Lois Alimentaires

The scriptural foundation of dietary laws is found in two major Torah texts with similar but not identical formulations: Chapter 11 of Leviticus and Chapter 14 of Deuteronomy. These passages establish the distinction between permitted and forbidden animals according to precise anatomical criteria. For terrestrial quadrupeds, those permitted are those with split hooves and that chew the cud: thus the ox, the sheep, the goat. The pig, which has a split hoof but does not chew the cud, as well as the camel, the hare and the rock badger, which chew the cud without having fully split hooves, are expressly proscribed.

For aquatic creatures, the criterion is the joint presence of fins and scales; crustaceans, mollusks and fish lacking scales are forbidden. Birds are not subject to definition by criteria but to a list of prohibited species — raptors and scavengers for the most part. Insects are forbidden, with the exception of a few named locusts. The Torah seals this ensemble with a recurring theological motif: Israel must sanctify itself and "be holy," for it is set apart for its God. Two fundamental prohibitions run through the entire structure: the consumption of blood, deemed to carry life, and the prohibition — repeated three times — of "cooking a kid in the milk of its mother," the matrix of the future separation of meat and dairy.

The biblical text, elliptical, was developed, systematized and made applicable by the oral tradition codified in the Mishna (around 200 of the common era) and then in the two Talmuds. The tractate Hullin ("profane," that is, animals slaughtered outside the Temple) became the heart of dietary law: it regulates ritual slaughter, examination of the viscera and the casuistry of permitted meat. This is where she'hita unfolds—slaughter by rapid and clean section of the trachea and esophagus using a perfectly smooth blade, intended to minimize suffering and ensure the draining of blood.

The sages also refined the inspection of the animal (bedika) to detect lesions rendering the beast unfit (terefa), the salting and rinsing intended to extract residual blood, and the extension of the verse on the kid into a general separation of meat and milk—down to the requirement of separate vessels and waiting periods between the two consumptions. The Talmud further elaborated categories regulating contact with non-Jews: wine (yayin nessekh and stam yeinam), bread, oil, cooked foods. This architecture made the table a space of boundary as much as of holiness.

Under the Roman Empire, Jewish dietary practices were one of the traits through which pagan authors perceived — and often mocked — the singularity of Israel, with the abstinence from pork becoming proverbial. But dietary observance also fit within a legal framework. Imperial legislation, particularly after the Christianization of the Empire, increasingly regulated Jewish life, including its ritual and cultic dimensions, as demonstrated by the work of exhaustive examination of normative sources conducted by Amnon Linder [Linder, 1987].

The critical gathering of Roman and Byzantine legislative texts relating to Jews shows how the recognition of a lawful status for Judaism coexisted with growing restrictions; distinctive practices, including diet, participated in the definition of a community both tolerated and monitored [Linder, 1987]. The kosher table, in this context, was not merely a matter of domestic piety: it also fell under a public order that authority claimed to know and sometimes to circumscribe.

The Middle Ages was the age of codification. Maimonides (Rabbi Moché ben Maïmon, 1138–1204), in his Mishné Torah, organized the entirety of dietary law into clear treatises — "Forbidden Foods," "Ritual Slaughter" — stripping talmudic material of its dialectical form to extract clear rules. He also proposed, in the Guide for the Perplexed, a rationalist reading of the interdictions, seeing in them notably considerations of temperance and hygiene, without ever reducing the Law to its apparent reasons alone.

Codification culminated in the 16th century with the Shulchan Aruch of Rabbi Yossef Karo (1488–1575), whose section Yoré Dé'a fixed for centuries the norms of slaughter, salting, meat-dairy separation, and wine kashrut. The glosses of Rabbi Moché Isserlès (circa 1530–1572) added Ashkenazi practices to it, making the work the common reference for the entire Jewish world. Around these codes there developed an immense literature of responsa, where each generation adapted the principles to local realities — new foods, new techniques, new species encountered in the course of migrations.

Observing kashrut required an entire social infrastructure: an approved slaughterer (sho'het) trained and supervised, monitored butcher shops, supervisors (mashgi'him), and detailed community regulations. In pre-modern Europe, the community (the kehilla) organized this service and often financed it through an indirect tax on kosher meat — the gabelle or korobka — which became one of the principal fiscal resources of communities and, sometimes, a source of internal conflicts.

The control of meat was thus as much a matter of power as of piety: it linked every family to rabbinical and community authority. This remarkably stable organization is found from the kehillot of Poland-Lithuania to the Sephardic communities of the Mediterranean basin. Kashrut was therefore not a private matter: it structured the economy, taxation, and social hierarchy of the traditional Jewish world, making the butcher shop and slaughterhouse institutions as central as the synagogue and the school.

The opening of modern societies placed dietary laws at the heart of a dilemma: how to reconcile fidelity to a separatist discipline with the civic integration offered by emancipation? The port cities and commercial centers of the eighteenth century offer a privileged observatory of this tension. Lois Dubin's study of the Jews of the free port of Trieste, under the Habsburg monarchy, shows a community engaged in profound acculturation while negotiating the maintenance of its institutions and traditional practices [Dubin, 1999].

In this type of cosmopolitan and mercantile milieu, the question of kosher meat, wine, and food shared with non-Jews became the concrete place where the balance between openness and fidelity was played out [Dubin, 1999]. The nineteenth century radicalized the debate: the nascent reformed Judaism called into question the obligation of dietary laws, deemed incompatible with universalism, while the orthodox current made it instead a pillar of resistance to assimilation. Kashrut thus became a revealer: according to whether one maintained it, eased it, or abandoned it, one affirmed a different conception of what the modern Jew should be.

Maimonides — Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (Rambam) (1138–1204) — Born in Cordoba, physician and philosopher active in Egypt, he was the greatest medieval codifier of the Law. In his Mishneh Torah, he organized the matter of forbidden foods and ritual slaughter into a lucid system; in the Guide for the Perplexed, he proposed a rational interpretation of dietary prohibitions. His work remains the hinge between the Talmud and later codes.

Rabbi Yosef Karo (1488–1575) — Born in the Iberian peninsula on the eve of the expulsion, exiled until Safed, he composed the Beit Yosef and then the Shulhan Arukh, whose section Yoreh De'ah still establishes today the rules of kashrut: slaughter, salting, separation of meat and dairy, kashrut of wine. His authority imposed itself on the entire Jewish world.

Rabbi Moshe Isserles (Rema) (c. 1530–1572) — Rabbi of Kraków, he added to the Shulhan Arukh his glosses (the Mappah) recording Ashkenazi practices. Through him, Karo's Sephardic code became the common reference text for the two great worlds of Judaism. His decisions on foods and slaughter remain normative in the Ashkenazi tradition.

Amnon Linder (born 1937) — Israeli historian, specialist in the relations between Judaism and the powers of late Antiquity. His critical edition of the imperial Roman legislative texts concerning Jews [Linder, 1987] renewed the understanding of the legal framework in which Jewish practices, including their dietary singularity, were inscribed in the Empire.

Lois C. Dubin (dates unknown) — Historian, specialist in Enlightenment Judaism and emancipation. Her study on the Jews of the free port of Trieste [Dubin, 1999] showed how a merchant community reconciled acculturation and fidelity to traditional institutions, illuminating the modern stakes of the table and observance in a cosmopolitan context.

From the verses of Leviticus to the debates of emancipation, dietary laws reveal a remarkable continuity doubled by constant reinvention. They were born of an imperative of holiness, transformed into a system of extreme legal precision under the pen of the sages, embodied in communal institutions — slaughterers, butchers, taxes — and finally confronted, in the modern age, with the trial of integration. Always, they made the table a place of memory and boundary, where there is expressed, day after day and meal after meal, belonging to Israel. To study kashrut is thus to read Jewish history through its most quotidian gesture: what one brings to one's mouth.