LAUSR

Jordan Rosenblum is the author of a fine book on Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Based on the title of his new book, I eagerly anticipated the broadening of his scope of inquiry. My expectations were disappointed, on two accounts: (1) the title of the book is somewhat misleading, for the author’s focus is narrower than the title promises; and (2) even on its own terms, the book promises more than it delivers. Rosenblum’s book explores two related questions: How did ancient Jews defend “the kosher [sic] laws?” and how did “ancient Others” critique these practices? He reviews the history of Jewish justifications of their eating laws from the Bible through late antiquity, along with the critiques of gentile “Others” pertaining to those same laws. In doing so, he detects three “rhetorical approaches” employed by the ancient authors: reason, revelation, and allegory. These three “strategies” (the first two imported from medieval philosophy, though I think fairly employed here) are used circularly, as each piece of writing on the Jewish eating laws is subsumed within one of the categories. Nevertheless, once one’s expectations concerning the subject are adjusted and the analytical categories granted, there is much potential insight in such a project. Unfortunately, Rosenblum’s execution often disappoints. The book is generally little more than a survey of ancient literary sources. The survey is mostly comprehensive and on that account excellent, but many of the same sources have already been collected in other recent writings on ancient Jewish eating (the author’s own previous book, David Freidenreich’s, and my own). Moreover, where analysis (as opposed to mere description) comes to the foreground, Rosenblum makes assumptions with which it is hard to agree. After a thorough presentation of the biblical laws, in the course of which Rosenblum notes that the Bible does not really justify its food laws (the Bible rarely justifies its laws), he offers a survey of modern interpretations of those laws, each of which he critiques in turn. (I’m not really sure why, since the focus of the book is ancient interpretations or justifications of the laws.) His cursory survey doesn’t do justice to the modern approaches, and his critiques are almost flip, as well as highly problematic. For example, in his discussion of Howard Eilberg-Schwartz’s interpretation of the system of pure-impure (permitted-forbidden) animals, in which Book Reviews