Author Response | Neis, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven

This essay is part of a review panel of When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven that took place at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. Read the full panel here.

I’m sincerely grateful for the careful and generative readings Beth Berkowitz, Sarah Taylor, Roland Betancourt, Mike Chin, and Andrea Cooper and to Krista Dalton for organizing, chairing, and facilitating our conversation. You all activated my work with your own, through words, images, and in Mike’s case, also sounds.

In the panel itself I began by asking those gathered to something a little different, something embodied and experimental. Lynda Barry observes that as children we are invited to draw and create in ways that we learn to judge and suppress in our transition to teen and adulthood.[1] In that spirit, I asked participants in the panel and the audience to join me in a drawing exercise borrowed and adapted from comics artist and philosopher Ivan Brunetti.[2] Feel free, dear readers, to try it yourselves:[3]  

Find a pencil or pen of your choice and spend 2 minutes drawing a cat from memory. Then start it over and draw it in 1 minute. Then begin again and draw it in 30 seconds. Then 15 second. Finally, 5 seconds. Make sure to complete the entire drawing within each shorter time frame.

Especially during the last couple of iterations, people really have to make quick decisions and simplify their renderings. These different, ever narrowing temporalities allow experiences of motion and line making that are somewhat unconscious, less concerned with the conceit of realism and detail. One idea behind this exercise is that as each time period gets shorter, we are forced to reduce the concept of “cat” to its most elemental – which is where “cartoon” or “comics” drawing resides. The cat becomes more abstracted and sometimes (hopefully?) absurd. Sharing our work afterwards was both entertaining. It was illuminating to see how many different ways people imagine “cat.”

I then followed with another brief exercise in which I asked those present to draw in response to the following prompt:

a silver cup fresh from the forge,

full of the seeds of a red pomegranate,

its brim encircled with red roses,

set between the sun and the shade.

This ekphrasis is borrowed from Bavli Bava Metsia 84a and purports to describe the luminous looks of Rabbi Yoḥanan following their claim to beauty:

R. Yoḥanan said: I am of the last remnants of the Jerusalem beauties. One who desires to see R. Yohanan's beauty, let them take a silver cup from the kiln, fill it with the seeds of red pomegranate, encircle its brim with red roses, and set it between the sun and the shade. And these that emanate, these are the rays (זהרורי)[4] of the beauty (שופרי) of R. Yoḥanan.[5]

Rabbi Yoḥanan calls attention to their own appearance here and the passage singles them out as looking like a woman and being smooth-cheeked and excluded from a lineage of masc beauties. The sage is not only self-aware; they also activate their Jerusalemite looks for eugenic purposes:

Rabbi Yoḥanan would go sit at the opening of the [place of ritual] immersion, saying, “when the daughters of Israel come up, let them gaze at me that they will have offspring as beautiful as me.”

The generative effects of beholding Yoḥanan are directly related to the (anonymous voice’s) instructions. I submit this is a ritual formula or “magical” recipe.[6] It consists in concrete instructions designed to conjure the rabbi’s radiance for the purposes of generating children in their likeness.[7] As such, the text straddles literary vividness that conjures images in the mind’s eye while demanding a set of materials and a series of physical actions (smelting silver, sliced and seeded pomegranates, plucked roses’ petals, placing at particular time and place).[8] Yet the “sympathetic” or “magical” character of this ritual recipe does not operate in the realm of realism or mimetic representation. It traffics in nonhuman materials and entities in order to elicit the “radiance” of Yoḥanan’s “beauty” rather than the lineaments of their visage or body. Rabbi Yoḥanan, then, stands in a non-mimetic relation in contrast to a vaunted masc patrilineal “reproduction” of likeness. Their radiance interrupts marital generative projects that trade in the perpetuation of continuity and sameness.

Similarly, I view my book not only as a celebration of resemblance and its nonsensical relations, but also an interruption of an exceptionalized and recurring image: that of God. The play of resemblances that found themselves in a divine origin is a patently human vanity project. Its reverberations continue to resound in a surprisingly wide set of contexts, particularly in Jewish and Christian discourses.[9] Tselem elohim or imago dei –  these terms secure or deny care. Who is sacred? Who is visible? Who is human? Who has “rights”? The stakes of this sort of classification are frightening.  

Beth Berkowitz highlights such stakes in her observation that animals have “families.” She somewhat apologizes “it sounds ridiculous to point out: of course they do.” I love this phrase. Is it ridiculous? In fact, Beth makes a careful, caring observation perhaps of the kind that Mike Chin (à la Elmer Bischoff) dubs one of those “simple things” which are “really loaded.” Beth ends up showing that it is no matter of “course” that animals have families. Their kinship arrangements go beyond what she dubs “straightforward biological units” and beyond “species” boundaries. Affective bonds of nurturance make kin in Beth’s account.

But more to the point: what even are “straightforward biological units”? Enough ink has been spilled in historical, anthropological, antiracist feminist scholarship about the the Family, that situates the notion of a biological unit quite late.[10] Certainly the “nuclear” family of two cishetero parents and a couple of children, a classed and racialized bourgeois institution of the Euro-American modern nation state, is of even more recent vintage. My question back to Beth would be: is the beyond that animal kinship bonds manifest exceptional or is it a highly contingent, provincial, humancentric, modernist, biopolitical idea of the family the problem here?

While Beth resists making animal families about humans, the rabbis did go there. I sought to think this through in comics form in book, via set of cases that I adapted from the Palestinian Talmud. Here, I submit, that what is often taken to be “ridiculous,” or in Mike’s terms, “stupid or simple,” is tamed by scholarship. That is, we tend to move away from “literal” readings of our sources when they discomfit us. I gravitate toward such simplicity or literalism in the making of comics (on which more below) and as a reading tendency in approaching ancient rabbinic and other sources.[11] Such an approach renders ancient traces as funny (in all the ways), poignant, and disturbing. Hence, I say, yes, humans gave birth to ravens. It’s not a metaphor. It’s also not bad science or a misunderstanding. Theirs was a world in which such things happened. And if “simple” or “ridiculous” things like this need to be said, then I’ll be the one to say them. So now, the comic:

I close this retelling with an aporia, another, “wait, what!?!” The sage with whom the parents consult, a teaching by Rabbi Yoḥanan that situates human exception in the face. In my mind’s eye, the parents or storyteller find this truly disturbing.

Assignations of “kind” – in modern, scientized terms, “species” – dictate whom Jewish humans eat or marry. The raven child who survives their brother turns out to have always been either dinner (if a pure kind) or a conduit for grandchildren. On the one hand, the story sends up the absurdity and contingent cruelty of such creaturely distinctions. On the other hand, there is a pointed gendering at work in the “generative imperative.”[12]

This persistent problem is what Andrea points to in her capacious response. Aside from recognizing that the rabbis contemplated non-dyadic models of generation, she asks how we can get beyond their limited insistence on a “problematic generative imperative that insists on progeny begotten by women” and ultimately “marriage and babies.” The ritual logic via which our raven can perpetuate his dead brother’s line, through the body of his previously incestuously forbidden sister-in-law, says everything about the unequal distribution of property, ritual obligation, and sexual exclusivity between human men and women. It falls upon us to imagine otherwise. This ambivalence of our own/ancient sources is inescapable. But for me it is far better than the ambivalence of the present all by itself (as if the present were ever alone unaccompanied by layered pasts). If you were to ask me how we might get beyond the rabbis’ – and our own – insistence on tying people we call “women” to reproductive futurity by refusing compulsory cisness and its attendant distributions of labor, property, and power. Easy, right?

I am talking about my comic as if its rendering of the Yerushalmi moves seamlessly into questions about assignations of categories and kin or care versus cruelty. I find it tricky to talk about my own artwork.  Not that I think that the work speaks for itself. I’m still basking in the glow of Roland’s smart and evocative analyses of my art and its relations to the text. I very much appreciate the generosity of this intellectual and aesthetic labor especially given the art historian’s pet peeve of those who simply drop images in as “mere” illustration.

I contend that it is somewhat different when the maker of the images is the writer of the book. That is, I’m not taking an image as a piece of evidence, or illustration of what I wrote. Moreover, I think that if the author is dead, the artist should be even deader.[13] My decision to not explicate or transparently stitch my art together with my writing was very intentional – I ended up discarding a much longer “Note on Images” in which I said much more than the rather dry deadpan set of references that it ended up being. I decided in favor of letting readers/viewers make their own determinations. Nonetheless, I will say a few more things about my artwork and its relation to scholarship.

Given comics or funny pages’ less than serious stature as Fine Art (or “stupid and simple” per Mike), and certainly as academic argument, I’m particularly delighted to incorporate them within scholarship (hopefully this doesn’t domesticate them) as well as to trade them as zines.

I’ve been painting, drawing, and sculpting for many decades, but I’ve had a complicated relationship with figuration. I’ve spent some periods submitting myself to the conceit of realism, the human figure, the still life, “linear perspective,” and various representational devices centered in Euro-American art. At the same time, I’ve also let go of these approaches in favor of process, materiality, sensation, mark-making, and what some might dub “abstraction.”

Mike rightly hones in on my interest in the fictions of “abstraction” and “figuration,” especially as supposedly contradictory representational schemes. Of recent years, I have submitted myself to the discipline of narrative comics. This has demanded some return to the of figuration. One of the things I like about the Brunetti exercise is how it allows us to tease apart the mechanics of mark-making, representation, and physical process. That is, while comics are in some sense “simple,” the genre itself demands a great deal of Betancourt’s “method-image.” You find yourself always already in page, text, text about image, image-text, and a relation of citation, hypercitation, and criticality. It turns out that even telling a “straightforward” story, in the sense simply of a sequence of panels, is quite difficult. Simplicity is not always easy.

An example of citation that recurs in my comics and also drawings and paintings, are marginalia, or as Michael Camille called them “images on the edge.”[14] These two multiform beings in the panel on the right – one with a human head and animal body and the other, vice versa –  turn out to be haunted by figures in the fourteenth century Barcelona Haggadah, and the early 14th century German Tripartite Mahzor.

The hooded dog of the Barcelona Haggadah stands atop a folio with the Havdalah text: the ritual prayer at the end of Shabbat. He wears the robe, cape and hood of a Dominican priest and is serving the hare who wears a traditional Spanish-Jewish cloak. Meanwhile, the hare strikes another dog with a stick. This depiction reverses ambient medieval social orders on several registers.[15] The other multiform creature is culled from the Tripartate Mahzor’s tripartite creature: part dragon torso with tail and head; part bearded human, and part human clarion-player. This three-headed, two-torsoed and six-limbed being straddles the top of the letter lamed, part of the world kol of the phrase kol nidre, the Yom Kippur prayer.[16] I deploy variants of these multiform (and multivalent) beings in figuring Rabbi Yoḥanan’s teaching about embodiments of multiformity and the assignation of kind (or species). But as they enter my comic, they carry affective resonances, grievances, terrors, subversions, or joy, in the ways that they maintained or confounded meawing for earlier viewer-readers.

The sharp-eyed viewer may have also spotted how I deploy Judaea capta iconography – coinage cast commemorate the Roman victory in Judaean revolt.

Vespasian (AD 69-79). AE sestertius

These coins in their various iterations depict Judaea(ns) twice: as a date palm and as a bowed, abject human woman (or man) seated under its fronds. The date palm was associated with Judaea, its iconography featured on the coinage of Judaean rebels in both revolts, and it was the subject of Roman capture, transplantation, and knowledge extraction (“colonial botany”) along with human people.[17] Rome is depicted as a soldier or as a trophy of Roman arms. This multivalent image with its dual human/nonhuman renderings of Jews is one context. But I turn it to a different end in the figures of the mourning widow and sibling. Because the palm tree is also drawn from the Talmudic narrative, which envisages the ravenlike child flying to the top of the date palm. Whether or not this feature of the narrative landscape manifests what we see elsewhere in rabbinic writings, which is an effort to (re)domesticate knowledge about local nonhuman life is another question.[18] Yet what is clear is that the potential violence inherent in the rabbinic trafficking in knowledge production about (non)human life and generation is subtly (or heavy-handedly) rendered.

Making a comic offers another way of studying the Yerushalmi Niddah passage. I draw to learn, I draw to read with my body. I draw to concretize otherness, the past. Translating the Talmud, transforming it, transmuting it to this sequence of marks on a page, which the eye reads in a certain chronology allows me to learn something new and to share it.

Rafael Rachel Neis is Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and author of The Sense of Sight in Rabbinic Culture: Jewish Ways of Seeing in Late Antiquity.

[1] Barry, Lynda. Syllabus: Notes from an accidental professor (Drawn & Quarterly, 2021).

[2] Brunetti, Ivan. Cartooning: Philosophy and practice (Yale University Press, 2011), 25.  

[3] The exercise need not involve sight: it can be a tactile experience involving mark-making in which you are invited to experience drawing and gesture and imagination at different paces.

[4] Par. Midrash Hagadol 21.84.1.23.

[5] MS Florence.

[6] Neis, When a Human, 160.

[7] Neis, When a Human,  156-60. On ekphrasis and energeia in late antiquity including in rabbinic literature see Neis, Sense of Sight, 22,110, 161, 165, and 202.

[8] Do we assign these materials – a cup, pomegranate seeds, rose petals – a “feminine” gender and consider this to be a “fertility” ritual? Elsewhere, I consider this question elsewhere while revising my earlier thinking (Neis, Sense of Sight, 161).

[9] Neis, When a Human, 3-6, 25-30, 32, 38-39, 97 and notes.

[10] Examples of such scholarship: Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, eds. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001; Shellee Colen, “‘Like a Mother to Them’: Stratified Reproduction and West Indian Childcare Workers and Employers in New York.” In Conceiving the NewWorld Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, 78–102. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; Ruha Benjamin. “Black AfterLives Matter: Cultivating Kinfulness as Reproductive Justice.” In Making Kin Not Population: Reconceiving Generations, edited by Adele E. Clarke and Donna Haraway, 41–65. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018;

Sophie Lewis. Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against Family. London: Verso Books, 2019; Michelle Murphy. The Economization of Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Amrita Pande. Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger. Reproductive Justice: An Introduction. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Marcin Smietana, Charis Thompson, and France Winddance Twine. “Making and Breaking Families—Reading Queer Reproductions, Stratified Reproduction, and Reproductive Justice Together.” Reproductive BioMedicine and Society Online 7 (2018): 112–30. doi.org/10.1016/j.rbms.2018.11.001; Kim TallBear. “Making Love and Relations beyond Settler Sex and Family.” In Making Kin Not Population: Reconceiving Generations, edited by Adele E. Clarke and Donna Haraway, 145–64. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018.

[11] On the Jewishness of bad and failed reading habits see Max Strassfeld, Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023), 19 and https://www.ancientjewreview.com/read/2023/9/28/transing-the-talmud-or-reading-the-talmud-badly  and failed reading: Roni Mazel, “Going Off Script: The Contradictory Pleasures of Unorthodox” respectively. On literal readings of bodily language (and against “metaphor”) see Neis, Directing the Heart: Corporeal Language and the Anatomy of Ritual Space.

[12] Anna Bonnell Freiden. Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome (Princeton University Press, 2024), 13.

[13] Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana, 1977), 142-148.

[14] Michael Camille, Image on the edge: The margins of medieval art. Reaktion Book. 1992. Jeffrey Hamburger notes that Camille’s view of marginalia’s subversion versus their revolutionary potential is deeply pessimistic: Jeffrey Hamburger, "Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Book Review)." The Art Bulletin 75.2 (1993): 319-327.

[15] Marc Michael Epstein. Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art and Literature. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1997), 25-31.

[16] https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/9e481d9a-06e6-41e8-ae36-a58d445a1ffa/surfaces/b9d9b19c-1669-45c5-a071-2405dc73a210/

[17] Pliny, Natural History 13.26-46.

[18] Neis, When a Human, 102-113.