m which
the Israelites were commanded to abstain were also forbidden to the
priests or saints of India, Persia, Mesopotamia, and partly of
Egypt.(1445) The natural conclusion is that the Mosaic law intended these
rules as a practical expression of its general principle that Israel was
to be "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation."(1446) In other words,
Israel was to fill the usual place of the priest among the nations of the
ancient world, a priest-people observing the priestly laws of
sanctification. Whatever the origin of these customs may have been,
whether they were tabu laws in connection with totemism or some other
primitive view, the Priestly Code itself admits their lack of an
Israelitish origin by recognizing that they were known to Noah.(1447) They
were simply adopted by the law-giver of Israel to make the whole people
feel their priestly calling.

In later times the dietary laws, especially abstinence from the flesh of
swine, became a mark of distinction which separated the Jew from his
heathen surroundings; and they became a symbol of Jewish loyalty in the
Syrian persecutions when pious Jews faced martyrdom for them as willingly
as for the refusal to adore the Syrian idols.(1448) In fact, Pharisaism
adopted the principle of separation from the heathen in every matter
pertaining to diet, and this spirit of separatism was strengthened by the
scorn of the Greeks and Romans and afterward by the antinomian spirit of
Christianity. While Hellenistic writers, eager to find a universal meaning
in these laws, assigned certain physical or psychic reasons for
them,(1449) the rabbis of the Talmud insisted that they were given solely
for the moral purification of Israel. Thus they were to be observed as
tests of Israel's submission to the divine will and not because of
personal distaste. In their own words, "We must overcome all desire for
the sake of our Father in heaven"; and "Only to those who wrestle with
temptation does the kingdom of God come."(1450) In the course of time
these prohibitions were steadily extended, until they encircled the whole
life of the Jew, forming an insurmountable wall which secluded him from
his non-Jewish environment. Finally, separation from the world came to be
regarded as an end in itself.(1451)

Now, it cannot be denied that these laws actually disciplined the medieval
Jew, so that during centuries of wild dissipation he practiced sobriety
and moderation; as Maimonides says,(1452) they