{"id":3,"date":"2011-06-26T10:37:59","date_gmt":"2011-06-26T14:37:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/dfreiden\/"},"modified":"2025-04-22T13:54:48","modified_gmt":"2025-04-22T17:54:48","slug":"food","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/dfreiden\/food\/","title":{"rendered":"Foreigners and Their Food"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Foreigners and their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law<\/strong><\/em> explores how Jews, Christians, and Muslims conceptualize \u201cus\u201d and \u201cthem\u201d 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 \u201cother.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

WINNER of the 2012 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion (in the Textual Studies category) from the American Academy of Religion. <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWritten in lucid prose, Freidenreich displays a masterful command of a variety of sources and scholarship. He enviably manages an arduous task: to write an accessible book that is, at the same time, a major contribution to several academic disciplines.\u201d \u2014Jordan D. Rosenblum, author of Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cCan a Muslim eat meat from a Christian butcher? Can a Jew drink wine that has been handled by a Christian? Breaking through disciplinary, linguistic, and religious boundaries that often dominate scholarship, David Freidenreich offers a fascinating synthesis of these and countless other issues. This is a rich feast.\u201d \u2014John Tolan, author of Saint Francis and the Sultan: The Curious History of a Christian-Muslim Encounter<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

University of California Press<\/a>; purchase from Amazon<\/a> or other retailers (in print or electronic format)<\/p>\n

A chapter of this book, with several scholarly responses, appears on the Religion and Culture Web Forum<\/a> (March 2012) of the University of Chicago Divinity School’s Martin Marty Center.  A two-minute summary of the book was featured on The Academic Minute<\/a>, broadcast on public radio stations.  I delivered a talk based on this book at the 2014 Greenfield Summer Institute of the Mosse-Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; the podcast will be available shortly on UW’s iTunesU channel.<\/p>\n

Related Articles<\/h2>\n

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\u201cFive Questions about Non-Muslim Meat: Toward a New Appreciation of Ibn Qayyim al-\u01e6awziyyah\u2019s Contribution to Islamic Law,\u201d in Re-evaluating Ibn Qayyim al-\u01e6awziyyah\u2019s Literary Stature: Religious and Historical Issues<\/em>, ed. Caterina Bori and Livnat Holtzman, Oriente Moderno<\/em> 90 (2010): 85\u2013104 [link to pdf<\/a>]<\/p>\n

\u201cFood and Drink \u2013 Medieval Period,\u201d The Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World<\/em>, ed. Norman A. Stillman (Brill Online, 2014) [link to pdf<\/a>]<\/p>\n

\u201cFood and Table Fellowship,\u201d The Jewish Annotated New Testament<\/em>, second ed., ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 650\u201353 [link to pdf<\/a>]<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Food of the Damned,\u201d in Between Heaven and Hell: Islam, Salvation, and the Fate of Others<\/i>, ed. Mohammad Hasan Khalil (Oxford University Press, 2013), 253\u201372 [link to pdf<\/a>]<\/p>\n

\u201cFood-Related Interaction among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in High and Late Medieval Latin Christendom,\u201d History Compass<\/em> 11.11 (2013): 957\u201366 [link to pdf<\/a>]<\/p>\n

\u201cHoliness and Impurity in the Torah and the Quran: Differences within a Common Typology,\u201d Comparative Islamic Studies<\/em> 6 (2010): 5\u201322 [link to pdf<\/a>]<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Implications of Unbelief: Tracing the Emergence of Distinctively Shi\u02bfi Notions Regarding the Food and Impurity of Non-Muslims,\u201d Islamic Law and Society<\/em>, 18 (2011): 53\u201384 [link to pdf<\/a>]<\/p>\n

\u201cSharing Meals with Non-Christians in Canon Law Commentaries, ca. 1160\u20131260: A Case Study in Legal Development,\u201d Medieval Encounters<\/em> 14: 41\u201377 [link to pdf<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Foreigners and their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law explores how Jews, Christians, and Muslims conceptualize \u201cus\u201d and \u201cthem\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1764,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/dfreiden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/dfreiden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/dfreiden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/dfreiden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1764"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/dfreiden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/dfreiden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":223,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/dfreiden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3\/revisions\/223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/dfreiden\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}