[Avodah] Chalav Yisrael: Required or recommended

[Simon Montagu]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 8:40 PM, Micha Berger via Avodah <
avodah at lists.aishdas.org> wrote:
>
>
> It is the opinion of the Radbaz and Peri Chasah that chalav aku"m means
> milk that might have non-kosher adulteration. A standard application of
> safeiq deOraisa lechumera, simply that the case is milk of iffy provenance.
> So they do agre it's an absolute issur.
>
> And I am guessing -- although I asked the chevrah to check -- that the
> Radbaz's opinion is more common among Sepharadim than the Chasam Sofer's.
> Even among Ashkenazim, I don't think it's a clear minority.
>
> That guess has two aspects, as someone pointed out to me in private
> email:
> - textual: what do most Seph acharonim pasqen?
> - mimetic: what do most Seph kehillot do in practice?
>

I (the "someone" in the previous paragraph -- al tikra "someone" ela
"Simon") found a couple of sources that address both of these aspects:
Unfortunately they contradict each other, or more precisely are coming from
different places, both geographically and historically

Birkei Yosef by the Hida, YD 115 -- http://www.hebrewbooks.org/
pdfpager.aspx?req=7670&st=&pgnum=36
at the end of subsection 1, says that one should be mahmir anywhere where
there isn't a clear universal minhag lehakel, and says "this is common
practice (pash'ta hahoraa) in all areas of Turkey and Eretz HaTzvi (i.e.
throughout the Eastern Mediterranean/Ottoman Empire)

Mayyim Hayyim by R. Yossef Messas vol 2, OH 92 (I don't have online access
to this source, but I believe it's on Bar Ilan)
permits because: camels are not found in the cities of the Maghreb, only
among the Arabs in the deserts; camel's milk today is many times more
expensive than kosher milk; asses' milk and horse milk is also not found
today even for medical use, and anyway is easy to distinguish because it
has a different color, smell and taste which are perceptible even when
mixed with kosher milk. Furthermore, he adds, today the government enforces
regulation and fines people even for diluting milk with water, kal vahomer
for mixing it with less healthy kinds of milk.

Two points that are worth noting here:

The questioner already notes that nobody in Morocco avoids milk milked
without Jewish supervision, even in Haredi circles; he is asking for a
source for the heter, rather than a psak
RYM completely takes for granted the approach of the Radbaz/Peri Hadash,
and only concerns himself with establishing the metziut.

And another general point: I don't understand why everybody calls this the
shita of the Radbaz and/or the Peri Hadash as if it originated among the
aharonim. Both RHYDA and RYM quote it from the Tashbetz, who is a rishon,
about 100 years before gerush Sefarad.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20180129/e33dc05a/attachment.html>