Kosher

When the high priests of Israel made sacrifices to the God of Abraham, they followed a ritual in their slaughter of the beast which was both humane and sanitary. Using a long, smooth blade, twice the width of the animal’s throat, they severed with a delicate stroke, scrupulously exact, the fourth ventricle of the trembling sheep, permitting the body to lie undisturbed until the blood had thoroughly drained from its lax veins. The ritual has never changed. Meat that is not fit for a sacrifice is, to the orthodox, not fit to eat. If there is any blemish in the manner of the killing, the meat of that killing is treife, unclean; it taints whatever it touches, and it were better for a man to cut off his right hand than to eat of it. Certain beasts are of themselves unclean—the pig, the camel and the hare; all carnivorous beasts, all birds of prey, all creeping things. Others, when slaughtered according to the law of Shehitah, are kosher.

Last week, before the U. S. Supreme Court at Washington, D. C, the law of Moses was cited together with the law of New York State. It is illegal in that State for butchers to represent meats as kosher which are not kosher, thus leading the faithful to defile themselves, albeit unwittingly. Certain packers—the Hygrade Provision Co., E. Greenbaum Co., Guckenheimer & Hess, Lewis & Fox Co., H. Statz—challenged the constitutionality of the law. They said that the term “kosher” was no more than a synonym for clean, that its religious meaning was too speculative to make legal application possible, that the enforcing of a religious definition was not within the power of the state. They pointed out that, according to the ancient law, if there is the least nick in the long smooth blade with which the beast is killed, the meat is not strictly kosher, nor is it if the slaughterer be a deaf mute, an idiot, a minor, or a non-Jew. How can all these things be surely ascertained in regard, say, to a lamb chop? Is unknowing transgression a sin? That was what the packers wanted to know.

Countered Samuel H. Hofstadter, Special Deputy Attorney-General for the State: “The cornerstone of the sale of kosher meat products is the belief of hundreds of thousands of people that the word ‘kosher’ has a meaning. . . . They eat or abstain from meat according to conscientious convictions. Whatever violates these convictions, either by force or fraud, is a matter of public interest and affects the good order of the State.”