Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law.

• Author: Reinhart, A. Kevin
• Position: Book review

Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law. By David M. Freidenreich. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011. Pp. xvii + 325. $60.

Food and sex--what else is there? Foreigners and Their Foods, among other things, demonstrates that the two are often the same: a way of talking about "otherness." David Freidenreich's book describes and compares the food strictures (or lack of them) in premodern Christianity (especially early and Latin Christianity), Israelite religion and Judaism, and Islam in its formative, Sunni and Shi'i forms. The author builds his argument from original sources and from a sturdy base of secondary literature. From these he constructs an index of indifference, repugnance, and hostility for each of the three Near Eastern traditions. He is no essentialist, and some of the more interesting analyses are of evolved traditions confronting their formative selves. The result is a thorough, diligent, exhaustive, and definitive description of the phenomenon. Freidenreich's remarkable comfort with the sources and methods of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, however, leads to what I like of think of as a kind of mentalism--seeing these rules as products of scholastic (not a bad word for him, or for me) reflection and systematization. This has the effect of downplaying the social and affective factors that must be accounted for in describing and explaining these rules that meant so much to their adherents.

The book begins with a constructive analysis of the kinds of impurity (pp. 26-28). His terminology clarifies what has often been muddled and imprecise. The first of his categories is intrinsic impurity--pork for Israelites, for instance. No technique or circumstance (except the threat of death) can render the pork pure. Circumstantial impurity refers to events that trigger impurity, which then either lapse through the passage of time or are undone through ritual; examples would be menstruation, or touching carrion. Offensive impurity is the third category, which seems to be defilement brought on by a moral offense, murder for example. Confusingly, "in some purity systems this defilement can carry over from one generation to the next. Offensive impurity results from human actions and is therefore neither communicable nor inevitable" (p. 27). In response, two words: original sin. Freidenreich uses "defiled" to refer only to the effect of offensive impurity; "polluted" refers to the result of circumstantial impurity; "impure" refers to persons or things afflicted with intrinsic impurity. The value of this terminology becomes clear (inter alia at p. 36) where the author shows that Daniel's avoidance of "the king's table" arises from obeying the rule "Do not eat the food of foreigners" (offensive impurity) rather than avoiding non-kosher food (intrinsic or circumstantial impurity).

The religion of the Pentateuch was, says the author, unconcerned with the food of non-Israelites; rather, food either conformed to the holiness imputed to a holy people, or it did not. Unholy foods were foods that were anomalous (here, of course, he draws from Mary Douglas). This is not new, but Freidenreich sternly and definitively refutes other, alternative explanations. To those who claim that the distinction between, say, sheep and pork was based on pastoral rivalries with the settled, he points out...