Editor’s Introduction

The first decade of the twenty-first century was a remarkable one in the annals of Jewish alimentary scholarship. In its last year alone, several noteworthy books appeared on a wide range of issues related to food practices and prohibitions: Julia Bernstein’s Food for Thought: Transnational Contested Identities and Food Practices of Russian-Speaking Migrants in Israel and Germany; Sue Fishkoff’s Kosher Nation: Why More and More of America’s Food Answers to a Higher Authority; David Friedenreich’s Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law; and Jordan Rosenblum’s Food and Eating in Early Rabbinic Judaism.¹ Beyond these monographs, mention should be made of the impressive Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, written single-handedly by Gil Marks—chef, ordained rabbi, and food historian.

In this regard, it is also worth mentioning the 2005 collective volume Food and Judaism, based on a conference that was held three years earlier. One of our forum’s contributors, Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus, contributed two essays to that volume.² Three of the volume’s other contributors have since published larger studies related to their articles therein: Joel Hecker’s Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals: Eating and Embodiment in Medieval Kabbalah (2005); Marci Cohen Ferris’s imaginatively titled Matzo Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South (2005); and David Kraemer’s wide-ranging Jewish Eating and Identity through the Ages (2007).

As coeditor of this journal, I share responsibility for our failure to publish review essays on these and other books on Jewish cuisine and food habits that have appeared in recent years, but the embryonic state of the field has made it difficult to find scholars who have not already reviewed (or written blurbs for) each other’s works. Furthermore, rooted as our journal is in—though not limited to—the traditions of nineteenth-century Wissenschaft, there is sometimes a tendency to omit such subjects as what an early contributor, Frances Amelia Joseph, referred to as the “religion of pots and pans.” Although one cannot find a single article devoted to culinary topics in the early years of the JQR,³ a fascinating exception—which in some ways proves the rule—is the lively exchange during the 1890s between one of its founding editors, Claude Montefiore, and his coreligionist Mrs. Joseph, provoked by the publication of Adolph Wiener’s Die jüdischen Speisegesetze nach ihren verschiedenen Gesichtpunkten zum ersten Male wissenschaftlich-methodisch geordnet und kritisch beleuchtet (The Jewish food laws in all their aspects, scientifically arranged and critically illuminated for the first time).

Rabbi Dr. Wiener’s book critically elucidating the Jewish dietary laws “for the first time” (!), which appeared shortly after his death in 1895, was praised by Montefiore as “one of the most important books on the Jewish religion which has appeared during the last quarter of a century.”⁴ Wiener (1811–95), who had served for over four decades as rabbi in the Silesian town of Oppeln, composed his controversial work calling for the abandonment of later rabbinical additions to the biblical dietary laws while he himself was still occasionally rendering, as Montefiore noted in amazement, “ritual decisions on all the casuistic minutiae of the dietary laws” according to the Shulḥan ‘arukh and its commentaries. “Love of Judaism,” he added in admiration, “still so hampered by obsolete ritualism and oriental superstitions, would not suffer” the old rabbi “to keep silence unto the end.” Hammering the “oriental” theme further, Montefiore asserted that “the Jewish dietary laws . . . are a bit of Asia in Europe, which can never prosper in their new environment.” That was more than two decades before Morris Bloom opened his eponymous kosher restaurant in London’s Brick Lane. Montefiore was less adamant than Wiener that the biblical dietary laws should be maintained, but he had no objection to their continuing “for a time.”⁵ In an illuminating personal aside, Montefiore noted that he himself “had never partaken deliberately of pig, hare, lobster” or the other biblically prohibited animals, a practice he still continued “out of respect for my mother.”⁶

In keeping with Victorian standards of fair play Montefiore politely...