This paper comes out of research for a book project that explores the connections between religion, consumer demand, and industrial structure through a close study of the kosher poultry industry in America between 1890 and 1960. Jewish demand for kosher poultry generated a large national market for the shipping of millions of live chickens to east coast centers where they could be killed by schocktim – kosher slaughters -- for Jewish consumers. At its height in the interwar period, roughly 200 million chickens annually made the trip from midwestern and southern farms to New York and other cities with large Jewish populations.
This paper looks at one particularly acute issue – the tight connection between the urban trade in kosher poultry and illicit practices by the firms involved, extending to outright criminal activity by gangsters. I draw on three principal areas of scholarship to explore this curious phenomenon: on branding (Andrea Lluch, Theresa Lopes, Paul Duguid, and Alessandro Stanziani); business rule-making in fragmented industries (Ellis Hawley, Gerry Berk, and Laura Phillips Sawyer); and union corruption (Steve Fraser, Andrew Wender Cohen.
Drawing on these literatures, the paper will argue that the corruption in the highly fragmented live poultry business was a recourse by stakeholders to facilitate rule-making in the absence of any legal channel to do so – and these rules included enforcement of kosher standards. A critical group of agents in this process were the schocktim who accepted an alliance with criminal elements to reinforce their ability to ensure that poultry “branded” as kosher truly met kosher requirements. Their acceptance of illicit practices reflected a practical awareness of the weakness of state power and the absence of other legal avenues to prevent dilution – counterfeiting, to adopt a term from the brand literature – of their unprotected kosher brand.