The Jewish Dog and 'Shehitah'

The essential clash between Judaism and Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, has been over purity and contamination, in particular, by touch. The anxiety is biblically derived. It pertains especially to consuming meat and is amplified by the biophilic 'affiliation' of humans with animals. The current debate over kosher and halal slaughtering carries over these anxieties. That debate is exemplified in the article by the prohibition of Christian butchers purchasing and selling non-kosher quarters of meat in the early eighteenth century Roman Ghetto and the fight against this prohibition waged by Rabbi Tranquillo Corcos

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65729/1/j.1752-7325.1980.tb01869.x.pd

Biblical Creatures: The Animal as an Object of Interpretation in Pre-Modern Christian and Jewish Hermeneutic Traditions

This issue of Interfaces explores the question of how Jewish and Christian authors in pre-modern Latin Europe thought and wrote about some of the animals mentioned in the Bible. To them, thinking about animals was a way of thinking about what it means to be human, to perceive the world, and to worship God and his creation. Animals' nature, animals' actions and animals' virtues or shortcomings were used as symbols and metaphors for describing human behavior, human desires, human abilities and disabilities, and positive or negative inclinations or traits of character. Both Christian and Jewish medieval and early modern scholars wondered about how they could possibly delve into the deeper layers of meaning they assumed any textual or extra-textual animal to convey. Not surprisingly, they often had to deal with the fact that a specific animal was of interest to members of both religious communities. A comparison between Jewish and Christian ways of reading and interpreting biblical passages featuring animals shows what the two hermeneutic traditions had in common, what separated them, and how they influenced each other, depending on the historical context in which the authors worked. The papers in this issue of Interfaces cover a wide range of animal species, such as the dove, the stag, the unicorn, the elephant, the crocodile, the lion, the hyena, the raven, the hare, and the dog as medieval and early modern authors and illuminators portrayed and interpreted them. Since several themes come up in more than one paper concerning different kinds of animals, this issue groups its papers in three sections. These sections deal with divine creatures (mediators between humankind and God, symbols for the human believer, agents of heaven); exotic creatures (animals in different parts of the world, encounters between humans and animals in past times, animals with extraordinary appearances and properties); and social creatures (transgressive and pious animals, animals used to demonstrate obedience or to facilitate transgression, animals as symbols for conflict or cooperation)

The Jews and Ius Commune

From the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, there was a gradually increasing integration of Jews into systems of ius commune, loosely, the law of the land, but actually a legal tradition based on Roman law, which subsumed local law, usually called ius proprium. The integration might be purely theoretical or in fact, as certainly occurred in the papal state and it seems elsewhere in Italy, too. This legal integration prepared the way for the major legal upheaval worked by the French Revolution. The implications are many. The details mostly unresearched. The Tractatus de Iudaeis of Giuseppe Sessa (Turin, 1713) is the fullest introduction to the issues. The Tract on Jews of Giuseppe Sessa is a watershed text. It lauds the medieval restrictions on Jews, perceives them in the most negative theological terms, yet equally anticipates full Jewish participation as citizens of a state, living under the identical laws as do others. The tradition of Jews as cives, citizens, actually began in the ancient world, but was properly resurrected only in the early fourteenth century in the writings of the major legal scholar Bartolus. The passage from Bartolus to full emancipation, however, took four centuries. The special worth of Sessa’s tract is that writing in 1716, he was on the edge, looking backward and forward simultaneously, intimating, but never quite reaching. We see in him, therefore, the final resistance to the passage from the restricted Jew, living in a confessional state, where religion determines politics, to the Jew made a fully fledged citizen in a deconfessionalized, modern, post-emancipatory civil unit, where the secular government determines the state’s direction. This presentation is for the following text(s): Tractatus de Iudaeis (Tract on the Jews) by Giuseppe Sess

A Challenge to Sexual and Marital Propriety and Communal Reaction

The selection of sources from the early 1550\u27s Rome deal with the question of honor of young women and their fathers. The Jewish Community of Rome was unimpressed. It wanted it made clear that one did not make accusations that could harm the well-being, in fact, mostly financial, but also the honor, of young women. Indeed, the bride Ricca was herself awarded what amounted to a hefty fine; we know that among Christians, it was the father’s honor that was considered impugned, and any monetary sanctions would go to him. Not here. Finally, we learn something about sacred and profane. Shem Tov approached a Christian for the rather crude cure. Christians in similar situations normally went to priests, considering the curse and the surrounding issues matters of holiness. We also learn that on everyday levels, there was considerable interchange between Jews and Christians. The events take place just five years before Rome’s ghetto was instituted by Pope Paul IV, but even in the ghetto period—which endured for three hundred years—such interactions would have been highly probable

Trent 1475: The Responses of a Pope and a Jewish Chronicler

This presentation discusses two responses to the 1475 trial of Jews accused of ritually murdering a Christian boy, Simon, in the city of Trent. One comes from Pope Sixtus IV and another, a century later, from a Jewish chronicler, Joseph ha-Cohen