Grace After Meat?

Post date: Aug 13, 2019 6:14:56 PM

As stated above, this is not a one time mistake but can be found in at least 16 different Haggadot produced by different printers in different countries. That it is not a one time mistake can also be seen from this 1874 Haggadah:

Part of the corpus with this expression can be found here: https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=9d4d2d6d05264441f524a4f68ec6b7ab&query=meat&view=Contexts

Now I come from a Dutch family and many Dutch people eat a Dairy meal on the Seder Night! (For me Pesach only really starts when I eat my Matzah with butter and yellow cheese - something I have to wait for until the next day here in Israel...) . So no meat on Seder Night would completely go against these 19th century Haggadot....

Searching backwards in time, I found the first translator who wrote "Grace After Meat". It was the renowned author, translator, and philosopher David Levi (1742-1801) from London, who was the second to translate the Haggadah into English - in 1794. He was so well respected and famous, that his translation was copied almost verbatim by others (at the time copyrights were not that well respected). Even translations that claimed to be his were considered to be authoritative. As a result, "Grace After Meat" was copied and reprinted over and over again, in one case even as late as 1912.

But why did the knowledgable David Levi use this expression? Was it maybe a typo and had he intended to write Grace After Meal? For years that had been my assumption. Levi made a mistake and all others followed him blindly. But not so long ago, I came upon the phrase "Grace After Meat" in many other (non-Jewish) 18th century sources. For example, Robert Burns (1759–1796) has a poem called "Grace After Meat" in his Poems and Songs - The Harvard Classics (1909–14). Reverend Isaac Watts includes the following prayer in his book with sermons and essays:

The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae Compendiarius (1752), an English-Latin dictionary, translates "Grace After Meat" as "Gratias Agere":

And a Manual of Devout Prayers, and Other Christian Devotions, Fitted for All Persons and Occasions contained the following prayer:

I found more, but I think the above suffices to show that apparently David Levi did NOT make a mistake but used this phrase on purpose. This leaves us with the question of why? I decided to ask my learned friends in the Ask the Beit Hamidrash Facebook group for help. They suggested an etymological link between bread and meat as well as other bread-meat connections but could not explain why David Levi would have written meat instead of bread. Levi was well aware of the word "bread" and translates "who bringeth forth bread from the earth" so he could have just written "Grace After Bread" if that is what he intended.

I also posted in the Hebrew Printing and Bibliography Facebook group. Within a minute, Aron Sterk came up with a simple, clear and logical answer: At the time, "meat" meant "food in general". Sterk even guided me to Samuel Johnson's 1752 dictionary:

So the meat of the matter is that David Levi, in 1794, used contemporary language to describe the meal and the Grace after the Meal by using the word "Meat". However, this was definitely no longer the case in the 20th century so that seeing this expression in Haggadot from as late as 1912 is very strange to say the least.

As the saying goes: G-d sends meat and satan sends the cooks...

And that's the meat and potatoes of it.