{"id":188536,"date":"2026-05-20T06:13:31","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T14:13:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=188536"},"modified":"2026-05-20T08:35:31","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T16:35:31","slug":"marc-shapiro-gelatin-supposed-retractions-and-abraham-goldstein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=188536","title":{"rendered":"Marc Shapiro: Gelatin, Supposed Retractions, and Abraham Goldstein"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shapiro’s claim<\/a> is about evidence and authority. A written responsum beats a remembered conversation, and the gelatin and dishwasher cases let him prove it twice.
\nThe dishwasher example is the cleanest piece of reasoning in the post. R. Moshe Feinstein (1895-1986) wrote a plain ruling. Separate racks, same dishwasher, fine, and he names householders so no one can pretend he meant only restaurants. Then someone tells R. Yehuda Spitz that R. Moshe privately said the opposite, that the leniency applied to commercial machines alone. Shapiro refuses the report. His logic is sound and he states it without hedging. A remembered private clarification cannot overturn a written text that anyone can read, except when the posek makes the change widely known or a recognized scholar reports it, and even then with caution. He then stacks the evidence against the report. R. Spitz himself admits in his own footnote that R. Moshe meant home dishwashers. R. Dovid Feinstein read his father the same way. R. Shmuel Fuerst explains it the same way. The report dies under its own contradictions. This is Shapiro at his best, careful and a little ruthless.
\nThe gelatin material is where the post earns its length, and the lever is Goldstein (1861-1944). Shapiro tells a story that flatters no one and then admits the loser was partly right. Goldstein was a chemist, not a rabbi, with no yeshiva training, and he set himself up to tell learned rabbis what was kosher. He called R. Samuel Pardes a scoundrel and hinted that the OU took money for false hekhshers. The rabbis answered with a near-herem. Shapiro grants the rabbis their grievance. A layman cannot overrule talmidei hakhamim on halakhah, and the chutzpah was real. Then he turns and says Goldstein won the larger point. Every mainstream hashgachah now treats food chemistry as essential, which is the thing Goldstein insisted on while the old rabbis waved it away. Shapiro lets both truths stand. The rabbis were right about authority and Goldstein was right about chemistry, and the institution that beat him quietly adopted his method while erasing his name. The erasure is the part Shapiro will not let pass. Goldstein built the OU’s certification program and got written out of its memory, and Shapiro restores him. That restoration is the same move he made with Elefant and Toledano in the other post<\/a>. He drags the inconvenient figure back into view.
\nThe corpse-medicine ending is the most interesting passage and also the one where Shapiro overreaches a touch. He wants to show that revulsion and halakhah are two different things. Great poskim permitted eating powdered human skull and mummy flesh as medicine because the form had changed and the stuff became mere dust. He uses this to needle Goldstein. If you can swallow a ground-up skull under the law, you cannot scream that nullified pork makes a food treif. The point lands on the abstract level. Bitul is bitul and feeling is not halakhah. But the commenter Eli Farhi caught the weak seam, and he is right. The skull and mummy permissions are for the sick, refuah, not for dessert. No one permits mummy ice cream. So the analogy proves less than Shapiro wants. It proves that halakhah can override disgust in a narrow medical case, not that disgust has no standing when the question is what a healthy man may eat for pleasure. Shapiro reaches for the shocking image because it is good writing, and it is, but the argument it carries is thinner than the prose.
\nWhat runs under all of it is a single conviction, and it is the honest core of Shapiro’s whole project. The written record outranks memory, sentiment, and institutional convenience. He applies it to oral retractions, to a chemist the OU prefers to forget, and to medieval permissions that modern stomachs reject. The conviction is also self-serving in the good sense. It is the historian’s faith, that the document survives and the gossip does not, and that a scholar’s job is to print the document even when the community would rather it stayed in a drawer.
\nThe Lieberman photographs and the long tefillin debate in the comments are filler, charming filler, but unconnected to the argument. The Ginzberg detail is the sharp aside. The Conservative scholar Louis Ginzberg (1873-1953), who knew R. Hayyim Ozer Grodzenski (1863-1940) personally and was related to his wife, ruled strictly on gelatin because he thought the question needed chemistry the rabbis lacked. The man on the academic side took the position Goldstein took, against the lenient giant he admired. Shapiro calls it ironic and moves on. He could have made more of it. The chemist and the Seminary professor agreeing that the old poskim did not understand the science, against the poskim themselves, is the whole tension of the post in one sentence. He leaves it sitting there, which is either restraint or a missed beat.
\nThe verdict. Stronger than the Elefant post<\/a> because the argument is real and tested twice. The dishwasher case is airtight. The Goldstein story is fair and a little brave, since the OU is a friend to no critic. The corpse-medicine flourish is fine writing wrapped around a claim that does not quite carry. Shapiro knows the difference between what a text says and what a man wishes it said, and he keeps choosing the text. That is the habit that makes him worth reading even when the post wanders.<\/p>\n

Part 2 sprawls<\/a> where part 1 held a line. The Goldstein thread that gave part 1 its spine becomes a recurring device here, a name Shapiro keeps invoking to introduce yet another lenient ruling. “Goldstein would have been outraged” works once, maybe twice. By the fourth time it reads as a peg, not an argument. The post is really three things stapled together. A long demonstration that great poskim ruled far more leniently than modern kashrut allows, a tour of hashgachah history and trivia, and a closing run of bibliographical firsts. Only the first has an argument.<\/p>\n

That argument is the same one from part 1, pushed harder. The written record beats sentiment, and the sentiment in question is now disgust. Shapiro lines up the leniencies. R. Moses Isserles (1530-1572) permits olive oil stored in barrels smeared with pig lard. R. David Ibn Zimra (1479-1573) permits meat eaten with sugar that was cooked in milk, and the Ari ate it. R. Yehezkel Landau (1713-1793) permits a drink with a nullified trace of non-kosher meat. R. Joseph Kafih (1917-2000) prefers gelatin from human bones over animal bones. Each ruling is one a modern hashgachah would refuse, and Shapiro’s point is that the refusal comes from feeling, not from law. The cumulative weight is real. He proves that the gap between halakhah on the page and halakhah on the supermarket shelf is wide and old.<\/p>\n

The Isserles pork passage is where the post does its best thinking, and it cuts against Shapiro’s own larger claim in a way he half-misses. Isserles rules pork is noten ta’am lifgam, that it spoils a dish rather than improves it. Shapiro flags the obvious problem. Pork tastes good to most of the world and sits on the tables of kings, so why call it spoiling. He cites R. Shimon Grunfeld, who says Isserles was so holy that pork genuinely disgusted him, and the disgust leaked into his pen and produced a halakhic error. That is a striking admission to quote. A great posek’s personal revulsion bent his ruling. But notice what it does to Shapiro’s thesis. He spends the post arguing that disgust is not halakhah and the texts override feeling. Then his own evidence shows a posek whose feeling produced the text. The two ideas sit in tension and Shapiro does not resolve it. He wants the written word clean of sentiment, yet his sharpest example is a written word soaked in it.<\/p>\n

The Sifra reading is the strongest small piece. Shapiro catches Isserles inverting the plain sense of a famous passage. The Sifra and Rashi teach that a man should not say pork disgusts him and that is why he abstains. He should say it would taste fine and he abstains only because God commanded it. The Rambam (1138-1204) drives this home in Shemonah Perakim. Want the lobster, then refuse it for the mitzvah alone. Isserles reads the same passage backward, as proof that pork is the most repulsive of forbidden foods. Shapiro says he knows no one else who reads it that way, and he is right to press it. The commenter Talmid pushes back well, arguing Isserles meant something closer to the standard reading, but Shapiro’s catch stands as a real observation about how a great mind can flip a text it knows by heart. This is Shapiro doing what he does best, reading closely and refusing to look away from the awkward line.<\/p>\n

The hashgachah material is entertaining and mostly weightless. The toilet cleaner, the roach killer, the seven hekhshers on romaine, the 1896 newspaper mocking a hashgachah on stove polish. It is good blog filler and it makes a mild point about scope creep, that certification expands until it covers things no one needs certified. The Impossible Pork section has more bite. Shapiro is openly annoyed that the OU refused to certify a vegetarian product because of how kosher eaters might feel, when the OU already certifies Bacos and bacon bits. His irritation is fair and consistent with his thesis. Emotion is driving a kashrut decision that the law does not require. R. Genack (b. 1948) all but admits it. This is the one place the trivia connects back to the argument, because the OU is doing exactly what Shapiro accuses the moderns of doing throughout, ruling by feeling and calling it standards.<\/p>\n

The Kornmehl conflict-of-interest point is sharp and Shapiro lands it without overplaying. The Barton’s mashgiach was the owner’s brother-in-law. Shapiro asks whether any agency today would tolerate that, and the commenters answer the obvious rejoinder, that paid supervision is already a conflict, related or not. Shapiro’s narrower point holds. Standards that did not bother anyone in 1950 would end a career now, and the change is sociological, not halakhic.<\/p>\n

The Gershuni material is the quiet gem and Shapiro undersells it. R. Yehuda Gershuni wrote a long article in 1952 defending his father-in-law R. Eliezer Silver’s ban on gelatin, then gave hekhshers on gelatin himself once Silver died in 1968. Shapiro offers the honest reading. Either Gershuni changed his mind or he never believed the stringency and wrote the article out of deference. Then Shapiro adds a second case, Gershuni reversing himself on Yom ha-Atzmaut and Hallel between 1957 and 1961. Two documented flips from one figure, one of them plausibly written against his own view to honor a relative. That is a sharper finding than most of the post and Shapiro lets it pass in a paragraph. A man who put his name to a position he may not have held, because the position belonged to his wife’s father, is the kind of thing Shapiro usually digs into. Here he reports it and moves on.<\/p>\n

The closing section on American-born authors is pure bibliography. The ten-year-old Reuven Grossman (1905-1974) publishing a book of essays and Torah commentary is a genuine curiosity, and the claim that he may be the youngest published Jewish author in history is the sort of thing Shapiro collects and shares well. It belongs to a different post.<\/p>\n

The verdict. Weaker than part 1 because the spine bends. Part 1 had two clean test cases and a real argument about evidence. Part 2 has a strong accumulation of leniencies, one excellent close reading of Isserles on the Sifra, and a buried tension Shapiro never faces, that his own Isserles example shows feeling shaping text in the very way his thesis denies. The rest is good company and good trivia. He reads the awkward lines, restores the forgotten figures, and prints what others would rather leave in the drawer. The habit holds even when the post itself does not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shapiro’s claim is about evidence and authority. A written responsum beats a remembered conversation, and the gelatin and dishwasher cases let him prove it twice. The dishwasher example is the cleanest piece of reasoning in the post. R. Moshe Feinstein … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marc-b-shapiro"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t