Ritual slaughter and animal welfare in interwar Poland

This articles examines the ritual slaughter debates in the Polish Second Republic (1918 to 1939) from the perspective of the organized animal welfare movement, and argues that animal welfarists both supplied and reinforced antisemitic arguments for banning ritual slaughter; Poland partially banned the Jewish rite in 1936. Animal protectionists in Poland subscribed to the view that the level of civilization reached by a people was best measured by their attitudes towards animals, the most defenseless of living creatures; compassion and humanitarianism, they believed, were defining feature of modern civility. Animal protectionists understood ritual slaughter to be unusually cruel, and as such they saw it as violating the imperatives of the modern and rational era. Given that Jews were the ones who practiced ritual slaughter, they in turn were described as a cruel anachronism that jeopardized animal protectionists' goal of establishing Poland's place in a civilized Europe.