Feasting and Fasting

The History and Ethics of Jewish Food

Aaron S. Gross, Jody Myers, Jordan D. Rosenblum

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781479866236
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

How Judaism and food are intertwined Judaism is a religion that is enthusiastic about food. Jewish holidays are inevitably celebrated through eating particular foods, or around fasting and then eating particular foods. Through fasting, feasting, dining, and noshing, food infuses the rich traditions of Judaism into daily life. What do the complicated laws of kosher food mean to Jews? How does food in Jewish bellies shape the hearts and minds of Jews? What does the Jewish relationship with food teach us about Christianity, Islam, and religion itself? Can food shape the future of Judaism? Feasting and Fasting explores questions like these to offer an expansive look at how Judaism and food have been intertwined, both historically and today. It also grapples with the charged ethical debates about how food choices reflect competing Jewish values about community, animals, the natural world and the very meaning of being human. Encompassing historical, ethnographic, and theoretical viewpoints, and including contributions dedicated to the religious dimensions of foods including garlic, Crisco, peanut oil, and wine, the volume advances the state of both Jewish studies and religious studies scholarship on food. Bookended with a foreword by the Jewish historian Hasia Diner and an epilogue by the novelist and food activist Jonathan Safran Foer, Feasting and Fasting provides a resource for anyone who hungers to understand how food and religion intersect.

PART 1

History

Introduction to Part 1

JODY MYERS

The chapters in this part describe Jewish foodways as a dynamic cultural phenomenon. Practices are lost and added over the centuries and layered upon each other, intertwined, and continually shifting. Biblical food laws and ceremonies form a starting point. Food—or more often, the perils of food scarcity—is crucial in stories of creation, settlement, exile, and potential redemption in the core literature of the Israelites and the later Jewish people. Especially when they move to lands dominated by people of other religions, when the priestly sacrificial system ends, and when commonly available foods are different than those their ancestors ate, Jews adapt their modes of food production and eating and also leave their visible mark on the foodways in their new lands. The frequent reference to biblical texts in Jewish prayers, ceremonies, and religious law conveys the impression that Jewish foodways have changed little from biblical times. In truth, the ancient practices would be merely a shell without the substance supplied in the rabbinic, medieval, and modern eras. The intricate rules for keeping kosher, the meanings ascribed to foods, the liturgies and ceremonies added to home-based eating, and the food markers that became signs of Jewishness were barely present in the earliest phase of Jewish history; they emerged and then were continually reshaped in the centuries after the Hebrew Bible was composed. Like a recipe, these four chapters explain the steps taken that produced today’s Jewish foodways in their multiple variations as well as the characteristically modern ways of rejecting these behaviors and beliefs and supplanting them with others.

Chapter 1, “Food in the Biblical Era” shows the importance of the ecology of the ancient Land of Israel in Israelite religion. The Bible insists that God rewards Israel’s obedience to divine laws with necessary rain and ample harvests and punishes its disobedience with drought and scarcity. Foods central to Israelite worship and celebratory meals are the ones most plentiful in the Mediterranean climate and dry terrain, and these are the ones permitted for profane consumption; foods plentiful at certain seasons become essential to seasonal holiday practices. Yet religious factors account for the prohibition of some readily available edible foods such as animal blood, amphibians, and insects. The challenging natural environment and the closeness of ancient Israelites with their animals provide the basis for later food ethics, especially the rules of charity and laws mandating respectful treatment of nature and animals. The six chapters on food ethics in part 3 of this volume demonstrate that biblically based principles still provoke creative ethical thinking today.

Chapter 2, “Food and Eating in the Rabbinic Era,” describes the crucial practices developed in the second thousand years of Jewish history, until about 1100. With the cessation of sacrificial worship and the dispersion of Jews throughout the Mediterranean region, religious scholars known as rabbis constructed an alternative means for Jewish women and men to express their relationship to God through food. The formation of Judaism and the making of Jewish meals were connected. The rabbis significantly expanded biblical prohibitions, provided details for animal slaughter and food ceremonies only vaguely recounted in the Bible, and transferred the locus of worship to the home and synagogue by creating domestic table rituals and devotion by way of Torah study. Rabbinic writings such as the Talmud include food blessings and rituals for daily, Sabbath, and holiday observances as well as kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws that restricted food choices, combinations, and foods prepared by non-Jews. By the last centuries of the first millennium, most Jews lived integrated within Muslim- and Christian-dominated societies but also followed these rabbinic practices, albeit with regional and class variations. Jewish distinctiveness in eating become the norm from the rabbinic era onward, creating the concept of “Jewish food” and “Jewish ways of eating” illustrated in the six case studies in part 2 of this volume.

Chapter 3, “Food and Jewish Culture during the Medieval Era,” describes foodways during the eleventh to the sixteenth century, when rabbis, influenced by the cultures of the Muslim and Christian empires where they lived, interpreted and adapted earlier Biblical and Talmudic food traditions for the Jews living under their authority. Despite interreligious collaboration in food preparation and trade, religious leaders—Jews, Christians, and Muslims—used food to mark their religious identities. Rabbis strengthened and extended the food laws to more rigorously define kosher food preparation and eating. Jews attributed new meanings to their foods, regarding them as symbols of their relationship to God. They created food-centered ceremonies and liturgies that fostered love for and loyalty to communal values. Rabbinic innovations helped Jews preserve their distinctiveness at a time when they were pressured, sometimes quite harshly, to accept the religious views and practices of their non-Jewish neighbors. Unique Jewish foodways enabled Jews to regard themselves as more elevated and refined in comparison to the surrounding majority cultures, and in the process, the rabbis found an outlet for their own pious expression and their sense of self-importance relative to ordinary Jews.

Chapter 4, “Food and Jewish Culture in the Modern Era,” describes how the six Jewish global migrations during the sixteenth to the late twentieth century influenced Jewish cuisines in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States. Although Jewish religious law was codified and widely disseminated at the start of this era, the political changes implemented by “modernized” governments severely lessened rabbinic authority and the power of religious law. New religious denominations appeared, each offering different interpretations of the dietary laws and different ways of honoring or rejecting separatist Jewish food preparation, eating, and food-based rituals. Defining “Jewish food” becomes difficult in the modern context of migration, modernization, and globalization. As Judaism becomes less important to many Jews, or where antisemitism wanes sufficiently so as to lessen the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, distinctive “Jewish food” and “Jewish eating” becomes increasingly relegated to the more insular Jewish religious communities. Furthermore, when food was no longer prepared locally but produced in factories distant from home, religious Jews created systems of checking and marking the kosher status of processed foods and meat. Kosher certification plays an important role in differentiating Jews from each other, determining whether they may eat together, and it has created new ways of interpreting religious law and new religious professions. The deleterious effects of industrialized food production on the natural environment, animals, and food workers prompted the emergence of a food movement offering new ways of applying older Jewish ethical principles to food preparation and food commerce.

1

Food in the Biblical Era

ELAINE ADLER GOODFRIEND

The Garden of Eden was filled with fruit trees “pleasing to the sight and good for food,” according to the Hebrew Bible’s account of the first phase of human history. God allowed Adam and Eve to eat from all the trees in the garden except one, and when they ate from the prohibited tree, they were punished, exiled, and required to grow food laboriously by the sweat of their brows. This biblical story foreshadows the logic of the dietary rules later transmitted by Moses. God permits the consumption of animals easily available in and native to the natural environment but forbids, with no explanation, some commonly available animals and food mixtures. Those disobeying these decrees would be punished by bad harvests and exile. The reward for obedience—the dream—was living in a land in which one could effortlessly find and enjoy a bountiful supply of food. The present chapter shows not only what the Hebrew Bible and postbiblical apocryphal literature, in addition to archeological evidence, reveal about the actual foodways in the society known as “ancient Israel” but also how food was used to demonstrate the Israelites’ unique relationship to God, to the land, and to each other. For the thousand years beginning in the Iron Age (1200 BCE) and extending to the Hellenistic era (approximately the second century BCE), the Israelite diet appears to be shaped by ecological pragmatism—that is, by what would be available in a challenging environment—and yet religious and cultural factors intervene to mark some edible animals and food mixtures as taboo.

The ancient foodways, especially as they are expressed in the Hebrew Bible, provide the template for later ways of considering and consuming food. First, the Pentateuch, or first five books of the Hebrew Bible—often referred to as “Torah” by Jews—presents food as the subject of divine law commanded by YHWH, Israel’s God, and says that God will reward or punish Israel according to its adherence to these and the rest of God’s laws. Belief in the need to eat in conformance with God’s laws is passed down the generations. Second, the Torah commands that Israelites offer gifts to God from their produce and livestock, a practice abandoned in the postbiblical era but symbolically performed in later Jewish worship, ritual, and study. Third, food in the Hebrew Bible serves as a means to celebrate sacred occasions and probably also major life events. In the postbiblical era, the celebratory function of food continues, and the centrality of food to Jewish culture survives through the modern era even as religious observance declines. Fourth, whereas the Hebrew Bible alludes to the social function of food laws in distinguishing or separating Israelites from other peoples, in the postbiblical era, this theme is expanded into a central element of religious practice. Fifth, these Jewish food traditions influence the formation of Christianity and Islam, whose leaders rejected or adapted them for their unique forms of religious expressions.

Finally, although the food laws are described as vehicles for making ancient Israel a holy nation, they address ethical ideals fundamental to world religions and moral philosophies. Implicitly or explicitly, biblical food-centered texts teach concern for animal suffering, the need for careful stewardship of the earth, the importance of hospitality to strangers, and the obligation to feed the poor. The actual historical context of these ancient foodways shows how ethical ideals were inculcated—and could be today, something explored in part 3 of this book—through daily routines and weekly and seasonal celebrations and commemorations.

Certain limitations in our knowledge of ancient Israelite food practices must be admitted from the outset. The Hebrew Bible, the major source of information for life in ancient Israel, is an anthology of literature that covers more than one thousand years and includes many mostly anonymous authors, the chronological context of whom is widely debated by modern scholars. While knowing the authorship of a literary section would help us understand the writer’s context and...