Tub taam; or Vindication of the Israelitish Way of Killing Animals, Called Shechitah, Aaron Zebi Friedman, New York: 1876

Aaron Zebi Friedman (1822-76), served as shohet, or ritual slaughterer, in his native Poland before immigrating to New York in 1848, where he found employment in one of the city’s largest kosher slaughterhouses. In 1866 the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals launched the first anti-Shehitah campaign in America. The president of the Society, Henry Bergh, dispatched a letter to the proprietor of a kosher abattoir in New York accusing him of engaging in "barbarous, revolting, and wicked" practices.  In 1875, Aaron Zebi Friedman, renowned for his piety, composed a sharp rejoinder entitled, Tub Taam, to refute Bergh's accusations. Because Friedman had written the original in Hebrew, the book was translated into English in 1876 by Laemlein Buttenweiser. The arguments espoused by Friedman in his vindication of traditional Jewish ritual practice proved so effective that in 1885, the same Henry Bergh who had fomented the original protests, defended shehitah against similar charges of cruelty leveled by the Philadelphia branch of his own Society.  The great scarcity of the first English edition is attested to in the preface to the subsequent (1904) English edition, which categorically states that although “in 1876, the book was translated by Prof. Buttenweiser into English, … owing to the illness of the author, the translation was never placed on sale.”