Without Taking a Fish; In the First 40 Days

Out of context quote from The Old Man and the Sea.

I was thinking about Lent, and the fact that alligator and capybara, and presumably whale if one lives in the places that eat those, are exempt from the fast. Now many people, myself included, have sloppily attributed this to Aristotle...but here's the thing, Aristotle knows that whales aren't fish (he also knew how octopodes reproduced—and his version was widely mocked by Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars, until he was proved right in the 19th century).

No, this little oddity has a different, older source. Aristotle doesn't consider whales or sea-turtles to be fish, but you know who does? Judaism. Read Leviticus. Everything that lives in the water is treated under a single heading. Now, as you may not be aware, kashrut law considers fish "pareve" (neutral), neither meat nor dairy, much like vegetables; as you probably did know, also, the only kosher fish are those that have both scales and fins. Sharks, whales, and lobsters have fins but not scales; alligators and turtles have scales but not fins; crabs, mollusks, and capybaras have neither. Thus all of them are "treif" (unclean).

Christianity is a sect of Judaism, and its first few centuries were very wary of introducing categories from pagan philosophy. So rather than fathering our peculiar categories onto Aristotle, who didn't have them, isn't it more likely that we just retained the Jewish conception "pareve because aquatic", but are forbidden from calling any animal "treif because lacking fins and/or scales" (see Acts 10:15)?

Of course, the main motive in retaining a now-irrelevant category of dietary law was to make the wealthy live as the poor do, and for most of human history poor people got a lot more of their protein from fish than from fowl or fauna. Many Indian tribes didn't eat fish, but they did eat gators, capybaras or nutrias, and whales (if they lived near them). We actually have church documents from the early Spanish Colonial period assessing the permissibility of capybara during Lent; they outright said to consider it a fish, because otherwise the Indians would starve, and cited the aquatic habitat as pretext merely to shush legalistic naysayers.

Compare this attitude to the imbecility that made the Long Walk a tragedy—namely that the Anglos rationed wheat flour to Navajos who'd never seen it before, assumed it could be treated like cornmeal, and thus starved, despite being well-provisioned. Why it's almost like Spaniards grasped the fact Indians had a different culture from them, and adapted their policies.