Jordan Rosenblum is the author of a fine book on Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Based on the title of his new book, I eagerly anticipated the broadening of his scope of inquiry. My expectations were disappointed, on two accounts: (1) the title of the book is somewhat misleading, for the author's focus is narrower than the title promises; and (2) even on its own terms, the book promises more than it delivers.
Rosenblum's book explores two related questions: How did ancient Jews defend “the kosher [sic] laws?” and how did “ancient Others” critique these practices? He reviews the history of Jewish justifications of their eating laws from the Bible through late antiquity, along with the critiques of gentile “Others” pertaining to those same laws. In doing so, he detects three “rhetorical approaches” employed by the ancient authors: reason, revelation, and allegory. These three “strategies” (the first two imported from medieval philosophy, though I think fairly employed here) are used circularly, as each piece of writing on the Jewish eating laws is subsumed within one of the categories. Nevertheless, once one's expectations concerning the subject are adjusted and the analytical categories granted, there is much potential insight in such a project. Unfortunately, Rosenblum's execution often disappoints.
The book is generally little more than a survey of ancient literary sources. The survey is mostly comprehensive and on that account excellent, but many of the same sources have already been collected in other recent writings on ancient Jewish eating (the author's own previous book, David Freidenreich's, and my own). Moreover, where analysis (as opposed to mere description) comes to the foreground, Rosenblum makes assumptions with which it is hard to agree.
After a thorough presentation of the biblical laws, in the course of which Rosenblum notes that the Bible does not really justify its food laws (the Bible rarely justifies its laws), he offers a survey of modern interpretations of those laws, each of which he critiques in turn. (I'm not really sure why, since the focus of the book is ancient interpretations or justifications of the laws.) His cursory survey doesn't do justice to the modern approaches, and his critiques are almost flip, as well as highly problematic.
For example, in his discussion of Howard Eilberg-Schwartz's interpretation of the system of pure-impure (permitted-forbidden) animals, in which Eilberg-Schwartz argues that the key to the system is metaphorical associations that would have been familiar to ancient Israelites, Rosenblum writes, “Eilberg-Schwartz's metaphorical association must be read into the text rather than out of it, as Leviticus 11 never makes this association.” Shortly thereafter he adds, “all of these theories lack explicit evidence from the text of Leviticus 11, relying more on logic and inference than on concrete data” (all p. 18). This is simply wrong, showing a confusion between interpretation and its focus. All of the theories interpret the “concrete data” of the biblical text based on the critical assumptions of the field from which they approach it. Even when a text seems to speak for itself, offering an explicit interpretation of its law or other data, this doesn't mean we should accept that interpretation. In fact, there is more reason to be suspicious, for there is ample reason to wonder what it gains by offering the said interpretation. The notion that an explicit interpretation is somehow harder data seems naïve, and I was surprised that Rosenblum offered it as a critique. Yet he does so repeatedly (see pp. 22, 24–25).
Later, Rosenblum offers an interpretation of why pork-related Jewish martyrdom stories are common in the Hellenistic period but disappear in the Roman (44). His reasonable explanation (“I have a theory”) is that at the former juncture, “Jews were breaking away from the rule of one group … and then being taken over by another,” while texts that lacked such stories were composed when “Jews in Palestine remained under the rule of Rome”; in other words, when Jews were not being faced with new religious challenges, no new stories of religious challenges appeared. This explanation is as good as any other for the noted phenomenon, but it is not based on anything the sources say explicitly. This is not a flaw, whatever critique one might direct against the interpretation. Rosenblum does what all interpreters do, and he should not imagine the work can be done any other way.
The weakness of Rosenblum's interpretive approach in this book (quite in contrast to his earlier book) is also evident in his discussion of Paul's approach to the Jewish food laws. In his immediate discussion of Paul, after noting that “Paul's leniency results from his general understanding that it is only one's mindset of eating, and not the food itself, that is defiling” (80), he goes on to suggest “justification for these food laws is absent” (81). But Rosenblum's interpretation would be enriched if he broadened his focus beyond eating-related passages and made associations with the broader Pauline framework. It is hard to avoid recognizing that it was Paul himself who pioneered the Christian deconstruction of the separation wall between Jews and “Greeks.” As both modern scholars and ancient writers—including the author of Acts 11—have recognized, the food laws are a primary stone in that wall. By removing this massive stone from the wall (and calling those who retain it “weak”), Paul takes a large step in his project of erasing the boundary. By implication, the justification for the inherited Jewish food laws is, in Paul's view, the erection and retention of the boundary. That Rosenblum doesn't explore such connections (presumably because the association is not explicit) exposes the weakness of his current approach.
A final criticism is of Rosenblum's biased, and I think “unscholarly,” critique of some of his authors and sources. For example, he critiques as “unsophisticated” Philo's rationale for certain food laws as based on popular custom (56). Eating practices are often based on popular custom, so Philo's explanation has the advantage of being true, even if it may not be fully satisfying. In another example, Rosenblum writes that early rabbinic justification of food laws by reference to Scripture “might seem weak in comparison to the more philosophically oriented responses” of other writers (89). It is hard to imagine a stronger justification than the claim that “God demands it.” If Rosenblum had not erected this straw man, I never would have imagined it. In this and other examples, Rosenblum's contemporary bias gets in the way of good representation and analysis.
I can recommend this book for introductory food studies classes, or introductory classes on Judaism in antiquity, for it offers a very complete survey of sources relating to a subject that is undeniably central to Jewish practice and identity in ancient, as in other, periods. But the book does little to advance our knowledge or understanding of the writings on which it reports.
