Berkeley prof sticks a fork in German Jewish culture with a history of meat

Many authors have unpacked the social history of specific foods, be it salt, coffee or potatoes. Others have focused on kashrut. But John Efron believes that he has set a unique table by serving up meat as a means of understanding the evolving relationship between Jews and non-Jews in a particular country. 

Efron, UC Berkeley’s Koret Professor of Jewish History, digests centuries of history in his 400-page book, “All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat.” Topics in the 2025 book range from medieval meat markets to the first Jewish cookbooks — written by German Jewish women eager to cement their rising social standing — to the Nazi era persecution of Jews through the banning of shechita, or kosher slaughter. 

J. spoke with Efron about this intersection of German and Jewish cultural history and identity formation. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you choose to focus on meat? 

Meat, for me, is the most visible and tangible object of difference between Jews and non-Jews. Also it intersects with so many things: It’s anthropological. It involves the history of science, the history of cooking. There’s a history of memory that’s involved. But at the bottom line, eating for all humans is elemental, and the very center of this edifice called the dietary laws, or kashrut, is meat. Without meat, there are no dietary laws. 

And why meat specifically in Germany? 

From the very beginning, the discussion about whether the Jews could ever be German citizens was tied to meat in a way it wasn’t in any other country.

German meat consumption tripled over the course of the 19th century. That tracks along with German industrialization. And, interestingly, 65% of all the meat consumed in Germany was pork. 

Germany became a country in 1871 [unifying the states and principalities]. That was also the year that the Jews were emancipated [receiving full legal and civil rights]. 

When emancipation was being discussed beginning in the late 18th century, the question was: Are there any of their customs and habits not compatible with us? It was the only country where diet was discussed — that they’ll never be German because of the meats that they refuse to eat, and the way that they won’t sit down at table with us. They won’t be able to serve in our armies because they won’t eat the rations. 

You write that Germany was the first place for several phenomena in Jewish history, including the creation of new Jewish streams of thought, all of which influenced how Jews and Germans looked at the laws of kosher meat production and consumption.

Germany is the home of Reform Judaism. There were Reform Jews who said: What do we do with kashrut? Do we still need it? Germany is the first place where we see Jews actually wrestle with this kind of thing.

Germany is also the first place where ethnographies were written about Jewish culture. They were written in the 16th century, about 75 of them, and they were written by [Jewish] converts [to Christianity]. They’re incredibly hate-filled texts. These are our first ethnographic descriptions of Jewish life in the 1500s and 1600s, and they focused a lot on food. They ridiculed the stupidity of the dietary laws, the unnecessary nature of the Jewish kitchen. And they were German Jews who wrote this.

You bring up a fascinating historical point that Jews and Germans, who lived separately in other ways, came into close contact in the medieval meat markets, and that was, ironically, because of the laws of kashrut. Jewish butchers sold the parts of the animal that Jews couldn’t eat, the hindquarters, to non-Jews. 

Jews can’t throw out a third of a cow [post-slaughter]. It’s just too expensive. So what they do is that they sell it. That’s to the advantage of the Christian customer and also to the advantage of the large Jewish community because if they couldn’t sell it, the price of kosher meat would have been astronomical. This cooperation that’s built into the whole structure of separating Jews from non-Jews allowed for affordability of kosher meat for the Jewish community.

I found that the treatment of Jews in the meat markets was fair. It was equitable. The laws were designed to allow for both Christian butchers and Jewish butchers to earn a living, and that’s in a time when there was considerable violence [against Jews] and Jews were totally marginal socially. 

The laws were fair, but this was also when negative stereotypes about Jewish butchers first arose in the popular imagination. We see such images much later in Nazi propaganda as well.

Yes, [Medeival-era antisemites] would describe the Jews as befouling the meat, having their children soil the meat, or urinate on the meat, defecate on the meat, and then sell it to non-Jews. 

But they didn’t accuse Jews of animal cruelty until much later, until the 19th century. It was all part of a larger movement of anti-vaccination, anti-vivisection, back to nature and vegetarianism. The movement was ecumenical. However, there was one strain which was implacably antisemitic. 

It blamed Jews, among other things, for their animal cruelty and their fixation on meat, which explained the difference between Jewish bodies and Aryan bodies, with preference going to the latter, of course. There’s a corruption that comes with meat eating, a bloodlust that, according to the philosopher [Arthur] Schopenhauer, began with Judaism and its mistreatment of animals during shechita. This idea gets picked up by [19th-century composer Richard] Wagner and the whole Wagner circle of vegetarians. Hitler says he became vegetarian under the influence of Wagner.

This leads to a very robust, almost relentless campaign to get rid of kosher slaughter in the 19th century. You can read it in records of the parliamentary debates, hours of an afternoon discussing shechita in the German Parliament. 

None of those attempts to ban shechita came to pass, except in the state of Saxony, where it existed for 18 years — until the rise of Nazism made the ban the law of the land.

Right. The goal was always a national ban, and that was passed on April 21, 1933, just 11 weeks after Hitler came to power. That’s a measure of how high it ranked, in terms of importance to him. You would think he had bigger fish to fry, even just in terms of Jewish persecution. But this was really up there. And when the war begins and they conquer one country after another, shechita is banned almost immediately in whichever country they go into.

Under the Nazis, we see a return to the medieval notion of Jewish butchers as barbarous, standing in for the entire Jewish people. It comes full circle.

Right. “We’re a land of animal lovers. We’re a cultured people. This sort of Oriental barbarism” — that’s the term they used — “it’s not German.” Julius Streicher, the editor of [antisemitic newspaper] Der Stürmer, ran story after story after story. He had a total fixation on Jewish butchers as being perpetrators of racial defilement, breaking the Nuremberg laws and sleeping with Aryan women. 

There was a lot more. [Propaganda Minister Joseph] Goebbels made a film called “The Eternal Jew,” one of the most horrid antisemitic films. There’s a full seven-minute scene of shechita, forcibly staged in the Lodz ghetto. And of course, everyone in the film was dispatched to their deaths.

“All Consuming: Germans, Jews and the Meaning of Meat” by John M. Efron (Stanford University Press, 400 pages) is available from Afikomen Judaica and other local bookshops.