The Gentile Chemist who Decided Jewish Law

What two legal revolutions teach us about the future

It’s not a secret that Jewish leaders are struggling to respond to pace of the technological revolution. This struggle isn’t new; in fact, it’s old enough that we learn lessons from how it has gone over the last century.

I want to tell you two stories. One is the story of Jewish leaders responding to new tech with a holistic approach. The other is a story of Jewish leaders shunting new tech into the realm of technical details. Both are sophisticated and neither is correct or incorrect. What’s interesting is why these two responses differ so dramatically and what they can teach us about adapting to future tech changes.

The Non-Jewish Chemist who Decided Sabbath Law

At the end of the 19th century, a London Jewish newspaper published a bit of correspondence about whether it was acceptable to use electric lamps on Shabbat.

The question itself isn’t odd. What’s odd is who they decided should answer it

A question has been asked in the Jewish Chronicle concerning the subject of Sabbath observance in relation to the use of the electric light, and Professor Crookes, the well-known electrician, has replied—

We need to pause because “electrician” doesn’t mean what it means today. William Crookes was a decorated British physicist and chemist who helped developed the vacuum tube—the precursor to the transistor—and discovered the element thallium. He was an electrician in the sense that he was a pioneering researcher of electricity.

Anyway, here’s what Crookes said:

“It is a rule of the Jewish religion that, on the Sabbath day, no fire may be kindled. The observant Jews obey this law very strictly, and abstain from any act which directly or indirectly can cause the production of fire or the consumption of anything by fire…” The question was, “Would a man be transgressing these rules of conduct by switching off or on electric glow lamps?” Professor Crookes replies: “The words ‘fire’ and ‘flame’ have in all ages and countries been associated with the idea of what we now term ‘combustion.’…The modern glow lamp has no connection, direct or indirect, with ‘fire,’ flame,’ or ‘combustion.’”

So Crookes thinks you can use electric lamps on Shabbat. The question is: why did The Jewish Chronicle think anyone would care what Crookes thought, given that he was absolutely not a rabbi and probably didn’t know the first thing about Jewish law?

The answer is very simple: in the world of the late 19th century electricity was not yet dominant, and its potential impact on Sabbath observance was not yet clear. The newspaper wasn’t thinking about what it would mean to use electricity on Shabbat; they just wanted a technical answer about whether it was equivalent to fire. This was a question of facts, so Crookes was the perfect person to answer.

It wasn’t long before the stakes got much higher. Despite the fact that the logic for banning Shabbat use of electricity is famously thin, the prohibition has become a defining feature of Shabbat observance, and its important has only grown as the ban has come to include motorized vehicles, televisions, and smartphones. Today, the ban has little to do with scientific reality (with the caveat that some workarounds—like the Sabbath lamp—do rely on technical design details). It’s about preserving a certain kind of atmosphere that electronic devices make impossible. Figuring out how to do this is less about facts and more about values. Scientists can provide their guidance, but ultimately the Shabbat atmosphere is shaped by rabbis and other Jewish leaders.

The Jewish Chemist who Decided Kosher Law

But some areas of Jewish law stayed in the realm of empirical fact. Just as England and the US were wiring their houses for electricity, the world’s food production was becoming increasingly centralized in large warehouses located far from consumers. These factories weren’t run by Jews and their supply chains were complicated. To figure out if they were kosher, an expert was needed.

Enter Abraham Goldstein. After the women’s branch of the Orthodox Union successfully lobbied the OU to start investigating and certifying food manufacturers—Heinz was famously the first company to put a kosher symbol on its label—Goldstein was brought on to lead the new certifying effort.

Goldstein is a pivotal figure in the history of kosher food. Like Crookes, he was a chemist, and he saw his job as one of fact-finding. Yes, there were cases when rabbis needed to get involved—e.g. if a non-kosher substance was used in tiny amounts and could not be tasted but was nonetheless integral to production—but as a rule Goldstein thought that industrial-age kosher just required shining a lot of sunlight on factories and substances. Through his many publications, he sought to create an informed Jewish public.

According to historian Roger Horowitz, Goldstein was actively allergic to rabbinic intervention; if you gave the Jewish public enough information, he reasoned, they wouldn’t need to rely on rabbis to tell them what to eat. Ultimately Goldstein left the OU to start the pointedly-named Organized Kashrus Laboratory (“OK”), perhaps riffing on Underwriters Laboratories, a company that certified products for fire safety and has a logo that is strikingly similar to that of the OU. For a time the OK was larger than the OU, and it remains one of the “Big Five” certifiers today.

Today the OU is the largest certifier in the world, but Goldstein won the argument. When certifiers (mashgichim) are trained these days, they need to become experts on modern production methods. More importantly, the Jewish public treats kosher symbols as statements of objective truth (with the important caveat that not all certifiers are looking for the same things or are equally vigilant). Sure, the certifiers may turn out to be rabbis—but their rabbinic knowledge just helps them understand what to look for.

Vibes Matter

Why did Shabbat and kosher go in such different directions? Why is Shabbat law more about vibes than scientific reality? Why is kashrut almost exclusively about scientific reality?

The simple answer is that modern Jewish dietary law does not have a clear value beyond fidelity to Jewish law itself. Sure, you can unearth all kinds of historical reasons for various kosher law—discouraging socialization with gentiles, perhaps discouraging meat consumption—but you’d be hard pressed to find Jews today who really think that kosher has some larger purpose. (This narrow understand of kashrut is why so many people thought that the OU made a bad call when they declined to certify Impossible Pork.) Without a clear value at play, kosher law evolved to become a kind of neutral science.

Shabbat isn’t like this. Shabbat mainly evolves through vibes; it’s about maintaining a kind of environment that many Jews cherish and wish to preserve in the face of rapid change. This deeply internalized sense of what is shabbosdik (Sabbath appropriate behavior) is distinct from what a cold reading of the law would indicate. This desire to preserve a Shabbat atmosphere has kept the electricity ban in place, with some exceptions, despite the weakness of the core argument.

(Short note for Haym Soloveitchik fans: “vibes” is more than just “mimetic tradition” because it involves the ability to extrapolate forwards perpetually. But I could be wrong about this! Maybe they’re the same.)

Who Cares?

For the ordinary observer of Jewish law, Shabbat and kashrut are the same. Both are part of tradition, both have long histories. For those who grow up in observant households, both are learned from birth through experience more than through books.

But the values behind the laws show up in important ways when it comes time to build them out. Shabbat law is laced with value, and so it has evolved in really interesting ways that would not be intuitive from a simple reading of the legal codes. Kosher law, by contrast, has remained quite narrow, despite occasional calls to expand it to accommodate things like ethical production methods and paying food workers a living wage. Both areas of law are triumphs of rabbinic adaptation to modern tech, but only one is a moral triumph.

As Jewish law evolves over the next century, people’s intuition about how it ought to evolve is going to be highly dependent on whether they see particular laws as reflecting moral values, or whether they see them as irrational or amoral artifacts worth preserving only because they are already part of the legal system. Which bucket a particular rule should go in is not always clear—but tech is going to force us to make it clear, and disagreements about how laws should evolve will crop up when there is less clarity or active disagreement.

We can make this process go more smoothly by proactively considering the values that underly Jewish law. It’s not necessarily a bad thing if a rule has no inherent value; sometimes fidelity to the system as a whole is enough to justify a rule’s inclusion. But if there are values at play, we need to be clear about them, and what we are trying to preserve. We’ll be much better prepared for the future if we do.