The Chemist, the Professor, and the Giant

Marc Shapiro tells the gelatin story and lets one detail go by too fast. Louis Ginzberg (1873-1953), the great Talmudist at the Jewish Theological Seminary, ruled that gelatin is forbidden. He gave his reason without hedging. He knew R. Hayyim Ozer Grodzenski (1863-1940), was related to the giant’s wife, and would defer to him on any question of Jewish law. But not on this one. This one needed chemistry, and chemistry was not R. Hayyim Ozer’s field.
Set that beside Abraham Goldstein (1861-1944), the chemist who built the OU’s certification program and then broke with it. Goldstein had no yeshiva training and no standing in halakhah. He ruled gelatin forbidden too, and for the same reason. The rabbis did not understand food technology. They were laundering pig through legal categories they could not test in a laboratory.
So the two men furthest from the traditional rabbinate, the academic on one side and the industrial chemist on the other, arrived at the same verdict and the same argument. The poskim did not grasp the science. And they aimed that argument at R. Hayyim Ozer, the most lenient and most authoritative voice in the room, the one who held that dried bones rendered inedible to a dog have left the category of forbidden food and may be reconstituted into something kosher.
Shapiro calls this ironic and moves on. The irony is real, but it sits on top of something larger, and the larger thing is worth digging out.
We carry a picture of how these fights are supposed to run. The traditional rabbis hold the line. The modernizers loosen it. The man with the secular degree and the man with the test tube push toward leniency, and the old authorities resist. The gelatin case runs backward. Here the academic and the chemist are the strict ones. The giant of the traditional world is lenient. The picture we carry cannot explain that, which means the picture is wrong about what the fight concerns.
The fight is not orthodoxy against reform, or learning against ignorance. It is a disagreement about where the truth of a thing lives. Ginzberg and Goldstein agree, against everyone else, that the truth of gelatin lives in the molecule. If the substance comes from a pig at the level of matter, then no ruling about dried bones can change what it is. The chemistry is the fact, and the law may govern only after the facts are fixed. Ginzberg said this in plain words. He would weigh R. Hayyim Ozer’s word heavily on Jewish law, but the gelatin question turned on knowledge of chemistry and physiology, and there the great posek had no special claim.
R. Hayyim Ozer would not grant the division. For him the truth of gelatin lives in its halakhic status, not in its molecule. The law has its own theory of what a thing is. A bone dried until a dog will not touch it has passed out of the category of food. That it remains pig at the level of matter is true and beside the point, because the law does not ask what the atom is. It asks what status the substance carries after it has been transformed. The category is the reality the law cares about. The chemist’s reality and the posek’s reality are two different descriptions, and the posek insists his runs on its own track.
This is the whole tension of Shapiro’s post, and it hides inside a single sentence about Ginzberg. The chemist and the Seminary professor agree that the old poskim did not understand the science, and they agree against the poskim themselves. What divides them from R. Hayyim Ozer is not piety. Ginzberg was no less serious about the law than R. Hayyim Ozer was about chemistry. What divides them is a prior question neither side argues out loud. Does the molecule govern the status, or does the status float free of the molecule?
Notice what Ginzberg’s move does to the giant’s authority. R. Hayyim Ozer claimed the whole field. The question of gelatin was a halakhic question, and a halakhic question belonged to him. Ginzberg honored him and then quietly shrank the field. He gave R. Hayyim Ozer Jewish law and kept chemistry for the laboratory. That is a smaller territory than R. Hayyim Ozer thought he held. The honoring and the shrinking come together, and they come together in the same sentence. You praise the master on his own ground and then redraw the boundary of that ground so it no longer covers the case in front of you. The move looks like deference. It works like a demotion.
Goldstein made the same move with less grace. He told the rabbis they could supply him information about how food was produced, and he would tell them what was kosher. He did not honor anyone. But the structure of his claim matched Ginzberg’s. The facts belong to the man who knows the chemistry. The law may speak only after the chemist has spoken.
There is a smaller irony folded inside the larger one, and it cuts the other way. Ginzberg gave private ordination to three men. One of them, R. Isaac Klein, permitted gelatin. So the lenient verdict lived inside Ginzberg’s own circle, carried by his own student, against the teacher. The teacher who trusted the molecule was stricter than the student he had made. The line did not hold even one generation in his own house.
Shapiro’s second post hands us a third position, and it completes the picture. R. Moses Isserles (1530-1572) ruled that pork spoils a dish rather than improving it, that it is noten ta’am lifgam, and on that ground he permitted olive oil from barrels smeared with lard. The ruling puzzled later authorities. Pork tastes good. It sits on the tables of kings. How does a thing that the whole world enjoys count as spoiling? R. Shimon Grunfeld gave an answer that should stop us. Isserles was so holy that pork repelled him, and the repulsion entered his pen. His sensibility produced the ruling.
Lay the three positions side by side. Ginzberg and Goldstein say the molecule governs the status. R. Hayyim Ozer says the status floats free of the molecule. Isserles, on Grunfeld’s reading, says the holy man’s revulsion is itself a kind of fact that finds its way into the law. The first subordinates law to chemistry. The second keeps law on its own track. The third lets a refined disgust steer the law from underneath. Three faiths about where the truth of a forbidden thing is kept.
The modern kashrut world is the settlement among them, and the settlement is uneasy. Shapiro shows in his first post that Goldstein won the long argument about method. Every major hashgachah now employs chemists. The mashgiach who knows nothing of food technology is gone. The molecule got its seat at the table, which is the thing Ginzberg and Goldstein wanted. And yet the halakhic categories survived intact. Bitul is still bitul. Gelatin is widely accepted as kosher, which is R. Hayyim Ozer’s verdict, not Ginzberg’s. So the field split exactly along Ginzberg’s line. The chemistry governs the finding of fact. The law governs the ruling. The man who lost the gelatin case won the argument about how such cases should be decided.
That is the part Shapiro leaves on the floor. Ginzberg lost on gelatin and his division became the architecture of the whole enterprise. He said law is one domain and chemistry another, that they meet at a seam, and that on one side of the seam the posek rules while on the other the chemist reports. We live inside that sentence now. The OU runs laboratories and quotes the Shulhan Arukh, and it does not feel the strain, because the strain was settled before most of the parties knew there was a question.
The Impossible Pork case shows the seam tearing again from a new direction. The OU certifies bacon bits and refuses to certify a plant product called pork, on the ground that kosher eaters might recoil. That is Isserles without the holiness. The molecule says there is nothing forbidden in the bottle. The law says the same. Only the sensibility objects, and the sensibility wins. Ginzberg would have called it a category error. Goldstein would have called it cowardice. R. Hayyim Ozer would have asked what halakhic status a feeling carries, and answered none.
Shapiro reads the awkward line and declines to follow it home. The restraint may be deliberate. A blog post is not a monograph, and not every thread needs pulling. But the thread runs through the whole subject. The quietest sentence in the post, the one about a Conservative professor who deferred to a great rabbi on everything except the one thing in front of him, holds the argument that organizes modern kashrut and most of the quarrels Shapiro likes to collect. The chemist and the professor were not the modernizers loosening the old law. They were the men who decided where the old law would be allowed to rule, and where it would have to wait outside while someone else established the facts.