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This year’s National Jewish Book Award for Food Writing and Cookbooks, announced last month, went to a book focused on fare that one might not expect.
Jordan Rosenblum’s wonderfully written “Forbidden: A 3,000 Year History of Jews and the Pig” offers a wide-reaching overview of the way the pig — whether as animal, metaphor or lunch — has had a major role in how Jews understand themselves and how others view Jews.
It is not simply that the pig is forbidden in the Torah, as Rosenblum, a professor of Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose previous book was about “Rabbinic Drinking,” demonstrates with a personal anecdote: After his infant son received a lovely set of blocks adorned with animals and their Hebrew names, Rosenblum purchased a matching set in Italian to reflect his wife’s heritage.
He then noticed that the sets were identical, except that, where the Hebrew version had a camel, the Italian version displayed a pig. The pig had apparently been deemed problematic for a Jewish child, but the substitution of an equally treyf (nonkosher) animal was acceptable. As Rosenblum writes: “If all we had was the Hebrew Bible, this would make absolutely no sense.”
In many ways, much of the book is an attempt to make it make sense, recording episodes over the millennia in which the pig has been given prominence and set apart, even from the voluminous menagerie of nonkosher animals.
There is no definitive starting point for this outsized role, but we know that the pig took on conspicuous meaning during the period of the Second Temple. This is reinforced by numerous accounts of martyrdom recorded in the Books of Maccabees, with Jews choosing death rather than submitting to their conquerors’ demand that they eat the flesh of pigs.
In classical rabbinic texts, the sages often went so far as to avoid using the word pig altogether, preferring euphemisms such as davar aher, meaning “another thing.” But Rosenblum invokes the wisdom of Professor Dumbledore of the Harry Potter books in asserting that “fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.” By making the pig unmentionable, the rabbis only increased the animal’s power in the Jewish imagination.
The aversion took on new meaning as the rabbis of the period of Roman rule, through some interpretive turns, began equating the despised animal with Rome. The comparison took on a somewhat literal dimension in one rabbinic account of the destruction of the Second Temple, reporting that the chief of the Roman soldiers catapulted a pig’s head into the Temple — and that Jerusalem fell at the moment when the pig’s head landed on the altar.
As Rosenblum moves through history, we see how non-Jews grasped the pig’s symbolic importance and often used it as a vehicle for mockery and denigration. In medieval Europe, Christians, via a twisted logical jump, began to identify Jews with the pigs they refused to eat. The image of the Judensau (Jews’ sow) was popularized in Germany, and artistic representations of Jews suckling or engaging in obscene acts with an oversized sow proliferated.
Simultaneously, many Christians began to see eating pork as a means of distancing themselves from Jews. Rosenblum cites a song sung by Christians in Burgundy in the 17th century proclaiming that, because Jews disavow pork, “the more we eat the piglets, the better Catholics we become.”
Moving chronologically, the book takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of Jewish diasporic history, focusing primarily on Europe and America. There was considerably less drama around pork in Muslim countries, given Islam’s ban on its consumption.
Of course, the Jewish relationship with pork is not defined exclusively by rejection of it. Rosenblum discusses many circumstances in which Jews have taken to eating pork, willingly or by necessity, reflecting their negotiation of their relationship with Jewish identity.
For Spanish Jews who converted to Christianity in the 15th century in order to avert persecution or expulsion, eating pork signaled their full embrace of their adopted religion — a behavior that would become all the more important once the Inquisition began using avoidance of pork as evidence that the convert was still secretly practicing Judaism.
For agrarian Jews on collective farms in the Soviet Union, raising swine was a signal of a full embrace of communism, with religious observance relegated to the past.
And for many Jews who have sought to distance themselves from their traditional upbringings, the first taste of pork has served as a sort of rite of independence.
Rosenblum brings the discussion to the present day, concluding with the recent refusal of the Orthodox Union’s kosher certification body to give its approval to the fake meat product Impossible Pork, despite the product’s absence of any animal-derived substances. The grounds are not legal, but, rather, very much about inheriting this fraught relationship with the pig.
In this way, Rosenblum’s book, a model of bringing religion, history, and contemporary experience together, shows how the decisions we make today often live in the shadow of those we have faced for centuries.