February 26, 2015

New attempts in the U.K. to outlaw shechitah (ritual slaughter) — and the broader political threat this poses to the Jews — bring to mind a book by Elijah J. Schochet, who has deep roots in the L.A. Jewish community. In his “Animal Life in Jewish Tradition: Attitudes and Relationships” (1984), Schochet essentially argues that Jews suffer in part from the historical fact of being premature animal rights activists. 

Darren Aronofsky’s 2014 film “Noah” goes too far in arguing that the issue of whether to eat animals was the crux of the disagreements between good guys and bad guys leading up to the flood. Yet he has a point about the Hebrew Bible. The biblical-rabbinic dictum of tza’ar ba’alei hayyim — do nothing to worsen the pain of living beings — is age-old. 

The Jewish historian Josephus devoted much space to refuting calumnies about Jewish animal worship including the alleged worship in the Temple of an ass’s head—connected to allegations of Jewish cannibalism. Rome’s Stoic philosophers admitted that pagan practices of bludgeoning animals with hammers were crueler than Jewish ritual slaughter with a clean, sharp blade.

Yet, by the 19th century, the German idealist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer ignored relatively humane Jewish practices and argued instead that cruelty to animals was “a doctrine revolting, gross, and barbarous peculiar to the West, and which has roots in Judaism.” The movement to ban shechitah on grounds of science as well as humane treatment of animals dates back to the 1850s in Germany. Yet, lurking behind “modern,” enlightened rationales were persistent medieval prejudices. 

In the 1840s and 1850s, the debate over “scientific” versus traditional methods of slaughtering animals began. Even those advocating “scientific” methods initially admitted that evidence was lacking that there were reliable new methods that were more humane than shechitah. In the late 19th century, this began to change with the  appearance of stunning or electric shock to render the animal insensible before the coup de grace was administered. The reality, then and now, was that stunning was expensive and not easy to implement uniformly and effectively. As a consequence, it remains debatable about whether, in practice, kosher methods of slaughter are less humane. 

By the 1880s and 1890s, anti-Semitism had become a major dynamic behind the attack of shechitah in German-speaking Europe. The anti-Semites went beyond declarations of concern that animals should not be caused unnecessary pain to aggressive attacks on “Jewish cruelty.” Newspaper accounts were particularly lurid. According to an 1878 article in the labor newspaper Neue Freie Volkszeitung, “The shochet [ritual slaughterer] comes with his knife and length of his arm and cuts the sword into the neck of the animal: that knife goes right through his shaking bellow. Such barbaric animal cruelty takes place today. With this kind of animal cruelty, all other [kinds] are kids’ play.” The shochet’s knife continued as an inflammatory symbol of bloodthirstiness and brutality.

Anti-shechitah laws were enacted in Norway (where they are still in force) even before the Nazis made the movement into a major thrust of their anti-Jewish legislation. Currently, momentum is gathering from Scandinavia across Europe to ban not only Jewish ritual slaughtering but also the importation of kosher meat. Previously banned in Norway, Sweden and Iceland, ritual slaughter without prior stunning has been outlawed in Denmark, overturning a 2012 compromise that allowed Jewish and Muslim ritual slaughter to continue. Denmark’s Minister for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, Dan Jorgensen, said, “Animal rights come before religion.” 

Double standards and inconsistences abound. Sweden bans Jewish ritual slaughter as cruel but allows its indigenous Sami people to herd and hunt reindeer by helicopter, which does not induce a tranquil form of death. 

On the philosophical level, there is a legitimate debate about the need to balance the religious rights of minority Jews and Muslims to eat kosher meat or practice halal versus the understandable distaste of the general public  for anything cruel. The problem is that — on the political level — the anti-ritual slaughter movement, though ostensibly aimed at Muslims, invariably threatens Jews as much or more. Even very pro-Israeli politicians, such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, have made a political calculation to exploit such sentiment despite the fact that doing so plays into the hands of anti-Semites who are heirs of the Nazis.

In her novel, “The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story” (2008), Diane Ackerman wrote: “Although Mengele’s subjects could be operated on without any painkillers at all, a remarkable example of Nazi zoophilia is that a leading biologist was once punished for not giving worms enough anesthesia during an experiment.” In their perverted way, the Nazis were nature worshipers and animal lovers.  

The handling of the issue of ritual slaughter varies with national contexts and political traditions. One side is the U.S., where the courts have overwhelmingly sided with the rights of religious minorities to perform ritual slaughter without stunning, subject to broader health and safety regulations. The other side is occupied by France, where the tradition of laicizing in the name of republican unity rules out any recognition of minority rights — from how you dress and what you eat — and the U.K., where traditions of religious liberty are not constitutional mandates and are, therefore, vulnerable to political expediency.

In the U.K., as Seth Mandel  points out in Commentary magazine, UKIP (the U.K. Independence Party) has now taken the political low road where the right-of-center insurgent party has used shock videos exposing “Muslim slaughter” of animals to whip up an electorate in favor of a sweeping ban against the practice. Even UKIP politicians admit that their vote-driven position threatens to make U.K. Jews and kosher butchering into “collateral damage.” Such damage may be great in a country where anti-Semitic incidents are at record levels and the dangers of cross-English Channel contagion of Parisian Charlie Hebdo/Hyper Cacher butchery is great. 

It may not be politically correct to say so, but  studies show that Jewish standards for kosher slaughter of meat are generally more restrictive than Muslim standards for halal slaughter, and shochets also are generally better trained than their Muslim counterparts. 

A few years ago, then-president-elect of the British Veterinary Association John Blackwell, announced his desire to extend a new Danish law prohibiting kosher and halal slaughter to the U.K. because it causes pain to the animal for “five or six seconds. … They will feel the massive injury of the tissues of the neck. … They will perceive the aspiration of blood. They will breathe in before they lose consciousness.” There is no conclusive scientific evidence for his claims — unlike the conclusive historical evidence of the association of anti-ritual slaughter campaigns and anti-Semitism. The irony is that, at the same time Blackwell leveled his attack on shechitah and halal slaughtering, the U.K.’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs issued a cease-and-desist order against electronic stunning because of a controversy over the administration of high-voltage electricity. Evidence compiled by U.S. animal-rights activist Temple Grandin and others shows massive malpractice in slaughterhouses that fail to stun animals properly on the way to slaughter.

Discrimination against Jews and Muslims can go both ways. A few years ago in London’s The Telegraph, a writer argued in favor of a British ban on halal slaughter by himself practicing bait-and-switch and using an accompanying photo showing two ultra-Orthodox Jews in a darkened, dirty Parisian abattoir. On the other hand, there has been no outrage over Palestinians slaughtering a sheep near a section of the controversial Israeli barrier, in the Shuafat refugee camp in the West Bank near Jerusalem, on the first day of the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.

Recent scandals show that the kosher butchering industry does not always live up to its own high standards. This means that public scrutiny and intervention are sometimes necessary. It is also important to note that in high-profile cases, such as Agriprocessors in Iowa, the most well-documented abuses involve the working conditions of undocumented workers rather than the treatment of animals. In the American traditions of voluntarism and pluralism, the ideal solutions would be self-regulation and reform, though we have quite a way to go to fully achieve such reforms.  

There are times when worship of scientific progress can get in the way of common-sense accommodations of religion and minority rights. I favor the American tradition of erring on the side of minority rights. Otherwise, we open ourselves to many embarrassing anomalies. Should non-Jews (including many African- and Asian-Americans) who are lactose intolerant be prevented from relying on the safety of a kosher label? Or should multicultural experiments in kosher-halal dining facilities at universities be forced to close down? The burden is on those who demand that we break with centuries-old American as well as millennia-old Jewish traditions that have served, and continue to serve, many of our people well.

Harold Brackman is a historian and a consultant to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.