Jews with Knives: Toronto’s Depression-Era Kosher-Slaughter Infrastructure and the Kehilla Enquiry of 1932

ABSTRACT

In the 1930s, a legal dispute upset Toronto’s kosher-slaughter and kosher-retail industry. The Kehilla, the governing body responsible for regulating the city’s kosher system, was accused of charging exorbitant prices for kosher slaughter. Moreover, several community butchers alleged that they had been ostracized from the Municipal Abattoir and coerced into signing binding agreements with a butchers’ association. The conflict escalated to such adegree that the city’s court mediated the dispute at the request of the Board of Control and City Council. Using foodways as a lens into social and cultural dynamics, this article narrates and examines this kosher controversy to illuminate divisions within the city’s Depression-era Jewish community and the larger metropolis. This examination reveals a stratified yet resilient community—one that fostered severe class conflict, but also one that drew on killing-floor activism and an entrepreneurial spirit to secure an economic base in the face of a worsening depression.     

New AMS Dates from the Lambourn Long Barrow and the Question of the Earliest Neolithic in Sourthern England: Repacking the Neolithic Package?

This paper reassesses the chronological status of the Lambourn long barrow, which has provided one of the earliest dates from a mortuary monument in Britain. Three new AMS dates on short-lived material indicate that the construction and primary use phase of the monument lies within the period 3760–3645 cal BC, and that the earlier estimate obtained on charcoal (4555–3780 cal BC) is likely subject to the old wood effect, or is residual. This is followed by a consideration of the implications of the new dates in the context of the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition, the timing of which remains poorly understood. It is argued that the evidence is increasingly pointing to a more rapid neolithization process, and that this had implications for the mechanisms involved.