A Law of Holiness

The dietary laws (kashrut) are presented in the Torah not as hygiene but as a discipline of holiness that sets Israel apart, and observant Jews keep them as an expression of the covenant regardless of any practical rationale. The prohibition is held across the observant denominations, and refusal of pork became historically a badge of Jewish fidelity under persecution. It parallels the independent Islamic prohibition of swine, though the two traditions ground the rule in separate revelations and Jewish law derives it from the general test of hoof and cud rather than naming the pig alone.

The prohibition's role as a marker of identity had severe historical consequences: during the Spanish Inquisition, the willingness to eat pork publicly became a test authorities used to judge whether conversos, Jews and their descendants who had converted to Catholicism, were sincere in their new faith or secretly continuing Jewish practice, and refusal or reluctance to eat pork was recorded as evidence of judaizing in inquisitorial proceedings; the same dynamic applied to Muslim converts, moriscos, under the same suspicion, making a dietary law into, at times, a literal matter of life and death rather than a purely religious observance.