“The interweaving of descriptions of biblical sacrificial rites with contemporary accounts of modern animal slaughter and sales makes for a striking juxtaposition between German and Jewish practices and sensibilities” (98), writes John M. Efron toward the middle of his All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat. This statement encapsulates Efron's project and the dialectical organization of the book, tracing the varied and often contradictory meanings and implications of meat production, preparation, and consumption among Jews and their Christian neighbors in the German realm, before and after unification. Those juxtapositions—depictions of Jewish butchers by Christian Hebraists alongside Hebrew and Yiddish butchering manuals; polemics against biblical sacrifice by Protestant Bible critics and Jewish reformers alongside reinterpretations of those rituals by modern Orthodox and Zionist thinkers—give the book a narrative and conceptual force that is unique and sure to engage both scholars and lay people.
All Consuming takes the anthropologist Mary Douglas's assertion that “the carcass of an animal is a virtual space on which social distinctions are projected” (2) as its theoretical underpinning. Efron argues that German Jews and Christians linked the meat they prepared (or did not prepare, in the case of vegetarians) to ideas of Jewishness and Germanness, from the Middle Ages until the post-World War II period. Meat was a signifier of identity, but not only. It was also a site of theological and political contest and co-existence, exclusion, and openness. In this way, while the book is a history of hostility and persecution, Efron does not indulge in teleology; he presents German Jews and Christians as engaged in complex interrelationships, marked by attraction and repulsion, collaboration and dependence. His Jewish subjects were embedded in and engaged with their surrounding cultures; they adapted to new circumstances while preserving their distinctiveness and actively advocating for themselves within an often hostile society.
All Consuming is composed of five roughly-chronological chapters, as well as an introduction and conclusion. In the introduction, Efron sets out his contention that meat was the focal point of debates among German Jews and Christians: “To an extent not seen elsewhere in Europe … Germans have identified, studied, decried, and gladly eaten meat understood to be Jewish. And likewise, to an extent not seen elsewhere in Europe, German Jews mounted vigorous and novel attempts to celebrate and, when called upon, defend their meat” (15). He also offers a brief history of Jewish dietary laws (kashrut, adj. kosher) and the controversies they provoked in antiquity. In this section, it would have been helpful had Efron clarified the conceptual armature that supports his analysis, had he summarized some of the sociological literature related to “assimilation” and “acculturation,” and had he explained his choice to dichotomize “Germans” and “Jews” throughout the text, rather than employ more subtle and context-dependent categories.
The following chapters each take a single issue or idea as their theme. As noted earlier, one aspect of these chapters’ novelty and what lends them narrative energy is their dialectical organization. Chapter one, exploring the role and depiction of Jewish slaughterers and butchers (shohatim) from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century, juxtaposes depictions of this essential communal functionary in Christian and Jewish literature and law. The chapter moves from church and state regulations of Jewish butchers to ethnographic descriptions of butchers and butchering by Christian Hebraists to Jewish slaughtering manuals in Hebrew, Yiddish, and German. It is clear from this survey that Jews and Christians worked side-by-side in the same abattoirs and markets, bought and sold meat from each other, and were subject to the same environmental conditions that led to the increasing prominence of meat in European diets beginning in the laterMiddle Ages. While it was a “mutually beneficial transactional relationship” (26), it was one tainted by Christian anti-Judaism. Ethnographies were thus marked by “compliments mixed with contempt” (46) and laws “allowed Jewish and Christians to come to a modus vivendi” while also sustaining “vehemently negative attitudes towards Jews and Judaism” (34).
Chapter two focuses on the symbolism of meat for Jews and Christians, and the ways Jews and Christians perceived meat produced and prepared by the other, from the Middle Ages to the Weimar period. Most illuminating is Efron's discussion of kashrut and ancient Jewish sacrificial liturgies and their significance for Christian theologians and Bible scholars, Jewish reformers, Zionists, and Jewish Neo-Orthodox interpreters. He reads the likes of Johann Bodenschatz, Johann Michaelis, and Julius Wellhausen, among others, to show how their depictions of kashrut and sacrifice “affirmed the stubborn unchangeability of Judaism and thus the unbridgeable gulf that separated Jews from Germans” (85). Alongside these arguments, Efron presents a diverse cast of Jewish characters, some, such as the reformers Leopold Stein and Abraham Geiger, who rejected dietary laws and synagogal evocations of sacrifice because such practices were “primitive” (91), and others, such as Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, who imagined a restoration of the ancient sacrificial cult in a reconstituted Jewish commonwealth in Palestine, and others still, such as Leopold Schwarz and Siegfried Lichtenstaedter, who advocated for vegetarianism on Zionist and reformist grounds, respectively.
The next three chapters zero in on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter three explores the Schächtfrage, debates over the legality of kosher animal slaughter (shehitah) and animal rights, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century in England and Switzerland and spreading rapidly to Germany, paralleling the processes of Jewish emancipation and German unification. This is a subject that remains controversial in Europe and has received significant analysis by other historians, upon whom Efron relies, including Robin Judd, Dorothee Brantz, and Pascal Krauthammer. Efron's assessment is guided by the irony that “The intensity of the kosher slaughter debate served to reify cultural and even psychological otherness just at that moment when German Jews were dedicated to the project of bridging—though not erasing—ethnic differences” (116). Some of the most compelling analysis in this and subsequent chapters is rooted in Efron's readings of newspaper articles and advertisements. He juxtaposes these sources, some vilifying shehitah, and others defending the practice, to show how both sides mustered the modern discourses of rights and science in support of their positions.
In chapter four, Efron turns his attention to the preparation of meat by Jews during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and argues emphatically that Jewish meat cookery was a mode of acculturation, not assimilation. Thus, while “many Jews had abandoned kashrut” (158) during this period, he shows how many others sought to persevere in their distinctiveness, adapting culinary trends of the majority to the rhythms of the Jewish calendar and the strictures of the traditional Jewish diet. Alongside a discussion of the Germanness of iconic Jewish foods such as berches (a Sabbath bread), kugel (a pudding/cake), and schalet (a long-cooked Sabbath stew), Efron introduces the reader to texts such as Joseph Stoltz's Cookbook for Jews (1815), an introduction for Jews to the fashionable recipes of the early nineteenth century, by the Catholic chef of the Grand Duke of Baden. Similarly, nineteenth- and twentieth-century cookbooks written by Jewish women and newspaper advertisements of processed foods depict a German Jewry adopting and adapting bourgeois habits and tastes while preserving its distinctiveness.
Matters turn dark once more in chapter five, where Efron explores the ironies and contradictions of Nazi antisemitism and nutrition policy. Drawing on a long romantic and conservative philosophical tradition, Efron shows how Nazi ideologues alternately depicted Jews as a domesticated bourgeoisie disconnected from the natural world, as wanton abusers of animals, and as gluttonous animals themselves. By the same token, the Nazis, and here Efron makes use of periodical literature once more, depicted themselves as defenders of an innocent natural world and animal life, as well as “beasts of prey” (237), valorizing physical power above all else. Efron describes how the Nazi propagandist and Minister of Agriculture Richard Wather Darré stirred popular antisemitism by linking Germany's failed agricultural policy during World War I to a cabal of Jewish “experts” whose inveterate hatred of pork led to the unnecessary “massacre” of millions of pigs and widespread privation. Alongside such accusations, Efron shows how Jews living under Hitler, subject to stringent restrictions on foodstuffs, adapted their diets, doing their best to adhere to some semblance of kashrut. On the other hand, those who escaped to Palestine endeavored to fashion a new diet centered around vegetables, having been liberated from the constraints of meat-oriented bourgeois cuisine in Europe.
The conclusion of All Consuming turns to the post-World War II period, and the mobilization of government and private resources to provide kosher meat to the survivors of the Holocaust. Such an effort was not merely good nutritional policy, Efron argues, but was also a necessary step in the religious revitalization of German Jewry and a rebuke to centuries of antisemitic polemic. He also notes how the revival of anti-shehitah activism in Germany in the twentieth century and the expansion of the movement to oppose halal slaughter, represent once more a Germany seeking to construct a national identity rooted in blood and soil, where Jews and Muslims need not apply.
It should be clear now that All Consuming is a wide-ranging book that will be of interest to students of German and Jewish history, as well as the history of cookery and nutrition, and the intersection of food and politics. It is an example of the salutary turn toward the material realm in Jewish history, and in that way, is a fitting counterpoint to Efron's earlier study of German Jews and medicine. Synthesizing the work of other scholars, including Robin Judd, Marion Kaplan, and Ruth Abusch-Magder, Efron also offers novel readings of familiar texts, such as Antonius Margaritha's polemic The Entire Jewish Faith (1530) and Heinrich Heine's poetry. He introduces new sources as well. The book's themes, moreover, resonate in a Europe and United States tilting toward authoritarianism and amid the mainstreaming once more of nativist and anti-institutional views. The book is absorbing to read and leaves one with a taste for more.
