and the Deep History of Food* (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019); Sarah Cockram and Andrew Wells, eds., *Interspecies Interactions: Animals and Humans between the Middle Ages and Modernity* (New York: Routledge, 2018); Keith Thomas, *Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Paula Young Lee, ed., *Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse* (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2008).</footnote>
in the shtetls. Due to the requirements of Jewish ritual slaughter, Jews typically kept animals for consumption—and did not have pets—in their homes, and raised them until their slaughter. Such distinct material interspecies relations at the turn of the twentieth century certainly contributed to the unusual literary focus on animals for consumption and their slaughter.

This anti-slaughter stance among *fin-de-siècle* Eastern European Jews was also greatly inspired by Tolstoyan beliefs, associated with the politics of social justice and pacifism.<fnref n="5" /> Moreover, the traditional Jewish approach to animal slaughter is largely ambivalent. In this article I seek to address the Jewish ambivalence towards slaughter and the consumption of animals, and analyze the child-calf relations in three stories, which echo this ambivalence: Mordecai Ze’ev Feierberg’s “The Calf” (“ha-’Egel,” 1899), Mendele Mocher Seforim’s “The Calf” (“Dos Kelbl,” 1902), and Sholem Aleichem’s *Motl the Cantor’s Son* (*Motl Peyse dem khazns*, 1907).<fnref n="6" />

## Jewish Ambivalence towards Animal Slaughter

Although animal slaughter and the consumption of their meat is permitted in Judaism, ambivalence about these practices is ubiquitous throughout the Jewish tradition.<fnref n="7" /> This

<footnote n="5">⁵ Rafi Tsirkin-Sadan, “Tolstoy, Zionism and the Hebrew Culture,” *Tolstoy Studies Journal* 24 (2012): 26-35; Jennifer Wilson, “The Revolution Will Not Be Consummated: The Politics of Tolstoyan Chastity in the West,” *The Slavic and East European Journal* 60, no. 3 (2016): 494-511.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ The *talush* (uprooted), which is a significant figure in *fin-de-siècle* Hebrew prose of a young Jewish man searching for his place in modern Europe, is in many cases a vegetarian that holds an anti-slaughter stance. Such works include Micha Josef Berdichevsky’s “Two Camps” (“Mahanayim,” 1899-1900), Uri Nissan Gnessin’s “Sideways” (“ha-Tzidah,” 1905), Yosef Haim’s Brenner’s *In Winter (Ba-horef*, 1903) and “One Year,” (“Shanah ahat,” 1908), Devorah Baron’s “The End of Sender Ziv” (“Kitzo shel Sender Ziv,” 1919), and Shmuel Yosef Agnon’s “Hill of Sand” (“Giv’at ha-hol,” 1919). Nevertheless, *talush* narratives are not included in this analysis, since their protagonists are not children, and their anti-slaughter stance is not driven from Judaism.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Anat Ben-Yonatan, “‘Yesterday You Slaughtered Animals, Today You Pity Them’: Ambivalence and Resolution Among Jewish Israeli Slaughterers,” *Anthrozoös* 35, no. 3 (2022): 355-370; Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus, “Meat-Eating and Jewish Identity: Ritualization of the Priestly ‘Torah of Beast and Fowl’ (Lev 11: 46) in Rabbinic Judaism and Medieval Kabbalah,” *AJS Review* 24, no. 2 (1999): 227-262; Geoffrey D. Claussen, “Musar and Jewish Veganism,” in *Jewish Veganism and Vegetarianism: Studies and New Directions*, eds. Jacob Ari Labendz and Shmuly Yanklowitz (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2019), 195-216; Aaron S. Gross, “Jewish Animal Ethics,” in *The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality*, eds. Elliot N. Dorff and Jonathan K. Crane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 419-432; Yael Shemesh, “Vegetarian Ideology</footnote>
ambivalence harks back to the biblical creation story. Interestingly, while humans are granted dominion over all other animals, their nutrition is solely restricted to plants: “And God said: ‘Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed—to you it shall be for food’” (Genesis 1:29). Various commentators from antiquity onward conclude from this verse that eating meat is forbidden. A Talmudic passage states that, “It is derived God told Adam: Eating vegetation is permitted, but eating the animals of the earth is not permitted to you (Sanhedrin 59b). Rashi, the foremost bible commentator of the eleventh century, likewise stresses what God’s first dietary law does not allow: “God did not permit Adam and his wife to kill a creature and to eat its flesh”” (Rashi on Genesis 1:29).

Animal slaughter and meat eating have been permitted, according to the Hebrew bible, only after the Flood. Several eminent commentators have regarded this permission as a divine compromise. In his classic work on the fundamentals of Judaism, Joseph Albo, the fifteenth century Jewish philosopher, ponders why eating meat was permitted after the Flood, although “in the killing of animals there is cruelty, rage, and the accustoming oneself to the bad habit of shedding innocent blood.” He then suggests: “the animals that were permitted were merely a concession to human lust and desire, in the same way as the Israelites were permitted women taken in war” (Sefer ha-Iqqarim 3:15). This view has received significant religious endorsement from Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, who argues in *Li-Nevukhe ha-dor* (*For the Perplexed of the Generation*):

> Let us hold up, for example, the ethical yearning of not killing any living thing for human purposes. It's impossible to deny something that is sensed by any feeling heart, that there is a general ethical deficiency in the human species that it fails to uphold the good and lofty feeling that it is wrong to take the life of any life for its own needs. And it's completely impossible that the good God would make an everlasting law in a very good creation dictating that the human species could not sustain itself unless it clouds its ethical feelings by spilling blood, even the blood of animals [...] However, after the generation of the flood, where meat was allowed to be eaten, it certainly wasn't meant to remain that way forever, for how can there be an ethical situation that changes and becomes nullified after it had already been the way to act? We are to increase holiness, not decrease it!

<footnote>in Talmudic Literature and Traditional Biblical Exegesis,” *Review of Rabbinic Judaism* 9 (2006): 141-166; Barry L. Stiefel, “Yes, but is It Kosher?: Varying Religio-Cultural Perspectives on Judaism and Veganism,” in *The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies*, ed. Laura Wright (New York: Routledge, 2021), 194-204.</footnote>
Rather, the Divine Intellect saw that man had fallen from his ethical state, and until the time comes of recognition and awakening of true ethics, we cannot burden man with an ethical level that does not accord with his value system.<fnref n="8" />

Furthermore, the permission given to Noah to consume meat was not unconditional; there was an immediate prohibition against consuming blood, since blood was associated with the *nefesh*, the animal soul (Genesis 9:4). In addition, various Mosaic laws protect animals not only from physical pain, but also from emotional suffering. In fact, the key term used in Judaism for the obligation to care for animals—*tza'ar ba'ale hayyim*—literally means “animal sorrow.” Maimonides, the greatest medieval Jewish thinker, explains a series of prohibitions regarding slaughter and meat consumption vis-à-vis the commandment to avoid *tza'ar ba'ale hayyim*:

> He also forbade slaughtering an animal and its young on the same day, to take care to avoid slaughtering the young before its mother's eyes, for the distress caused thereby to animals is great; there is no difference between the distress felt by human beings and the distress of other creatures, for a mother's love and compassion for the fruit of her womb is not guided by the intellect but by the power of imagination, which exists equally in most animals as in humans. (*Guide for the Perplexed* III:48)

The notion of *tza'ar ba'ale hayyim* was later defined and broadened by the rabbis of the Talmud, which is exemplified in the following Talmudic teaching:

> A calf that was being led to slaughter went and hung its head on the corner of Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi's garment and was weeping, and the Rabbi said to him: "Go, as you were created for this purpose." It was said in Heaven: "Since he was not compassionate toward the calf, let afflictions come upon him." One day, his maid was sweeping the house. There were newly-born rats lying about, and she was about to sweep them out. The Rabbi told her: "Let them be, as it is written: "The Lord is good to all; and His mercies are over all His works" (Psalms 145:9).

<footnote n="8">⁸ Abraham Isaac Kook, 2014. *Li-nevukhe ha-dor: ha-mekhuneh Moreh nevokhim he-hadash* (Tel Aviv: Yedi'ot ahronot, Sifre Hemed, 2014), 65. Sefaria Community Translation. Alongside viewing the permission to eat meat as a moral compromise, it has been also considered as a temporary ecological necessity, since the Flood devastated the flora. See, for example, Isaac Abravanel on Genesis 9:3.</footnote>
Naama Harel

They said in Heaven: Since he was compassionate, we shall be compassionate on him, and he was relieved of his suffering. (Bava Metzia 85a)

## Feierberg's Calf

Mordecai Ze'ev Feierberg (1871-1899), a prominent writer of Hebrew Revival Literature (*sifrut ha-tehiyyah*), was born in the Ukraine as the son of a Jewish ritual slaughterer (*Shohet*). Feierberg's father was interested in teaching his trade to his son, who could not handle the cruelty involved in slaughtering animals,<fnref n="9" /> as he later described in one of his prominent short stories, “The Calf,” written from the perspective of a nine-year-old Jewish boy named Hofni. The boy is strongly attached to the beautiful calf that the family cow gave birth to, and thus is outraged to realize that his mother plans to slaughter the calf and roast him for Shabbat.

Despite the fact that the story entirely focuses on the child's loving feelings for the calf and resistance to his killing, as well as the clear autobiographical context, critics have tended to read the anti-slaughter theme as a mere vehicle to other concepts, which allegedly stand at the core of the story and have nothing to do with compassion for animals, such as the dismal fate of Jewish children in the diaspora,<fnref n="10" /> or—more broadly—pure life and its arbitrary suffering.<fnref n="11" /> Moreover, some critics have even argued that the story, which concludes with the slaughter of the calf, actually takes the pro-slaughter position, represented by Hofni's mother.<fnref n="12" />

Alternatively, I seek to read Feierberg's "The Calf" as a groundbreaking anti-slaughter narrative, criticizing human dominion over animals, notably in Jewish society. A foreshadow to this concept is found in an early stage of the story, when Hofni depicts the streets of the small Jewish town, in which he and his classmates rush to the synagogue for the afternoon and evening prayers, sharing the road with numerous farm animals:

<footnote n="9">⁹ Joseph Klausner, *Yotzrim u-bonim: ma'amare biqoret*, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1929), II: 179.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Aharon Ben-Or, *Toldot ha-sifrut ha-’ivrit ha-hadashah*, 2 vols. (Tel Aviv: Hotsaat Yizrael, 1946), II: 140. Rachel Katzenelson-Shazar, *Masot ve-reshimot* (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘Oved, 1947), 87.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Baruch Kurzweil, *Sifrutenu ha-hadashah: hemshekh o mahapekhah?* (Jerusalem: Shoken, 1965), 164. Alan Mintz, “Mordecai Zev Feierberg and the Reveries of Redemption,” *AJS Review 2* (1977): 171-199.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Aviad Kleinberg, ‘*Al ahavat em ve-’al mora av: mabat aher ’al ha-mishpahah* (Tel Aviv: Keter, 2004), 147-148. Samuel Werses, *Mi-Mendele ’ad Hazaz: sugiyot be-hitpathut ha-sipporet ha-’ivrit* (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1987), 123.</footnote>
Here someone stealing a ride on a billy goat's back and there on a she-goat's, while yet someone else terrorized the animals by stampeding them wildly to let them know he was a man, a scion of that heroic race whose dominion was one with the world. Suddenly, at the herd's edge, I spied our own cow coming towards me by the side of a herdsman, who was carrying a lovely little calf on his shoulder.<fnref n="13" />

Hofni witnesses his classmates' cruelty to animals, when he sees the newborn calf for the first time. The lovely calf was born to this very world, where such power dynamics are at play. Upon spotting the calf, the narrator says: "I wanted desperately to run after him, to throw myself ardently on the calf and kiss him with the kisses of my mouth with love."<fnref n="14" /> The boy's first reaction to the newborn calf alludes to Song of Songs 1:2, "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth," connecting the protagonist and the calf with the strongest love expression in Jewish tradition.

Young Hofni, however, has to restrain his urges, and keep distance from the calf, due to societal norms and restrictions: "But what can I do? What about the rabbi and the afternoon prayer? And what would my mother say if she were to see her son the Talmud student giving in to such unworthy impulses?"<fnref n="15" /> In his grand historiography of modern Hebrew literature, Gershon Shaked argues that in Feierberg's writings the Jewish world stands in opposition to the world of nature.<fnref n="16" /> This opposition is manifested here, as Hofni draws a clear-cut distinction between two spheres; the Jewish sphere, to which belong his rabbi and mother, prayers, the Talmud, and the synagogue, and the sphere of nature, to which the calf and the feelings the calf evokes in him belong. Hofni defines his attraction to the calf as "unworthy impulses," which seems to reflect his mother's perspective rather than his own.

Reluctantly, yet only temporarily, he chooses the Jewish sphere over the calf: "and so I had no choice but to force myself to go to the synagogue to pray."<fnref n="17" /> As soon as the service was over, Hofni rushed home: "I ran impatiently to the barn, where I knelt before the calf on my knees and ran both hands over his limbs."<fnref n="18" /> In contrast to his classmates, who have ridden over the farm animals on their way to the synagogue, he falls on his knees before this one and takes him in his arms. Hofni's compassionate approach is highlighted against

<footnote n="13">¹³ Mordecai Ze’ev Feierberg, *Whither? & Other Stories*, trans. Hillel Halkin (New Milford, CT: Toby Press. 2004), 32.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Gershon Shaked, *Ha-Sipporet ha-Ivrit, 1880-1980*, 5 vols. (Jerusalem: Keter, 1977), I: 208.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Feierberg, *Whither? & Other Stories*, 32.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Ibid.</footnote>