Beyond Religious Borders: Interaction and Intellectual Exchange in the Medieval Islamic World

Chapter 10: Fusion Cooking in an Islamic Milieu: Jewish and Christian Jurists on Food Associated with Foreigners

c h A p t e r 1 0 Fusion Cooking in an Islamic Milieu Jewish and Christian Jurists on Food Associated with Foreigners dAvId m. fr eIdenr eIch The fact that Maimonidean writing is so often characterized, in Ben Jonson’s phrase, by “a newness of sense and antiquity of voice” is the crucial determinant, eclipsing the formalization of geneticliterary relationships. His literary and conceptual apparatuses are purposely fused. Proper study of the Mishneh Torah thus necessitates tireless sleuthing, a deliberate and disciplined search for sources, together with an ever-deepening empathy for the modes of abstraction and conceptualization. In the final analysis, however, the attempt to uncover and understand “Maimonides’ mind” must be paramount, for the originality of the “Maimonidean mind” was ensconced in the smooth anonymous texture of the work.1 The principle that intellectual activity is shaped by the milieu in which it occurs receives strong confirmation in medieval philosophical literature by Jews and Christians who lived in lands dominated by Islamic culture. Sarah Stroumsa vividly depicts the intellectual marketplace in these lands as a whirlpool whose current transports and transforms ideas irrespective of the religious community in which they originate: “Like colored drops falling into a whirlpool, new ideas were immediately carried away by the stream, coloring Fusion Cooking in an Islamic Milieu 145 the whole body of water while changing their own color in the process.”2 Because Christian and Jewish philosophers were full participants in what scholars have dubbed “the Islamic philosophical tradition,” their works cannot be fully understood in isolation from that broad intellectual tradition. These philosophers were, in a sense, “Islamic” as well as Jewish or Christian; the confession-specific terminology commonplace in modern scholarship is inadequate when it comes to capturing the complexity of this medieval reality. Our profession-specific terminology is similarly inadequate, as medieval “philosophers” in the Islamic world engaged in a range of intellectual activities that transcends modern disciplinary boundaries. Among these activities is the study of law. In contrast to philosophy, law in premodern Islamic lands is a genre of thought beholden to an explicitly confessional intellectual tradition. If the medieval marketplace of ideas can be likened to a whirlpool, the currents of legal thought can be said to flow in narrow channels bounded according to individual religious communities—at least in theory. We shall see that the reality is somewhat more complicated. Legal literature, moreover, is “traditional” not only in its appeal to sources from a single normative tradition but also in its conservative rhetoric. The authority of a work of law derives in no small measure from its claim of fidelity to the normative tradition in which it grounds itself. Ideas from outside that confessional tradition lack normative authority. Some of the most prominent medieval intellectuals were both active participants in the transconfessional Islamic intellectual marketplace and masters of the law within the circumscribed chambers of the Jewish or Christian—or Islamic, in the narrow sense of the term—house of study. This essay examines the work of two such masters, Gregorius Barhebraeus and Moses Maimonides, each of whom draws on ideas and models from his Islamic milieu in the course of codifying Christian or Jewish law. The essay focuses on a pair of passages about restrictions governing food associated with adherents of foreign religions, laws that express conceptions regarding the distinctiveness of one’s own religious community.3 These passages reflect the intermingling of ideas derived from both confessional and transconfessional intellectual traditions. Analysis of the confluence of these distinct currents reveals the minds of these jurists at work. To shift our metaphorical vocabulary from the realm of water to that of food, these case studies show our jurists to be cooks who employ a wide range of locally available ingredients and draw on both ancestral and regional recipes to create their own brand of intellectual fusion cuisine. This essay endeavors to uncover the principles of fusion cooking employed by Barhebraeus and Maimonides, which is to say the ways in which 146 dAvId m. fr eIdenr eIch these jurists select and utilize both elements native to their own legal tradition and elements derived from their Islamic milieu in the formulation and expression of explicitly Christian or Jewish norms. Its emphasis on the thought processes that underlie legal texts, what Isadore Twersky refers to in the epigraph as the “Maimonidean mind,” stands at the core of what William Ewald calls “comparative jurisprudence...