In recent years, as Sue Fishkoff has shown (Kosher Nation [New York: Schocken Books, 2010]), kosher food has become mainstream American food, valued by millions for its ostensible (if largely fallacious) healthy characteristics. To generations of traditional Jews who observed the dietary laws in part to distinguish themselves from their Gentile neighbors, this recent development in American food culture would seem bizarre and—worse—a collapse of the barriers which over several millennia Jews have constructed to define their identity. To be sure, nothing in the laws of kashrut forbids non-Jews from eating kosher food, although Orthodox Jews are forbidden at least some of the food of Gentiles, but the very blurring of the boundaries calls into question the role of food in Jewish identity.
Over the last half decade, scholars of Jewish Studies have turned increasingly to food as an identity marker in Jewish culture. Excellent studies by David Kraemer surveying the whole range of Jewish history (Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages [New York: Routledge, 2007]) and by Jordan Rosenblum focusing more specifically on rabbinic literature (Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010]) have laid the fundamental groundwork for this largely new field. And, now, David Freidenreich, in a very impressive book, situates ancient and early medieval Jewish texts in comparison to early Christian and Islamic discussions of food. As a comparative study, Freidenreich's is a model and demonstrates how a new generation of Jewish Studies scholars has taken seriously the need to train in the parallel textual traditions of Judaism's immediate neighbors.
Freidenreich starts by pointing out, as Kraemer already noted in passing, that biblical law does not prevent commensality with foreigners. Thus, it is Joseph (posing as an Egyptian) who refrains from dining with his brothers because Egyptians—not Israelites—do not eat with foreigners. The original meaning of the dietary laws, which Freidenreich does not investigate since it lies outside his defined subject, seems to have little to do with defining boundaries between Israelites and their neighbors. Indeed, it seems likely that they all consumed similar cuisine and were divided, if at all, more by theology rather than by practice. It was only in the Hellenistic period that the Jews adopted the Greeks' binary between themselves and barbarians. Now, food became a device to divide Jews from Gentiles. So, the Book of Daniel, one of the only books of the Bible to have a clear Hellenistic provenance, insists that Daniel cannot eat the King's food. On the other hand, in the Letter of Aristeas, the Jews who translate the Bible into Greek eat with the King. It is possible that we have here a distinction between the Jews of Judaea, who were more vehement in resisting Hellenization, and the Jews of Alexandria, who had less trouble with eating with their Greek neighbors.
In the Hellenistic period, we also find, for the first time, a fear of eating food that was offered as an idolatrous sacrifice. This fear was elevated to new levels by the rabbis who devoted considerably energy to a taxonomy of idolatry, although their interest was less in who the foreigners were than in their actions. Thus, some of their food, especially meat, was prohibited because it may have been dedicated to an idol. But matters became more interesting when the rabbis parsed at what point food becomes “Gentile” food. Their examples were bread and cheese, two foodstuffs that undergo a biochemical transformation (fermentation and curdling). The Gentiles may prepare the raw ingredients, but may not be involved in the transformative process (baking and working the curds). In other words, the part of the process that turns nature into culture cannot involve Gentiles, even though none of this has to do directly with idolatry. On the other hand, since wine is so integral to idolatrous cults, Jews are not allowed to either drink or derive benefit from any wine produced or even touched by Gentiles.
Freidenreich demonstrates that the rabbis were not particularly interested in segregating Jews from Gentiles in terms of commensality. Only in Babylonia were Gentiles themselves—as opposed to their religions—described in vituperative terms. Here, the problem seemed to be the danger of commensality leading to sexual relations and this “fear of their daughters” became a second reason, in addition to idolatry, for culinary avoidance.
Christianity inherited from Judaism this anxiety over idolatrous food, but divided over whether one should still refrain from eating with pagans. Paul's solution was to restrict such commensality since Christians have their own ritual meal—the Eucharist—that must not be confused with idolatrous meals, even if other gods do not exist. On the other hand, he expanded Christian commensality to include Gentile Christians since the very logic of the Church was to be universal: a common meal of Christians united “Jew and Greek.” Later, as the split between Church and Synagogue became increasingly bitter, Christians were forbidden from eating with Jews, who were now seen either as heretics or idolaters. In the new Christian-Jewish binary, Christians believed themselves superior because they were permitted to eat everything, while the legalistic Jews had dietary laws. In the Middle Ages, a fascinating dispute broke out between two Spanish Christians as to whether one should deliberately buy meat forbidden to Jews from a Jewish butcher in order to reinforce this antinomianism, or, conversely, refrain from any Jewish meat because the Jews themselves are polluted.
Islam struck out in a notably more lenient direction. Since Christians and Jews were thought to have valid, if incomplete, revelations, one could dine with them. The Jews might have more restrictive dietary laws as punishment for their transgressions, but not because they follow a false religion. One can also eat the meat of Jews and Christians because they do not utter oaths to idols. On the other hand, Shi'a Islam refuses the meat of other monotheists, but Freidenreich argues that this is really an anti-Sunni polemic rather than a drawing of a strict border between Muslims and “Scripturalists” (that is, Jews and Christians). The Sunni-Shi'a divide is the more crucial one within Islam, rather than the divide between Jews and Christians.
This brief synopsis only covers part of Freidenreich's rich argument. While perhaps the greater part of the book is devoted to Jewish sources, Muslims and Christians are treated extensively and in their own right. One question that suggested itself several times is the intrinsic meaning of food for each of these religions. Granted that Freidenreich's subject is food as an index of boundary, given the importance of such practices as kashrut and Eucharist for Judaism and Christianity respectively, it is not sufficient to simply look at food from the external point of view. Thus, for example, Kraemer and Rosenblum, the two authors mentioned earlier, look at the innovative separation of milk and meat in rabbinic law as constitutive of rabbinic culture, quite apart from the Jewish-Gentile dichotomy. Thus, a complete picture of food in late antique Jewish culture requires reading all three of these books together.
The use of food as an index of internal Islamic conflict is mirrored in the debates between Protestants and Catholics about fasting during Lent, a central preoccupation of a number of the essays in the fascinating volume edited by Ken Albala and Trudy Eden, two veteran food studies scholars (see most relevantly, Ken Albala, The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late-Renaissance Europe [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007] and Trudy Eden, The Early American Table: Food and Society in the New World [DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008]). The editors note that a great deal of the scholarship on food in Christianity has focused on late antiquity and that the time has come to look at more recent phenomena. As Albala demonstrates in his essay on “The Ideology of Fasting During the Reformation,” because the Bible never mentions Lenten fasting, the Reformers could claim that it could be modified or even rejected altogether. For the most part, the moderate Reformation continued to endorse fasting, but in moderation and more for reasons of health than religion. They attacked the Catholic Church for wholesale granting of dispensations and for allowing hypocritical gluttony. At the same time, the Counter-Reformation responded to these developments by shifting the rationale for fasting from obedience to the Church to reasons of bodily and spiritual health not so different from the arguments of the Reformation.
Johanna B. Moyer extends this argument by showing how the increase in sumptuary laws in the sixteenth century reflects a desire to promote health by curbing excess and at the same time by reinforcing confessionalization. Applying Galenic medicine, those promoting such laws argued that gluttony, especially the consumption of meat, created an excess of blood which might be cured by metaphorical phlebotomy, the legal restriction of consumption. Catholics tended to prefer a Galenic theory, which matched the physicality of their religion, while Protestants adhered more to Paracelsus's chemical theory of the body. Protestants were more likely in this period to tolerate some luxury, since in moderation, it supported a mercantile economy.
Moving to the eighteenth century, Sydney Watts demonstrates how the Enlightenment brought medicine to bear on questions of fasting during Lent. Enlightenment medicine did not contradict religion so much as it gave it a new basis for evaluating what should be permitted during Lent. Yet because the different medical theories were grounded in Galenic medicine, the Enlightenment arguments were less modern than they were medieval. What was new here, as in the previous two centuries, was the harnessing of science to what had originally been primarily a religious question. Even in the twentieth century, Richard Irvine shows that the Counter-Reformation's move away from strict asceticism can be found in a British Benedictine monastery where the monks reject excessive self-denial in favor of commensality, the foundation, for them, of community.
Early modern ideas about food developed in part in the encounter with newly colonized peoples in the Americas and beyond. In a remarkably fascinating essay, Heather Martel shows how Europeans in the New World struggled with whether the bread and wine made by indigenous women out of maize qualified as bread and wine in Christian terms. Since the winemaking process involved women using their saliva to create fermentation, Europeans saw such wine as “dirty.” At the same time, some European observers were struck by the inherent moderation of indigenous peoples as opposed to European gluttony. A similar kind of encounter occurred between British colonizers and the Maori in New Zealand. The Maori came to associate kumara, the tuber root which was their primary source of carbohydrate, with wheat bread, introduced by the British. Because both the Christians and Maori associated their respective carbohydrates with peace, the Maori were able to fit Christianity into their worldview.
In America of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, food played a central role in emergence of new religious movements. Heidi Olberholtzer Lee argues that radical Protestant sects developed an agape feast as a central commensual ritual, but because they adopted American ideas of hygiene, they insisted on individualized, rather than a communal, cups. And since they also fell under the influence of the American temperance movement, they moved away from the tradition of ritual consumption of wine to unfermented wine. Similarly, Trudy Eden shows how the New Thought movements in America (which include Christian Science) married “scientific” ideas of hygiene, health, and ethics to a religiously based vegetarianism. Vegetarianism echoed with the early modern debates about the dangers of excessive meat, but now involved the new idea that vegetables contain the “life force.” Human beings can regenerate themselves, and thus imitate Christ, by eating vegetables. In another related essay, Samantha Kwan and Christine Sheikh examine Christian dieting regimens which combine religion with the contemporary American fashion of the slender body. Such Christian dieters believe that they are returning to the Garden of Eden by purging their bodies of artificial ingredients, a twentieth-century version of the nineteenth-century Seventh Day Adventist fad for new, “pure” foods.
An essay on contemporary “Fasting and Food Habits in the Eastern Orthodox Church” returns us to the early modern question of fasting. The authors demonstrate how the Mediterranean diet of bread, olives, and cheese is ideally suited for the periodic fasts from meat prescribed by the Orthodox Church. Religion and dietary geography thus converge in a way that was less appropriate for the rigors of the Northern European climate.
In both of these volumes, food becomes the vehicle through which religious groups define their identities and the boundaries between theirs and others' identities. It would be particularly interesting to see how the conjunction between medicine and food that the Albala-Eden book discusses plays out in the earlier Jewish, Christian, and Islamic material that is Freidenreich's subject. And, conversely, it might be equally fascinating to see how the commensality questions of Freidenreich's book inform early modern and modern Christian debates over with whom one can break bread. Reading these two works together demonstrates how rich the new discipline of the culture study of food has become and how much it can contribute toward the understanding of religion.
