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Is turkey kosher? As far as I know, every group of Jews eats turkey, so certainly turkey is kosher. But why is it kosher? Some animals, such as quadrupeds (chew cud, split hooves) or fish (fins and scales) have simple rules that determine whether or not they are kosher. But what is the rule for birds? Actually, there is no rule for birds. The Torah does not specify a rule, although it makes clear that some birds (e.g. turtledoves) are kosher and others (e.g. eagles) are not. By the Middle Ages, though, the rule of which birds are kosher is: tradition! Chickens, geese, turtledoves – these are all well known to be kosher, so they are kosher. On the other hand, there is no tradition of roast albatross in Jewish cuisine, so albatross is not kosher; likewise hummingbirds, storks, owls and so on. Now, given this, people who know a little bit about Jews will not, I think, be very surprised that some rabbis actually have held that turkey is also not kosher. After all, our ancestors, centuries ago, did not eat turkey. Turkey is native to the Americas. Indeed, some Jewish families today, for instance, the Lapidus family of Boston, have a tradition of never eating turkey. Many years ago, I heard this story, when Marcia Lapidus Kaunfer was my teacher in Hebrew high school. The Lapidus family (she said) trace their ancestry back four hundred years to an ancestor named Rabbi Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller. Rabbi Heller, who lived about 1620, in the time of the Pilgrims actually, was a disciple of Maharal of Prague, the hero of the Golem legend. Someone (this is the Lapidus story) once brought Heller a turkey and asked him whether it was kosher. Rabbi Heller naturally answered that it was not kosher (no tradition, as we said). And so to this day the family finds other menu options on our national holiday. When I first heard this story, I didn’t know that I would become a Jewish historian, and I especially did not know that I would spend a decade of my life writing a biography of Heller. But I did. You can buy it on Amazon; it is called (appropriately, I thought) Rabbi Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller. When we have our Thanksgiving dinners, we should no doubt obey Heller’s advice, in one of his works, to avoid harmful foods as if they were unkosher (“the Torah is a tree of life,” he quotes, not a suicide pact). And as we commemorate the Pilgrim fathers, we could do worse than to remember a contemporary of theirs who studied Talmud in the ghetto of Prague, and who, like the Pilgrims, suffered religious persecution (that is another story for another time), and who, also like the Pilgrims, established communal thanksgiving celebrations (yet another story), but who unlike the Pilgrims, and unlike most of us, never ate any turkey. |
“Is Turkey Kosher? and other Jewish Thanksgiving Questions”