Do you know the song by the band “The Weight” “I pulled into Nazareth…. it is not some pseudo-religious imagery – they were going to the Martin Guitar Factory!

I have a friend named Nelson Braff – I wanted him to start a blintz business ” The Crepes of Braff”:)

http://www.mirembekawomera.com/cooperative

though cheeses of nazareth is a way catcher name…

I expect we’d do bang up business with American Evangelicals…

Because of fear that non-Jewish cheesemakers would use rennet derived from a non-kosher or not kosherly slaughtered animal, the rabbis of the Mishnaic era (0-200 CE) enacted the prohibition of gevinat akum or non-Jewish cheese. This prohibition requires that a Shomer Shabbat Jew actually add the rennet to the mixture. The parallel for normal dairy products (milk, butter, etc.) is the prohibition of chalav akum (milk of a non-Jew). This is to prevent a non-Jewish producer from mixing cow’s milk with pig’s milk, camel’s milk, etc.

In the middle of the 20th century Rabbi Moses Feinstein held that American Jews could trust the UDSDA to supervise non-Jewish diary farmers so that cow’s milk remained such. He still advised getting Jewish supervised (chalav yisrael) milk where possible.

He wrote a seperate teshuvah on cheese. There were two major opinions regarding supervision on cheese. One held that it need merely be the same sort of supervision as for chalav yisrael (where a Jew need merely watch, not actually milk the cow) and the other opinion required a Jew to actually add the rennet. Rav Moshe held we should follow the stricter opinion, and the majority of Orthodoxy holds by this position.

There are a few O rabbis who believe we should follow the more lenient opinion. One of them is the rabbi who runs the tablet k supervising organization.

The Conservative movement allows the eating of any USDA certified cheese(*). The two reasons I have seen expressed are firstly that the rennet need not be kosher at all, because it is not edible and has been so processed that it isn’t really a food at all. Secondly, they feel that if we can rely on the USDA for milk we can similarly rely on it for cheese.

When I had the rennet conversation with an Orthodox rabbi, he explained to me that kosher cheese used to be made from curdling the milk inside the stomach and what makes it unkosher is when someone takes that rennet from the animal (possibly slaughtering it in an unkosher fashion) and then using the rennet seperately. Nowadays, most kosher cheese makers use vegetable or microbial rennet instead of curdling it inside of an animal stomach since it is cheaper and more practical.

If it had to processed by a Jew, I doubt he would have given me a posek to eat rennetless cheese without a hecture.

The concept of batel bi shishim doesn’t apply if it’s intentional. If a drop of milk accidently falls into a meat stew, it is still kosher, but if you sprinkle cheddar cheese on top of a pot of meat chili, that chili is unkosher (unless it is soy cheese or the meat is seitan!).