In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food

by Stewart Lee Allen

  The Jewish Pig

  Once upon a time, Jesus bumped into a rabbi sitting by the side of the road. The rabbi had just been arguing with his friends about the rumors that this guy Christ was the Messiah. So he decided to test His powers. “If you are truly the Messiah,” the skeptical rabbi said to Jesus, “then you can surely see what lies beneath this barrel next to me.” The rabbi believed some pigs were napping there. Unbeknownst to him, however, the pigs had been replaced by his own son. When Jesus told him that his son was sleeping under the barrel, the rabbi sneered—some Messiah! Christ tried to convince the rabbi of the truth, but the rabbi would not listen. So Christ simply turned the child into a pig and walked away. It’s a relatively benign fable told by early European Christians to explain the Jewish aversion to pork as a fear Jews have of eating their own children. But the tale grew over the centuries into a series of beliefs that implied that Jews were actually a subhuman race that had sprung from swine. Christian Poles believed that Jewish women had horizontal vaginas, like sows, and that they carried their babies for only six months. Butchers renamed the most succulent part of the pig (a single vertebrae near the base of the spine) the Jewess, or Damsel in the Swine, and some parts of Germany created a “cloven foot” tax exclusively for Jewish visitors. Other cantons required them to swear to tell the truth in court while standing on the flayed skin of a sow, i.e., to literally swear “on their mother’s body.” If found guilty, Jews were hung upside down, as opposed to by the neck, in a parody of the way one slaughters and bleeds a hog. In a bizarre reversal, some pigs received court trials as humans: the famous French hog of Falaise was tried for murder while wearing a jacket, breeches, and gloves. When found guilty of murdering a child—an accusation frequently leveled at Jews—the animal was hung while wearing a human mask.

  Then a curious figure called der Judensau (the Jewish pig) began to appear among the gargoyles guarding the churches of Central Europe. It showed Jewish people sucking on the teats of a pig and gave the Church’s official seal of approval to the Jews-as-pigs myth. Peasants spread rumors that circumcision, then only performed by Jews, was actually a castration like the one performed on male pigs to help keep their flesh edible. The pig castrators of the French Pyrenees adopted a uniform parodying that worn by the Hebrew mohel, who performs the act of circumcision, including the mohel’s trademark red silk belt. Cutting off part of the ear was a traditional way of marking a pig whose flesh was inedible. So officials began mutilating “inferior humans,” like Jews, in the same way, and the phrase “here’s your father’s ear” eventually became a popular anti-Semite jeer. The upside to this insanity was that it allowed the Romans to forgo the ritual murder that had kicked off their Easter rites. The tradition had been to put an elderly Jewish man into a barrel lined with spikes and roll him down the side of Mount Testaccio, according to Claudine Fabre-Vassas’s mesmerizing La Bête singulière (“The Singular Beast”). By 1312 Jews and swine were considered so interchangeable that a pair of pigs were substituted for the gentleman, albeit only after being dressed in fine silk suits and driven in an elegant carriage to the mountaintop. Rome’s Jewish community, of course, was forced to pay for the carriage.

  The development of printing turned the Judensau into “a forceful image which kept imprinting itself on the mind, conditioning, indeed stereotyping, an attitude toward Jews,” according to Isaiah Shachar’s study of the subject, and soon graced the

  The author’s sketch of a judensau gargoyle on a fourteenth-century German church.

  covers of popular travel guides. The printed version, however, had been “improved” by the addition of an elderly rabbi who was pictured eating excrement jetting out of the pig’s rear. The father of Germany’s Protestant revolution, Martin Luther, expounded upon this hateful bit of pornography in 1543. “The Rabbi,” he wrote, “bows and stares with great attentiveness [into the pig’s rectum] and into the Talmud [Judaic holy book] as if he wanted to read something intricate and extraordinary … and the letters that fall from this [they] gobble down.” Luther’s “analysis” was embellished over the next few centuries. One bestseller explained that in the past “pious Jews did not approve of the sow for eating [but] today the Jews ignore this and make her their mistress.” Another used the Judensau image as proof that “the sow is the brother to the Jews.” The concept was such a hit in Germany that Christian house painters hid the image on the walls of their Jewish customers by covering it with a layer of watery plaster that would eventually peel away and “miraculously” reveal the “true nature of Judaism.”

  The Jewish dietary taboo against consuming blood underwent a similar metamorphosis and anti-Semites claimed that Jews were actually obsessed with blood because they used it in their religious ceremonies. The best blood was said to come from Christian children, a belief that became so deep-rooted that it was still causing riots among Polish Americans in the 1920s. This cocktail of bigotry, fear, and ignorance was unfortunately amplified by some Jewish dietary laws that limited communication between the two groups; followers were banned from eating nonkosher foods, or anything touched by a nonbeliever. Sharing wine between the religions was also taboo in some sects, as was eating together. “The Christians interpreted these ancient laws—formulated long before Christianity—as meaning that to a Jew everything Christian was unclean” wrote historian Will Durant, and retaliated by banning “Jews and harlots” from touching food in the market. Kosher meat could only be displayed in stalls selling diseased flesh.

  These inversions of Hebraic food taboos would be laughable were their ramifications not so ghastly. “If it was impossible for men in the age of Enlightenment and later to conceive of Jews as their fellow humans it was not just because of religious differences,” wrote Shachar. “It seems clear that the Judensau— honoring the Jew more or sometimes less humorously with porcine ancestry—had been contributing to a transfer of the Jews to a totally different, nonhuman category … or as the German would put it, unsereiner.” It was the unsereiner concept that Nazi scientists modernized so effectively with the use of scientific jargon. “Non Nordic man,” wrote the authors of the Nazi textbook New Fundamental Problems of Racial Research, “occupies an intermediate zone between Nordic man and the animal kingdom,” and is worthy of extermination. Interviews with Germans involved in Nazi massacres indicate that many felt no revulsion at the murders themselves but only at the accompanying mess, which they compared to working in a butcher shop.

  Human beings magically transformed into animals are the stuff of fairy tales. But racist propaganda is just that, bedtime stories told to frightened adults, and Hitler was merely a master storyteller who brought the medieval fable of the “Jewish pig” to life. First he used the quasi-science of eugenics to reclassify the Jews as a subhuman species. He then forced Christian women accused of fornicating with Jews to wear signs identifying them as sows. Then he moved the Jewish people into sty-like ghettoes and built a netherworld of slaughterhouses where millions of these “animals” were butchered. In the end, however, it was not the Jews that Hitler’s fantasy transformed into animals, but his German followers. In the famous study of Nazi atrocities Violence Without Moral Restraint, Herbert Kelman points out that when people dehumanize their victims in order to rationalize violence, it is the aggressors who become “increasingly dehumanized … until they lose the capacity to act as moral beings.” The Führer must have forgotten that fairy tales tend to have moral endings.

  Dinner with the Spanish Inquisition

  “The said Beatriz cooked and had cooked adafina and Jewish cuisine with meat, onions, chickpeas, spices all crushed… .” This excerpt from the trial of a housewife named Beatriz Lopez is a good indication of just how perilous a dinner party could be in sixteenth-century Spain. Catholic priests roamed the streets of Madrid sniffing for Jewish cookery; friends invited for dinner might be informers and show up with pork sausage to see if you would resist adding it to the stew you were cooking. To serve a Jewish dish, or even to use certain i
ngredients (like oil), was considered proof of heresy and invariably led to being burned at the stake. The Spanish Inquisition even published a kind of cookbook so Christian neighbors or servants could recognize suspicious cooking techniques. The Jews the Catholics were seeking—called Marranos (pork) because they’d feigned conversion to Christianity by publicly eating bacon—countered by developing fake food like their chorizo di Marrano, a sausage that omitted pork and substituted red-colored spices for blood. If an officer of the Spanish Inquisition dropped by a Marrano’s house, the inhabitant would pop one of these babies into a bun and have lunch to confuse the officer. People, both Catholic and Jewish, took to hanging hams outside their front door to ward off suspicion.

  In a study of women accused of heresy by the Inquisition, scholar Renee Levine determined that almost all of their “crimes” consisted of cooking forbidden dishes and that they took the risk because, with all Jewish institutions destroyed, these household practices were the sole “remaining device for transmitting knowledge” of Jewish culture. The dish most often mentioned in the Inquisition’s transcripts was a delicious stew of meat, chickpeas, and cabbage called adafina. It was a particularly incriminating meal because adafina was designed to cook overnight so as to avoid doing any work on the Sabbath in accordance with Jewish law. The fact that matzoh balls were one of the main ingredients couldn’t have helped matters.

  The following recipe for cocido madrileño comes from Juan Carlos Rodriguez, the chef and owner of a New York restaurant, 1492 Food, which specializes in modern versions of heretic Spanish cuisine (1492 was the year Jews and Muslims were expelled from Spain). Ironically, the Jewish adafina (of Moroccan background) became cocido, the national dish of Spain. Both are traditionally served in three courses, first the broth with the relleno meatballs or matzoh balls, then the vegetables, then the meat. The trial of Ms. Lopez seemed to hinge on this fact, as the prosecutor noted in his charges by writing, “after long cooking, the broth was extracted and the meat awaited … and thus she ate it with great devotion that [she] had for the laws of Moses.” Beatriz Lopez was burned alive before the Spanish elite in the mid-1500s. A choir sang hymns to drown out her screams.

  Make the Relleno first.

  10 ounces (300 grams) chickpeas

  1 pound (1⁄2 kilogram) veal shank

  4 marrow bones (about 1⁄2 inch thick)

  1 bone from a serrano ham

  1⁄2 morcilla de arroz (blood sausage)

  2 pounds (1 kilogram) cabbage in quarters or large chunks

  1 pound ( 1⁄2 kilogram) carrots, thickly chopped

  1⁄4 Cornish game hen per person, cut into quarters

  6 smallish potatoes, peeled

  1⁄2 Spanish chorizo sausage

  5 ounces (150 grams) tocino (whole bacon)

  6 ounces (180 grams) fideo pasta

  Salt

  Freshly ground pepper

  Soak chickpeas overnight, rinse, and pick over. Wrap in a cheesecloth bag and set aside.

  Put the veal, marrow bones, ham bone, blood sausage, cabbage, and carrots into about three quarts (three liters) fresh, cold water. Bring to a boil and skim fat. Adjust heat to low and cook uncovered for approximately two and a half hours. Add chickpeas with hen or chicken (chickpeas should be on top), and cook another hour on low. Add peeled whole potatoes, chorizo sausage, and tocino. Simmer another thirty minutes or until potatoes are tender. Remove all ingredients and put the broth back on low heat and skim again. Season with salt and pepper to taste. You should have approximately two quarts (2 liters) of broth. Serve broth with relleno and noodles first. Then serve chickpeas and vegetables as a second course. Finish with the meats (some like to pile vegetables and chickpeas in the center of plate and surround with meat). Dampen with broth. Serves 6.

  Relleno

  1⁄4 pound lean ground pork, lamb, or veal

  1 egg, beaten

  1⁄2 teaspoon thyme

  1⁄2 teaspoon oregano

  Salt

  Fresh black pepper

  1 cup bread crumbs or matzoh

  Olive oil (for browning)

  Combine all ingredients in a bowl and form into about 12 meatballs. Brown in hot olive oil, and set aside, then boil briefly with the fideo noodles for the soup course.

  If you wish to make this dish kosher, simply replace all pork products with approximately two pounds of boneless lean lamb, cubed. Replace bacon and sausage with one veal foot or four lamb’s feet. Add approximately a half dozen cloves of minced garlic and six raw eggs in the shell and approximately a tablespoon of ground cumin, and cook as before. The eggs are cooked like hardboiled eggs in the broth with the other ingredients, but served peeled and cut in half. If you wish, you can cook this for eighteen hours on very, very low heat (use a heat diffuser) or in an oven at 170°F. You should check from time to time to make sure that the liquid covers all ingredients.

  The Kosher Question

  There is so little agreement on the meaning of Jewish dietary laws that a New York court recently declared it unconstitutional for the government to certify a business as kosher. The rules, they said, were so incomprehensible it would force government employees to interpret religious doctrine thus violating the separation between church and state. In fact, the only thing that seems relatively clear is that the regime known as kosher, or kashruth , and its Islamic brother halal, both derive loosely from the biblical Book of Leviticus, which details the “beasts which ye shall eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.” It lists about one hundred animals from rabbits to salamanders, but the underlying premise is relatively simple. God created the world in three sections, earth, water, and sky. The religious chefs of the day interpreted this to mean that an animal that lived within one of those realms was the Lord YHWH’s pet and suitable for dinner. Beasts that straddled the line, however, came from the Devil’s menagerie. So, mammals that are cloven-footed and chew the cud are kosher, but the pig, which has a cloven foot but apparently doesn’t chew his food properly, is so blasphemous that some Jewish texts refer to it as “that which should not be named.” Likewise, a fish with scales and fins belongs to the sea element and is kosher, whereas an amphibious salamander is not.

  At any rate, that’s the interpretation of some cultural theorists. Scientists persist in speculating that the antiporcine clause relates to pork’s tendency to harbor trichinosis. Never mind that this disease is not necessarily fatal, or that cows and lambs were responsible for the much deadlier anthrax plagues. Historians fancy the notion that Jewish pig phobia stems from their stint as slaves in Egypt during the time when the cult of the god Seth held pigs to be exalted beasts. This may also explain the curious reports that certain Jewish cults used to have secret pork feasts once a year. According to scholar Frederick Simoons, when Seth was overthrown, his beloved spareribs became taboo for Egyptians, save for a yearly feast held at the full moon, a habit some Jews might have picked up. Why the full moon? Because the original sacred animal was not the pig, but the similar-looking hippo, which lives on the Moon. Hippos live on the Moon? Well, yes; the idea is that while some Pharaoh was meditating on the full moon reflected in the Nile, a hippo emerged from the reflection… .

  For obvious reasons, most rabbis have given up on finding a coherent explanation. Even the great twelfth-century rabbinical scholar Maimonides, in his appropriately titled book Guide for the Perplexed, suggested that devout Jews should follow the food taboos but view them as an object of meditation and “whatever is possible for him to do in order to find a reason for [following] it, he should.” The result of this advice is the delightfully Jewish chaos noted by the New York Supreme Court: some sects ban certain types of fat or particular veins or tomatoes. Some even express reservations about women suffering a yeast infection over the holiday because it goes against the Passover ban on fermented substances. Only two questions, however, need concern the civilized creature. Why is kosher wine so damn awful (it’s sometimes boiled); and, if Muslims and Jews are the only people whose l
aws make them (almost) each other’s ideal dinner guests, why can’t they get along?

  The Lawyer in Us

  “One must be careful not to be taken in by appearances, even at Lent feasts held by great ecclesiastics, where scandal should have been easily avoided,” wrote an Italian courtier in the eighteenth century. “I remember one where they appeared to be serving white soups, red mullet, sole and trout.” This note referred to a series of blasphemous feasts held by Roman priests who’d disguised dishes to accord with Catholic Lenten laws restricting diners to fish and vegetables. The cream soups the letter described turned out to be made of finely minced capon. That luscious trout on the table, head still on, was actually pheasant covered in “scales” made of almonds.

  This is a rather artistic example of what people will do to circumvent dietary taboos. There are plenty of simpler examples. The clergy’s classifying of newborn rabbits as “fish” suitable for eating during Lent created such a demand that it led to the modern method of rabbit domestication in pens because they had to be killed as soon as they’d popped out of mama to qualify for the exemption. Missionaries in South America displayed similar creativity by classifying iguanas as fish because the reptile’s propensity for sunning itself in riverside trees revealed its “true nature.” The iguana’s refined diet of hibiscus flowers made it a welcome addition to fasting clerics, according to one happy abbot, who compared the flavor of saddle of iguana to sweet rabbit, “ugly but very tasty when you get over your disgust.” Modern-day Japanese prove themselves no slackers at parsing a rule when they claim their slaughter of whales to provide whale bacon occurs in the course of legitimate scientific research. Hypocritical gibberish, of course, but no more so than that of Americans who bemoan the damage done to the environment by this whale slaughter, and then serenely allow the massive deforestation of Brazilian forests in order to ensure their supply of cheap hamburger meat.