Ancient Jewish Vegetarianism

In the late 15th C. C.E., R. Yitzchak Arama, in Akeidat Yitzchak “Parshat Beshalach”, makes the following statement (translation by R. Dovid Sears, The Vision of Eden, p. 321):

Thus, from time immemorial, men of spiritual attainments, possessed of divine wisdom and removed from worldly desires, having separated the intellect from the physical, removed themselves from society to dwell in the deserts and forests, far from the rest of humankind, in order to attain spiritual perfection. They refrained from consuming the flesh of animals, but sustained the body with grains, fruits, and vegetables. Heeding G-d’s benevolent instruction to all mankind at the beginning of creation to eat only vegetarian foods, they sought to extricate the intellect from the physical and free themselves from inner conflict. Thus, the wise [King Solomon] said, “Better a morsel of bread eaten in peace than a feast in a house full of strife” (Proverbs 17:1). According to this teaching, bread and all that belongs in this category – grains, fruits, and vegetables that comprise the level below the animal realm – are the foods that a spiritually refined person should eat.

R. Arama’s words evoke the ascetic vegetarian practice of the Jewish men and women who lived in the community of the “Therapeutae” described near Lake Mereoitis in Egypt by 1st C. C.E. Philo Judaeus in De Vita Contemplativa (translation at http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/book34.html):

(37) and they eat nothing of a costly character, but plain bread and a seasoning of salt, which the more luxurious of them to further season with hyssop; and their drink is water from the spring; for they oppose those feelings which nature has made mistresses of the human race, namely, hunger and thirst, giving them nothing to flatter or humor them, but only such useful things as it is not possible to exist without. On this account they eat only so far as not to be hungry, and they drink just enough to escape from thirst, avoiding all satiety, as an enemy of and a plotter against both soul and body.

(73) I know well that some persons will laugh when they hear this, but they who laugh will be those who do things worthy of weeping and lamentation. And in those days wine is not introduced, but only the clearest water; cold water for the generality, and hot water for those old men who are accustomed to a luxurious life. And the table, too, bears nothing which has blood, but there is placed upon it bread for food and salt for seasoning, to which also hyssop is sometimes added as an extra sauce for the sake of those who are delicate in their eating…

In 1999, archaeological investigations in Israel, near Qumran, have yielded evidence for a similar community and practice (http://www.archaeology.org/9905/newsbriefs/vege.html):

Twenty-eight spartan dwellings on the edge of the Ein Gedi oasis in southern Israel may have been the home of a community of Essenes, the Jewish sect thought by some to have collected the Dead Sea Scrolls. While no inscriptions have been found positively linking the site to the group, its proximity to the village of Ein Gedi a mile away is grounds for assuming that its inhabitants belonged to the same community, says Yitzhar Hirschfeld of Hebrew University, the site's excavator. Descriptions of the Essenes by ancient authors such as Pliny the Elder "fit the character of the site," he says. Another clue is the presence of a mikveh, or Jewish ritual bath.

The Essenes are thought to have flourished between the second century B.C. and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70. Ancient sources describe them as a tightly knit group of men, possibly celibate, who practiced communal ownership of property. "The people who lived here worked the fields of the oasis," says Hirschfeld, who suspects that the site was a permanent, rather than seasonal, settlement. The dwellings were built for one person only and measure six by nine feet. They appear to have been occupied twice, in the first and early second centuries A.D., and between the fourth and sixth centuries. Three larger buildings possibly had a communal use; one, likely a kitchen, had three stoves and a thick layer of ash on the floor.

While the site yielded a fairly rich collection of pottery vessels, glass sherds, and seven coins from the early Roman and Byzantine eras, it is most remarkable for its lack of animal bones. "Although we worked carefully, sifting everything, we didn't find any," says Hirschfeld, adding that the settlers might have been vegetarian. Although Josephus noted that the dietary restrictions of the Essenes were stringent, the nearby village appears not to have been bound by vegetarianism. "We've found 4,000 animal bones in the village of Ein Gedi," he notes.