The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World 1st edition Edition by Jordan D. Rosenblum ( Cambridge University Press)

Partial comments by John Mandsager in his Aug. 20, 2018 review in the “Ancient Jew Review”:
“As [this book] is primarily focused on Hellenistic, Rabbinic, and Christian sources, Rosenblum is careful to address the question of justification in context, while resisting later, decontextualized, attempts to comprehend Jewish dietary laws. Using Rosenblum’s categories of justification, we can see that modern (and ancient) attempts to provide justification often rely heavily on reason… or Douglas’s structural arguments about eating animals only of the correct category …, while Rosenblum insists that we attend to the lack of explicit justifications in the Hebrew Bible itself.

“Without any real primary evidence, scholars have nevertheless asserted that they have uncovered the explanation for why certain animals are biblical declared edible or inedible”. And, as Rosenblum shows for many of his sources, ancient authors also offered “the” explanation for these laws, even as the Hebrew Bible remains mostly silent. Rabbinic sources are the exception to this justificatory impulse, as rabbinic sources primarily focus on the question of how to keep these laws, rather than why one must keep them.

Thus, “The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World” is more tightly focused on a specific interpretive question than Rosenblum’s earlier work, “Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism” (2010). In the earlier book, Rosenblum focuses on questions that are at once broader and intimately tied to the question of "why do Jews eat what they eat," the questions of "how do Rabbinic Jewish men distinguish, differentiate, and define themselves, via their tables and table practices?"…. What you eat matters, but whom you eat with matters as well. Questions of identity (both self-identification and othering) and commensality also are key components of The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World” ….

“The book is organized by time period and type of source, as Rosenblum provides sources that consider the biblical laws concerning the categories of permitted and forbidden animals; the prohibitions on eating of blood, the sciatic nerve, a parent and its offspring on the same day, on cooking a kid in its own milk, on animals not slaughtered by humans; and the prohibition on sending a bird away from her nest….

“To briefly sketch some of Rosenblum's findings, we see that Greek and Roman sources are often perplexed by or antagonistic to these laws, Hellenistic Jews justify the laws via allegory, reason, and revelation, Rabbinic sources only begin to provide justifications beyond revelation with the Amoraim, and later Christian sources return to allegory, while denying the literal adherence to these prohibitions.”