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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"“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.
But first, a few notes. Firstly, I’m not a follower of Judaism myself, so this will be an outsider’s view of this religion. Secondly, the rules I’ll be writing about are quite complex, so this will be only a brief and simplified overview of the principal points. Thirdly, Jews aren’t all equally pious, so not all of them respect religious dietary laws and, among those who do, some respect them more strictly than others. Henceforth, when writing about ``Jews"“Jews”, I will mean only those Jews who really take these laws seriously. And fourthly, Jews have been dispersed across many countries for centuries and developed different ways of interpreting and obeying their laws depending on where they happened to live. Unless I note otherwise, I will be focusing on culinary habits of Ashkenazi Jews, that is, those of Central and Eastern Europe.
== What is the Jewish Religion About? ==
[[File:Talmud.jpg|thumb|Complementing the Scripture, Jewish oral tradition was only written down in the early centuries of the Common Era in a book known as the Talmud. In this Warsaw edition published in 1877 you can see the distinctive text layout where an initial thought is surrounded by a later commentary, which in turn is surrounded by a commentary to the commentary, etc.<br>{{small|Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw}}]]
First of all, Judaism is a religion which is very big on obeying commandments. Jews believe in a God who doesn’t really care whether someone believes in him. What he’s interested in is whether the Jews, a nation whose ancestors he made a special covenant with, respect the law he gave them as part of that deal. What you believe in doesn’t matter as much as what you do. The chief source of that law is the Torah, also known as the Pentateuch, that is, the first five books of the Bible (Old Testament). It’s not just the famous Ten Commandments chiselled onto stone tablets, but all of the various commands and prohibitions the Torah is filled with. Long time ago someone determined there’s 613 of them altogether and this is the number that has stuck, even though, when other people later did the counting, they got different results.
== Animals, Clean and Unclean ==
Anyone who knows anything about Jewish dietary laws is most likely aware that Jews are not allowed to eat pork. But the matter is a tad more complex. ''Kashrut'', or the set of Jewish food-related religious regulations, is primarily concerned with determining what is ``clean"“clean”, or kosher (and thus edible), and what is ``unclean"“unclean”, or treif. The distinction applies mostly to animal species.
=== Quadrupeds ===
Let’s start with four-legged land animals and see what the Bible has to say about their ``cleanness"“cleanness”.
{{ Cytat
So, for a land-dwelling mammal to be kosher, it must meet two conditions at the same time: it must chew its cud (which means swallowing its food, partly digesting it in one of its stomachs, regurgitating it back to its mouth, then chewing it well, swallowing again and completing the digestion in the remaining stomachs) and have cloven, that is even-numbered, hooves.
[[File:Gazelle rumination - zoom.webm|thumb|right|An impala, a perfectly kosher South African antelope, chewing its cud (look closely at its food pipe).]]
And so, for example, a pig has cloven hooves, but doesn’t chew its cud, which is precisely why it’s not kosher. A camel, on the other hand, does chew its cud and it does have two toes on each foot, but the toes end with toenails rather than hooves, which makes the camel treif as well. A rabbit also passes its food twice through its digestive system, but obviously has no hooves, so it’s out. The only animals which do meet both criteria belong to the suborder ''Ruminantia'', to use modern taxonomic terminology. Apart from the species listed in the Biblical passage above, ruminants also include such creatures as: water buffalo, mouse-deer, bison, moose, wapiti and giraffe. But if we only count those ruminants which are traditionally raised for meat in Europe, then we’re left with nothing but cattle, sheep and goats.
I should note here that the notion of ritual cleanness has nothing to do with whether a particular animal is physically clean or dirty. Ritual cleanness isn’t a moral category either, so it’s not like ``clean" “clean” animals are good and the ``unclean" “unclean” ones are evil. All animals, as God’s creations, deserve the same kind of respect from humans. The only difference is that some of them are considered fit for Jewish consumption, while others are seen as kind of… gross.
=== Water Creatures ===
}}</ref> What’s more, the scales must be visible with a naked eye and easily removable without tearing the skin, which makes such fish as eel, sturgeon and shark unkosher. And anything that lives in water, but is not a fish, that is, all kinds of non-fish seafood, isn’t kosher either.
Now, have you ever heard of a traditional delicacy, still popular in Poland, known as ``Jewish caviar"“Jewish caviar”? Is Jewish caviar even possible? Anything that comes from an unclean animal – meat, milk, eggs, etc. – is unclean. So don’t be fooled: if the sturgeon isn’t kosher, then neither is sturgeon roe. Jewish ``caviar" “caviar” is nothing more than fried goose liver that has been chopped so finely it kind of resembles caviar – in the way it looks, at least, because it certainly doesn’t taste the same.
=== Birds ===
}}
[[File:Zwierzęta latające EN.png|400px|left|Winged vertebrates are kosher as long as they're they’re not carnivorous and don't don’t belong to any other forbidden species.]]
No more clear-cut criteria here. Instead, we’ve got a short list of bird species which are definitely not kosher. It would seem the matter is simple enough: if these few birds are not kosher, then all other kinds of birds must be good to eat, right? The trouble is that there’s no certainty whether all of the bird species enumerated in the original Hebrew text have been correctly translated and identified. Rabbis, therefore, took it upon themselves to come up with their own criteria allowing to classify each bird as either kosher or treif.
=== Creeping Things ===
What remains are all the little critters the Bible refers to generically as ``creeping things"“creeping things”. This term seems to include all invertebrates, as well as amphibians, reptiles and small mammals. The matter of their ritual cleanness is simple enough: they’re all unkosher.
{{ Cytat
There is one interesting exception, though: the Bible enumerates four kinds of Middle Eastern grasshoppers which are not ``abominable"“abominable”.
{{ Cytat
}}
[[File:Owady EN.png|400px|right|Insects are all unkosher with the exception of a few species of locust.]]
Again, it’s hard to tell which species exactly Biblical authors had in mind, so there’s no other choice then falling back on tradition. But when it comes to tradition of locust consumption, it turns out it’s only been preserved among Yemenite Jews. They’re the only ones who can still tell which species of these insects are kosher. As for European Jews, just like Europeans in general, they’re happy not to include any kinds of bugs in their menu.
What does the prohibition against blood consumption mean in practice? Well, the animal must be butchered in such a way that lets it bleed out as quickly and as amply as possible, and then the carcass must be dressed in a way that will remove almost all of the remaining blood. This so-called Jewish ritual slaughter is practised by specially trained butchers who are required to cut the animal’s throat with a single pull of a long, very sharp, unserrated knife, severing the wind pipe, the food pipe and major blood vessels in the neck at the same time. Next, the carcass is quartered, larger blood vessels are removed, the meat is soaked in water, buried in salt and rinsed with water again, so as to get rid of the last drops of blood. The liver, which is especially well supplied with blood, must be additionally grilled.
[[File:Kosher salt.jpg|thumb|Coarse uniodized salt which is used for kashering (making kosher) meat is known as ``kosher salt" “kosher salt” in American English.]]
The prohibition also applies to that little red spot you may occasionally find inside an egg. It’s usually a tiny blood clot, which may result from a small rupture of a blood vessel in the hen’s oviduct. And if it’s blood, then it’s unkosher. That’s why each egg must be cracked into a glass and checked for such clots before use. If a blood spot is found, it must be removed (some Jews discard the entire egg). Okay, but what about a boiled egg? You can’t see the blood spot when the white is already thickened, so it would seem that a boiled egg can’t be kosher. But here’s a surprise: if you can’t see it, then it’s fine, so soft or hard-boiled eggs are good to eat. Of course, if you do find a blood spot inside a boiled egg, then you have to remove it (or even throw away the whole egg).
Knowing what you already know about kosher cookery, you may be surprised to know that there is such a thing as a Jewish ''kishke''. Especially, if you know what its ancestor, the Polish ''kiszka'', is: a thick sausage made of pork offal mixed with buckwheat and pork blood, and stuffed into a pork intestine (''``kiszka"“kiszka”'' literally means ``bowel" “bowel” in Polish). You’d be hard pressed to find anything less kosher than that! And yet, Polish Jews have been able to invent their own kosher version of this delicacy. They’ve done this by replacing the blood with goose fat, the buckwheat with flour, seasoning the mixture generously with onions and packing it all inside a beef intestine.
=== Ritual Slaughter Controversy ===
Ritual slaughter advocates respond that the requirement for the animal to be healthy and uninjured makes it necessary to treat it humanely on the farm, in transport and at the abattoir. They also claim that a creature slaughtered by an appropriately trained ritual butcher dies in a matter of seconds and practically without pain (keep in mind, though, that this said by people who subject their own newborn sons to genital mutilation without anaesthesia). Ritual slaughter, the argument goes, is at least as humane as slaughter with prior stunning (which may be painful in and of itself), to say nothing of such practices as hunting or carrying live carp in a plastic bag without water (which are legal and common in Poland). The debate is complicated by the fact that any attempts at limiting the practice of ritual slaughter are met with knee-jerk accusations of anti-Semitism (before World War 2, this was indeed one of the ways to deliberately annoy the Jews).
The most recent rounds of the conflict around ritual slaughter in Poland took place within the 21st century. According to the Polish Animal Welfare Act of 1997, ``a “a vertebrate animal may be slaughtered in an abattoir only after prior deprivation of consciousness"consciousness”.<ref>''Ustawa z dnia 21 sierpnia 1997 r. o ochronie zwierząt'' [Animal Welfare Act of 21 August 1997] ([https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/download.xsp/WDU19971110724/U/D19970724Lj.pdf Dz.U. 1997 Nr 111 poz. 724]), article 34, point 1</ref> The same law originally contained a special provision, excepting those animals which were subjected to ``specific “specific methods of slaughter prescribed by religious rites"rites”.<ref>''Ustawa z dnia 21 sierpnia 1997 r. o ochronie zwierząt'' [Animal Welfare Act of 21 August 1997] ([https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/download.xsp/WDU19971110724/O/D19970724.pdf Dz.U. 1997 Nr 111 poz. 724]), article 34, point 5 (nullified)</ref> This exemption, however, was cancelled by parliament in 2002,<ref>''Ustawa z dnia 6 czerwca 2002 r. o zmianie ustawy o ochronie zwierząt'' [Animal Welfare Amendment Act of 6 June 2002] ([https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/download.xsp/WDU20021351141/O/D20021141.pdf Dz.U. 2002 nr 135 poz. 1141]), article 1, point 27 (b)</ref> ostensibly to bring Polish legislation in line with European Union law (even though the EU allows individual member states to make their own rules regarding ritual slaughter). Two years later, in an attempt to save lucrative Polish kosher and halal meat exports, the agriculture minister issued an ordinance which brought the exemption back,<ref>''Rozporządzenie Ministra Rolnictwa i Rozwoju Wsi z dnia 9 września 2004 r. w sprawie kwalifikacji osób uprawnionych do zawodowego uboju oraz warunków i metod uboju i uśmiercania zwierząt'' [Ordinance of the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development of 9 September 2004 on the qualifications of persons authorised to conduct professional animal slaughter and on conditions and methods of killing animals] ([https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/download.xsp/WDU20042052102/O/D20042102.pdf Dz.U. 2004 nr 205 poz. 2102]), paragraph 8, point 2</ref> but in 2012, the Constitutional Tribunal struck it down. This prompted foreign Jewish press to raise an alarm: a Polish court has ruled ritual slaughter unconstitutional! Mr. Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland, himself a vegetarian, expressed a more nuanced view, saying there’s no point fighting over which way of killing is better.<ref>Michael Schudrich, quoted in: {{Cyt
| tytuł = Krytyka Polityczna
| nazwisko r = Pacewicz
{{ Cytat
| And he shall offer of the sacrifice of the peace offering an offering made by fire unto the Lord; the fat that covereth the inwards, and all the fat that is upon the inwards, and the two kidneys, and the fat that is on them, which is by the flanks, and the caul above the liver, with the kidneys, it shall he take away. And Aaron’s sons shall burn it on the altar upon the burnt sacrifice, which is upon the wood that is on the fire: it is an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord.
| źródło = {{Cyt
| tytuł = Authorized (King James) Bible
The above passage is only about bovine suet, but sheep and goat fat is covered by similar regulations.
And then there’s probably the weirdest prohibition of them all: Jews are not allowed to eat a string that goes down all along the thigh and if it’s damaged, then you can’t move your hind limb. This commandment is linked to a Biblical story about an injury suffered by Jacob Israel while sparring with some mysterious figure when there was no one else around (kind of like Brad Pitt’s character in ''Fight Club''). The key word in the passage below has been translated as ``sinew"“sinew”, but what it’s really about is the sciatic nerve.
{{ Cytat
| And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. {{...}} And as [Jacob] passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh. Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh, unto this day: because he touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh in the sinew that shrank.
| źródło = {{Cyt
| tytuł = Authorized (King James) Bible
{{Cytat
| The reason why meat is so cheap [in September] is that Jews, who slaughter a lot of cattle before their almost month-long festivals, make all of their profit on the kosher, while selling the treif, as well as hind quarters of meat, which they do not eat, for a song.
| oryg = Taniość mięsa pochodzi {{...}} bardziej jeszcze z tej przyczyny, iż Żydzi rżnąc teraz wiele bydła przed święta swe, trwające prawie cały miesiąc, cały swój zysk zakładają na koszerze, a tref zaś, równie jak tylne ćwierci mięsa, których sami nie jedzą, za bezcen zbywają.
| źródło = {{Cyt
{{ Cytat
| Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk.
| źródło = {{Cyt
| tytuł = Authorized (King James) Bible
}}
Note that the word ``kid" “kid” in the English translation is used in its original sense of ``young goat"“young goat”. Of course, one shouldn’t take this literally anyway. It’s not just about young goats, but any kind of meat in general (including poultry). And it isn’t just about the animal’s own mother’s milk, but any sort of milk. And not just seething (boiling), but any method of food preparation. Just in case, one should never eat any kind of meat together with any kind of dairy products. What do they mean by ``together"“together”, though? Certainly not as part of the same meal. But what if a piece of meat is stuck between someone teeth after the meal? You never know, so just in case, you must wait six hours after eating meat before you can have anything dairy. And if you’d been having cheese, then you have to wait six hours until you can enjoy meat again.
[[File:Mięsne, mleczne, neutralne.png|400px|right|]]
Some rabbis have classified certain animal-based foodstuffs, such as gelatin or rennet, as neutral, although it must have required some impressive mental acrobatics on their part. Gelatin is made from skin and bones, that is, these body parts which are not normally considered fit for human consumption. And the rules of ''kashrut'' are only concerned with food, so they don’t apply to anything that’s inedible. Same thing with rennet, an enzyme obtained from a calf’s stomach and used in the production of most yellow cheeses. Pure dried rennet doesn’t resemble meat in any way and no one in their right mind would eat it. So it seems we’re good. But on the other hand, gelatin and rennet are added to food, which means they are edible after all. But then, you only add very small amounts, and very small amounts of things unkosher are sometimes permissible when mixed with large amounts of kosher stuff. But on the fourth hand, this rule only applies, if the small amount of the unkosher additive doesn’t affect the overall characteristics of the whole product; and the whole point of using gelatin or rennet is that we want them to affect the overall characteristics of the whole product… And so on, and so forth. In the end, the more liberal Jews will probably partake of rennet-set cheese or jelly cheesecake (provided, of course, that the rennet or the gelatin comes from kosher animals butchered in a kosher way). Those more strict will rather look for plant-based or microbiological equivalents.
[[File:Koszerna kuchnia.jpg|thumb|left|Example of a kosher kitchen with two sets of everything]]What’s more, meat products should never even touch the dairy ones. Not even indirectly. A vessel that has been ``stained" “stained” with milk fat can no longer be used for meat – and ''vice versa''. That’s why a typical kosher kitchen is really two or even three kitchens rolled into one: separate sets of milk, dairy and neutral dishes, separate sets of utensils, pots, pan, kitchen tools, towels, separate cupboards, worktops, fridges, stoves, microwave ovens, sinks and dishwashers. Preferably with some kind of colour coding, so that nobody ever chops an onion that is meant for a dairy dish on a meat cutting board by mistake.
You can see how important this separation of meat and dairy in Judaism is by how the Jews observe the Feast of Weeks (Shavuot), when they remember how God (through Moses) gave them a new law. According to tradition, all of the law was revealed at once, which means that Jews had to adapt to a completely new way of life overnight. Until then, they had used the same pots for both meat and dairy, just like everyone else. Now they had to kasher their pots (by rinsing with boiling water) and decide whether they would use them for meat or for dairy moving forward. On the first day of the new law they didn’t have any kosher-slaughtered meat yet anyway, so they chose to use all of their old pots as dairy pots and later make new vessels for cooking meat. And so, on the first day, they could only eat dairy, but no meat. In memory of that, Jews celebrate the Feast of Weeks by having their favourite dairy-based dishes, such as ''milchik borscht'' (vegetarian red-beet soup whitened with cream) and ''blintzes'' (crêpes filled with sweetened farmer cheese and sautéed until golden).
{{----}}
That’s all for now, but it’s not the end of the topic. Stay tuned for my [[Eat Bread with Joy, Drink Wine with a Merry Heart|next post]], where I will delve into, among other things, which religious commandments gave rise to such Jewish classics as cholent, gefilte fish and matzah balls.
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{{Nawigacja|poprz=A Menu Lost in Translation|nast=Eat Bread with Joy, Drink Wine with a Merry Heart}}
[[Category: Borscht]]
