Friday, September 23, 2011

Pg. 99: David Freidenreich's "Foreigners and Their Food"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law by David M. Freidenreich.

About the book, from the publisher:
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.
Read more about Foreigners and Their Food at the University of California Press website.

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

The Page 99 Test: Foreigners and Their Food.

--Marshal Zeringue