Symbolic Constitutionalism: On Sacred Cows and Abominable Pigs

The article discusses the significance of symbols within constitutional law by analyzing the role of laws introducing traditional national symbols into two legal systems characterized by a mixture of secular and traditional traits—India and Israel. Specifically, it focuses on the legal prohibitions on cattle slaughter in India and on pig growing and pork trading in Israel, animals considered “key symbols” in their respective cultures. Changes in the social and political context emerged as crucial for the legal regulation of these symbols as well as for its durability. Despite the similarities in their starting points, the Indian and the Israeli systems have ultimately taken divergent courses, reflecting differences in their respective contexts and underlying tensions. Whereas Indian cattle slaughter prohibitions are expanding with the constitutional backing of the Indian Supreme Court, pig-related prohibitions in Israel are declining, again with the constitutional backing of the Israeli Supreme Court. The article explains this difference by placing these symbols in a wider social context. Cattle slaughter in India has long been a consistent source of tension with the Muslim community. The basic strain that led to the original legislation, then, remains just as powerful, encouraging the preservation and expansion of laws forbidding cattle slaughter. By contrast, pig prohibitions in Jewish culture developed in the context of persecutions by Greco-Roman rulers and later on in Christian Europe. The “other” against whom this prohibition developed, however, is no longer part of public life in Israel. In addition, the Muslim community in Israel is equally averse to pigs. As time passed, then, the importance of pig prohibitions for Israeli secular Jews within the context of their national identity has declined, and they are currently perceived as a source of tension between secular and religious Jews. Many secular Israelis indeed view the pressure for pig-related legal prohibitions more as a symbol of religious coercion than as a national symbol of identification.