At Passover seders, numerous Jewish families will be singing the Aramaic song Ḥad Gadya (“Only a Goat”), which includes the line, “Then came a cat and ate the goat that my father bought for two zuzim.” While the Hebrew Bible has numerous references to goats, it has none to cats—although the animal was certainly known to ancient Israelites. Joshua Schwartz examines the evidence:
Cats have been excavated in Jericho from as early as the pre-pottery Neolithic period (before 6000 BCE). At most, these ancient cats may have co-existed in some form with humans, although they were not yet domesticated.
To date, we have found no evidence that the Israelites kept cats in their houses. The scant archaeological evidence of cats in a domestic context from Bronze and Iron Age Israel shows no connection to the Israelites, and the Bible never mentions cats. This silence stands in contrast with the evidence from Egypt, where cats were dearly loved and often depicted in wall paintings and bronzes from the mid-second through late-first millennium BCE.
Schwartz then moves on to the Talmud:
The Persians who ruled talmudic Babylonia despised cats; they were considered khrafstra, noxious creatures, not much better than the vermin they destroyed. The talmudic traditions about cats suggest a slightly more mixed view of cats. The only talmudic tradition that directly praises cats is cited by the Palestinian sage Rabbi Yohanan (3rd century CE): “If the Torah had not been given, we could have learned modesty from the cat.”
Read more on theTorah.com: https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-curious-case-of-cats