Why Are There No Mermaids in the Mishna?

For ten days this summer, the world watched while a twenty-year old orca whale grieved for her infant calf. The orca, called Talequah by the marine naturalists who study her pod, is one of a dwindling number of killer whales who inhabit the Salish Sea, off the coast of San Juan

Island in the Pacific northwest. The waters are overfished and filled with toxins from the shipping industry, and infant mortality rates among the whales are high. Talequah’s calf lived for just half an hour. When the newborn died, Talequah refused to let its body sink, carrying the calf on her back or in her mouth, and diving to fetch it whenever it slipped from her grasp. She brought her dead calf with her on a migration across the sea, sometimes falling behind her pod, and sometimes relying on her fellow whales to help transport her difficult burden. She clung to the dead calf for more than a week in what researchers called a “tour of grief.”

As Talequah mourned, millions of humans watched, tracking her movements in news reports and on social media, scanning youtube videos for glimpses of the mother and child. This was different than the whale-watching tourists generally do. When one embarks on a whale- watching tour, it is with a sense of adventure, looking to be wowed by the massive scale and awesome power of the whales, a sense of whales’ profound difference from people. Talequah’s tour of grief drew viewers because it demonstrated what whales and humans share in common. I watched her with a sense of recognition, of familiarity—yes, this is grief, this is heartbreak, this is what it feels like to be a mother.

This inchoate sense of connection with a member of another species that was shared by so many people tracking Talequah pulls against the general thrust of Western thought. Long- standing traditions in philosophy, religion and art are founded on the presumption that humans

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 1 are superior to other creatures, endowed with a special proximity to the divine, and the force of this idea has served to magnify human difference in ways that obscure the fact that humans are indeed animals. It is only over the course of the past several decades that humanistic scholarship has caught up with science in beginning to recognize profound continuities between humans and other species. Robust scholarship across diverse academic fields now challenges the notion of human exceptionalism, buttressing the sense of fellow-feeling we might experience with our companion animals, or upon seeing an ape or an orca. Among scientists, empirical investigations in ethology, evolutionary biology, and genetics confirm our close resemblance to other species.

Within the humanities, critical theorists expose the folly of putting humans and other animals in binary opposition. Scholars join activists in confronting the ways human cultures and societies— and modern, Western cultures in particular— deny human commonalities with other species to our own detriment, and with devastating effects for other animals and for the planet.

In my recent book, I sought to engage critical animal studies as I examined the tacit and explicit ways that the Talmud uses ideas about animals and animality to construct a vision of what it means to be a person, and to be a Jew. I proposed that though the rabbis of late antiquity share many of the presumptions and blindspots that critical scholarship has exposed and excoriated in the western philosophic tradition, the Talmud avoids some pitfalls of human exceptionalism. My current research builds on this work, investigating how rabbinic literature might contribute to animal ethics. In its attitudes to animals, rabbinic literature can be distinguished both from other late antique intellectual cultures and also from later Jewish teachings, and this makes it a useful resource for re-thinking what it means to be human and animal. In this essay, I use one short passage from the Talmud as a key to unlock a world of attitudes and ideas about species, gender, and culture. What is most arresting to me about the

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 2 passage is not its acknowledgment of continuities between humans and other species, but rather the way that this content was flagrantly misread by later readers.

Before we look at the Talmud however, let me make some disclaimers. I’ve titled this paper, “Why are there no mermaids in the Mishna?” and I need to acknowledge up front that this might seem like a very strange question. Why are there no mermaids in the Mishna? “Well, why should there be?” one might counter, “Given that mermaids are not even real.” Indeed, for people like us, mermaids are relics of mythology, figments of the imagination, and so their absence from rabbinic literature might seem as unremarkable as their absence from the world. What makes the

Mishna’s silence with regard to mermaids worth wondering about, however, is that during the centuries that the Mishna was being produced, and for many centuries afterward, mermaids appeared in works of poetry and art, and in works of theology and natural history as well. My task in this essay will be to establish that mermaids were indeed known to the authorities of the

Mishna and the Talmud, and so their absence might be significant.

But to claim that my question is not frivolous is not to pretend that it is a question that can be answered. Any explanation as to why mermaids do not appear in the Mishna and Talmud would be an argument from silence. Instead of venturing to explain mermaids’ absence, I will offer reflections on what the significance of this absence is, on what it suggests about how rabbis thought about humans and other species and their interrelation. I will suggest that the absence of mermaids from the Mishna and Talmud participates in a rabbinic outlook on animals and on nature that can be contrasted to other kinds of animal-thinking in the late antique world. I will propose that attending to the Mishna’s silence about mermaids can help us tune into other aspects of rabbinic thought and offer some tentative suggestions about how these subtle strains of rabbinic wisdom might be generative for us today.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 3 Part I: Dolphins

My point of departure is a passage in the Babylonian Talmud that describes how a variety of animal species mate and rear their young. Some background and context will be helpful before we delve into the talmudic text.

The Mishna, edited in the Galilee in about 200 CE, is a compendium that organizes the diverse legal teachings of the earliest generations of rabbinic sages, the Tannaim, into six large sub-divisions or Orders. Soon after the Mishna took shape, it moved to the center of the curriculum for subsequent generations of rabbinic sages and their disciples in the two great centers of rabbinic learning, in the land of Israel and in Babylonia. Both the Palestinian and

Babylonian Talmuds are ostensibly commentaries on the Mishna: They are organized according to the Mishna’s overarching structure, and present discussions of the mishnaic materials attributed to rabbinic authorities in successive generations. Of the two talmuds, the Babylonian

Talmud is later and far more expansive than the Palestinian Talmud; it has been called

“encyclopedic” in that it extends far beyond mishnaic commentary, amassing and arranging materials in a variety of forms on a diversity of topics that far exceed the legal concerns of the

Mishna. Most scholars now date the editing of the Babylonian Talmud to the seventh century

CE.

The passage that interests me is from Tractate Bekhorot, a sub-division of the Mishna and

Talmud that discusses the biblical commandment to consecrate the first-born. In the Bible, this requirement extends both to the Israelites’ first-born sons, and to the firstlings that are born to livestock owned by Israelites: The first-born of pure animals like sheep and cows are to be sacrificed, the first-born of impure animals such as the ass are redeemed through the sacrifice of kosher animals that serve as substitutes, and first-born human sons are redeemed through the

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 4 ritual dedication of coins to the priests.1 It is up to the head of the household to give God His due before he can claim either his offspring or those of his animals as his own. This continuity between human sons and other animals carries over to the rabbinic corpus as well. Tractate

Bekhorot falls within the fifth of the six main divisions of the Mishna, the Order dedicated to rules of sacrifice, or Kodashim. In keeping with the organizing theme of Kodashim, the majority of tractate Bekhorot indeed focuses on procedures governing the sacrificial offering of firstlings from flocks and herds, and on the rules concerning the redemption of first-born donkeys. Also in this tractate, however, are two chapters that are exclusively focused on humans: Chapter 7 presents rules regarding the blemishes that disqualify priests from serving in the Temple service, a set of laws that explicitly parallels the list of blemishes that disqualify sacrificial animals, and

Chapter 8 presents laws governing the redemption of first-born sons, and inheritance law with regard to primogeniture. The organization of the tractate thus highlights continuities between humans and other species.

For now, however, I’d like to move from the macro-structure of the tractate to the particulars of one short passage; before looking to the Talmud, it will be helpful to see the mishnaic materials on which the Talmud comments. Here’s the context: In Bekhorot 1:2, the

Mishna addresses the strange case of a first-born animal that is so different from its mother it does not appear to belong to the same species. If a pure animal—a sheep, cow, or goat-- gives birth to an animal that looks like a kind one would not sacrifice, like a donkey or a horse, what kind sacrifice is required? Does one proceed according to the rules governing the mother’s kind, or the offspring’s kind?

1 See Ex 13: 2, 12-15; Num 18:15-18; Deut 15:19-23. In the Bible, the commandment is linked to the Exodus narrative, where God slays the first-born children and cattle of the Egyptians (Ex 12:29).

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 5 If a cow gives birth to something like a donkey, or a donkey gives

birth to something like a horse—it is exempt from the laws of the

first-born, since it says in Scripture, “but a first-born donkey shall

be redeemed with a sheep (Ex 34:20)” and “first-born donkey (Ex

13:13).” “Donkey” [is mentioned] two times [signifying that both]

the bearer need be a donkey and the born need be a donkey.2

For the Mishna, it is a live possibility that mother and offspring will belong to different species of animal—in such a case, the procedures for consecrating the first-born do not apply.3 As the

Mishna goes on, it addresses other ritual considerations with regard to these surprising offspring:

And what are they [the offspring] with regard to eating?

If a pure animal gave birth to something like (a pure animal gave

birth to something like) an impure animal, it is permitted to eat,

and if an impure animal gave birth to something like a pure animal,

it is prohibited to eat, for that which comes out of the impure is

impure, and that which comes out of the pure is pure.

2 Mishna Bekhorot 1:2. My translation follows the Kaufmann manuscript. The square brackets indicate my own expansions. 3 In this context, the Mishna addresses the spontaneous propagation of cross-species offspring, not the results of deliberate cross-breeding that result in interspecies offspring such as mules. (Cross-breeding is explicitly prohibited in Mishna Kila’im 8:1, and “kila’im” is the rabbinic term for such hybrid offspring.) For a discussion of these materials, see Rachel Neis, “The Reproduction of Species: Humans, Animals and Species Nonconformity in Early Rabbinic Science,” Jewish Studies Quarterly Vol. 24 No. 4: 289-317. Neis compares the cross-species reproduction here to other tannaitic passages in which human women expel fetuses that resemble other species, identifying this ability to gestate other species as a commonality among humans and other animals. But as Neis observes, some rabbinic traditions limit possibilities for cross-species propagations among humans, preserving some degree of human exceptionalism. See Tosefta Bekhorot 1:6.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 6 If an impure fish swallows a pure fish, it is permitted to eat [the

pure fish found inside]. And if a pure fish swallows an impure fish,

it is prohibited to eat [the impure fish found inside], since it is not

its offspring.4

Here, the Mishna rules that when the offspring of a kosher animal does not appear to belong to a kosher species, it is nonetheless considered kosher, in keeping with the status of the mother. The

Mishna goes so far as to extrapolate a matrilineal principle of animal identity—“That which comes out of the pure is pure, and out of the impure is impure.” At least when it comes to dietary law, species-identity follows the mother.

The Mishna closes with a caution about a potential misapplication of this principle, however. Say you have caught a large fish, and in preparing it you discover another whole fish in its belly. The larger fish has apparently swallowed the smaller fish. This is not a case where the status of the larger fish would determine the status of the fish within, because this is not a case of a mother and child. If the smaller fish is kosher, it may be eaten, but if it is not kosher, it is prohibited, and the status of the fish that has swallowed it does not make a difference to its kosher status one way or another.

The Mishna’s discussion here exemplifies its engagement both with the empirical and the exceptional. To be sure, the notion of a cow giving birth to a donkey strains credulity, and this is what leads me to suspect some background in reality, a rumored report that such a case actually occured in nature. Alongside this case is one a bit more mundane, but still the stuff of a big fish

4 M. Bekhorot 1:3 according to the manuscripts; 1:2 in print. My translation here follows ms. Parma. Ms. Kaufman includes an additional phrase which is likely a scribal error and has been crossed out in the manuscript itself. It reads: “If a pure animal gave birth to something like (a pure animal gave birth to something like) an impure animal, it is permitted to eat. . .”

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 7 story: A fish within a fish. The Mishna’s approach to these curious events is rooted in sound natural science, however. The rabbinic authorities know that cattle animals reproduce differently than fish. They know that fish do not get pregnant, and so the little fish inside the big one is not its offspring, but rather its meal.

Within the Babylonian Talmud, this Mishna instigates a discussion of reproductive biology in the animal world. (There is no treatment of Tractate Bekhorot in the Palestinian

Talmud.) It begins by explicating the Mishna’s tacit scientific knowledge that a fish within a fish should not be considered offspring. How does the Mishna know that a fish within another fish has been swallowed and not bred? The Talmud takes care to lay out its reasoning, step by step, and as it does so, it appeals to a baraita, a tannaitic tradition attributed to the same period as the

Mishna, that distinguishes among three distinct ways that animal species reproduce:

Our Sages taught: Impure fish swarm; pure fish lays eggs.

All those who give birth lactate,5 while all those who lay eggs

collect [food for their young], except for the bat, which lactates

even though it lays eggs.

Dolphins are fruitful and multiply like humans.6

The first part of the teaching distinguishes between just two modes of reproduction--

“swarming” and laying eggs—which correspond to unkosher fish on the one hand, and kosher

5 It is interesting to note that the verbs here are in the masculine rather than the feminine. When breastfeeding and childbirth serve as taxonomic markers, the subjects are classes of animals rather than individual animals, and the individual animal and human mothers are rendered invisible. 6 B. Bekhorot 7b-8a. My translation. Compare this baraita, or tannaitic teaching, to Tosefta Bekhorot 1:11 which reads, “Dolphins give birth and raise young like the human. Impure fish swarm, pure fish lay eggs.” Mention of dolphins in the Tosefta confirms that the Tannaitic rabbis were familiar with dolphins and their mating habits.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 8 fish on the other. 7 The next section of the baraita turns to other kinds of animals, dividing them into two main categories: those who lay eggs and those who give birth to live young. The sages here observe that the two modes of reproduction correspond to two distinct ways that animals care for their young—while animals that birth their offspring lactate, animals that lay eggs must collect food for their hatchlings. The baraita defines a class of living things that more or less corresponds to modern understandings of Mammalia, and no sooner does it define this category, than it identifies two special cases. First, the bat is invoked as a singular exception that contravenes the rule, in that it lays eggs and lactates. (We now know that the rabbis are wrong about this—as mammals, bats gestate and give birth to live young.) Next, the baraita singles out dolphins, as animals that reproduce just as humans do. Why are dolphins singled out? While this is not spelled out in the baraita or in the talmudic discussion that follows, it would seem that dolphins require special mention because of their exceptional status as mammals that reside in the sea. 8

Within this baraita, as in the talmudic discourse on animal reproduction that follows, humans take their place alongside other animal species, as one among a variety of species that copulate, gestate, and birth live young. The baraita uses terminology for birth and lactation that can be assigned to both human and non-human animals, terms that are used far more frequently

is less (משריץ :While the reference to egg-laying is clear enough, the precise meaning of the term “swarming” (Heb 7 is related to the שרצ straightforward and does not correspond to modern scientific understandings. While the root biblical term for vermin or small animals that creep and convey impurity, the verbal hiphil form means to propagate. participates in biblical taxonomies of land-animals, see Richard שרצ For an examination of how the root Whitekettle, “Rats are Like Snakes, and Hares are Like Goats: A Study in Israelite Land Animal Taxonomy,” Biblica Vol. 82, No. 3 (2001), 345-362. 8 I am suggesting that implied within this Mishna is a tacit scheme of classifying animals based on whether they live in the seas, on land, or in the heavens, a tripartite division that traces back to Genesis. It is this underlying structure which generates the special mentions of bats on the one hand and dolphins on the other—bats because they give birth like land animals, though they belong to the sky, and dolphins because they give birth like land animals, though they belong to the sea. For the classic study on this biblical taxonomy and how it undergirds the laws of kashrut, see Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Routledge: London, 1966 and 2003, especially pp. 55-58. For a more recent refinement of this kind of investigation, see Whitekettle.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 9 to refer to humans than to other species in biblical and rabbinic literature, anthropocentric as these literatures are. When the final section of the baraita compares dolphins to humans, the force of this comparison is to emphasize the special status of dolphins; while the tacit message is that humans set a standard against which other species are to be measured, there is no explicit claim for human exceptionalism here.9

The knowledge about dolphins that the rabbis convey corresponds to other writings about dolphins in the ancient world. The biology and behavior of cetaceous marine animals was a well- established body of knowledge in antiquity, long before the emergence of rabbis. Aristotle gives special attention to dolphins in his History of Animals, where he not only describes their mode of reproduction, but also how they care for their young: “Its young accompany it for a considerable period; and in fact, the creature is remarkable for the strength of its parental affection.”10 Closer in time to the rabbis, the Roman Pliny the Elder11 gives an account that is even more detailed than that of Aristotle:

Dolphins generally go in couples; the females bring forth their

young in the tenth month, during the summer season, sometimes

two in number. They suckle their young at the teat like the balæna,

and even carry them during the weakness of infancy; in addition to

9 There is a parallel to this Baraita in the Tosefta Bekhorot 1:9-10, and that passage does delineate one way in which humans are distinct from others—they do not participate in cross-species propagation. I discuss this passage below. 10 Aristotle, The History of Animals, trans. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, Book VI, Part XII. Online through the Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.6.vi.html accessed 08/10/2018. 11 Written in 77 CE, Pliny’s The Natural History is dedicated to the Emperor Titus (whom the rabbis would have known as the destroyer of the Jerusalem Temple).

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 10 which, long after they are grown up, they accompany them, so

great is their affection for their progeny.12

Pliny’s work was widely disseminated, and very influential; it survived antiquity in multiple manuscripts and is an oft-cited source among writers of later centuries. The account of dolphin reproduction in the baraita can thus be seen as reflecting the current state of scientific knowledge during the period of the early rabbis.

To be clear, I am not claiming that early rabbis had read Aristotle or Pliny, but rather that basic information about dolphins had become common knowledge in the Greco-Roman cultural orbit in which the Tannaim lived, in a similar way that non-experts in our own day are familiar with the basics of genetics even if we don’t read scientific journals. This general alignment between the baraita’s content and the authoritative sources of the time makes later rabbinic discussions of this baraita all the more surprising. Following immediately in the wake of the baraita, comes the following brief exchange:

What are dolphins?

Rav Yehuda said: Children of the sea.13

12 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. John Bostock and H. T. Riley. Book XIX, Chapter 7. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D9%3Achapter%3D 7 accessed 08/10/2018. In keeping with Pliny’s ambition to offer comprehensive treatment of all his subjects, he not only includes information on dolphin biology, but also a rich assortment of dolphin lore. Thus, Book IX on fish contains four chapters dedicated to dolphins, including “Dolphins” (chapter 7); “Human Beings Who Have Been Beloved by Dolphins” (chapter 8); “Places Where Dolphins Help Men to Fish” (Chapter 9), and “Other Wonderful Things Relating to Dolphins.” (Chapter 10). 13 B. Bekhorot 8a. My translation.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 11 Unlike the baraita, whose Hebrew reflects its tannaitic provenance in Palestine of the first two centuries of the common era,14 the question “What are dolphins?” is expressed in the Aramaic of the Babylonian Talmud’s anonymous editors. It seems that while the early rabbis of the tannaitic era were familiar with dolphin science, this knowledge did not traverse the geographic and chronological distance to the later rabbis of Babylonia, rendering the baraita that the talmudic editors inherited obscure. The editors of the Babylonian Talmud provide a gloss for the Greek loan-word “Dolphin,” and this suggests that while they understand the baraita’s reference, they presume that their audience will not. We can guess at what accounts for this erosion in zoological knowledge among successive generations of rabbis: Perhaps in land-locked Persia, there was less familiarity with aquatic animals than along the Mediterranean, or perhaps Greco-

Roman natural science meant that it did not have the same cultural purchase in Babylonia that it had in Roman Palestine. The layers of talmudic discourse here offer snapshots of two successive ages in rabbinic epistemic culture.

The story of the Rabbis and their knowledge of dolphins does not end there, however, because the reception of this passage among later rabbinic readers takes a surprising turn. (It is this reception history that was the initial prompt for this essay.) Jump ahead several centuries to eleventh century Northern France, and we find that even the helpful gloss provided by the talmudic commentators does not help the foremost talmudic commentator Rabbi Shlomo

Yitzchaki (aka Rashi, 1040-1105). This is how Rashi explains the discussion of dolphins in the baraita and Talmud:

14 To be sure, many scholars challenge the reliability of baraitas, pointing to examples of spurious attributions and and the baraita’s ,דולפנין invented content. In this case, the tannaitic provenance of both the term “dolphin,” or content with regard to dolphins is confirmed by the parallel in Tosefta Bekhorot 1:9-10. For the classic discussion of spurious baraitot, see Louis Jacobs, “Are there Fictitious Baraitot in the Babylonian Talmud?” HUCA 42 (1971): 186-96.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 12

Thus do we read: Dolphanin are fruitful and multiply from

humans—That if a man came and copulated with them, they

would get pregnant from him.

Children of the sea: There are fish in the sea that are half human

and half in the form of fish, and in French: “sirène.”15

Rashi does not associate the baraita’s “dolphanin” with the cetaceous creatures that we know as

“dolphins;” he does not seem to be familiar with the term. To makes sense of the talmudic passage, Rashi takes the radical step of proposing an alternative reading. He alters the baraita so that it reads not “Dolphanin are fruitful and multiply like humans,” but “Dolphanin are fruitful and multiply from humans.” His gloss on this revised text then expands on this idea of cross human-dolphan sex, suggesting that humans and dolphanin can mate. And lest we find ourselves imagining the challenge of bedding a sleek marine mammal, Rashi’s next comment confirms that our picture of dolphins is not what he has in mind. In keeping with the talmudic gloss that identifies “dolphanin” as “children of the sea,” Rashi concludes that the baraita here discusses the half-fish, half-human hybrids that are known as Sirènes in his Old French vernacular. For

Rashi, dolphanin are mermaids!

Rashi’s commentary substitutes the Sirens of Greek mythology for the dolphins of Greek science, and in doing so he offers a revealing snapshot of medieval Ashkenazic knowledge culture. On the one hand, it is not surprising that the Greek loan-word “dolphanin” is not intelligible to Rashi, who lived at a great remove from the Greco-Roman setting of the early

15 Rashi on B. Bekhorot 8a, my translation. I have distinguished between the lemma and the gloss by putting the lemma in bold.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 13 rabbis. At the same time, his familiarity with the term “Siren”—a figure who belongs to classical

Greek myth—is striking.

As it happens, Rashi lived on the cusp of an era in which mythic animals and monsters were objects of burgeoning interest in medieval Christian Europe. Fascination with hybrid beings is reflected in the popular genre of the illuminated medieval bestiary, which would reach its heyday in the decades following Rashi’s death.16 Though there is great diversity in the content of works of this genre, one thing all the bestiaries have in common is their reliance on a core of material from the Physiologus of late antiquity, a work in which Sirens figure prominently.17 But

Rashi need not have learned about mermaids from accounts or images in books, because during his lifetime, animals and monsters were also emerging as prominent features of Romanesque architecture. Figures of bare-breasted females sporting one or two fishtails would become a common motif on the ornamental capitals of churches and other structures throughout France and beyond; there is reason to suspect that these figures might already have appeared in the built environment in which Rashi lived.18 In land-locked northern France of the eleventh and early

16 For an introduction to the genre, see Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Hassig offers an overview, and then focuses her analysis on select images from English-language bestiaries. The classic scholarly treatment on Latin and French bestiaries is Florence McCulloch, Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960). For a focus on French manuscripts that is informed by recent trends in scholarship, see Sarah Kay, Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 7-15. For a more extensive review of earlier scholarly approaches, see Ron Baxter, Bestiaries and their Users in the Middle Ages (London: Sutton Publishing, 1998), 1-22. In Appendix Four (227-28), Baxter presents a statistical analysis that suggests that the production of medieval bestiaries began at least fifty years earlier than the earlier survival. His analysis is limited to English bestiaries, however. 17 Kay analyzes the representation of the Siren on pp. 17-20. For a sustained analysis of the centrality of the Siren in Physiologus, see Valentine A. Pakis, “Contextual Duplicity and Textual Variations: The Siren and Onocentaur in the Physiologus Tradition,” Mediaevistik, Vol. 23 (2010), 115-185. 18 I have been unable to locate surviving examples of sculptural mermaids in the region of Troyes, but there are many of these figures in other regions that can still be seen. Rita Wood discusses the mermaid that appears in a capital of the Norman Chapel in Durham Castle (built in the eleventh century) in “Norman Chapel in Durham Castle,” Northern History, XLVII:1 (March, 2010), 9-48, and especially 31-37. For examples from another region, see Anat Tcherikover, High Romanesque Sculpture in the Duchy of Aquitaine c. 1090-1140 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), plates 15, 17, 80, 138, 178. For a sustained analysis of the Siren and Onocentaur in an exemplary work, see William J. Travis, “Of Sirens and Onocentaurs: A Romanesque Apocalypse at Montceaux-l’Etoile,” Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 23, No. 45 (2002), 29-62. Jacqueline Leclercq emphasizes the multivocality of siren

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 14 twelfth century, it is more likely that Rashi would have seen an image of a mermaid than seen an actual marine mammal, and this might explain his surprising gloss on the Talmud’s dolphins.

The full account of how mermaids come to displace marine mammals in the vocabulary of medieval Jewish scholarship is a story with a long, broad sweep, shaped by such diverse forces as Hellenization, the emergence of Christianity, Jewish migration, the rises and falls of imperial powers and the cultural change that swirled in the wake of all these world-historical shifts. While I can’t recapitulate the full story here, these are the waters that we will swim in as we track the elusive mermaids that surface in Rashi’s commentary back in time. My primary focus is not the cultural world of Rashi in which Sirens are so prevalent, but rather the realm of the early rabbis, where such beings are only rarely acknowledged. The mermaids who appear in the art and literature of medieval Europe can be traced back to ancient cultures that pre-date the rabbis’ emergence. Though these mythic beings travel through religious and cultural channels that pass alongside centers of rabbinic learning is centered, mermaids seldom surface in rabbinic literature, and are never mentioned in the central texts of the Mishna and Talmud. The prominence of Sirens in pagan and Christian literature and art makes their scarcity in rabbinic texts all the more salient. This is the riddle I seek to address. It is the Sirens’ elusive presence--on the margins of rabbinic culture but not in the central texts--that the next section of this essay explores.19

symbolism in the art and literature of the eleventh and twelfth century in “Les Sirènes Romanes et Gothiques” in Sirènes: m’étaient contées (Brussels: Galerie CGER, 1992), 40-63. 19 Galit Hasan-Rokem anticipates this essay in an article that engages some of the same material that I address below. While my focus is on the ethical implications of the rabbinic Siren, she explores questions of hermeneutics. See her “Leviticus Rabbah 16,1 – “Odysseus and the Sirens” in the Beit Leontis Mosaic from Beit She’an,” in Talmuda De-Eretz Yisrael: Archaeology and the Rabbis in Late Antique Palestine, ed. Steven Fine and Aaron Koller (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 159-189.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 15 Part II: Sirens

Though Rashi characterizes Sirens as human-fish hybrids, in classical Greek art and literature, the Sirens are beings with the bodies of birds and the heads of human women. They are best known from Homer’s Odyssey (12.39-54), in which Circe warns Odysseus of the beguiling song of the Sirens, who tempt sailors away from their missions, leaving their bodies to rot in the shoals. To resist this danger, Odysseus instructs his sailors to bind him to the mast of his ship so that he can hear the beautiful Siren song without being distracted from his voyage; the sailors cover their ears with wax so they cannot hear the Sirens at all (12:158-191).20 The ancient sources transmit conflicting accounts as to whether there are two, three, or more Sirens, and who their parents are; sometimes they are identified as the daughters of Muses, and often they are represented as a trio, in which one sings, one plays the wind instrument knowns as the aulos, and the other plays the stringed kithara. There seems to be a longstanding association between the

Sirens and death, and some of the earliest representations can be found on gravestones.21 Though in the Greek literary sources, Sirens are bird-tailed, in art, they are occasionally conflated with the fish-tailed tritoness and also with the sea-nymphs known as the Nereids. Scholars theorize that their participation in Odysseus’ trials at sea contributes to a convergence with iconographic representation of the ferocious fish-tailed Scylla, another of Odysseus’ female foes.22 In Greek sources, Sirens are multivalent, sometimes connoting positive values such as beauty, harmony,

20 My cursory review of the history of Sirens is indebted to the comprehensive survey provided in Leofranc Holford- Streven, “Sirens in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” in Music of the Sirens, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern and Inna Naroditkaya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 16-51. 21 Though sometimes, these images are identified not as “Sirens,” but as “Soothers.” Holford-Strevens, 19, and the extensive bibliography in the notes. 22 Holford-Strevens, 29. Hasan-Rokem 181-183 proposes that in a later period, the local religious cultures of Syria- Palestine play a decisive role in transforming the bird-like Siren of the Greeks to the fish-tailed Sirens of the medieval period.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 16 persuasion, and consolation, and sometimes associated with death, lament, lust, lies, seduction,

and danger.

Sirens first enter the Jewish story in Hellenized Alexandria of the third century BCE,

when the Hebrew Bible is translated into Greek.23 The translators insert Sirens into six different

passages, as a translation for the Hebrew benot ya’ana, or ostriches, in Isaiah 13:21-22 and in

Jeremiah 27(50):39 and Micah 1:8; and as a translation for tannim, or jackals, in Job 30:29,

Isaiah 34:13 and Isaiah 43:20.24 All of these are poetic passages that describe or predict scenes of

destruction and lament, and they mention a variety of animals. For example, Isaiah 13:21-22

predicts the desolation of Babylon, conjuring an image of the great city reduced to ruins. Here is

an English translation of the Septuagint, juxtaposed with a contemporary English translation

directly from the Hebrew:

Septuagint25 New JPS Translation26 But wild animals will rest there, But beasts shall lie down there and the houses will be filled with noise; And the houses be filled with owls: there sirens will rest, There shall ostriches make their home, and there demons will dance. And there shall satyrs dance. Donkey-centaurs will dwell there, And jackals shall abide in its castles and hedgehogs will build nests in their And dragons in the places of pleasure.

23 Manolis Papoutsakis argues that the Septuagint’s reference to Sirens is based on an earlier identification of the biblical character of Naama (Gen 4:22) as a Siren based on her association with music and beauty. Papoutsakis into the Greek “Siren” is mediated by a targumic בנות יענה surmises that the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew which was in turn associated with Naama. This would suggest that Sirens בנת נעמיין translation into the Aramaic enter the Jewish story even earlier. The argument is highly speculative, as the sources that Papoutsakis uses to identify Naama as a musician and by extension as a Siren post-date the Septuagint. See Papoutsakis, “Ostriches into Sirens: Towards an Understanding of a Septuagint Crux,” Journal of Jewish Studies 55 (2004), 25-36. 24 For investigation of the background and reverberations of the Septuagint’s surprising translation of Is 3:21, see Peter Joshua Atkins, “Mythology or Zoology: A Study of the Impact of Translation History in Isaiah 13:21,” Biblical Interpretation 24 (2016), 48-59. For the suggestion that the appeal to Sirens in the Greek translation of this verse might be indebted to the Aramaic of the Targum, see Papoutsakis. 25Esaias, trans. Moisés Silva, in A New English Translation of the Septuagint: and the other Greek translations traditionally included under that title, ed. Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 26 JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh: The Traditional Hebrew Text and The New JPS Translation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003), 875.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 17 houses It is coming quickly Her hour is close at hand; and will not delay. her days will not be long.

Both translations reflect the way the Hebrew juxtaposes references to extant animal

species with references to mythical beasts; arguably, the very distinction between the zoological

and mythological is an imposition of modern categories.27 It is important to note that where the

Septuagint diverges from the Hebrew is not in its appeal to the supernatural, but rather in

enlisting particular figures known from Greek myth. While the “donkey-centaur,” or

“onocentaur” of the Septuagint is without precedent in early Greek sources, the invention is

clearly derived from the well-known centaur, a being that is part horse, part human. In invoking

the Siren and the centaur in the biblical text, the Septuagint does more than translate Hebrew

terminology into Greek equivalents, it lays the groundwork for a new Greek-Hebrew hybrid

mythology. The biblical contextualization of the Siren activates some aspects of earlier Greek

myth more than others. The Septuagint builds on the identification of Sirens with birds, with

death, and with desolation, but does not activate long-standing associations of the Sirens with

sea-faring or with sexual allure and danger.

The Septuagint’s Sirens have a robust afterlife in Christian sources, and it is their

prominence in a religious culture that develops in the same time and spaces that rabbinic Judaism

is taking shape that makes their absence from rabbinic texts worthy of note. For this reason, I’d

like to attend to the signification of the Siren in early Christianity. Sirens enter Christianity

chiefly through the mediation of the Physiologus, the composition that later becomes the nucleus

27 Atkins, 49.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 18 of the medieval bestiary tradition.28 An early Christian work first written in Greek, the

Physiologus collects stories of real and mythical animals, plants and stones. Each chapter joins an account of its titular figure—for example, the lion, the owl, the phoenix, the fig tree—with an explication of the religious virtue or meaning that the figure represents. The Physiologus was an extremely popular work, and there is so much variability among the many surviving witnesses of the Greek text that scholars have judged it impossible to reconstruct an Urtext.29 All the versions maintain the same basic structure, pairing a story of an animal, plant, or stone with an explanation of its religious or moral meaning, but beyond that, the content, order, and number of the chapters are exceedingly fluid, and there is even more diversity among the translations into

Syriac, Ethiopic, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Coptic, Latin, German, English, Icelandic, and

French.30 Amidst all this variability, the inclusion of the Siren is fairly constant, and in most instances in which the Siren appears, she is paired with the Onocentaur, an association that confirms the writer’s debt to the Septuagint.31 Scholars generally place the work’s origin in

Alexandria of the second century, CE.32

While “Physiologus” is sometimes translated as “Naturalist” or “Natural History,” both the work and the title are best understood in a religious frame. Michael J. Curley explains that

28 While the Sirens have special prominence in the Physiologus, they are mentioned by many fathers of the early Church, chiefly but not exclusively in connection to the Septuagint’s “Siren verses.” For a discussion of their appearance in the works of Origen, Jerome, and Ambrose, see Hasan-Rokem 176-178 and in the notes there. 29 See Valentine A. Pakis, “Contextual Duplicity and Textual Variation: The Siren and Onocentaur in the Physiologus Tradition,” Meidiaevistik, Vol. 23 (2010), 115-185, especially 116. Pakis provides bibliography on the Greek manuscript tradition in note 5. He provides alternative versions of the Greek treatments of the Siren on pp. 157-160. 30 For an English translation that includes an introduction to the sources and history of the work, as well as an overview of scholarship and further bibliography, see Physiologus, Translated by Michael J. Curley. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979.) For more details about the complexity of the manuscript traditions, more recent bibliography and an interpretation of the treatment of the Siren and Onocentaur in particular, see Pakis. 31 Though as Pakis emphasizes, depictions of these two creatures vary considerably across versions and languages, combining the tops of women and men with the bottoms of birds, reptiles, fish, donkeys, oxen and horses. See pp. 132-143. Pakis reads this variability as reflective of the figures’ association with duality. 32 For an explanation of the rationale behind this dating, see Curley xvi-xxi and Pakis 148. Pakis raises compelling challenges to the scholarly consensus, however; see Pakis 149-157.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 19 the Physiologus exemplifies Origen’s neo-Platonist teaching that there are correspondences between the things of the natural world and their heavenly archetypes.33 Read in this light,

“Physiologus” can be parsed as a joining of Nature (phusis) and Reason (logos), and the book can be appreciated as an effort to identify the divine truths that lie behind the things of nature. In fact, however, even when the work engages species that exist in nature, the descriptions of animal behavior are so fabulous, that the accounts of nature seem indebted to and even generated by their allegorical interpretations. This is one way that the Physiologus conveys the supremacy of the spiritual over the material. According to scholar Valentine A. Pakis, the depictions of the

Siren and the Onocentaur play a special role in the work precisely because they highlight the duality of body and spirit at every level of analysis: They appear as a pair within a single chapter; they are each “biformal Michwesen”—uniting human and animal; and they are depicted as being deceitful and two-faced.34

The following is a scholarly translation that takes into account not only the Greek manuscripts but also an early translation into Armenian:

Prophet Isaiah says: “there sirens will live and goat-demons will

dance, and hedgehogs will give birth to offspring.”

Physiologus says about the Sirens that they cause death and are in

the sea, and they sing sweet songs; and if sailors passing by hear

the sounds of the songs, it seems so delightful, that they plunge

into the sea and perish.

33 Curley xiv. 34 Pakis 118,

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 20 And their appearance up to the navel is of a woman, and the half—

of a bird.

Likewise the onocentaurs have the half of man and the half of ass.

Likewise every “man of two ways of life and two minds, is

unstable in all his ways” (cf. James 1:8). Likewise now there are

some, that assemble in church, but do not abstain from sins. They

have the appearance of piety, but are far from its power.

When they enter the church, they have the appearance of lambs,

and when they leave the assembly, they manifest the appearance of

beasts.

Such [men] bear in themselves the example of sirens and

onocentaurs, and of the power of the adversary and of the deceitful

heretics.

So that “By fair and flattering words they deceive the hearts of the

simple-minded” (Rom. 16:18).

Just as he says: “Bad company ruins good morals” (cf. 1 Cor.

15:33).35

Even as the dependence on the Septuagint is made explicit through a citation of Isaiah

13:21-22, the writer also draws on classic Greek sources to fill out the depiction of the Sirens as female singers who pose a deadly and seductive threat to sailors at sea. Alongside these qualities of the Siren that draw on Greek mythology are others that are new to the Physiologus and are

35 Gohar Muradyan, Physiologus: The Greek and Armenian Versions with a Study of Translation Technique (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 150-151.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 21 marked as Christian through their association with verses from the New Testament: Like the onocentaurs, the Sirens are portrayed as being deceitful in word and in deed; even as they pretend to be pious, they are actually sinful heretics who use lies and flattery to ensnare others.

Noting the way that both subjects combine elements of the human and the animal, the

Physiologus emphasizes the dual nature of these figures, heightening the significance of their hybrid forms, and making this a component of their signification in a way that neither the Greek sources nor the Septuagint do. The Physiologus incorporates the ancient Greek association of the mythological Sirens with death, destruction, and sexual seduction into a new Christian signification of the Siren in which sex and death are associated with sin. The Siren’s dual female/animal body becomes an overdetermined vehicle that simultaneously reifies the binary between the spiritual and material, and degrades the female and the animal through their mutual association with carnality and sin.36 In the medieval period, when the Siren is re-imagined as a mermaid rather than a winged creature, her demotion from air to sea intensifies the debasement of women, animals, and sex. The Christian sources fuse Greek mythological elements into their reimagination of the Siren as an allegory for the seductiveness of sin.

While the Physiologus makes the Siren a central figure in the Christian imaginary, she is far more elusive in early Judaism, and where she does appear, her significations are less developed and less engaged with Greek myth. One reverberation of the Septuagint’s Sirens in

Hellenistic Jewish literature can be found in 2 Baruch 10:8, an apocalyptic text preserved in

Syriac that is thought to be the work of a Jewish writer of the first century CE. Here, as in the

Septuagint, Sirens are invoked together with Lilliths, demons and jackals, and invited to join in

36 Others have pointed out how the correspondences between the material/spiritual and animal/human binaries are graphically depicted medieval illuminated manuscripts where there are thick belts that separate the human and animal elements of both the siren and onocentaur with wide belts. See Kay 17-20 and notes.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 22 lamentation.37 Sirens are also mentioned in 4 Maccabees 15:21, in the gruesome story of the pious mother who encouraged her seven young sons to martyr themselves. In a macabre account of how the pious mother experiences her children’s torture, the narrator compares the sound of the children’s voices to the song of the Siren.38 While these sources confirm that Jews living during and after the Hellenistic age were familiar with Greek myth, they betray no special interest in the Sirens; on the contrary, the mentions of Sirens in both 2 Baruch and 4 Maccabees are but literary flourishes.

The only Hellenistic Jewish text that gives any prominence to Homer’s mythology about the Siren is one whose authenticity has been called into question. 1 Enoch is an apocalyptic work that gives expansive treatment to the cryptic biblical account of couplings between “divine beings” and “the daughters of men” in Genesis 6:1-4. In Enochic literature, the “divine beings” are angels or Watchers who continue to incite humanity even after they are punished. The ultimate fate of the women who are implicated in these transgressive unions gets little attention, however, outside of a single verse, 1 Enoch 19:2, that is preserved in two separate versions.

According to the Greek version, discovered in a codex that was buried with a Coptic monk, the women become Sirens: “and the wives of the transgressing angels will become sirens.”39 In the other early witness, an Ethiopic manuscript, Sirens are not mentioned, and the original Aramaic of the verse does not survive. 40 The Greek version’s appeal to Sirens is striking in the original

37 See the discussion in Papoutsakis 33. 38 Translation by H. Anderson in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2, edited by James H. Charlesworth (New York: Doubleday, 1985), 560. The writer here evokes aspects of Greek mythology in characterizing the Sirens’ song as a magical, distracting force. More subtly, the reference establishes an intertextual link between the piled corpses of the martyred Maccabean children and the moldering heap of bones of the Sirens’ victims in the Odyssey (Book 12:45-50). The complicated allusion to Greek myth in a story about Jewish resistance to paganism is an ironic inversion. 39 Kelley Cobentz Bautch, “What becomes of the Angels’ “Wives”” A Text-Critical Study of “1 Enoch” 19:2,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 125:4 (Winter, 2006), 766-780. The translation of the Greek is Bautch’s, page 769. 40 Ibid. 769.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 23 way that it blends Greek and Hebrew myth, accentuating features that the Watchers’ human wives share in common with Greek Sirens. Like the Homeric Sirens who seduce human sailors, the human wives are associated with transgressive sexual couplings, and like them, they are implicated in destruction. There is reason to doubt that the Greek is a reliable source for the original, however: While Greek myth and the Physiologus disparage Sirens for their sexual predation, Enochic literature in general has tended to place the blame on the Watchers rather than on the human women, making this verse an outlier in its implied vilification of the women.41 For this and other text-critical reasons, Kelley Cobentz Bautch has challenged the scholarly consensus that regards the Greek version as a reliable witness to the original. If Bautch is right, and a Christian Greek translator is responsible for inserting mention of the Sirens into 1 Enoch, we can understand the reference as an index of the rising prominence of Sirens among Christians in the wake of the Physiologus rather than as evidence for early Jewish interest in Sirens.

Scant evidence of Sirens in the Jewish literature of the Second Temple Period suggests that while Jewish writers were familiar with the Sirens, they did not loom large in the Jewish imagination. A similar picture emerges when we turn to sources from the rabbinic period. There is but one clear and explicit mention of Sirens in all of rabbinic literature, and what is most striking about it is that it is almost entirely bereft of myth.

The Sifra is an early work of midrash that belongs to the era of the Tannaitic rabbis, the same authorities who are the creators of the Mishna, though its editing is considered to be some decades later. Sifra offers a running commentary of the ritual-legal materials of Leviticus. Its

41 Ibid. notes 15 and 30. Bautch cites George W.E. Nickelsburg, who writes that the identification of the women with sirens makes this verse “one of the few pejorative comments about these women in this work.” In 1 Enoch: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, vol. 1, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 288.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 24 mention of Sirens comes in the context of its discussion of the laws of kosher animals in

Leviticus 11. Regarding sea-creatures, Leviticus rules:

But anything in the seas or in the streams that has no fins and

scales among all the swarming things of the water and among all

the animal souls42 that are in the water—they are an abomination

for you and an abomination for you they shall remain; you shall

not eat of their flesh and their carcasses you shall abominate.43

(Lev 11:10-11)

Sifra 3:7 offers the following gloss:

“Animal”—this refers to sea animal.

“Souls”—This comes to include the Siren.44

Is it possible that she would cause tent pollution [as does the dead

body of a human?], as ben Hakinai45 has said?

.חית הנפש My translation of 42 43 The italics are mine. I have adapted the new JPS translation to make the Sifra’s interpretive intervention more clear. 44 Among the textual witnesses there is a lot of variability in how this word is rendered. The standard print reads For manuscript evidence, I rely on the transcriptions provided online through the Primary Textual Witnesses .סירונית to Tannaitic Literature, a resource provided Bar Ilan University’s Institute for Computerization in Jewish Life and .Ms .הסורני Ms. London has .הסיריני ms. NY has ;הסיר)(ני supervised by Shamma Friedman. Ms. Vatican 66 has .but it is not clear if the correction is in the manuscript itself. Ms , הסירני corrected to readהסילונות Parma has .הסילונית Vatican 31 reads 45 This reflects the manuscripts. The standard print version reads “Rabbi Hanina,” and likely refers to the sage Hanina ben Hakinai. In M. Kilayim 8:5, Rabbi Yosi is attributed with a similar ruling in relation to a mysterious ,or a wild man, who is categorized as a wild animal by the Mishna. According to Rabbi Yosi ,אדני השדה figure called despite his wildness, his dead body nonetheless imparts tent-impurity like a human body does.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 25 [No.] That’s why it reads, “and46 [their carcasses you shall

abominate.]47

Here, the Sifra explains that what seems like a redundancy in the biblical text in fact introduces new information. It takes Leviticus’s idiomatic reference to “animal souls” as signifying a sea creature that is part animal, and part soul--the Siren, here imagined as half fish, half human. The

Sifra relates to the Siren as a biological being who presents a special taxonomic challenge to the biblical categories of ritual law. The Siren possesses fins and scales, which might lead one to conclude that she could be considered Kosher; the Sifra takes pains to demonstrate, however, that the Siren is specifically excluded from the class of Kosher fish. Presumably, her distinctively human parts disqualify her from being eaten. But this raises the possibility that she might have the same ritual status as humans, leading the Sifra to ask whether a Siren’s corpse is ritually defiling, imparting “tent impurity” as does a dead human body. Again, the Sifra looks to a seeming redundancy in the Scriptural text for legal guidance, and concludes from the explicit abomination of “their carcasses” that Sirens are denied the ritual status of human people. For the

Sifra, the Siren’s hybrid form—part human, part fish—presents a ritual conundrum that is resolved by a close, midrashic reading of Leviticus.

The Sifra’s explicit mention of the Sirens is consistent with scholarly assessments of the

Rabbis’ knowledge of Greek myth. Rabbinic literature mentions Homer by name,48 and it has long been the scholarly consensus that rabbis living in Roman Palestine would have been

.a common scribal error ,ואת instead of זאת Ms. Vatican 66 reads 46 47 Sifra 3:7, according to the manuscripts. My translation. The expansions within the square brackets are mine. 48 Mishna Yadayim 4:6; Palestinian Talmud Sanhedrin 10:1, 28a. For a discussion of these sources, the classic work is Saul Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine: Studies in the Literary Transmission, Beliefs, and Manners of Palestine in the I Century B.C.E-IV Century C.E. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1962), 100-114.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 26 familiar with features of Homeric myth, even if they did not read Homer themselves.49 This early rabbinic text confirms that some rabbinic sages were familiar with the Sirens, associating them with the sea, and identifying them as part human, part animal. But in contrast to both pagan sources and to contemporary Christian sources, the Sifra attaches no mythological or moral significance to the Siren. In this midrash, none of the classical significations of the Siren—as singer, as seducer, as destroyer, as consoler—are activated. Here, the Siren is not personified; she is rather a zoological being, whose human traits are only of interest insofar as they complicate ritual questions. Even as the rabbinic editors of the Sifra incorporate a figure from

Greek mythology into a Jewish text, they strip the Siren of mythology,50 reconfiguring her within a distinctively legal-ritual grid as a halakhic riddle that Scripture has already solved. The Sifra exposes both the rabbis’ familiarity with Greek lore, and their denial of its mythic dimension.

For the Sifra, the existence of mermaids is presented as a mundane biological fact.51

49 Lieberman, 113. 50 According to Hasan-Rokem, Dudu Rotman makes a similar point about the Sirens in later Jewish literature and folklore: The Jewish sources acknowledge the existence of Sirens but don’t tell stories about them. See Hasan Rokem 174, note 39, where she cites Rotman’s dissertation, “The Marvelous in the Medieval Hebrew Narrative,” (Tel Aviv University, 2011). 51 One possible explanation for why the Sifra includes mention of Sirens while other rabbinic texts do not is that early rabbinic authorities disagreed about whether such creatures could actually exist. Sifra presents Sirens as animals that join qualities of both humans and marine animals, a hint that it might regard them as does Rashi, as hybrid offspring of disparate species. Other tannaitic authorities expressly exclude the possibility that humans yield offspring of other species. Thus, in Tosefta Bekhorot 1, the majority of the Sages say, “That which comes out of the impure is impure and that which comes out of the pure is pure, for impure livestock do not give birth to pure livestock, and pure does not give birth to impure, and large [livestock] do not [give birth to] small, and small do not give birth to large, and a human does not [give birth to] any of them, and none of them [give birth to] a human.” (My translation based on ms. Vienna, which does not break down the chapter into individual halakhot. In Zuckermandel, this is numbered as T. Bekhorot 1:9 but in the standard print is 1:5.) The Rabbis’ claim with regard to humans is difficult to pin down, because of the way this tradition fuses normative realities with empirical realities: When the Rabbis here claim that pure livestock does not give birth to impure livestock, they are making a normative determination—an animal that looks like a camel but is born to a cow is classified as a cow. Are they similarly claiming that a fish-tailed organism born to a human is classified as a human, or are they suggesting that such species crossings simply do not—cannot—occur? On this issue, See M. Nidah 3:1-2 and R. Neis’s discussion of such cross-species deliveries in humans and other species.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 27 I propose that the scant attention that the Rabbis pay the Sirens-- and their exclusion from the Mishna and Talmud altogether--is an editorial choice that reflects rabbinic ideology, and not rabbinic ignorance of Siren lore. This impression is supported by a piece of evidence that comes from archaeology, from a mosaic floor depicting Sirens that was discovered in Beth Shean, or

Scythopolis, a Roman city populated by Jews, Christians, and pagan. The mosaic was discovered at a site that archaeologists call “The House of Kyrios Leontis,” a mansion dated to the middle of the fifth century, CE, that belonged to a Jew.52 The mosaic has three panels, and together they reflect the home-owner’s connections to Jewish life, to Greek mythological traditions, and also to Alexandria. The uppermost panel depicts scenes from the Odyssey, including one image of a man bound to the mast of a ship, and another image in which a man on a ship contends with an ichthyosaurus while a siren—half woman; half bird53—looks on. The second panel has a Greek inscription in the center, which reads, “Be remembered for good and praise Kyrios Leontis

Kloubas because he paved this with mosaic at his own (expense) for his own salvation and that of his brother Jonathan.”54 Adjacent to these words is the image of a Menorah, indicating

Leontis’ Jewish identity. The third panel features images of a bare-chested male figure scholars identify as the Nile god, a Nilometer, animals such as birds, fish, and an ox, a ship, and an inscription that reads “Alexandria.” Scholars differ as to how to assess what the Hellenistic elements of the mosaic convey about Jewish identity in Byzantine Palestine.55 Does the myth of

52 N. Zori, “The House of Kyrios Leontis at Beth Shean,” Israel Exploration Journal 16:2 (1966), 123-134. 53 In Galit Hasan-Rokem’s discussion of the image, she identifies this figure as fish-tailed. The image is hard to make out in published photographs, and here I am guided by Zori’s description and sketches. 54 Ibid., 132-133. 55 For an example of a scholar who approaches this artwork through the lens of Jewish, apocalyptic myth, see L.A. Roussin, “The Beit Leontis Mosaic: An Eschatologial Interpretation,” Journal of Jewish Art 8 (1981), 6-18. For an approach which emphasizes the classical Greek resonances of the mosaic, see Nava Sevilla Sadeh, “A Promise of Wisdom: The Classical Origins of the Odysseus and the Sirens Mosaic Floor from Scythopolis (Bet-Shean),” in Pictorial Languages and Their Meanings—Liber Amicorum in Honor of Nurith Kenaan-Kedar, ed. C. Verzar and G. Fishhof (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2006), 203-220. Hasan-Rokem engages yet another aspect of the

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 28 the Odyssey mean something personal to the homeowner Leontis, or is it a standard motif in mosaic art of the time? Is Leontis a native of Alexandria, or has he taken a sea voyage there that he wishes to memorialize? Do his wealth and his possible Alexandrian roots disqualify him as an indicator of other Jews’ awareness of Greek mythology? While it is impossible to definitively answer these questions, the artwork does confirm that some Jews during the rabbinic period were familiar with the details of Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens, and with the seductiveness of the Sirens’ song.

Galit Hasan-Rokem appeals to the testimony of this mosaic when she makes the proposal that a cryptic rabbinic statement transmitted in the rabbinic work Leviticus Rabbah is in fact a reference to Sirens. She presents her reading not as a watertight argument but rather as an experiment in imaginative interpretation. The passage that she discusses is from an extended homily in Leviticus Rabbah 16:1 that expounds upon the haughtiness that Isaiah 3:16 ascribes to the daughters of Zion, describing their wiles and tricks for seducing soldiers and officers of the foreign occupying army.56 The midrash spins a misogynistic fantasy whereby God endeavors to interrupt sexual relations between these young women and the foreigners by causing the women to bleed profusely, filling up the foreign soldiers’ carriages with menstrual blood and provoking the men to throw the women out of their carriages and run over them, slicing their bodies in half.

The homily applies an exclamation from Lamentations 4:15, “Away! Away! Touch not!” to the impurity of the women’s bleeding bodies. Following this gruesome phantasm, the midrash appends a statement attributed to Rabbi Reuven57: “That is Greek language: Siron, Siron.” Rabbi

Reuven’s statement is obscure, and there is no consensus among traditional commentators or

iconography when she emphasizes local folklore, connects the fish-tailed beings in the mosaic to an ancient local fish-goddess, 181-182. 56 A parallel to this midrash is Lamentations Rabbah 4:15. 57 In Lamentations Rabbah, the statement is attributed to Rabbi Abba.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 29 among critical scholars about what Greek root the midrash here invokes. Hasan-Rokem suggests that Rabbi Reuven’s cryptic statement is a reference to Sirens.58 In her reading, Rabbi Reuven substitutes the foreigners’ outcry “Away, away!” with the exclamation, “Sirens, Sirens!”

If Hasan-Rokem’s reading is correct, this rabbinic reference to the Sirens is an outlier in rabbinic literature, an exception that proves the rule of the rabbis’ general disavowal of the

Sirens’ mythology. The primary reason that I find Hasan-Rokem’s proposal so compelling is that there are many points of connection between this midrash’s characterization of the licentious daughters of Zion and the associations that accrue to the Sirens in both pagan myth and in the

Christian Physiologus. Among the motifs that this midrash shares in common with stories of the

Sirens are sexual seduction, lamentation, destruction, and heaped body parts.59 Even the strange detail of the young women’s bodies being cut in half call to mind the physiognomy of the hybrid

Siren body, which is only half human. Rabbi Reuven’s invocation of the Sirens would be doubly subversive, in that it not only enlists a figure from foreign mythology to convey the deadly allure of foreigners, but also casts the Jewish woman—and not the foreign conqueror—in the role of seducer. Hasan-Rokem’s reading suggests that rabbis in Byzantine Palestine were attuned to the whole complex of significations that Sirens conveyed in the classic Greek and in the contemporary Christian imagination, and the mosaic art in the Leontis house from roughly the same period strengthens this proposal. If Hasan-Rokem is right, the story of the seductive Sirens that Christians adopt from Greek myth in this period does not stay at the margins of Jewish life

58 As Hasan-Rokem indicates, her reading is anticipated by the nineteenth century scholar Michael Sachs. For her review of scholarly attempts to identify Rabbi Reuven’s “siron” with other Greek words, see 169. 59 Hasan-Rokem makes an additional connection between the motif of leprosy in the midrash and the scaly skin of the Siren’s fish-tail, 170-175, even as she notes that most scholars date the transformation of the Siren from bird- woman to fish-woman to the medieval period.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 30 but penetrates the rabbinic imagination. Nevertheless, the editors of the Mishna and Talmud choose not to incorporate the Siren into the central texts of rabbinic law and lore.

To review: The Jewish translators of the Septuagint incorporate the Sirens of Greek mythology into their Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible because the Sirens’ associations with danger and destruction offer a vivid equivalent to the demons invoked by the Hebrew Bible in passages like Isaiah 13:21-22. This transfer of the Siren from pagan into Jewish myth provides the foundation for the elaboration of the Siren’s symbolism within Christian texts like the

Physiologus, where she becomes an emblem for sexual danger, for carnality, and sin. Rabbis remain far more circumspect in their engagement with the Siren. One possible reference to

Sirens in Leviticus Rabbah participates in the same complex of narrative associations that animate their characterization in the Physiologus, including its potent misogyny. The only certain reference to the Siren in rabbinic literature effectively shuts down these associations, reducing the Siren to a biological specimen.

I set out on this fishing expedition in the hope that even if I could not answer the question of why there are no mermaids in the Mishna, I could nonetheless shed some new light on the rabbis’ attitudes toward animals and the kinds of cultural and biological hybridity that the Siren represents. Having now pursued the elusive mermaid through early Jewish literature and art, I’d like to close with some reflections on how the divergent engagements with mermaids and Sirens among late antique pagans, Christians and Jews correspond to different ways of thinking about animals, knowledge, and the natural world.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 31 Part III. Hybrids

In the context of rabbinic literature, Sirens are hybrid in two respects. On a literal level, their physiognomy joins human heads with animal tails. And for historians and cultural theorists, hybridity functions as a metaphor that draws on biology to describe interactions between two cultures-- the rabbis’ Sirens are hybrids in this sense too, combining elements of Greek myth with the idioms of rabbinic discourse. The use of this metaphor to characterize interactions between two cultures has a long history among scholars, and Steven Weitzman tells the story of its shifting connotations.60 Foundational studies in the nineteenth century characterized the

Hellenistic cultures that emerged in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquests in the Near

East as a “fusion” or “cross-fertilization” between East and West. Applying this model to

Hellenistic Judaism, scholars in the twentieth century emphasized the melding of Greek and

Hebrew elements in the emergence of new forms of Jewish identity and religiosity. More recently, however, postcolonial theorists have rejected this biological model of cultural mixing; for theorist Homi Bhabha, “hybridity” is a strategy whereby the colonized adopt elements of the colonial culture, deploying them politically, as an act of resistance.61 Following Bhabha, contemporary scholars who invoke “hybridity” tend to emphasize cultural resistance and difference, rather than the dissolution of difference.62

It is the postcolonial approach to hybridity that is most apt for characterizing the divergent ways Christians and Jews incorporate the pagan Siren into their respective religious writings. The near absence of the Siren in rabbinic literature can be read as a strategic,

60 This account of the changing meanings of cultural hybridity is based on the formulation in Steven Weitzman’s The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 210- 223 and 362-363. 61 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 62 For an overview of different models, seek Deborah Kapchan and Pauline Strong, “Theorizing the Hybrid,” Journal of American Folklore 112 (1999), 239-253. For a review of other scholarship on hybridity, see Weitzman, 362-363.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 32 ideological choice, and the Physiologus offers an instructive contrast. The Physiologus adopts key aspects of the Sirens’ story in Homer, transposing pagan myth into a Christian morality tale.

The Siren offers a semiotic key for unlocking the animating ideas of the Physiologus, because its bi-sectioned body is emblematic of the way the work divides the world of nature from the world of truth.63 As Lisa Verner explains, for the Physiologus, “spiritual reality contains so much more significance than does physical reality that whether or not the physical is real or not at some point becomes an almost trivial distinction.”64

Arguably, the rabbis are no less engaged with Greco-Roman culture than is the

Physiologus, and they selectively deploy those aspects of pagan culture that accord with their ideology and further their intellectual project. The Tannaim’s commitment to empirical reality brings them closer to Greco-Roman science than to pagan myth or Christian figuration. Like

Pliny the Elder’s natural history, the Mishna is a project in the taxonomy of empirical knowledge.65 But while Pliny collects and organizes knowledge about the natural world, the

Mishna undertakes to impose structure on a different kind of knowledge, organizing and rationalizing a welter of received traditions about divine law. Its central task in passages like M.

Bekhorot 1:2 above is to reconcile its legal-ritual categories—many of them received from the

Bible and from earlier religious authorities—with empirical knowledge about the natural world.

To the degree that the Sirens are familiar to rabbis from Hellenistic lore and art, the Mishna’s editors do not regard these works as authoritative sources of knowledge. For the editors of the

63 This is Pakis’s claim. See above. 64 Lisa Verner, The Epistemology of the Monstrous in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2005), 27. 65 Verner observes that Pliny includes information about Sirens and other mythical beings in his work, and faults him for his “perverse insistence on documenting fabrications,” 18. I see his deference to earlier sources as an outgrowth of his commitment to empiricism. He faithfully reports on earlier works—even when their content is dubious—because he sees them as authoritative sources of knowledge.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 33 Mishna (though not for the editors of the Sifra), mermaids are not natural phenomena that compel rabbinic attention and classification.

It is my speculation that the semiotics that make the Siren such a compelling figure in the

Physiologus help account for the neglect of the rabbis. On the rare occasions in which Sirens do appear in rabbinic writings—in the Sifra, and in Rashi’s medieval commentary—they are characterized above all in terms of their physiognomy, as creatures who are part fish, part human. Appearing under the sign of cross-breeding, they exemplify the biological model of hybridity whereby parents of different species give rise to offspring that unite elements of both.

But the fish-tailed Siren depicts is an expression of hybridity that is not a fusion or melding—it does not resolve the differences between its component parts— but rather accentuates the juxtaposition of irreconcilable elements. In medieval images, this irresolvable divide is expressed iconographically, in the bands or belts that bisect the bodies of the Sirens and onocentuars, separating their human form from their nether, animal parts.66 For the rabbis, as for the

Physiologus, the Sirens unite disparate kinds that should not come together, joining the human with the animal. But while the Physiologus is profoundly invested in the binary opposition that the Siren’s hybridity expresses, structuring its outlook on the world in terms of the polarities of the supernal and the physical, the spiritual and the carnal, for the rabbis, the difference between the human and animal is not nearly so absolute or symbolically fraught. The monstrous hybridity of the Siren does not have the same purchase for the rabbis that it does for their Christian counterparts.

For the rabbis, the difference between humans and other animals is a difference of species, not ontology. While some sources in rabbinic literature do express ideas of human

66 See for example, the discussion on Kay 18 of plate 1.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 34 supremacy, in the context of our passages from Mishna Bekhorot and from Bavli Bekhorot 7b-

8a, human difference is treated in much the same way that cows are differentiated from donkeys, and dolphins from leopards. Species difference accommodates similarity and commonality alongside variation. This is why Rashi’s intervention into the Talmud’s account of dolphins is such a startling transmutation. The Talmud offers an account of sea-creatures whose distance from humans belies basic commonalities in how the two species live and raise their young.

Emphasizing that which dolphins and humans share in common, the Talmud’s accent is on the surprising similarity of unlike creatures, the dappled beauty of biodiversity. When Rashi alters the baraita so that it reads not “Dolphanin are fruitful and multiply like humans,” but “Dolphanin are fruitful and multiply from humans,” he subverts the baraita’s emphasis on likeness and affinity, collapsing species difference into a misbegotten Sameness that swallows up variability.

Rashi’s comment unwittingly jettisons the Talmud’s recognition of parental care as an experience that diverse species share in common. Not only does Rashi discount the cross-species similarity borne of parenthood, he replaces the maternal dolphin with the Siren, an emblem of female monstrosity.

Coda: Humans

In a recent work of constructive Jewish theology and ethics, Mara H. Benjamin undertakes to re-imagine human subjectivity on the model of maternal love and obligation.67 She explores two alternative ethical possibilities that can emerge from a parent’s experience of a love for their particular child. On the one hand, there is a danger that parental love will veer into solipsism, constricting moral life by narrowing the parent’s circle of concern so that the love

67 Mara H. Benjamin, The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 35 lavished on one’s own child eclipses and excludes all other caring, crowding out the claims of others. On the other hand, the particularities of parental love open up into a universalist morality, a recognition of fellow-feeling that binds a parent to all other people. For Benjamin,

Parental love of the unique miracle of one’s child overflows banks

and transforms the landscape of humanity as a whole. The love and

wonder I feel in marveling at my child’s existence is both mine

alone, and, at the same time, known by many people for their

children.

The revelation of analogous love uncovers an obligation and

responsibility through which I become more rather than less

connected to the world. I see other people as being (or having

been) loved in all of their distinctive particularity, and of being

perceived (or having been perceived) as a wonder of creation as

much as I do my own child.68

Benjamin here explores how parenthood can nurture an ethical imagination that opens up to a universalism that embraces all people, with every human potentially the beloved parent or child of someone. Her account invites further expansion, to an ethics inclusive not just of other humans, but of animals of other species, and in particular, to animals that bear and rear their young in just the ways that humans do.

68 Ibid. 177.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 36 The flash of fellow-feeling that so many people experienced this past summer in witnessing a bereaved orca carry the remains of her dead calf speaks to the way commonalities in bodily experience and emotion can serve as a foundation for moral concern. Greco-Roman naturalists and rabbinic sages recognized birth, lactation, and childrearing as activities that humans and other animals share in common, but their accounts of parental care among other species have had little purchase in the Christian and Jewish ethical traditions. In both religious traditions, animals, emotions, and bodily experience are devalued, and this has contributed to the neglect of maternity and parenthood as a grounding for ethics. In this essay, I have sought to recover ancient articulations of affinity and commonalities linking humans with other species in the hope they can encourage a more robust engagement with other animals’ ethical claims. The

Talmud’s acknowledgement of animal-mothers offers a foundation for an ethos of caring that extends beyond the particular love that binds human families to fellowship with other families, human or otherwise.

DRAFT October 2018 Mira Beth Waserman 37