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

When writing about an aspect of the German-Jewish experience that does not have to do with victimization, one of the most difficult things to do is to escape what one author has called the “paper ghetto,” that is, the perfunctory treatment of Jewish issues in separate sections or chapters of books devoted to mainstream German history. Robin Judd overcomes this difficulty by embedding her study of circumcision and kosher slaughtering from the 1840s to 1933 in the larger German story. Like all good history, hers spares us none of the subject’s rich complications.

Arguments that began within the Jewish community concerning the defining nature of religiously prescribed rites soon became a matter of lively interest to non-Jews, the controversies surrounding ritual slaughter winning by far the greater attention. State and municipal authorities, the medical establishment, the animal rights movement, and antisemites intervened repeatedly in the debates centering on the two rituals that most clearly separated Jews from non-Jews. Judd corrects the commonly held view that opposition to circumcision and especially kosher slaughtering was always and everywhere simply an antisemitic pretext. She distinguishes degrees of antisemitism in anti-kosher slaughtering campaigns and does not assume its centrality or its significance where bans and partial bans were enacted before 1917. In the Weimar era, the Nazis commandeered the movement against circumcision and kosher butchering and intensified the antisemitic rhetoric that had always portrayed both practices as irrefutable evidence of Jewish cruelty and the futility of trying to integrate Jews into German life. During the imperial era, antisemitism often made its way into public discourse, but it seems only rarely to have swayed governmental action. There were many in the animal rights movement who thought the Jewish method of animal slaughter to be inhumane but who nevertheless distanced themselves from antisemitic arguments and even called for exempting Jews from the general reforms they advocated. The practices also became embroiled in a tangle of jurisdictional disputes at a time when state and local governments sought to extend their reach by regulating economic activity, safeguarding food supplies, and policing public hygiene. How the state should balance the rights of religious minorities against the larger public good was a source of ongoing conflict. All this is laid out in meticulously researched detail and admirably clear prose.

Jews by and large rallied to the defense of Judaism, even as most of them became less and less observant. ( Judd estimates that perhaps fifteen to twenty percent kept kosher by the 1920s. Liberal [Reform] Jews constituted the majority of the community as early as 1870.) In 1886, national campaigns against kosher slaughtering politicized Germany’s Jews, who saw a threat to their civic as well as their religious freedom and responded in a new way. The traditional timid petitioning of the powerful or resigned silence gave way to vigorous action. Nearly a decade before the founding of the Centralverein, the main vehicle of Jewish self-defense from 1893 until the 1930s, Jews carried their fight into the public sphere. Having made this revisionist point, Judd then spells out what it meant. Jewish organizations and individuals—often in conflict with one another—forged an activist network that was able to exploit modern techniques in fund-raising, public relations, and the exerting of economic and political influence. Their defense used every available argument, from the insistence that the method was in fact humane to stirring appeals for religious toleration. They often made common cause with the Catholic Center Party to protect the free practice of religion. Jews learned how to behave politically and were successful in fending off national bans on kosher slaughtering and having several local prohibitions repealed. In 1917, the Bundesrat approved a set of policies that safeguarded the rite, a great but short-lived victory that was undone by the Nazis in April 1933.

Judd has written an important book, using a seemingly small subject to...