Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism (review)

This study by Jordan D. Rosenblum, University of Wisconsin, of "how the Tannaitic movement constructed identity through regulating culinary and commensal practices" relies on the Tannaite compilations for data to describe the processes of identity definition, "analyzing the interlocking dimensions of identity formation and commensality regulation that can be applied cross-culturally" (p. 2). The program is stated as follows:

This book examines how the Tannaitic movement constructed identity through regulating culinary and commensal practices. Focusing onto the extant literary corpus, redacted in circa third century C.E. Palestine, I argue that the Tannaim both draw on earlier and contemporary Jewish and non-Jewish culinary and commensal customs and introduce innovations as part of an attempt to establish a discreet Tannaitic identity. In these texts the table is a locus for identity negotiation. Rules that regulate what, with whom and how one eats are therefore understood to divide the world into a binary: those with whom "We" eat and those with whom "We" do not eat."

(p. 2).

The thesis is worked out in four specific chapters: realia (what did they eat?); Jewish identity: pre-Tannaitic evidence for commensality restrictions (pig, Mana, meat); Jewish male identity (preparing food as reproducing male identity); and Jewish male Rabbinic identity (the cuisine of the rabbinic Jew).

The chapters are prodigiously researched. I cannot exaggerate how broad and deep is Rosenblum's reading of the extant scholarship on his topic and thesis, providing an exceptionally full survey of the previous writings of scholars and scholarship and showing himself to be a first class mind. Obviously, his thesis is not original, but his program of exposition is original indeed, and he systematically demonstrates that fact through his own exegesis of the sources, not only in his survey of the extant literature.

Compared with prior work the organizing emphasis is on anthropology rather than history or literature. Readers will find David Kraemer, Jewish Eating and Identity through the Ages (2007) is the single closest work. There as here the focus is on defining oneself as an Israelite through the food one eats and the people with whom one eats. Kraemer is more historical, Rosenblum more anthropological. Kraemer tells a compelling story, Rosenblum illuminates texts and details without a rich outcome that coheres and clarifies the picture whole and complete. But highly accomplished, Kraemer writes as a mature scholar and Rosenblum's book began as a doctoral dissertation. The strength lies in more than only the quality of the account of prior work, but the weakness lies in the focus on one detail after another.

Essentially, Rosenblum supplies an anthropological exegesis of topically selected texts, so we emerge with a massive collection of comments on bits and pieces of Rabbinic writings classified as Tannaite. Kraemer produced a more interesting book, and his documentary category yields an unfolding narrative account. So his account is coherent, not merely a succession of comments on sources. Kraemer historically explains the unfolding of the law and establishes a documentary sequence of results; Rosenblum has no historical sequences to speak of and ignores the documentary outcomes of a temporal sequence of writings. It goes without saying that so far as temporal categories go, Rosenblum takes a standard approach to the Tannaite corpus—everything truly belongs to the named authorities to whom they are attributed, we take them all for granted as testimony to the same period of time, and documents are mere collections of random writings assembled for no clear purpose. Note the contrast: the documentary hypothesis, employed by Kraemer, effectively yields a clear and persuasive outcome for the history of formative Judaism. Anthropology in the model of Rosenblum comes in a clear second to history and the study of society.

But I compare a beginner's doctoral dissertation with the work of a mature and proven scholar of established authority and distinction. Rosenblum shows himself to be a first-class researcher who brings to his topic a thorough and compelling account of the sources and the anthropological reading...