Haggadah for the Vegetarian Family
This haggadah assumes that it is the mission of a haggadah to speak about slavery of all kinds,
not only past slavery or human slavery. In the October 17th issue (1996) of The New York
Review of Books, David Brion Davis, a leading scholar on the issue of slavery, speculated that
human beings learned how to enslave other human beings by first enslaving animals. Marjorie
Spiegel explores this idea in her book, The Dreaded Comparison. If slavery is defined
as the commercialization of living creatures, the buying and selling of living flesh, can we describe
animals in zoos, in cages, in slaughterhouses and in laboratories, who have been abducted from
their own world, as "enslaved"? In Man and the Natural World, Keith Thomas pointed
out that the Portugese used to mark slaves like sheep with a hot branding iron. The Torah
prohibits the muzzling of the ox to prevent him from grazing in the field. W.E.H. Lecky, in his
History of European Morals, compared this law with the condition of Sicilian peasants
in the 18th century who worked in vineyards with their mouths muzzled so that they would not
eat a single grape.
We in the West are ignorant of the fact that there are more slaves in the world today than 150
years ago when the Anti-Slavery Society was formed in England. Slavery is not only pernicious
but persistent. For information about modern slavery, contact The Anti-Slavery Society, The
Stableyard, Broomgrove Road, London 9 9TL, England. In the US the address is PO Box 81,
Newtonville, MA 02160