Hobbits May Be Kosher!

The debate continues on Evil Monkey's Guide to Kosher Imaginary Animals, with this comment about hobbits. I am disallowing comments on this post only so that the full discussion will continue on the original post, because it's been linked to throughout the blogosphere--thanks!Joshua Zelinsky Says:April 20, 2008 at 10:08 pmThe kashtrut of mythological creatures has been a pet issue of mine for sometime. I will take the time to point that this list is wrong about hobbits; sentience does not a priori make something not kosher. In fact humans are only not kosher due to a rabbinic prohibition. From a strictly torahdic perspective humans are kosher (the rabbis understandably decided this was ridiculous). This leads to a number of interesting issues like if a Jew is starving and has an option of eating a human corpse or a pig according to some opinions they should eat the corpse since that would entail breaking only a rabbinic commandment rather than one from the torah. (This has more practical consequences as well - if one is say cutting vegetables into a soup and you cut yourself and a drop of blood falls into the soup according to many opinions you don’t have to kasher the pot. However, if it were a drop of pig blood you would have to).So the real question about whether hobbits are kosher is whether or not they are close enough to being human that they would fall under the rabbinic injunction making humans unkosher.