Meat-eating and jewish identity: Ritualization of the priestly “torah of beast and fowl” (lev 11:46) in rabbinic judaism and medieval kabbalah

AJS Review

Volumn 24, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 227-262

  Brumberg Kraus, Jonathan ^a  

^a WHEATON COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 85012438249     PISSN: 03640094     EISSN: 14754541     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0364009400011259     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. b.Pesah 49b, quoted by Bahya, Shulhan shel Arba, from Kitve Rabenu Bahya (Kad ha-kemah, Shulhan shel Arba, Pirke Avot), ed. Charles B. Chavel (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 1969), p. 496.
2. See Colin Spencer, The Heretics Feast: A History of Vegetarianism (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1995); Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990).
3. Joseph Gikatilla, Shaare Orah, ed. Joseph Ben Shlomo (Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1981), II, 11-12
4. Bahya, Shulhan shel Arba, p. 496: “Consider well that human beings’ food ought to have been only plants from the earth, such as grain produce and fruit, not animals… but at the time when all flesh ruined its way and all animals deserved annihilation, they were saved only by the merit of Noah, to whom animals were them permitted [to be eaten] just like the green grasses” (an allusion to Gen 9:3: “Every living creature shall be yours for food, like the green grasses, I am now giving you everything”). Bahya has a very clearly articulated sense of a fall of humanity in Eden, even if it sounds almost like Christian original sin. He refers to the rabbinic traditions of Adam's loss of stature, and describes the post-Edenic human condition thus, “all the children of Adam, the children of the man of sin, we are all stained, and our soul sickened [gam benei ‘adam gam benei ‘ish ‘avon kulanu nikhtam ve-nafshenu davah ],” p. 459.
5. Bahya, Shulhan shel Arba, p. 501 (ha-ma ‘akhlim ha-dakim ve-ha-zakhim shenivre ‘u min ha- ‘or ha- ‘elyori). I owe this metaphor to Andrea Lieber, whose aptly titled unpublished paper, ‘Tastes Great, Less Filling,” deals in detail with Jewish and parallel traditions of nourishment through the sense of sight.
6. The expression dat sha'ashu'im is difficult to translate, though Chavel in his notes to Shulhan shel Arba, p. 459, understands it as an allusion to Ps. 119:92 ilulei toratekha sha ‘ashu ‘iy, “Would that your torah were my pleasure”) and means the “Torah which is called ‘pleasure.'” I agree with Chavel that Bahya understands dat as a synonym for the Torah. But Bahya draws on dot's other specific connotations: law, rule, or decree. I suspect that Bahya has in mind an analogy to a monastic rule, or manual, for the moral instructions for princes of the type that began to proliferate in medieval Europe, or to the adab manuals of etiquette in Muslim culture. Bahya views the Torah as a kind of manual of conduct, a sefer ha-hanhagah, which has clear affinities to this genre of ethical literature. In other words, he projects the genre of his own Shulhan shel Arba onto the Torah. For a discussion of this genre and its relationship to other medieval Christian and Muslim ethical manuals, see Ze'ev Gries, Sifrut ha-hanhagot: toldoteha u-mekomah be-haye haside R. Yisra'el Ba'al Shem-Tov (Tel Aviv: Mossad Bialik, 1989), pp. 4-11, esp. 5-8. See also the discussion of medieval Muslim cooking and table etiquette literature in Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine, and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1982), pp. 127-133. Though Goody does not discuss Jewish literature, his point that literary elaborations of cooking and table manners legitimate upper classes is relevant to our discussion of diet and class distinction between the talmidei hakhamim and the ammei ha-aretz.
7. Bahya, Shulhan shel Arba, p. 460.
8. Chavel, Shulhan shel Arba, p. 460, in his notes suggests that Bahya alludes here to Is 11:7, Na 2:11, Hos 4:18, Ezek 45:20, Prv 15:28.
9. As Aharon Oppenheimer, The ‘Am Ha-aretz: A Study in the Social History of the Jewish People in the Hellenistic-Roman Period (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), p. 175, suggests regarding the tradition in its earlier context as a baraita in b.Pesah 49b.
10. Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus, “Were the Pharisees a Conversionist Sect?” The Making of Proselytes. Jewish Missionary Activity in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, ed. A. J. Levine and R. Pervo (Scholars Press, forthcoming).
11. Oppenheimer, ‘Am Ha-aretz, p. 170. The tannaitic sources themselves recognize this distinction, for example m. Dem 2:3 regarding what is excluded from the definition of & haver. However, in later strata of the Talmud and in the Derekh Eretz literature the terminological distinction between haver and hakhamltalmid hakham is blurred.
12. However, in later strata of the Talmud and in the Derekh Eretz literature the terminological distinction between haver and hakhamltalmid hakham is blurred., p. 171.
13. However, in later strata of the Talmud and in the Derekh Eretz literature the terminological distinction between haver and hakhamltalmid hakham is blurred., pp. 67 ff. Adolf Buchler coined the terms, but Oppenheimer and others dispute which historical social strata they accurately describe (p. 5). However, even if coined later, the terms accurately describe an implicit distinction that the talmudic sources themselves recognize (p. 67).
14. Goody, Cooking, Cuisine, and Class, p. 123, suggests that class conflicts often underlie gastronomic preferences for meat (“high”) vs. vegetable-based (“low”) cuisines, referring to Islamic texts as examples.
15. Yitzhak Baer, “Ha-Reka’ Ha-Histori shel Raya Mehemna,” Zion, n.s. 5, no. 1 (1939): 1-44; idem, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1961-66), 1:270-277.
16. Nefesh ha-tnuah, literally, “mobile soul.” In Bahya's psychology, there are three levels of soul: the “vegetative soul” (nefesh tzomahat) characteristic of plants, the “mobile soul” (nefesh ha-tnuah) characteristic of animals, and the “intellectual soul” (nefesh sekhlit) characteristic of human and angelic beings. Only human beings have all three. See below, my discussion of Bahya, Shulhan shelArba, p. 496, and n. 72.
17. Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. xxiii.
18. Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat, pp. 48-62.
19. b.Pesah 49b: “… but he [a talmid hakham] should not marry the daughter of an am ha-aretz, for they are detestable and their wives are vermin, and of their daughters it is said, ‘Cursed be he who lies with any kind of beast [behemah] [Deut 27:21].”’
20. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1991), pp. 382-383.
21. For general studies, see Miriam Levering, ed., Rethinking Scripture; Essays from a Comparative Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); Wilfred Cantrell Smith, What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993); William A. Graham, Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Jeffrey Timm, ed., Texts in Context: Traditional Hermeneutics in South Asia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). For studies of Torah from this comparative perspective, see Barbara Holdrege, Veda and Torah: Transcending the Textuality of Scripture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); Martin S. Jaffee, “A Rabbinic Ontology of the Written and Spoken Word: On Discipleship, Transformative Knowledge, and the Living Tests of Oral Torah” (Paper read at the American Academy of Religion Consultation on the Comparative Study'of Hinduisms and Judaisms, November 1996).
22. William A. Graham, s.v. “Scripture, “in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Miicea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 13:134.
23. b.MenahoJ 110. R. Bahya, Biur al Ha-Torah (ed. Chavel), p. 433, brings this tradition in his comment to Lev 7:37, but not to suggest that Torah study supplants sacrificial earing altogether, as I argue later.
24. E.g., Bahya, Shulhan shel Arba, p. 496; Joel Hecker, “Each Man Ate an Angel's Meal: Eating and Embodiment in the Zohar” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1996; Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1996), pp. 224-296, esp. 273-279; and also Pinchas Giller, The Enlightened Will Shine: Symbolization and Theurgy in the Later Strata of the Zohar (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
25. See Bahya, Shulhan shel Arba, p. 492, for the ritualization of the metaphors of Nu 28:2 and Ps. 103:1 (and below, for my translation of the passage), and of Ps 36:8, Joseph Gikatilla, Shaare Orah,II, 11.
26. The relationship of this cosmic drama to these nonlegal Torah verses is basically analogous to Victor Turner's “Social Dramas and Stories About Them,” Critical Inquiry, 1980, pp. 141-168. See the next note.
27. See Ivan G. Marcus, The Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 6, for the application of the anthropologist James Fernandez's concept of “ritualization of metaphors” to other medieval Jewish eating rituals. Particularly apt is Marcus's recognition of this process as an impulse toward ritual innovations.
28. What I mean by ritualization is the tendency of interpretations to stress the extratextual performance of the rituals described in the texts, or the social dramas “behind” the texts, of which the texts themselves are consciously understood as a performance. Conversely, deritualization would be the tendency to play down the actual performance of the specific rituals described in the text; in effect, to turn the prescriptive into the descriptive, or the imperative into the indicative. In addition to Ivan Marcus's approach, I also have in mind Victor Turner, “Social Dramas and Stories About Them,” who views texts that describe rituals as parts of an extratextual ritual process-“scripts” of social dramas. I have also been influenced by Baruch Bokser's idea that ritualization can be an editorial phenomenon, the way that one text interprets actions described in another text, as in the tendency of the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds to augment M.Pesah 10's account of the seder rituals by giving symbolic explanations for props and actions that the Mishnah treats more or less as accidents. “Ritualizing the Seder,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56 (1988): 443-471.
29. Milgrom, Leviticus, p. 52.
30. Jacob Neusner, The Way of Torah: An Introduction to Judaism, 4th ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1988), p. 35, similarly argues that different types of Judaism in history can be distinguished from one another by their particular way of bonding these two generative symbols of priestly altar and scribal scroll, and a third, messianic/nationalist wreath in a coherent religious system.
31. Baruch Halpern, Leviticus (NJPS), pp. xi-xii.
32. What I mean by ritualization is the tendency of interpretations to stress the extratextual performance of the rituals described in the texts, or the social dramas “behind” the texts, of which the texts themselves are consciously understood as a performance., p. xvii.
33. What I mean by ritualization is the tendency of interpretations to stress the extratextual performance of the rituals described in the texts, or the social dramas “behind” the texts, of which the texts themselves are consciously understood as a performance.
34. Obviously, there are other places in Leviticus where this is the intention, i.e., in the passages describing the priestly gift portions of sacrifices, and the prohibition of ordinary Israelites from eating them.
35. Milgrom, Leviticus, pp. 52-53.
36. Grimm, From Feasting to Fasting, p. 16, suggests that the restrictions in Leviticus on animals fit to eat, and particularly the extensive enumeration of animals which are unfit to eat, “rather than addressing a largely vegetarian society… confront a human society that… would eat just about anything that moved.” She questions the assumption that meat was infrequently eaten, only on sacrificial occasions, in the ancient Near East. Moreover, she claims that the preoccupation of Leviticus with clean and unclean animals was the precedent for later Jewish tendencies away from vegetarianism. If Grimm is correct that everybody was “eating anything that moved,” the Israelites would have been eating less meat than their neighbors, since fewer animals are permitted to them to eat. Thus, pace Grimm, it is arguable that the narrowing of meat options in Leviticus put Israelite religion and later Judaism on a continuum tending toward vegetarianism.
37. Gen 1:20-21,24-25: i.e.,yishretzu ha-mayim sheretz nefesh hayah ve-'of ye'ofef… kol nefesh ha-hayah ha-romeset asher shirtzu ha-mayim leminehem ve- ‘et kol ‘of… totze ha-'aretz nefesh hayah leminah behemah va-remes ve-hayto ‘eretz leminah… va-ya'as elohim et hay at ha- ‘aretz leminah ve ‘et ha-behemah leminah ve- ‘et kol remes ha- ‘adamah leminehu.
38. In biblical Hebrew nefesh, lit. “throat,” usually translated as some sort of life force, or even “self or “person” depending on the context, does not have the connotation of an immaterial soul or spirit that it develops in later rabbinic Hebrew under the influence of Greek thought. Gen 9:4, You shall not eat flesh with its life [nefesh], that is, its blood,” equates nefesh with blood.
39. “Let us create human being in Our image according to our likeness” (Gen 1:26 ff); “You shall make yourselves holy and be holy because I am holy” (Lev 11:44).
40. Some printed editions of the Talmud place a fourth behemah in parentheses after am ha-aretz asur le- ‘ekhol basar, but it seems clear that this a later editorial addition, and does not appear in R. Bahya's quotation of the baraita.
41. b.Pesah 49b.
42. As R. Hiyya taught, “All who engage in Torah in front of an am ha-aretz, it as if they cohabited with his betrothed in his presence…, for it is said, ‘Moses commanded us a Torah, as a possession [morashah] for the assembly of Jacob.’ Do not read morashah but me'orasah, betrothed” (b.Pesah 49b).
43. In fact, this is how R. Isaiah Horowitz understands this baraita in Shnay Luhot Ha-Brit, albeit probably through the kabbalistic lens of R. Bahya's interpretation: “Everything that is created longs and yearns to go up to a level greater than it until it goes up to the level of an angel. And when a person eats an animal the flesh of the animal is changed into the flesh of a human being. Thus an am ha ‘aretz is forbidden to eat meat. (b. Pesah. 49b) Alas for the flesh because of flesh. For an am ha ‘aretz is [made out of] the material of a beast like the beast that is eaten. But when a person who has intellect and eats an animal, the animal merits to be raised into human flesh. After that the human level [itself] goes up due to the intellect and soul that the Holy One Blessed be He placed in it.” Sha'ar Ha-Othiyot 4, Derekh Eretz (3).
44. Oppenheimer, Am Ha-aretz, p. 184.
45. And when a person eats an animal the flesh of the animal is changed into the flesh of a human being.
46. So Ozar Ha-Geonim, ad loc: “These are not statements of halakhic prohibition or permission by which one could say this is or is not halakhah. Rather they are statements of recommendation, rules of derekh eretz, and the expression of contempt for ammei ha-aretz.” In general the halakhic commentators on this baraita stress that it is the am ha-aretz's ignorance of the “torah” of kashrut-the slaughter and preparation of beasts and fowl-that makes it inadvisable for them to eat meat if not under the supervision of talmidei hakhamim. For example, the RI”N on R. Isaac al-Fasi cites R. Sherira Gaon and R. Isaac the Barceloni: “Too bad for the am ha-aretz, who sometimes has beasts and fowl, but because of his am ha-aretz-ness, does not know how to slaughter or examine them, so it is forbidden to eat from them”; the Meiri: “an am ha-aretz where there is no one [sage] greater than him, it is forbidden for him to eat meat, for many doubts may arise over the slaughter, and its corpse, and the meat's salting, and its mixture with other foods, and he does not know”; or R. Solomon ben Adret (R. Bahya's teacher): “Of beast and fowl there are many rules, and whoever does not engage in Torah cannot distinguish between prohibited and permitted, whereas for fish he can easily distinguish between prohibited and permitted, he can tell by the scales by himself (cited in M. Kasher, Torah Shelemah, vol. 28, p. 242).
47. Sifra to Lev 11:46, par. b.Hull 27b, b.Zevah 69a.
48. Sifta Behukotai 8:13.
49. Martin S. Jaffee, “A Rabbinic Ontology.”
50. “A Rabbinic Ontology.”, p. 7.
51. “A Rabbinic Ontology.”., p. 6.
52. My thanks to Stanley Stowers for pointing out the relevance of this distinction when I presented an earlier version of this paper to the Brown University Seminar on Mediterranean Religions in Antiquity. For a clear exposition of this theory and its application to first-century Judaism, see Bruce Malina, The New Testament World: Insights From Cultural Anthropology, rev. ed. (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), pp. 28-62, esp. 33-34.
53. Song of Songs Zuta, though in R. Bahya's own paraphrased version (as per Chavel's note).
54. Shulhan shelArba, p. 492.
55. R. Bahya's interpretation of the sacrifices-'the hidden things of the Torah”-seems to come from kabbalah of the Zohar. See esp. Zohar to Parashat Tzav (Raya Mehemna) 33a-b, ed. Margoliot, vol. 3, pp. 65-66.
56. The Iggeret Ha-Kodesh, a kabbalistic manual of sexual etiquette falsely attributed to Nahmanides, but nevertheless from the same circle of Spanish kabbalists as Bahya, states this explicitly. Gregory Spinner, in his “Sexual and Dietary Restrictions in the Iggeret Hakodesh” (Paper delivered at the Hinduisms and Judaisms Consultation Panel on “Problematizing the Category of Asceticism: The Domestic Arena,” American Academy of Religion/Society for Biblical Literature National Meeting, New Orleans, 1996), p. 11, called my attention to this reference.
57. b.Pesah 49b.
58. b.Pesah 49b.
59. Shulhan shel Arba, p. 496.
60. See esp. Louis Jacobs, “The Uplifting of Sparks in Later Jewish Mysticism,” in Jewish Spirituality: From the Bible to the Middle Ages, ed. Arthur Green (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 2:115-116, 117-119, and the 18th-19th Hasidic sources cited therein. Jacobs views this as a Hasidic innovation, the doctrine of avodah be-gashmiyut (“divine worship through the use of material things”), to be contrasted with the more “ascetical” tendencies of Lurianic kabbalah stressing abstinence from sensual pleasures, fasting, and generally negative toward the body. As we can see, Eastern European Hasidic avodah be-gashmiyut is more likely a revival of earlier views such as those of R. Bahya's Shulhan shelArba than an unprecedented innovation.
61. Shulhan shelArba, p. 496.
62. See the excellent study by Joel Hecker, Each Man Ate an Angel's Meal.
63. “My korban, my bread, my fire” (R. Isaac), cited in Eft-aim Gottlieb, Ha-Kabalah be-khitve Rabenu Bahya ben Asher (Jerusalem: Be-siyuah Reshut ha-mehkar shel Universitat; Tel-Aviv: Hotsaat Kiryat Sefer, 1970); Zohar in, 252-253 (Raya Mehemna); “Zaddik knows his beast,” Zohar III, 33b.
64. Hecker, Each Man Ate an Angel's Meal, p. 310, remarks on this “notable lacuna” in the Zohar's interpretation of eating, especially in light of its frequent discussion in the Spanish Zoharic circle. See the texts cited in the following note.
65. Zohar 111, 110a (Raya Mehemna).
66. Zohar 111, 110a (Raya Mehemna). Note that the eaters of meat and grain offerings are of a higher rank than those compared to eaters only of the grain offerings or their remains.
67. See Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, pp. 898 and esp. 1430-1432 for a discussion of the am ha-aretz in Raya Mehemna.
68. Yitzhak Baer, “Ha-Reka’ Ha-Histori shel Raya Mehemna”; idem, History of the Jews in Christian Spain, vol. 1.
69. Another possibility is that the am ha-aretz as “beast” is not a person, but one of the three parts of a tripartite division of the soul. Both the Zohar and R. Bahya interpret ihepasuk, “the Zaddik knows his beast,” in this way, and use am ha-aretz as a synonym for “beast.” See Zohar, III, 33b; R. Bahya, Kad Ha-Kemah, “Taanit.”
70. Marcus, Rituals of ‘Childhood, pp. 11-12, contrasts modem outward acculturation, “the blurring of individual and communal traditional Jewish identities and of the religious and cultural boundaries between Jews and modern societies,” to premodero inward acculturation, “when Jews… did not assimilate or convert to the majority culture [and] retained an unequivocal Jewish identity.” At the same time, however, “the writings of the articulate few or the customs of the ordinary many sometimes expressed elements of their Jewish religious cultural identity by internalizing and transforming various genres, motifs, term, institutions, or rituals of the majority culture in a polemical, parodic, or neutralized manner.”
71. Joseph Dan, “Philosophical Ethics and the Early Kabbalists,” in Jewish Mysticism and Jewish Ethics, 2nd ed. (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1996), pp. 17-48.
72. “Philosophical Ethics and the Early Kabbalists,”., pp. 18-19, 23-28.
73. Matt, “The Mystic and the Mitzwot,” pp. 396-367.
74. They did, however, maintain the philosophical idea that at the highest level God was unknowable, as the Ayn Sof, “Infinite One,” but that by means of the sefirotic emanations, God was knowable and could be named.
75. See especially Matt, “The Mystic and the Mitzwot”
76. They were following the instructions of the letter written by Isaac the Blind advising them to keep their kabbalah esoteric, Dan, “Philosophical Ethics and the Early Kabbalists,” pp. 36-37, and see also Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, ed. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, trans Allan Arkush (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1987), pp. 394-397. Jacob ibn Sheshet and Asher ben David are mentioned by Dan, p. 35, as exceptions who did cite kabbalistic explanations in their ethical treatises. Obviously, Bahya ben Asher is an exception too.
77. Dan, “Philosophical Ethics and the Early Kabbalists,” p. 39.
78. Maimonides, Moreh Nebukhim (Guide to the Perplexed) 3:32; Matt, “The Mystic and the Mitzwot,” p. 372.
79. Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, pp. 404 ff.
80. Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever, p. xxvii.
81. Bahya, Shulhan shel Arba, p. 459.
82. Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever, p. xxiii.
83. Spinner, “Sexual and Dietary Restrictions in the Iggeret Hakodesh,” p. 17.
84. Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever, pp. 112-127.
85. See, for example, Chava Weissler's “Women in Paradise,” Tikkun 2 (April-lay 1987): 43-46, 117-120, who discusses the “Three Gates Tkhine,” a later seventeenth-century text influenced by kabbalah which portrays women learning Torah in paradise.
86. I.e., Adams, Sexual Politics of Meat.
87. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, pp. 11-12.
88. For these Christian tendencies, though none of her examples are from Spain, see Carol Walker Bynum, “Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), pp. 143-148. A more precise account of the relationship of Bahya's eating rituals to the specific theological trends of thirteenth-century Christian Spain is still needed.