Why don’t Jews eat pork?

[Valjean]

Oh for heaven's sake. It was economics, politics and, to an extent, aesthetics.

Pigs don't graze and they can't be herded about like sheep or goats. They must be kept in pens.
Unlike grazers, they must be fed the same food people eat.
They cannot be ridden, they can't pull a plow. They don't lay eggs. They can't change grass to milk or wool.
They originated as northern European forest animals. They don't do well in hot climates. In hot climates they need lots of water -- a scarce resource -- plus mud to wallow in and shield their skin from the sun.
Confined in pens, the normally clean animals have no choice but to relieve themselves where they live, sleep and eat, soiling themselves, creating a massive stench, polluting water sources and generally being a public nuisance.
And they make rude sounds.

Thus pork was an expensive indulgence of the rich and a health hazard and annoyance to the general community. Naturally pig farms were resented and the pigs regarded as unclean. When they could, communities banned pork production.

The trichinosis theory is dubious, as the cysts weren't discovered till 1821, weren't recognized as pathologic for some years after and the route of transmission by undercooked pork not established till the 1860s
I've also read that in the ancient middle East you were more at risk of contracting diseases like brucellosis, listeriosis or campylobacteriosis from beef and poultry than trichinosis from pork.

 

[metis]

I asked around and the chief answer I got is that they never learned how to cook it.

Maybe it'll be kosher if you burn the hell out of it?

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

Oh for heaven's sake. It was economics, politics and, to an extent, aesthetics.

Oh for heaven's sake. To the best of my knowledge, while there is plenty of informed (and uninformed) speculation. the consensus of scholarship is that we really do not know the reason with any degree of certainty. So the question now becomes, how do you explain, much less justify, your cocky certainty?

 

[Levite]

Oh for heaven's sake. It was economics, politics and, to an extent, aesthetics.

Pigs don't graze and they can't be herded about like sheep or goats. They must be kept in pens.
Unlike grazers, they must be fed the same food people eat.
They cannot be ridden, they can't pull a plow. They don't lay eggs. They can't change grass to milk or wool.
They originated as northern European forest animals. They don't do well in hot climates. In hot climates they need lots of water -- a scarce resource -- plus mud to wallow in and shield their skin from the sun.
Confined in pens, the normally clean animals have no choice but to relieve themselves where they live, sleep and eat, soiling themselves, creating a massive stench, polluting water sources and generally being a public nuisance.
And they make rude sounds.

Thus pork was an expensive indulgence of the rich and a health hazard and annoyance to the general community. Naturally pig farms were resented and the pigs regarded as unclean. When they could, communities banned pork production.

The trichinosis theory is dubious, as the cysts weren't discovered till 1821, weren't recognized as pathologic for some years after and the route of transmission by undercooked pork not established till the 1860s
I've also read that in the ancient middle East you were more at risk of contracting diseases like brucellosis, listeriosis or campylobacteriosis from beef and poultry than trichinosis from pork.

While I don't know that there is support for stating the above as certainties, I will say I find it more convincing than the trichinosis hypothesis, though I would expect there would be some other reasons at work in addition to these.

 

[Akivah]

Everything is speculation. The real answer is "we don't know and we are comfortable with that uncertainty".

 

[gnostic]

I think you are missing a lot if you don't eat cracklings from roast pork belly. Delicious!

 

[metis]

I think you are missing a lot if you don't eat cracklings from roast pork belly. Delicious!

But eating them makes you look exactly like your avatar. Or IS that a selfie???

 

[outhouse]

This is the trichinosis hypothesis. A while back, there were some articles written by archaeologists and historians noting that the Ancient Near East did not appear to have been inundated with constant plagues of trichinosis, and yet many of those cultures ate pork. Ritual practices we don't necessarily understand today are not necessarily explicable as primitive attempts at sanitation or health improvement. They might be actual ritual practices.

True but.

Regional practices based on geographic location may play a bigger part for how well the meat was cooked or kept. We don't see the absence of pig bones in Canaanite cultures like we do in the early settlements after 1200 BC. So we can look at a regional practice that migrated OR the preparation and preservation methods changed with the collapse of previous civilizations. I personally would place more weight on the latter.

To understand this issue one needs to understand the ethnogenesis and many answers are not known. But we do know major civilizations collapsed and for the most part these displaced Canaanites made up the these new cultures in the highlands of what would become Israel. Its funny how we see many mythology and previous traditions reflected in these emerging cultures, but dietary customs changed in this respect in all the different cultures with both southern and northern cultures following this new dietary tradition.

 

[outhouse]

Everything is speculation. The real answer is "we don't know and we are comfortable with that uncertainty".

Either we investigate and weigh odds, or do poor work guessing about what might have been.

This topic has quite the interest to me, and objective opinions need to be applied to what Is known to make educated guesses. There is not a complete lack of evidence here that does not frame in the possibilities to only a few possible conclusions.

Thus pork was an expensive indulgence of the rich

Which as a great point that directly applies to the previous collapsed civilizations, and emerging poor cultures of various Semitic cultures migrating slowly into this new area.

 

[ether-ore]

Please don’t quote scripture. I can do that on my own. Is there something that predates Jewish dietary laws? I don’t have an answer. I can only guess.

My own opinion concerning Jewish dietary laws is that they were meant for the times they were living in. It is a matter of degrees. Some foods are less healthy than others and ancient food processing techniques perhaps did not work well with certain types of meat in terms of eliminating parasites that may have been embedded in the flesh of some animals. I believe God gave these laws so that if adhered to, the nation of Israel would have remained healthy. I do not believe these laws had any bearing on salvation... in other words, if one did not obey these laws, they might get sick and even die, but their salvation would not be in jeopardy.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

My own opinion concerning Jewish dietary laws is that they were meant for the times they were living in.

Or, evolved for the times they were living in. Again:

Religious restrictions on the consumption of pork are a tradition in the Ancient Near East. Swine were prohibited in ancient Syria and Phonecia, ... [ibid]

Whatever the reason, the aversion to pork was not limited to nascent Israel or its God; the Torah simply took it and invested it with religious import.

 

[David M]

Interestingly, we read the following in the Wikipedia entry on Bubonic plague.

Interestingly that simple.wiki entry looks to be contaminated with a good dose of BS. Pigs have not been not identified as a blood-borne carrier of plague and Muslim cities were certainly heavily affected by plague so the claim that they suffered fewer deaths due to not eating pork is rubbish.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

Pigs have not been not identified as a blood-borne carrier of plague ...

note

 

[David M]

note

That link doe not state that pigs can carry the plague in their blood.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

That link doe not state that pigs can carry the plague in their blood.

It's hard to know whether this is a case of being willfully dense or woefully disingenuous, but believe what you wish. Others can draw their own conclusion from the link.

At the same time, it is easy to infer that settlements on the trade routes would have served as hot spots for disease, and it is reasonable to think that pastoralists would have developed a healthy suspicion about the extent to which the religion and the dietary habits found therein were key factors.

(Parenthetically, here we learn of the role played by pigs in the influenza pandemic "that killed at least 25 million people in one year.")

 

[David M]

It's hard to know whether this is a case of being willfully dense or woefully disingenuous, but believe what you wish. Others can draw their own conclusion from the link.

What comes up in that link is only a part of an article. What is visible does not contain the word "pig" at all and the rest of the article is not accessible.

Pigs can indeed catch plague as can cats, dogs, cattle, sheep, goats and horses, but in all these species it difficult for the infection to occur. For pigs the identified vector is again a flea, however it is P. irritans rather than X. cheopsis which is the species that has been identified as the principal plague flea. P. Irritans is a weak transmitter of the plague.

None of this supports your contention that transmission of plague occurs by eating infected pigs.