“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” This two-hundred-year-old adage by the French lawyer and politician Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin reveals a deep historical connection between food and identity. Sociologists like Claude Fischler have long noted the shift from the nutritional to the cultural function of food and have examined how the practices of consuming certain foods and forming an ascribed identity have helped to create imagined and real communities. Moreover, the imagined “perfect table” has served as an apt metaphor for the imagined “perfect society.” In Judaism, too, food is of central importance for all festivals as well as for the daily religious routine. Indeed, one of the best-known and authoritative codes of Judaism—the Shulḥan ‘Arukh—means “the set table.” When Joseph Karo published this work in the second half of the sixteenth century, he “set the table” according to rules that go as far back as the Tannaim, rabbinic sages of the first and second century CE.
In Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism, Jordan Rosenblum takes the reader out for an ancient dinner. In so doing, he examines how the tannaitic movement constructed identity through regulating culinary and commensal practices. The book begins—as does every good dinner in a restaurant—with a menu from tannaitic-period Palestine. Drawing on textual and material evidence from both tannaitic and contemporary sources, in Chapter 1 Rosenblum discusses basic questions such as: What did people eat? How did they obtain their food? How did they prepare their food? In what manner did they eat their food? He ascertains that more than half of the caloric intake of Jews and non-Jews consisted of bread and grain. Their menu also contained oil, legumes, nuts, spices, honey, salt, water, and wine; the Sabbath added a vegetable and, very rarely, depending on one's economic resources, fish and animal protein. Rosenblum tells where one could purchase food, how grain was turned into bread, and how olive oil and wine were produced in tannaitic-period Palestine. Indeed, as he concludes, on the macro level (in general structure and appearance) the “historical realia of food production and consumption for Jews and non-Jews do not differ greatly” (10). The tannaitic menu seems at first glance to have been indistinguishable from a non-Jewish menu. However—as today—a restaurant's advertisement declaring “We do what everybody else does” does not prove very effective in drawing customers. Rosenblum, therefore, moves on to three chapters in which he shows his reader the micro level of the tannaitic “kitchen,” which in its activities goes far beyond food production. The Tannaim, as he demonstrates, used food practices to create an identity by fashioning an “us” and a “them” dichotomy. They thus constructed an identity that was distinctly Jewish, male, and rabbinic. Further, he argues that the Tannaim conceived of a new Jewish cuisine and identity by adopting the following techniques:
First, the Tannaim themselves suggested that Jews are Jews because of what they eat. In understanding certain foods as metonymic and a form of embodiment, the Tannaim could construct a distinctly Jewish cuisine. To demonstrate this, Rosenblum examines two particular categories of foods: (1) Food “they” eat and from which “we” abstain (e.g., pork), and (2) foods “we” eat and from which “they” abstain (manna, Passover sacrifice, and, related to food, the general kashrut laws).
Second, Rosenblum notes that in tannaitic literature the status of the food produced directly correlates to the status of the cook. In making a connection between the status of that which is prepared and the status of the person who prepares it, the Tannaim render a predictable analogy between the regulation of food and desired social relations.
Third, by connecting commensality between Jews and non-Jews with idolatry (through intermarriage and table talk), the Tannaim used—according to Rosenblum—legal and persuasive rhetoric to problematize social relations. Even though Jews and non-Jews were not completely segregated, commensal interactions were increasingly more difficult as meals became more and more laden with social practices that constructed Jewishness. Rosenblum shows how the Tannaim greatly expanded the role that purity played in the legislation of regulating food consumption and how this “new” tannaitic cuisine comprised the diet and the socially constructed identity of a “rabbinic Jew,” a term he uses in reference to a Jew who chooses to follow the prescriptions of rabbinic Judaism. The tannaitic reinterpretation of festival rules excluded nonrabbinic Jews from the “proper” observance of these festivals.
Another important principle of the tannaitic “kitchen” is what Rosenblum labels the “chef/sous-chef principle.” While a sous-chef could be non-Jewish or female, the chef had to be, by definition, Jewish, rabbinic (i.e., obedient to tannaitic law), and male.
Chapter 3 deals with the “male” aspect of the tannaitic identity construction, and discusses depictions of women in the discursive site of the tannaitic kitchen. The first interesting observation is that cooking encounters between non-Jews and Jews in tannaitic literature involved men only, whereas women were described as cooking only with other Jewish women. Second, although women produced most of the food products, they are rarely mentioned in tannaitic literature; Rosenblum notes that they were only referred to when women's actions were regarded as directly affecting male practice. He concludes that “women were not of interest in and of themselves.”
This aspect of Rosenblum's analysis could have gone further, especially as he himself continuously identifies the prescriptive and nondescriptive character of tannaitic literature. To be sure, the process of only rarely or never mentioning women in tannaitic literature cannot simply be understood as coming from a lack of interest. Scholarly research on women in rabbinic literature has pointed out the rhetorical absence of women as a result of an active and deliberate process that Tal Ilan has so accurately labeled “silencing.” This silencing can be observed throughout tannaitic literature. Rosenblum himself notices that the Tannaim articulated a set of rules in an attempt to control a situation perceived to be potentially problematic. What he could have explored more profoundly is the obvious threat that the resource power of women concerning food preparation posed to the claimed tannaitic male hierarchy, turning it upside down. Through new rabbinic laws such as the later ‘eruv tavshilin, the rabbis regained their power over a female sphere of action. This rule was one tool that was used to “correct” the hierarchy between the sexes; although women could theoretically set the ‘eruv, it was by definition under the control of men. Women's knowledge in food preparation was highly suspect to the rabbis and had to be silenced, particularly because food came to occupy such a central role, not only because of its nutritional function but also as a main component of Jewish identity. By linguistically silencing women, the Tannaim created—intentionally or not—the future basis for the exclusion of women, especially from the sacred realm of Judaism. The exclusion of women was an integral part of this new tannaitic identity construction, which Rosenblum so convincingly characterizes as Jewish, male, and rabbinic.
Rosenblum's book is an important scholarly contribution to the understanding of tannaitic literature and the themes of edible identity and the cross-cultural utility of the chef/sous-chef principle. Moreover, a good meal had to be tasty, but for a successful dinner one needed a beautifully set table. Rosenblum's book is not just “tasty” in its “ingredients,” but is also very well written. The reader will not leave it until she or he gets to the dessert and will leave the table knowing that she or he will return to it.
