[Avodah] Is Turkey Kosher

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 10:42:26PM -0500, Rich Wolberg wrote:
: In response to:
: > The person who pointed me to this wrote, "According to R' Hamburger
: > [author of Sheirushei Minhag Ashkenaz], Turkey has a valid mesorah."
: 
: Someone wrote (with such certainty):
: > But we know beyond doubt that that isn't true.
: 
: In response to "But we know beyond doubt that that isn't true", I quote
: from the end of the excellent, informative and scholarly article Is
: Turkey Kosher?  by Rabbi Ari Z. Zivotofsky, Ph.D., the following: 

RAZZ himself says the mesorah is questionable. Here we do not mean the
pragmatic mesorah of seeing what the people are doing (which is what the
deleted quote refers to). Rather, we're asking how that got started. If
the first person to eat a turkey didn't have a mesorah that turkey
was on the list of kosher birds, would it be permissable according to
the Rama to eat it? (Section 4 discusses this requirement at length
<http://www.kashrut.com/articles/turk_part4>.

RAZZ's conclusion is that at this point, too many people accepted the eating
of turkey for the question to be open, but that's not the "valid mesorah"
in discussion. We know as a certainty that the uncertainty about how to
determine the kashrus of a bird that forced us to stick to only the known
(mesorah) kosher birds predates anyone bringing back a turkey from the new
world.

RAZZ lists ways to understand how we got to this point (in
<http://www.kashrut.com/articles/turk_part5>).
1- Error
(I wanted to split it out into two kinds of error:
    1a- the first generations sinned beshogeig, not thinking about the need for a
	mesorah, and the next generations now had a tradition;
    1b- error as to thinking the turkey was indeed an old world bird identified
        by one of the names on the list. I wanted to put the MB's labeling
	of the turkey as the tarnigoles adumah of the SA in this category,
	since the tarnigoles adumah is in the Y-mi -- a millennium too
	early to be a turkey.)

2- Arugos haBosem: The Rama's requirement for a mesorah is only when one
   cannot read the simanim of a kosher species with certainty.

3- Sho'el uMeishiv: We don't entirely follow the Rama

4- The Lubliner Rav: Mesorah is not by species, but by category -- and chickens
   and voltures are in the same category. (He might be referring to the order
   Galliformes, which I see includes also quail, partridges, pheasant and grouse.
   That's just a small sampling, but I notice they're all kosher too. More likely
   the LR isn't speakiing scientifically. But turkey and chickens aren't even
   in the same genus.)

   4b (from later in the article)- Chicken turkey hybrids do not occur naturally,
   but they have been produced and are used in tests. (As well as turkey-pheasant
   and pheasant-chicken hybrids.)

5- Perhaps we accepted the widespread Sepharadi use as a mesorah. After all, it
   was people from the Ottoman Empire who first brought the turkey to Europe.
   (Thus the name TURKey.) The mechaber is more "flexible" (RAZZ's word) when
   it comes to the need for a mesorah.

6- Otzer Yisrael-
   6a- the eating of turkey predates our acceptance of the Rama's ruling, the
       first to permit turkey simply didn't hold like the Rama;
   6b- the Rama was born in 1540, 46 years after America was discovered, and
       the ruling couldn't have been made until he grew up and made a name
       for himself. The eating of turkey could predate the ruling itself.

It is only then that RAZZ points out that the responsa were written with
the assumption that turkey is kosher, and post-facto asked how.

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Rescue me from the desire to win every
micha at aishdas.org        argument and to always be right.
http://www.aishdas.org              - Rav Nassan of Breslav
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