Callbacks not being called with validations present

To reproduce, consider a Person basic model with an attribute of name:string, with the requisite DB table. Now add a failing callback to cause an error as such:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
before_create { raise } end

And this fails as expected:

dhcp80ff9b7b:ptest rory$ script/console
Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.4)

z = Person.create RuntimeError:
(...)

Perfect, but then change the class to:

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
before_create { raise } validates_presence_of :name end
exit and reload the console:
dhcp80ff9b7b:ptest rory$ script/console
Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.4)

z = Person.create => #

before_create is never being called, therefore raise is never hit to trigger the test failure. All that is needed to reproduce is to use a basic class listed above. Further of note, when using .create with these conflicting conditions, a record is NOT created in the database:

Person.all => []

(note that in the console response, the id is nil)

The same behavior is also present when using before_create, after_create, before_save, after_save callbacks, including .create not creating a new record in the database.

I would track it down in the AR callbacks class, but I'm quite lost as to where to look there, apologies.