[Avodah] Wait, Is This Weird Duck Kosher Or Not?

[Professor L. Levine]

>From https://goo.gl/VyQGmj

A bird so strange that, more than 150 years after Jewish authorities first began discussing it, nobody can decide whether it's kosher today.

Domestic ducks are kosher, though duck is not a particularly common protein on the Jewish table (except perhaps in Sephardic, or Mediterranean, families). But the Muscovy was so weird that Rabbi Illowy, upon moving to New Orleans and finding it eaten there, immediately declared it off-limits. New Orleans Jews were familiar with the Muscovy, and told the new rabbi that there was indeed a history of eating this bird, therefore making it kosher, but Illowy arbitrarily declared, according to Kashrut.com<http://www.kashrut.com/articles/ThreeBirds/#sdfootnote25anc>, that he doubted the expertise of the rabbis who had allowed the eating of the Muscovy in the past.

The Muscovy duck never became nearly as popular as the mallard in the U.S., but bizarrely enough, it is very popular in, of all places, Israel. A scholarly paper from late 2010<http://www.hakirah.org/Vol%2011%20Zivotofsky.pdf> from Zohar Amar and Ari Z. Zivotofsky documents its wide acceptance there. The duck was fairly common in Israel by the late 19th century and was never really considered anything but a kosher duck there. In fact, in early 2010<http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2010/02/satmar-poultry-slaughterhouse-duck-recall-345.html>, an Israeli duck farmer shipped, by accident, a huge shipment of Muscovy ducks instead of mallards to kosher communities in the U.S., where the shipment of strange alien-looking ducks was greeted with horror.

See the above URL for more.

YL



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