Meals in Early Judaism

Social Formation at the Table

S. Marks, H. Taussig, S. Marks, H. Taussig

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137363794
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Histoire des religions

This is the first book about the meals of Early Judaism. As such it breaks important new ground in establishing the basis for understanding the centrality of meals in this pivotal period of Judaism and providing a framework of historical patterns and influences.

C H A P T E R 1

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Ten Theses Concerning Meals and Early Judaism

Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus, Susan Marks, and Jordan D. Rosenblum

The three of us began to study meals because we understood we could not address our questions concerning Early Judaism without such a perspective.¹ We have now been writing on meals for quite some time and have experienced some very substantial breakthroughs in our accumulated work. The study of Jewish meals as a subdiscipline of Biblical Studies, Jewish Studies, or the emergent field of Food Studies existed, but scholarly attention to ancient Jewish meals tended to be incidental to “silo-ed” disciplinary focuses, with scholars interested in the origins of the Eucharist, the Last Supper, or the Passover Seder in a much less interdisciplinary age.² The question of whether these iconic meals were more “Jewish” or “Greek” or an innovation of Jesus often dominated the discussion. Our work sought to take this foundational scholarship forward by employing more theory and engaging in a more interdisciplinary conversation.

We first worked together to articulate these new directions when we were asked to write several theses for presentation at the Society of Biblical Literature’s “Meals in the Greco-Roman World” Seminar in 2010. This exercise proved quite fruitful, causing us to realize that together we could explore ideas more deeply and recognize new connections. The crafting of this chapter provided an opportunity to return to these Ten Theses, to look back at the research that had allowed us to begin our studies, at what we had discovered, and at new possibilities. We consider our Ten Theses as akin to rabbinic hermeneutical principles: rules for reading ancient Jewish sources concerning food and foodways. You will find all Ten Theses listed in the Appendix to this chapter as well as individually featured as epigraphs prior to the discussions they triggered. Further explorations encompass the perspectives of three different scholars who have been involved with this dialogue—one earliest (JBK), the other a little more recently (SM), and another more recently still (JR). On the macrolevel, we tend to agree with each other. However, happily our slight disagreements have led to more nuanced statements.

In this chapter we are interested in explaining early Judaism, from the time when the Second Temple still stood in the early centuries BCE, but most particularly early rabbinic Judaism, whose key texts first appeared in the third century CE. Recently, scholars have argued more forcefully for the Roman-ness of the early Rabbis.³ In examining the meals of these people, we build upon these developments in rabbinic scholarship while also expanding it in new directions.⁴ We aim to share ideas that have proved valuable to us, while simultaneously recognizing what has yet to be explored in the way of Meals in Early Judaism, so that a volume such as this in 20 years will look quite different. In what follows, we explore new insights into the Jewish meal context (Theses 1–4); ways that the study of meals offers confirmation for other kinds of research (Theses 5–6); and finally, the early Jewish development of received meal traditions (Theses 7–10).⁵ Ultimately, we demonstrate that a focus on meals transforms prior insights into early Judaism.

1) Theories developed in other disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, and especially food studies contribute a methodological foundation to the study of the early Jewish table.

While scholars of Jewish food and meals have drawn profitably on theories from other disciplines for some time (e.g., the influential work of Mary Douglas),⁶ the opportunities for dialogue have greatly expanded in the past two decades. Various scholars, including anthropologists, sociologists, and historians, have turned their attention toward food and meals. These topics have also grown in popular appeal, with the rise of television shows, books, and magazines devoted to cooking and cookery. From scholars working on the ancient Mediterranean in general,⁷ to those working on early Christianity in particular,⁸ there is much new conversation to be had. Further, work on groups (both Jewish and Gentile) in other time periods and locations have much to offer, overlapping considerations emerging from notions of embodiment, commensality, and foodways.

Scholars of early Judaism have also begun to interact with and profit from the work of food studies in general. Reading cultural and historical studies of food that examine groups temporally, spatially, religiously, and culturally distinct from early Judaism has resulted in more complex, comparative, and theoretically savvy scholarship, such as Brumberg-Kraus’s explorations of recent trends in Jewish Food History.⁹ For another example, the interactions between politics and gender in World War II America, as explored by Amy Bentley, can inform similar discussions about the rabbis in Roman-period Palestine.¹⁰ Bentley shows how US government propaganda about wartime food rationing evidences broader conceptions of gender construction. Scholars of rabbinic literature can use Bentley’s analysis to explore the ways in which rabbinic foodways help to establish and reify rabbinic conceptions of gender.¹¹ This interaction is not limited to scholars of antiquity, as discussions of politics, food regulations, and corporate business in regard to modern kosher laws draw on similar discussions about the American food system in general.¹² Or the work of scholars such as Ohnuki-Tierney and Appadurai on food and the construction of Japanese and Indian national identities offer suggestive ways of describing the connections (e.g., “metonymic foods”) as well as the instructive caveats about simple definitions of national or ethnic “identities” foods and meal practices are supposed to express.¹³

2) Any early Jewish ritual involving meals must seriously investigate meals, as Catherine Bell observes about ritual: “When abstracted from its immediate context, an activity is not quite the same activity.”¹⁴

Because meals are so mundane, scholarship has tended to selectively decontextualize or overly theologize them. The difference between ancient meals found in difficult and fragmentary sources and idealized descriptions of them have too often been blurred. In the light of information supplied by all the fields that contribute to our understanding of meals, we recognize that consideration of meals can no longer be considered a luxury, a nice domestic touch. Rather, without understanding meals, we fail to understand the myriad aspects of the social world that developed as part of the meal. Difficulties abound. On the one hand, the idea that we must investigate the situation of ritual activity sounds obvious; on the other hand, in practice, the study of the ancient world depends on textual passages and fragments, which can easily lead scholars to an articulation of textual puzzles to the exclusion of the larger context. In the face of this, we must think contextually and, in the case of meals, wonder about the mealtime situation framing the ritualized practice, for which the text offers one puzzling kernel of indirect evidence.

For many years, sheva brachot, the seven blessings recited at a rabbinic wedding, constituted such a puzzle. Studies of the words of this wedding blessing so absorbed scholars that the meal context faded into the background. Since, in the modern world, the seven blessings appears prominently in a ceremony separate from the meal, it was forgotten that in the ancient world these blessings belonged to a meal.¹⁵ Once the “situation” of this seven-part blessing is recalled, then the nearby huppah and the sexual activity of the bridal couple loom larger, challenging us to search for contextual evidence for this “disembodied text.” Consideration of the irrepressible wedding meal, peopled by real hosts and guests, a local community and neighboring communities, reveals new possibilities and challenges hinted at by the blessing.

The text of sheva brachot, or “seven blessings,”¹⁶ does cite biblical texts, such as Genesis, pertaining to creation, or Jeremiah, with its “streets of Jerusalem,” in the last component of blessing:

Speedily, O Lord our God, may there be heard in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem, the voice of joy and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the voice of the singing of bridegrooms from their huppot (wedding chambers) and of youths from their feasts of song. Blessed are you, O Lord, who makes the bridegroom to rejoice with the bride. ¹⁷

How exciting to see such a messianic vision! Nevertheless, attention to the context recalls that, despite the salience of the intertextual references, these words become associated with actions and rarely appear as merely a text.¹⁸ The relevant passage in the Babylonian Talmud introduces these components by describing participants who interact with the meal and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   Ten Theses Concerning Meals and Early Judaism
• SECTION I
• SECTION II
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Author Index