How the pig became a bête noire

There are probably many Jews who would happily order lobster Thermidor but balk at a plate of pork. From the Torah’s standpoint, one may be no more transgressive than the other but in the popular Jewish mind, pig is the king of treif.

The relationship between Jews and the unkosher quadruped is the subject of a lively new history by Jordan D. Rosenblum. A professor of classical Judaism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he explores how the pig has become a marker of Jewish identity in different ways, from the Bible to the modern Anglo-Jewish comedy Leon the Pig Farmer.

The pig is not singled out for special aversion in the Torah. It is described as “impure”, but so are the rock badger, hare and camel. One difference is that the Israelites are also warned not to go near the carcass of a pig, but the Torah does not offer a rationale, just as it does not for the dietary laws in general.

The pig crops up a few times elsewhere in the Bible. Isaiah foretells that those who “eat pig meat, abominable things and the mouse” – probably during some form of cultic rite – will come to a sticky end. Later in the Talmud pig is associated with filth and a source of plague. But the classical Jewish philosopher Philo considered abstention from it as a test of self-control since “there is none whose meat is so delicious as the pig’s”.

It is in the Second Temple period and particularly with the Maccabean revolt against their hellenising oppressors that the pig comes into its own as an object of defilement. The Stoic philospher Epictetus records that the tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes sacrifices a sow in the Temple and pours its blood over the altar in an act of desecration.

The Books of Maccabees tell of the the heroism of the mother and her seven sons who choose a painful death rather publicly eat the pig’s meat offered to them by their rulers as a sign of submission. The elderly scholar Eleazar prefers to die rather than accept a ruse to save his life – his guards suggest they will give him another meat and he can pretend it is swine.

Rosenblum explains that the pig came to be identified with Esau, father of the Edomites. The animal tries to mask its impurity by presenting itself as kosher with its cloven hooves. Edom comes to stand for Rome, destroyer of the Temple and persecutor of Jews, violent and corrupt beneath its veneer of civilisation.

A midrashic legend tells of a visit to Rome by Rabbi Akiva where a general sends two beautiful women to try to seduce the sage. He manages to resist their overtures, remarking that their body odour reminds him of a pig’s. The rabbis drive home their point with a pun: the Roman escort girls appeal to the rabbi to “turn” to them – the verb is chazor in Hebrew, which closely resembles the word for “pig”, chazir.

So reviled is the pig that the rabbis in the Talmud are reluctant to name it, referring it to only as davar acher, “another thing”. The Mishnah goes further than the Torah by prohibiting Jews from becoming pig farmers.

One explanation given for why the rabbinic heretic Elisha ben Ahuya went off the rails is that when his mother was pregnant, she was exposed to the scent of pig’s flesh.

However, Rosenblum observes that the rabbis did not go so far as the Maccabean rebels in their readiness for martyrdom and restricted the conditions when a Jew must accept it – only when otherwise forced to transgress the laws against idolatory, adultery and incest, and murder. In the last resort the rabbis would permit a pregnant Jewish woman who craved pig’s meat to take it as it could be a matter of life and death.

In Christian Europe in medieval times, the pig came to be used as a weapon to denigrate and abuse Jews, for example in the poisonous image of the Judensau in Germany, which depicted conical-hatted Jews sucking from the teats of a sow. Jews who forcibly converted to Christianity under the evil eye of the Spanish Inquisition but were suspected of clandestinely practising their faith were known as Marranos, “swine”. In 1560s Toledo one Jewish converso, Elvira del Campo, was sentenced to torture for confessing that she refrained from eating pig.

Among the many intriguing details offered by Rosenblum along the way is that in 1756 a rabbinic court sentenced a follower of the false Messiah, Shabbetai Zvi – who preached antinomianism – to be lashed for eating pork during Passover; and that the young Karl Marx had a penchant for a pork and matzah sandwich at Pesach time.

Finally, we come to modern America where in 1885 the Reform movement declared that the Mosaic dietary laws were no longer relevant: and yet there were Progressive rabbis who could not bring themselves to partake of pig. “Shrimp is treif, pork is antisemitic,” declared one.

And also to Israel, where laws that restricted pig-breeding and the sale of “white meat” have been challenged by secularists contesting the influence of religion in the state. Such was the horror of the pig that when there was an outbreak of swine flu in 2006, the strictly Orthodox deputy health minister Yaacov Litzman refused to call it by its name, instead terming it “Mexican flu”.

​

Forbidden – A 3,000-year History of Jews and the Pig, by Jordan D. Rosenblum (New York University Press, £23,99) is out now