1 - Agobard of Lyons, Megillat Aḥima’ats, and the Babylonian Orientation of Early Ashkenaz

Summary

Agobard of Lyons: De Insolentia Iudaeorum

Agobard's letter to Louis the Pious, On Jewish Insolence, has been adduced by my eminent colleague, Reuven Bonfil, as evidence that the Jews of Lyons regulated their religious life by the Palestinian halakhah, and, by implication, so did other Jews in the Carolingian Empire at that time. Sometime in the third decade of the ninth century, Agobard, archbishop of Lyons, wrote a sharp letter to Emperor Louis in Aachen, attacking the insufferable arrogance of the Jews. Among the charges leveled was that meat that was deemed unclean (immundum) and unfit for Jewish consumption was regularly sold to Christians and called derisively ‘Christian meat’. Agobard had in mind the dietary laws of sheḥitah (ritual slaughter) and terefot (the bodily defects that render the animal, even if correctly slaughtered, not kosher). His detailed description of what the Jews deemed immundum is the earliest report that we have of sheḥitah and terefot as practiced by the Jews of Europe. It antedates all Jewish reports by some 150 years and merits a close reading.

Est enim Iudeorum usus, ut, quando quodlibet pecus ad esum mactant, ut subactum idem pecus tribus incisionibus non fuerit iugulatum; si apertis interaneis iecur lesum apparuerit; si pulmo lateri adheserit, vel eum insufflatio penetraverit; si fel inventum non fuerit, et alia huiusmodi, hec tamquam immunda a Iudeis repudiata christianis venduntur et insulatario vocabulo christiana pecora appelantur.

Bonfil translates:

For this is the Jewish custom: when they kill any animal so as to eat it, when this animal is brought [forth] and it has not been slaughtered in three strokes [of the knife] or if a defective liver be found in its opened entrails, or [if ] the lung cleaves to the wall [i.e. the ribcage of the animal] or if it [the lung] is penetrable to an influx of air or if the gall bladder is not to be found or the like—they [the animals] are [deemed] unclean and are discarded by the Jews and sold to Christians, and are called [by the Jews] by the insulting appellation ‘Christian animals’.

Let us analyze the cases one by one.