For many Jews, the pig is not a for­ma­tive part of Jew­ish iden­ti­ty. Yet accord­ing to Jor­dan D. Rosen­blum, it is pre­cise­ly the pig’s absence that makes it an inte­gral part of Jew­ish his­to­ry and iden­ti­ty. In his book For­bid­den, Rosen­blum explores the some­times vio­lent, some­times hilar­i­ous rela­tion­ship between Jews and the pig over the centuries.

While the pig has hum­ble begin­nings in the Hebrew Bible, it has emerged over time as the for­bid­den food. Lit­er­a­ture dat­ing back to the Sec­ond Tem­ple peri­od sug­gests that pigs were weaponized by the Greeks against the Jews to quell resis­tance, thus ignit­ing sto­ries of Jew­ish mar­tyr­dom, hero­ic resis­tance, and porcine euphemisms — sto­ries that would rever­ber­ate for cen­turies to come.

The pig turned into a sym­bol of Judaism’s vices in the face of per­se­cu­tion insti­gat­ed by Rome. Through­out the Mid­dle Ages, and cul­mi­nat­ing with the Span­ish Inqui­si­tion, Chris­t­ian rulers and believ­ers often asso­ci­at­ed Jews with pigs, lead­ing to mock­ery, degra­da­tion, and, in the worst case, mur­der. Even chang­ing sides and eat­ing pork did not help: dis­parag­ing­ly referred to as Mar­ra­nos (Span­ish for ​“pigs”), Jew­ish con­verts to Chris­tian­i­ty couldn’t escape the pig, nei­ther in Chris­t­ian Spain nor in oth­er countries.

In the ear­ly mod­ern peri­od, Jews are described as using the sym­bol and lit­er­al flesh of the pig to counter Chris­tians or to strength­en their con­nec­tion to God through rit­u­al inver­sion, as evi­denced by Shakespeare’s The Mer­chant of Venice and the leg­ends sur­round­ing the trans­gres­sive Sab­batean and Frankist move­ments. How­ev­er, these are rare exam­ples in the move toward eman­ci­pa­tion, which, in most cas­es, demand­ed that Jews aban­don their tra­di­tions — includ­ing their reser­va­tions about pork — to be grant­ed polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic rights. This esca­lat­ed with Com­mu­nism and Nazism, ide­olo­gies that sought to erad­i­cate Jew­ish cul­ture and Jew­ish lives through the use of age-old stereotypes.

It appears that through­out the cen­turies, Jews have assert­ed agency over the pig (and thus over pres­sures to con­form to non-Jew­ish stan­dards), but only in the wake of moder­ni­ty did Jews ful­ly gain pow­er over it. Rosen­blum also explores twen­ti­eth- and twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry pop-cul­tur­al ref­er­ences relat­ed to the pig, such as Hebrew Union College’s ​“Tre­fa Ban­quet” in 1883.

Rosenblum’s expla­na­tions are aca­d­e­m­ic yet enter­tain­ing and easy to fol­low. His book is orga­nized chrono­log­i­cal­ly, illus­trat­ing the com­plex stage on which Jew­ish – porcine rela­tions have unfold­ed. Along the way, Rosen­blum not only adds the occa­sion­al pig pun, but he also clar­i­fies the many cul­tur­al and reli­gious con­no­ta­tions that have come to be asso­ci­at­ed with Jews, Jew­ish dietary laws, and pigs. Using a wealth of sources, he invites read­ers to delve deep into the Jew­ish cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance of the swine over time.