Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law
David Freidenreich
Abstract
This book explores how Jews, Christians, and Muslims conceptualize “us” and “them” through rules about the preparation of food by adherents of other religions and the act of eating with such outsiders. The book analyzes the significance of food to religious formation, elucidating the ways ancient and medieval scholars use food restrictions to think about the “other.” It illuminates the subtly different ways Jews, Christians, and Muslims perceive themselves, and it demonstrates how these distinctive self-conceptions shape ideas about religious foreigners and communal boundaries. This work, the ... More
This book explores how Jews, Christians, and Muslims conceptualize “us” and “them” through rules about the preparation of food by adherents of other religions and the act of eating with such outsiders. The book analyzes the significance of food to religious formation, elucidating the ways ancient and medieval scholars use food restrictions to think about the “other.” It illuminates the subtly different ways Jews, Christians, and Muslims perceive themselves, and it demonstrates how these distinctive self-conceptions shape ideas about religious foreigners and communal boundaries. This work, the first to analyze change over time across the legal literatures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, contributes to the history of interreligious intolerance and to the comparative study of religion.
Keywords:
Jews,
Christians,
Muslims,
rules,
preparation of food,
outsiders,
food restrictions,
other,
self-conceptions,
religious foreigners
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780520253216 |
Published to California Scholarship Online: May 2012 |
DOI:10.1525/california/9780520253216.001.0001 |