Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany, 1843-1933 (review)

Robin Judd's study of circumcision and kosher butchering in Germany prior to the Nazi seizure of power is an attempt at what Michael André Bernstein calls "side-shadowing" (p. 18). It offers an alternative to the "apocalyptic" or "backshadowing" histories of German Jewry, decried by Bernstein, that plot the trajectory of that community's life during the nineteenth and first third of the twentieth centuries as ineluctably headed along a well-marked—for those who had eyes to see—path to the ovens.¹ Instead, she outlines for her readers a series of local, regional, and national confrontations between various constellations of forces whose interests and motivations are not simply determined by the labels Jew or Gentile, antisemite or liberal, rabbi or judge. By focusing on the public debates over specific Jewish ritual practices and on the changing tenor of those debates, the author seeks—successfully—to "complicat[e] and de-exceptionaliz[e] the Jewish experience in Germany" (p. 11). Further, her examination of the political deployment of these questions provides an important supplement to previous research on such "ritualized markings of difference" (p. 3) that focuses on them only as discursive phenomena.

Professor Judd discerns four periods, distinct in terms of both players and priorities, during which questions of ritual were politicized in Germany. She first addresses a series of disputes about circumcision that commenced in Frankfurt in 1843 and faded out by 1857. Rather than rehearsing the reformer/traditionalist disputations that earlier historians have addressed, she focuses on how some Jewish fathers as well as the radical reformers "rejected circumcision as a marker for Jewish belonging" (p. 49) and called for membership in a Jewish community to be determined by descent. Their arguments initiated a series of contestations whereby the borders between Jewish communal and secular government authority, as well as between state and local governmental authorities, were renegotiated. Further, Judd shows how these debates contributed to internal and external redefinitions of membership in the Jewish community and to realignments of status among educated Jewish elites—especially between the university-trained physicians and the traditionally trained rabbis. Above all, she emphasizes the variety of resolutions reached.

Moving on to the period of German unification and Jewish emancipation, the author shows how these developments, including the enactment of a nationwide ruling that the obligatory denominational registration was sufficient for Jewish community membership, changed the issues and arguments in public discussions of ritual. Her primary focus here is on demonstrating that technological developments in the meat industry (stunning the animals before slaughter) and increased governmental attention to the health conditions of the population contributed to the salience of public debates over kosher butchering. The tension between the constitution's guarantee of legal equality for all religions and the no less constitutional privileging of Christianity was played out in the opposition between the assertion that kosher slaughtering was cruel to animals and the still-powerful liberal discourse of "toleration."

Judd follows this discussion with an examination of the radicalization of the debate in the 1880s and 1890s, as the German public sphere witnessed the emergence of mass politics and the concomitant rise of "interest" groups. Animal rights and antisemitic groups formed a movement to outlaw kosher slaughter both nationally and within states, achieving success in Saxony in 1892. Jewish defense groups created an opposing network, which in turn formed ad hoc coalitions with political Catholicism over religious freedom. As a result of the Jewish organizations' persistent lobbying in the name of religious freedom, the Saxon government overturned the law in 1910; however, despite the fact that they were pursuing a common goal, these Jewish organizations were divided along both theological and jurisdictional (national versus local) lines.

The Weimar period saw increasing politicization of the issue of kosher slaughter and a series of legislative efforts to ban it, especially as the Nazi Party greatly expanded its local, state, and national presence after 1930. However...