The Politics of Beef: Animal Advocacy and the Kosher Butchering Debates in Germany

Shehitah (kosher butchering), a subset of Judaism's dietary laws, dictates that a conscious animal must be slaughtered by rapidly severing its trachea and esophagus with an extremely smooth knife. Because the government refused to exempt the Jewish community from its regulations despite several appeals, the passage of the abattoir reforms forced religiously observant Jews to make a choice-transgress Jewish law by stunning the animal before its slaughter, slaughter meat illegally, or procure kosher meat from another source.2 The Saxon legislation remained unchanged until 1910, when the minister of the interior deemed that certain exemptions be put into place.3 Although Saxony was the only state in Imperial Germany to allow a statewide ban on kosher butchering, the events there were not unique. According to Sedlaßek, when a shohet found a diseased animal, he would gleefully announce, "this is for the goyim!" The Centralverein later successfully sued Sedlaßek for libel.51 Seven years later, members of the radical Berlin animal rights movement similarly expressed outrage when they discovered that the German army served meat from cattle that had been "slaughtered ritually. In Soest, Kustrin, Sorau, and Hanau, for example, local magistrates endorsed prohibitions on kosher butchering without the previous approval of their town councils. Because the magistrates had the ultimate authority to execute local law, the town councils then appealed to the Prussian government to have the mandatory stunning laws overturned.70 In other cases, town councils recommended mandatory stunning laws that the magistrates overturned and the town councils tried to reinstate.71 The fact that town councils in Prussia had the least opportunity to be representative can explain the high number of internal conflicts there. Even though German Catholics were traditionally motivated by anti-Jewish animus in a number of political, social, and cultural settings, the Catholic Center Party consistently supported the Jewish community's right to practice kosher butchering.83 Claiming that they wanted to "protect the ancient tenets of the religion of our Jewish citizens,"84 Windthorst and his successors-and not Liberal Reichstag deputies-defended Jewish slaughtering rights with speeches about religious tolerance. [...]1908, Jewish leaders uniformly welcomed the Center Party's assistance; after 1908, they increasingly voiced concern with the Center Party's framing their defense around the religious nat