On Wed, 8 Jan 2003, Jordan Hayes wrote:
> In my experience, just being 'Jewish' (before we start the "What does it
> mean to be 'N'?" thread again, let's limit this to "self-identified
> Jewish") doesn't make it a slam-dunk that there's not going to be some
> pork-eating going on. In fact, quite to the contrary.
Marvin Harris, in his book _Cannibals and Kings_, has my favorite theory on the origin of the Jewish ban on pigs: that it was because we loved them *too much.* He hypothesizes that originally the Galilee was full of woods where pigs fed themselves on mast, the walking fat of the land. But after centuries of bad farming practice and climate change, desertification meant that raising pigs was a huge waste of scarce water. But the only way to get people to stop was a religious injunction. (Harris is a little more subtle than that, but that's the gist.)
One of the funniest things about the Russian immigration into Israel in the 80s is that they can't live without wurst. All over the place in Haifa you see butcher shops with wurst on the wall and a guy behind the counter wearing one of those classic fake fur russian envelope hats, even though it's 80 degrees out. This drives the orthodox nuts. (It's actually a Basic Law that you can't "raise pigs on the land of Israel." It has also long been an orthodox/secular flashpoint. Back in the early days, militantly secular kibbutzim used to build wooden platforms under their pig pens a few inches of the ground so that technically the pigs were not raised on the land of Israel. So this goes ways back.) Occasionally the orthodox come in and start fights and produce hilarious arguments with the Russians, who shout: "Who are you to tell me I'm not a Jew! I was in prison in Russia while you were sitting fat and happy in Brooklyn! So who are you to tell me I can't eat pork?!"
And while we're on the subject of classically Jewish-identified food that isn't kosher: how about that Reuben sandwich?
Michael