“I am Not a Butcher”

Rabbinic halakhah encompasses numerous areas wherein determination of the facts pertinent to the law appears to demand something like professional expertise. Cases of this sort introduce a dialectical dynamic of interest to the sociology of law. On the one hand, such cases can be construed as rabbinic assertions of authority over the relevant professional field. On the other hand, rabbis undermine their authority insofar as they expose themselves to dependence upon non-rabbinic experts, unless they can either produce experts from within their own ranks, or so frame the relevant laws as to somehow render complex determination of fact less necessary. In this article, I take up the relationship between rabbis and butchers, or between rabbinic law and the production and sale of meat. The most significant intersections, real and conceptual, between rabbis and butchers in the classical rabbinic corpus occur around the law of the “torn” animal, the terefah. The article therefore focuses on it, but not to the exclusion of other relevant bodies of law. In part one, I attempt to explain the origins of the innovations in tannaitic terefah law that distinguish it from its biblical and Second Temple predecessors. I suggest that these innovations represent, at least in part, analogical extensions of the law of blemishes. One consequence of the elaboration of terefah law and related bodies of law is rabbinic dependence on a range of professional experts, first and foremost butchers, for determination of relevant facts, and even for clarification of obscure legal terms. Such dependence, and related features of terefah law that arise from the complexity of its factual basis, are the subject of part two. Dependence is one movement in the dynamic described above. The opposite movement is control, in this case over meat production. Whether or not a desire to extend rabbinic control motivated the expansion of terefah law – this question is impossible to answer – we do frequently find rabbis and butchers coming into conflict over terefah law and related areas of law. I offer some brief reflections on such conflicts in part three. An appendix takes up the case of the hunter and the fowler, who are to the domain of undomesticated animals what the butcher is to that of domestic animals.