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Introduction Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19598-0 - Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism Jordan D. Rosenblum Excerpt More information Introduction On July 11, 1883, Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio hosted a banquet to celebrate the ordination of the college’s first class of Reform rabbis. The menu for this gourmet feast, later (in)famously known as the “Terefah [nonkosher] Banquet” and greatly mythologized, included four biblically forbidden foods (clams, crabs, shrimp, and frogs).1 Over a series of elaborate courses, each accompanied with its own wine or spirit, the diners who partook of this feast – and those who stormed out – each made a statement about Reform Judaism’s stance on the traditional Jewish dietary laws and, by extension, on its theology in general. The intra- and interdenominational consternation inspired, in part, by the “Terefah Banquet” eventually contributed to the bifurcation of American Judaismthatwestillseetoday.2 More than simply consuming calories, it would appear that the “Terefah Banquet” was about staking a claim on a new Jewish identity.3 However, the use of a meal to create social distinctions and to enact and maintain distinct communities is far from a modern phenomenon, both 1 A copy of the menu can be found in Jacob Rader Marcus, ed., The Jew in the American World: A Source Book (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 240–241.Onthe myths surrounding this event, see Lance J. Sussman, “The Myth of the Trefa Banquet: American Culinary Culture and the Radicalization of Food Policy in American Reform Judaism,” American Jewish Archives Journal 57/1–2 (2005): 29–52. As will be discussed in Chapter 2, the absence of pork from this menu is significant (see also Sussman, “Myth of the Trefa Banquet,” 34–43). 2 For a brief overview, see Marcus, Jew in the American World, 238–239; Sussman, “Myth of the Trefa Banquet,” 43–44. 3 Although the extent to which those who organized, hosted, dined, abstained, or departed from this banquet were, at that moment, intentionally or consciously engag- ing in making active identity statements is debated, it is clear that this is how the event was subsequently interpreted. See Sussman, “The Myth of the Trefa Banquet.” 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19598-0 - Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism Jordan D. Rosenblum Excerpt More information 2 FOOD AND IDENTITY IN EARLY RABBINIC JUDAISM in Judaism and cross-culturally. The early rabbinic (tannaitic) corpus is replete with legislation concerning what and with whom one should or should not eat. The authors of these texts (singular: Tanna; plural: Tannaim) build on earlier precedents and introduce innovative practices regulating commensal interactions. In short, the food on one’s plate serves as a social symbol (or sign) that communicates group association and disassociation. This book examines how the tannaitic movement constructed identity through regulating culinary and commensal practices. Focusing on 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 inno- vations as part of an attempt to establish a discrete tannaitic identity. In these texts, the table is a locus for identity negotiation. Rules that regu- late what, with whom, and how one eats – and how one prepares that food – are therefore understood to divide the world into a binary: those with whom “We” eat and those with whom “We” do not eat. Although commensality regulations are not the only manner in which the Tannaim attempt to establish their own unique identity (purity, for example, is another way), these rules are a key component of the larger identity formation process. In addition to explaining a specific ancient data set, I develop a methodological framework for analyzing the interlocking dimensions of identity formation and commensality regulations that can be applied cross-culturally. As every recorded society that I am aware of has some form of food taboo (many for sound biological reasons),4 the utility of refining such a heuristic model for cross-cultural and transhistorical studies is vast. In particular, I seek to avoid three weaknesses that I detect in studies addressing the intersection between diet and identity in ancient Judaism. 4 For example, evolutionary anthropologists Daniel M. T. Fessler and Carlos David Navarrete trace the origin of meat taboos specifically to “evolved psychological mech- anisms and predispositions” developed to avoid biological harm to the human body. See “Meat Is Good to Taboo: Dietary Proscriptions as a Product of the Interaction of Psychological Mechanisms and Social Processes,” Journal of Cognition and Culture 3/1 (2003): 1–40, 26. In addition to biological factors, anthropologist Marvin Harris argues that food taboos “can be explained by nutritional, ecological, or dollar-and- cents choices” (Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture [Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1998], 17). © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19598-0 - Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism Jordan D. Rosenblum Excerpt More information INTRODUCTION 3 First, piecemeal data from texts spanning a large timeframe and cover- ing a wide swath of geographically and culturally diverse territory (for example, Palestine and Babylonia) are assumed to present one coherent and consistent picture.5 This scrapbook approach represents the bulk of previous scholarship in the field of rabbinics in general.6 However, the recent trend in the field has been toward greater sensitivity to this issue.7 To address this concern, I limit my scope to tannaitic literature.8 Fur- ther, whenever possible, I distinguish between commensality regulations with precedents in earlier (almost always Second Temple-period) extant evidence and those that appear to represent tannaitic innovations. This approach brings into relief the ways in which the Tannaim specifically manipulate culinary and commensal practices as part of their identity construction. Second, by focusing only on culinary regulations (what one eats) and commensal regulations (how one eats) between Jew and non-Jew, or between rabbinic Jew and nonrabbinic Jew, previous studies fail to address a key component of boundary maintenance: that the proverbial “fence around the Torah”9 – the rabbinic metaphor for a hedging policy of erring on the side of caution, to prevent violating biblical legislation – allowsforthecreationoflawsandpracticesdesignedtokeepboth“Us” in and “Them” out. Scholarship that concentrates solely on regulations 5 E.g., Sacha Stern, Jewish Identity in Early Rabbinic Writings (New York: Brill, 1994). 6 This approach is not unique to the study of rabbinics. Classicists, for example, grapple with this same issue. As Mary Beard notes, with regard to scholarship on the Vestal virgins: “The ancient texts it considers are excavated,notread. The method is a familiar one: the Roman antiquarian literature is combed – a bit of Labeo (quoted by Aulus Gellius) is dug out here, some convenient lines of Festus on the Vestal hairdo deployed there, with plenty of snippets from Pliny the Elder and Valerius Maximus sprinkled on for good measure. The byways of Latin literature ransacked and minutely dismembered, all (as intended) making a very learned impression. But what is left out of the picture (what Ancient History, as a discipline, has consistently ignored) is the character, point and focus of the texts so expertly dissected: what were these writers writing about when they wrote about the Vestals? Who wrote about Vestals, to whom, and why?” (“Re-reading (Vestal) Virginity,” in Women in Antiquity: New Assessments,ed.Richard Hawley and Barbara Levick, 166–177 [New York: Routledge, 1995], 171–172, emphasis in original). 7 E.g., Michael L. Satlow,Tasting the Dish: Rabbinic Rhetorics of Sexuality,BJS303 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1995); Alyssa M. Gray, ATalmudinExile:TheInfluence of Yerushalmi Avodah Zarah on the Formation of Bavli Avodah Zarah,BJS342 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005). 8 “Rabbinic literature,” writ large, refers to both the tannaitic and amoraic corpora, as I discuss later in this chapter. 9 E.g., m. Avot 1:1 (ed. Albeck 4:353). © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19598-0 - Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism Jordan D. Rosenblum Excerpt More information 4 FOOD AND IDENTITY IN EARLY RABBINIC JUDAISM either between rabbinic and nonrabbinic Jews10 orbetweenJewsand non-Jews11 does not provide a complete picture. Here I am influenced by the work of Arjun Appadurai, who examines the role that the practice of writing cookbooks plays in creating a national cuisine – and hence, identity – in contemporary India. Appadurai notes: What we see in these many ethnic and regional cookbooks is the growth of an anthology of naturally generated images of the ethnic Other, a kind of “ethnoethnicity,” rooted in the details of regional recipes, but creating a set of generalized gastroethnic images of Bengalis, Tamils, and so forth. Such representations, produced by both insiders and outsiders, constitute reflections as well as continuing refinements of the culinary conception of the Other in contemporary India.12 To understand the identities constructed in cookbooks, a burgeoning topic in food studies, one must consider how these recipe collections construct the identity of both “Self” and “Other.”13 An important result of parsing the tannaitic data in this manner is that it highlights a key difference, namely that the boundaries that the Tannaim erect between 10 For a recent example of this general approach to identity construction, although not in the domain of culinary and commensality regulations, see Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 11 E.g., David Moshe Freidenreich, Foreign Food: Restrictions on the Food of Members of Other Religions in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law (Ph.D.
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