When Food Betrayed the Jews

Jump to Aunt Sally’s Sponge Cake story, or to New Recipe: Hazelnut, Pistachio and Cherry Thin Cookies or to Dishes with roots in the Judaeo-Spanish Kitchen.

Food carries memory, and in the case of Sephardic cuisine, it carries history. From sponge cakes to chickpea stews, the culinary traditions born in medieval Spain and preserved by Jews through Inquisition and exile have shaped global Jewish tastes in enduring ways. This is a tale of edible resistance, and the surprising role of food in preserving identity.

I will do my best to be brief, but this is a long story. NOTE: It goes without saying, but I am saying it anyhow, that all population numbers are approximate.

Life Before the Expulsions

Jews had been living on the Iberian Peninsula since the Roman Empire destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE and forcibly expelled the Jews from Judea into Europe and North Africa, with many of them settling in the then Roman-controlled Iberian Peninsula.

During the Golden Age of Spain, which lasted conservatively from the 10th to the 11th century, there would have been approximately half a million Jews living there. This would have been the majority of world Jewry, as the number of Jews worldwide was no more than a million, likely less.

Starting in earnest with the militant missionising Islamic sect, the Almohads, in the 12th century, it was they who drove a young Maimonides and his family, on pain of conversion or death, from Cordoba to North Africa, and from Morocco to Israel, finally settling in Egypt.

It was then the Christians, slowly over the next two centuries gaining control of the Iberian Peninsula, who made the situation worse for the Jews of the country.

Spain in Crisis

As is always the case — and we tend to forget this part of the story — Spain, prior to Columbus’s journey across the Atlantic, was suffering as a country. From around 1300 to 1310 there was a famine due to what would later be called in Spain a Little Ice Age. That was followed by flood, and then pestilence.

It seemed like God had pre-empted the Plagues of Egypt, but with devastating effects on the Jewish population. The Black Plague arrived in Barcelona, a port city, in 1348 and within the year had ravaged the country. In the face of biblical-scale plagues, the scapegoat was found.

^{Jewish Wedding in Morocco, Eugène Delacroix c.1839}

In 1391 came the first real pogrom; it is said that around 10,000 Jews were murdered. Over the next hundred years, beginning with those pogroms and continuing through waves of persecution and local expulsions, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 Jews left Spain. Many went to the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and Italy, while others made their way to Portugal, though their refuge there was short-lived. Smaller numbers settled in Eastern Europe, and as soon as the Americas became a viable option, an intrepid few crossed the Atlantic.

By 1492, the remaining openly practising Jewish population of Spain was significantly reduced. That year, the Alhambra Decree expelled between 50,000 and 80,000 Jews who had not converted to Christianity, forcing them to leave by late July. Many of these joined relatives and communities abroad who had left during the previous century’s exoduses. Meanwhile, as many as 100,000 to 200,000 Jews over this period had converted to Christianity, willingly or under duress.

The Inquisition in the Kitchen

^{An Old Woman Cooking Eggs 1618 – both this painting and the featured image are by Spanish artist Diego Velázquez – it was suspected that his grandparents were conversos.}

The Spanish Inquisition, established in 1478, was targeted not at people practising their Judaism openly but rather at those who had converted and were said to be secret Jews, who, in the privacy of their own homes, still kept Jewish practice.

The Inquisition was invited into towns by the local authority or population. Many of the New Christians accused and later tried by the Inquisition were denounced by neighbours and colleagues, and in one account I recently read, by a daughter of the family. Much of the accusation was made out of spite or jealousy.

On a plate of food you have before you right now, you may find clues to how our Iberian co-religionists influenced both Jewish food and world food. Be it the use of chickpeas — considered a Jewish food — the ordinary Christian or Muslim Spaniard in the Middle Ages would rarely, if ever, have eaten them.

Or the introduction of mezé as an appetiser to start a meal — that too was learned from the Jews, who would, on a Saturday after Shabbat services, serve small appetiser dishes that were shared around the family.

Sponge cakes, macaroons, and almond cakes all come from the Jews of Spain, with sponge cake, first baked around 1000 CE, becoming closely associated with the Jews of Spain because of its pareve quality, its popularity spreading across Europe.

The Inquisition, in its effort to weed out heretics in the form of people outwardly professing Christianity while practising Judaism at home, told people to look out for specific characteristics, as we read in the Inquisition’s directive to the city of Las Palmas in the 1480s. For example:

“… any Christian persons, living or dead, present or absent, natives, residents or inhabitants of this said royal city of Las Palmas or other cities … who … [keep] … the Sabbaths … [by] cooking on the said Fridays such food as is required for the Saturdays and on the latter eating the meat thus cooked on Fridays as is the manner of the Jews; … cleansing or causing meat to be cleansed, cutting away from it all fat or grease and cutting away the nerve or sinew from the leg; … not eating pork, hare, rabbit, strangled birds, conger eel, cuttlefish, nor eels or other scaleless fish, as laid down in the Jewish law; and upon the death of parents … eating … such things as boiled eggs, olives and other viands … . who have purged or deveined the meat they are preparing to eat, soaking it in water to remove the blood, or who have removed the sciatic vein from a leg of mutton or from any other animal … . Or who have eaten meat during Lent or on other days forbidden by the Holy Mother Church, without needing to do so … . Or who celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread, beginning by eating lettuce, celery or other bitter herbs on those days…”

This directive gives us a clear view of what was thought of as a Jewish lifestyle, and much of it revolved around the kitchen. The main way one could tell who was a Jew was by what they ate or didn’t eat and how they prepared their food.

Food as Resistance

^{Marranos: Secret Seder in Spain during the times of inquisition, an 1892 painting by Moshe Maimon}.

With the fear that as long as Jews lived in Spain the New Christians would be influenced by them, it was decided in 1492 that the only way for the New Christians to adhere to their Christianity was to expel all remaining Jews from Spain.

This had many effects and repercussions we still feel over five hundred years later. But in terms of food, it meant that these Spanish Jews, who went to the far reaches of Europe, into the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and the Americas, took their food traditions with them and spread their culinary knowledge.

For those left in Spain, it did not have the desired effect, as New Christians were accused of Judaizing for centuries to follow. The Inquisition only officially ended on 15 July 1834.

The Inquisition trials went into people’s kitchens. Women were often accused of being secret Jews based on the food they cooked and served, it being so different from what the average Spanish household would eat. From these depositions, we can get a fairly accurate picture of their recipes and preferences, as well as when and how they ate. But we must not forget that these were accusations. The writing down of recipes by the Inquisition was not a form of memorialisation but rather of prosecution.

This led to women in their hundreds being tried and convicted for Judaizing. Many were punished: some were fined and confined to their homes, others were banished to the colonies, and others still were burned at the stake. Knowing that these were the consequences of cooking Jewish, why did they not stop?

Some tried, by introducing pork to their diets or mixing meat and milk, and yet still cooking in the Jewish style. Others perhaps did not know how to cook differently. Others still could not break from this last vestige of their tradition, that last thread that tethered them to their Judaism.

Since I started sharing recipes and seeing it as a pathway for Jews to connect to their heritage, I have felt that the very last thing Jews hold onto on their way out of Judaism is their food, and the first thing they grab onto on their way back into Judaism is food — be it a Friday night dinner or attending a Seder, it is the easiest way in.

A Blessing Passed Down

The recipes of the Inquisition can be found in a number of books, mostly out of print, but they are a worthwhile read, if you can find them. They are humbling in that they remind us of these women who lived centuries ago, but were so like us in so many ways.

I will leave you with this: in one of the recipes I read, one Juana Nunez, in the sixteenth century in Ciudad Real, was accused by a neighbour of Judaizing. Her neighbours gave evidence to the inquisitors against her, saying that when her sons Hernandico (12) and Antonito (13) came home from school to show respect to their mother, they would kiss their mother’s hand in the Jewish fashion and she would then put her hand on their head in the form of a blessing, and not make the sign of the cross.

Reading this gave me chills, as this is exactly how we would kiss our Savta when saying goodbye to her: we would kiss the top of her hand, and she would then lay her hand on the top of our heads in the form of a blessing. Being Savta, she would follow that with a hearty “Masalam” (literally “get out of here” in Arabic) and a laugh.

It seems that Jewish children are still respecting their mothers and grandmothers in the same fashion as they did across time and space. These women, in the face of great adversity, kept their faith in the small ways, the ways they felt would carry to the next generation, in the food they ate and in their gestures of love.

Aunt Sally’s Sponge Cake

Sally was married to my great uncle Dejó (Dave in English). Unlike my grandfather — his older brother — Uncle Dave and Aunt Sally seemed so American to me. My Saba Yaakov and Savta Hadassa were foreign, though I believe Saba could and must have spoken English. He spoke to us in Hebrew, and to others in Yiddish, or Czech, but mainly he spoke Hungarian.

My grandparents would visit us wherever we were living in the world. They would come each January for a month if not longer, and would become part of the activities of the household — Saba walking me to the bus stop and Savta Hadassa helping in the kitchen or sitting at the sewing machine, mending or creating new clothes for us. On Sundays, when we lived in New York, they would go visiting friends and family, primarily in Brooklyn but also further into New Jersey.

On Shabbat, especially when we lived in Forest Hills, every Shabbat afternoon they would go visit Dejó and Sally in their apartment, a 15-minute walk up Queens Boulevard — a less friendly walk I could not imagine. Queens Boulevard, for those who may not be familiar with the most eyesore of streets, is in fact not a boulevard. A boulevard has one thinking of tree-lined streets and women with parasols, arms elegantly draped on their companion, who wears a top hat and swings a cane while promenading down the street. Queens Boulevard is in fact an eight-lane highway disguised as a street that runs through a neighbourhood, and instead of trees it is lined by tall red brick buildings of the 1960s, with close to no personality but lots of window air-conditioners marring their otherwise boring facades. Crossing Queens Boulevard is an act of bravery and foolishness all at the same time, while you take your life in your own hands and pray to make it to the other side.

_{^{Aunt Sally and Uncle Dave with my brother Bentzi – Summer of 1969}}

All of this to say — that it was heavenly walking into Aunt Sally and Uncle Dave’s apartment after 15 minutes of Queens Boulevard. My recollection is of a warm home, lots of golden trimmings that matched so well with Aunt Sally’s red hair. I’m not sure why I was always with them, but I was. My siblings and parents weren’t often with us — just me and the “olds”. As soon as we walked in, greetings out of the way, they would sit at the table, drink tea and eat from Sally’s delicious spread of cookies and cakes, while talking a mile a minute in Hungarian. I was set up at a side table with a book and a slice of Aunt Sally’s sponge cake.

It would take me years to realise that all four of them — my grandparents and great aunt and uncle — had grown up in the same town, Berehove, in Subcarpathian Ruthenia. At various times in its history it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and today it is part of Ukraine. The majority of the town still speaks Hungarian and its historical as well as culinary roots are Hungarian.

Sally grew up next door to my grandfather and great uncle. The war drove them all apart. Uncle Dave and Saba Yaakov served (servitude being the right word) as indentured servants in the Hungarian Army. Later they were separated, Uncle Dave surviving the tortures of one of the most notorious of Nazi labour camps, Mauthausen. Aunt Sally, and my grandmother, as well as the remaining members of my Grandmother’s, Sally’s and Dave’s families, were deported to Auschwitz in May of 1944. Sally lost her parents and three of her sisters (she was one of six girls). Dave and my Saba lost their parents and eight siblings (they were 12 children altogether). Of those eight siblings, many were married and had children of their own. I don’t even begin to pretend to understand how they survived or what trauma they all carried for the rest of their lives — how each and every one of them picked themselves up after losing everything and made new lives for themselves.

When I would walk into Sally and Dave’s house, each and every time they would discuss with my grandparents how much I looked like their sister Miriam. Perhaps that is why I always tagged along, or maybe it was for the sponge cake. Little did I know that Sally was recreating the dishes she grew up with in Berehove, that she was introducing them to a new generation and holding onto a piece of a vanished past.

Dave and Sally made their separate ways to America, Sally to Miami and Dave to Trenton, NJ, where each of them had family. With time, Hungarian Holocaust survivors made their way to New York, specifically to the Bronx, in order to meet other young people. Sally and Dave met and were married in 1948, recognising each other from back home. They had two sons, Eliezer and Robert, and today their family legacy continues into the fourth and fifth generations. For my part, I will never forget their warmth and kindness, and the feeling of having another set of grandparents.

^{Aunt Sally (second from the left) at the wedding of Eudice and Menachem Spitz Oct, 1970, Cleveland, Ohio.}

When I was fourteen, I spent an extended time in Forest Hills with just my older brothers. My parents’ work took them to the Far East, and I found myself eating Shabbat meals often with Aunt Sally and Uncle Dave. Without my grandparents, all their attention was on me and the conversation was in English. I felt special and looked after. And one Shabbat afternoon, as I was leaving to walk back down the dreaded Queens Boulevard home, Aunt Sally handed me an envelope. Inside was the recipe for the sponge cake, she had noticed how much I loved it and had taken the time before Shabbat to write it down for me. I didn’t realise what a gift that was, that she was following in the tradition of so many women before her, sharing a Jewish recipe that had been around for a thousand years, starting in Spain in the 10th century. She was passing on knowledge and, as my cousin Eliezer (Sally’s son) puts it, “the taste of home.”

New Recipe: Hazelnut, Pistachio and Cherry Thin Cookies

New Recipe: Hazelnut, Pistachio and Cherry Thin Cookies. Thin is a descriptor of the cookies — not what you will be if you start eating these and don’t stop, as I am wont to do! These cookies have become mine and Daniel’s signature bake — to the point that we have friends and community members who request them when we visit, rather than sending flowers.

Dishes with roots in the Judaeo-Spanish Kitchen: