Read Online Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig by Mark Essig - Free Book Online Page B

customs.”Many Jews acquiesced and “sacrificed to idols and profaned the Sabbath.”Worst of all, Antiochus ordered the Jews “to defile the sanctuary, . . . to sacrifice swine and unclean animals, and to leave their sons uncircumcised.”
    In the Second Book of the Maccabees, the invaders force pork into the mouth of Eleazer, an elderly Jewish scribe, but he spits it out. His tormenters, old friends who have gone over to the enemy’s side, bring him aside and quietly tell him they will secretly replace the pork with kosher meat so that he can obey God’s law while pretending to obey Antiochus. Again Eleazer refuses: “Many of the young should suppose that Eleazer in his ninetieth year has gone over to an alien religion,” he says. “For the sake of living a brief moment longer, they should be led astray because of me.”His purpose, he explains, is to leave “a noble example of how to die a good death willingly and nobly for the revered and holy laws.” So he goes to the rack and is beaten to death over a mouthful of pork.
    In the next chapter of the Second Book of the Maccabees, the pork-related punishments continue. A mother and her seven sons are arrested and told they must eat swine’s flesh, but they too refuse. On the king’s orders, a guard cuts out the tongue of one of the brothers, scalps him, and chops off his hands and feet. Then a large pan is heated over a fire, and the king orders his guards to take the brother, “still breathing, and to fry him in the pan,” which they do.After he is dead, they kill another brother in the same way, and then another, until all seven brothers are dead, at which point Antiochus orders the mother slain as well.
    Although these episodes occurred hundreds of years after the laws of Leviticus were laid down, they comprise only the second recorded instance of pork eating among the Jews. The first occurs in the book of Isaiah, when God expresses his fury at a few people who have eaten “swine’s flesh, and broth of abominable things.” They have done so in secret, hidden away in gardens and graveyards, and their sin is known only to God.It is a matter between the Lord and his people, and God promises to destroy the offenders.
    In Maccabees, the situation is public. Infuriated by the Jews’ desire to remain a separate people, Antiochus has outlawed the most visible symbol of their difference: their refusal to share a table with their neighbors. Here eating pork is not simply a matter of ritual purity, of remaining holy in order to keep the temple pure. It has become, instead, the key to cultural identity. The Books of the Maccabees provided a model of what it meant to be Jewish: even in the face of death, a Jew must refuse pork in order to remain true to his people.
    Greek rulers killed the Jewish elder Eleazer because he refused to eat pork. For centuries, the scriptural prohibition played little role in Jewish life because all of the Israelites’ neighbors rejected pork as well. Only with the arrival of pig-loving Greeks and Romans did pork abstention become a crucial aspect of Jewish identity.

    Pork eating hadn’t carried much significance as a marker of Jewish identity before the Greek conquest of Persia because most others in the region didn’t eat pork either. Since the Israelites’ return from exile in Egypt, abstaining from pork simply had been one way that they remained pure in order to preserve their relationship with God.Now, however, it also became a way that they drew boundaries between themselves and those they lived among. Indeed, when pork-eating Greeks ruled over the Jews, refusing pork became a key element of what it meant to be Jewish. You are what you eat, the saying goes, but the Jews were what they didn’t eat.
    The Jews rebelled against Antiochus and in 142 bc won control of Palestine and reconsecrated the Temple, an event commemorated in the celebration of Chanukah. Their independence lasted less than a century: in 63 bc the Romans