Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law
ISBN: 9780520950276
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: East Asian Religions; Comparative Religion Interfaith Relations;

Foreigners and Their Food explores how Jews, Christians, and Muslims conceptualize "us" and "them" through rules about the preparation of food by adherents of other religions and the act of eating with such outsiders. David M. Freidenreich analyzes the significance of food to religious formation, elucidating the ways ancient and medieval scholars use food restrictions to think about the "other." Freidenreich illuminates the subtly different ways Jews, Christians, and Muslims perceive themselves, and he demonstrates how these distinctive self-conceptions shape ideas about religious foreigners and communal boundaries. This work, the first to analyze change over time across the legal literatures of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, makes pathbreaking contributions to the history of interreligious intolerance and to the comparative study of religion.

David M. Freidenreich is the Pulver Family Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Colby College.