A few years ago, I was explaining to some non-Jewish friends why there are kosher rules specifically for milk. Not milk products, but just "milk".
"But it's just milk from a cow? Why would that be unkosher?" they asked.
"Well, it's simple but really disgusting. You see, the reason that kosher milk standards explicitly state that there needs to be a Jew present for every step of the process--from milking the cow to drinking the milk, ideally--is because of contamination fears."
"What kind of contamination fears?"
"The kind where Medieval Christians would milk pigs and try to sneak the sow's milk into cow's milk, just out of Jew-hating spite."
"..."
"Yeah. People would go to the trouble of milking a pig and wait for their chance to try to pour that milk into a bucket of cow's milk, just because they hated Jews so much that they wanted us to accidentally break kosher rules. So the kosher rules evolved because of that sort of environment of active spite."
In the last year, pretty much everyone who was involved in that conversation and who hasn't hopped onto the Jew-hating bandwagon themselves has admitted to me that at the time, they didn't believe it, not fully, and now they do.
Because, being blunt, that environment of active spite is in the process of returning after a seventy year absence.
So much of kashrut makes so much more load bearing sense when you consider a community having to survive but being unable to trust the authorities who process their food. If this didn't keep people alive over generations, it would've died out by now.
It's worth thinking about if we lose any of our safeguards over our food supply.
How is it hard to believe, when every vegetarian has a story about people trying to sneak meat?
With the FDA being what it is now (going down the toilet), I believe that we'll see a resurgence of food borne illnesses. We've already seen botulism in baby food, ffs. And since Jews follow incredibly strict laws, we're less likely to be affected. Not totally free, because we're obviously going to be affected by things like E. coli or Salmonella on produce. But we won't be affected by tainted meat and dairy as much.
And I think, unfortunately, this will further antisemitism. "Why aren't the Jews sick? They must be contaminating our food!"
Alberta, Canada, has already tried to pass a law banning halal and kosher school lunches. (So they're putting pork into all school lunches? I don't understand how they thought this would work.) It won't be long until someone tries to do that in the US, too.
Literally on the second to last paragraph, the black death was less (relatively) devastating to Jewish communities than christians because per their own laws, Jews had stricter standards of hygiene and bathed much more regularly
So naturally christians concluded it must be the Jews who called down the black death because what other reason could there be for them dying to it slightly less
When I see posts like this, I think it's important to say that we do not have good evidence that Jews died at lower rates of plague than Christians in the middle ages, and we know that Muslims had virtually identical hygene practices to Jews, and Muslim terretories were very hard hit by the plague.
Medieval Christians did not need Jews to be actually dying at lower rates of the plague to claim we were, and kill us over it. This is important to understand. Bigotry does not need evidence.
@short-wooloo blocked me when I sent this info over message, probably because they thought "who tf is this person?", an understandable reaponse. If I made them uncomfortable I would like to appologise, and will of course not persue any further contact.
I had figured kosher dairy rules were about accidental cross contamination but sadly unsurprising that people might do it on purpose
Some people criticize kosher or halal butchering as animal cruelty (maybe by modern standards, but I can understand it as a clean kill in the time when the rules were written). I understand that as a secularist not wanting to give religious exemptions. But I do see how it could be a pretext for religious discrimination. On a similar note, making the menu halal might be unfair to non-Muslims who want more options and might seem like secular institutions acting as enforcers of Muslim rules.
