In April 1913, Rabbi Avraham Gershom Levitt, the shochet (licensed kosher animal slaughterer) of the remote Canadian Jewish community of Halifax, Nova Scotia was arrested, tried and found guilty of “inhumane practices in kosher slaughter”.
The prosecution’s case rested on Rabbi Levitt’s refusal to stun an animal before killing, a method proscribed in Jewish law and he was fined $6.00 with $7.65 costs for causing “unnecessary pain and suffering while slaughtering”. Although the sentence was swiftly reversed on appeal, the affair was thought by many to be an antisemitic attack.
The episode is among those mentioned by Professor David Fraser in **Anti-Shechita Prosecutions in the Anglo-American World, 1855–1913: A major attack on Jewish freedoms, a work which itself may be viewed against a backdrop of increasing global antisemitism not seen in almost 80 years – durig the depths of The Holocaust.
In July 1940, for example, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that “virtually 90%” of European Jews had been prevented from eating kosher killed meat and poultry”.
Now, Jewish history continues to be repeated: Twice since the start of 2018, diverse news outlets like US Jewish website Aish.com and Britain’s The Guardian newspaper have noted marked trends in hostility towards Jewish and Muslim methods of animal slaughter.
Are such incidents simply vexatious, or are they, as suggested by the author of the Aish.com feature, part of a thinly veiled campaign aiming to make both communities feel unwelcome? If so, Jews and Muslims have more to bring us together than the hatreds that drive us apart.
Meanwhile Professor Fraser maintains that his work is “the first study of historical attempts by animal welfare groups to ban the Jewish method of slaughter (shechita). It details cases from Australia, Canada, England, Scotland, and the United States, many for the first time, in which anti-animal cruelty groups prosecuted those engaged in shechita as part of their attempts to introduce compulsory stunning of animals before slaughter. Despite claims to the contrary, this study offers clear evidence of underlying, unrelenting antisemitic motivations in the prosecutions, and highlights the ways in which a basic idea of innate Jewish cruelty was always juxtaposed with an overtly Christian ideal of humane treatment of animals across time and borders”.
I read the opening pages of Professor Fraser’s work just as it was reported that UK Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn had allegedly suggested that people like me lack a ‘British sense of irony’. I wonder how he would view the following:
The large proportion of Jewish people who have helped to found internationally renowned welfare and social justice societies is well documented and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (the SPCA, later the RSPCA) is no exception.
Moreover, its start also became another example of petty antisemitism when Lewis Gompertz, a co-founder and honorary secretary, was forced out following a decision to limit membership to Christians!
The several ironies are clear: Not only had Gompertz, an eccentric engineer and vegan of Dutch Jewish descent helped to found the SPCA, although known to be Jewish, he married in church and was buried in a Christian cemetery.
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David Fraser is Professor of Law and Social Theory at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on legal aspects of the Shoah and modern Jewish legal history in the Anglo-American world. He has previously published the book Honorary Protestants: The Jewish School Question in Montreal, 1867-1997 (2015).
**Anti-Shechita Prosecutions in the Anglo-American World, 1855–1913: A major attack on Jewish freedoms is available from Amazon in hardcover @ $119.00.
© Natalie Wood (24 August 2018)
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