re: #58 Sergey Romanov

Thanks. So, generally, an observant Jew won’t buy halal meat? What about other products?

Briefly, and bearing in mind that I am no expert:

1. An observant Jew will not eat halal-slaughtered meat. To be kosher, meat must have been slaughtered by a shochet, who is by definition a Jew, and there are requirements, such as the removal of the sciatic nerve, and salting, that halal processing doesn’t take into account.

2. However, many/most Sunnis will eat kosher meat. This goes back a long ways, and appears to be based on the idea that kosher slaughter encompasses the requirements of halal slaughter, and that since the Jews are more picky about it than the Muslims, you can count on them to do it right. You’ll often see small storefronts in Muslim neighborhoods offering ‘halal and kosher’ meat products. In the Arab world, a lot of Jews worked as butchers.

3. Shiites, and other Sunnis, believe that meat is only halal if it has been slaughtered by a Muslim, and won’t eat kosher meat.

4. In general, outside the realm of meat, frum Jews won’t buy something halal-certified without a kosher certification, because the rules are just too different.

5. One exception I can think of might be grape juice. That requires a kosher certification because of the avodah zarah issue, which I believe should not be a problem with Muslims. So if you’re offered halal-certified grape juice, I’d say, go ahead and drink it. I don’t even know if grape juice needs to be halal. The degree of stringency that Jews apply to hekshers on things like fruit juice varies greatly from community to community.

6. The Jewish world has such varying levels of strictness that it’s hard to generalize to everyone.

7. I will eat halal in restaurants, or at a friend’s home. This is my personal custom, that of a semi-kosher keeping person, and has no rabbinic authority whatsoever. It allows me to have some good Moroccan chicken once in a blue moon, and makes feeding me less difficult for some of my friends.