Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages (review)

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the kashruth-related anxieties of Jews in the United States, or at least in New York, came to focus on the one ingredient that had for millennia been unambiguously neutral. Copepods, tiny and almost invisible crustaceans, had been found in selected samples of New York City tap water, and the organisms, while very small, were not, strictly speaking, microscopic. For a considerable segment of New York's kashruth supervisors, the presence of the copepods rendered ordinary tap water unkosher.

David Kraemer examines the copepod episode in the last chapter of his compelling and compellingly readable book Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages, and finds it to be part of a reaction within the Orthodox communities that might almost have been predicted, bizarre though it is. Kraemer demonstrates convincingly that beginning in the 1980s, discussions of controversies about kashruth occupied the popular press serving the Orthodox community to an unprecedented extent. Fresh fruits and vegetables, long held to be safe and kosher, came to require intense examination, so time-consuming and difficult as to make many home and professional cooks uncomfortable with the use of fresh produce altogether.

The explanation for this unprecedented stringency within the Ultra-Orthodox community was that subsequent to the ban on DDT, insect infestation of fruits and vegetables had become much more severe, requiring more stringent scrutiny, but by putting the new stringencies in the context of controversies within the larger Jewish community, Kraemer argues that it was the issue of defining Jewish identity that drove the impulse toward greater stringency, just as the definition of Jewish identity has always provided the force behind the codification and observance of Jewish dietary laws.

The book begins with the biblical period, and a novel reading of the prohibitions of Leviticus. The first chapter challenges the almost universally accepted notion that the primary motivation and function of the biblical dietary prohibitions was to separate the Israelites from their neighbors (17). In fact, Kraemer argues, the laws as written would have had almost no effect in distinguishing Israelite from non-Israelite eating, since they deal exclusively with animal foods—foods that both the Israelites and their neighbors consumed only very rarely. The Levitical dietary laws are more usefully understood as symbolic, separating those animals with whom Israel is identified (flocks, doves, and so on) from those such as predators and scavengers, whose characteristics are contrary to the identity of the Israelite people. While the separate identity carved out by the dietary laws is symbolic, the laws of the biblical period reflect "a condition of relatively congenial mixing" (23), a condition that was possible as long as that identity remained uncontested.

The distinctions that define kosher eating for contemporary Jews, most notably the separation of milk and meat, and the requirement for Jewish bread and wine, developed only when Jewish identity was challenged, and such challenges were as likely to come from within the Jewish community as from outside. The Second Temple period began the distinction between foods that were Jewish and those that were gentile, most particularly bread and wine. What is most interesting is not whether Gentile foods were prohibited or if the prohibition was observed by some classes of Jews and ignored by others, as seems to have been the case, but that Jews created distinctions between foods that may have been in fact indistinguishable.

Jewish Eating and Identity reads like a mystery and, in a way, it is one. How could contemporary Jewish eating practices, or those of the rabbinic period, or the early modern age, ever have been inferred from the commandments of Leviticus? This brings us back to the alarm regarding organism-infested water of twenty-first century New York. As Kraemer demonstrates, it is the same concern for an understandable definition of Jewish identity that allowed relative laxity in the period of the First Temple, delineation of Jewish and non Jewish categories in the period of the Second Temple...