Reproduction in Rabbinic and Greco-Roman Worlds

Lecture by Dr Shana Schick. 

Held jointly with the RFE-research network “Between Encyclopaedia and Epitome"   https://fit.uni-tuebingen.de/Project/Details?id=9826

 How did ancient rabbis think about reproduction — and did their science match their law? This lecture uncovers a contradiction at the heart of rabbinic culture in Roman Palestine. In midrashic texts like Genesis Rabbah and Leviticus Rabbah, rabbis embraced a "one-seed" theory borrowed from Greco-Roman medicine, casting women as passive vessels in reproduction. Yet in legal texts like the Tosefta and Yerushalmi, women bear full responsibility for the commandment to procreate — obligated to marry, divorce, and remarry in pursuit of offspring. Drawing on aggadic and halakhic sources alongside Roman imperial policy, the speaker argues that rabbinic culture operated with two distinct regimes of knowledge: one shaped by popular medical ideas, another by legal and demographic imperatives. The result is a fresh window into how science, gender, and governance intersected in the late antique world.

Dr. Shana Strauch Schick is a lecturer in Rabbinic Literature in the Department of Talmud and the Multidisciplinary Department of Jewish Studies at Bar-Ilan University. She is the author of Intention in Talmudic Law: Between Thought and Deed (Brill, 2021) and the editor of Land and Spirituality in Rabbinic Literature: A Memorial Volume for Yaakov Elman (Brill, 2022). Her forthcoming monograph, Women in Rabbinic Law and Narrative: Vying Currents in Babylonian and Palestinian Texts, will be published by Brandeis University Press.