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Of This Ye Shall Not Eat for It Is an Abomination

12 bytes added, 23:18, 5 August 2022
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{{data|5 August 2022}}
[[File:{{#setmainimage:Stempel koszerności.jpg}}|thumb|upright|Mirror-flipped picture of a kosher certification stamp from interwar Poland, with the Hebrew word כשר ("kosher").<br>{{small|Oświęcim (Auschwitz) Jewish Museum}}]]
I've been asked by one of the Readers to try and explain what it means that something is or isn't kosher. On this blog, I've been focusing mostly on the history of Polish cuisine, but Jewish cuisine used to develop right next to the Polish one for ages, so naturally there's been a lot of overlap and recipë sharing between the two. Which means that if you want to know more about Polish cuisine, then it's a good idea to also learn something about Jewish foodways – and how the Jews' own religion has shaped what they do or do not eat. Prior to the Holocaust, most of the world's Jews and Poles lived in the same country, but Gentile Poles, even back then, had seldom more than only a very superficial idea about the religious rules followed by their Jewish neighbours (and ''vice versa''). Nowadays, this level of familiarity is surely even lower.
I won't be writing here anything you wouldn't find in a plethora of already existing sources, but these sources may be difficult to understand for people with little prior knowledge of Judaism. So I will do my best to elucidate the topic as clearly as I can, while keeping the number of Hebrew and Yiddish terms to a minimum.