Dear Colleagues,
As days grow shorter, appetites seem to expand and we crave food—holiday food, familiar food—that connects us to people, places, and past times. The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization recognizes the recurring significance of food in Jewish culture throughout the ages. It includes selections from cookbooks, such as Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York and Matthew Goodman’s Jewish Food: The World at Table. These selections are available to view for free, once you register or login to the Posen Digital Library.
“Every cuisine tells a story,” Roden explains. “Jewish food tells the story of an uprooted, migrating people and their vanished worlds. It lives in people’s minds and has been kept alive because of what it evokes and represents.” Then she adds how her own Egyptian world had disappeared forty years earlier.
But does Jewish food exist? Some say there is no such thing. Roden replies, “Because a culture is complex this does not mean it does not exist.”1
Matthew Goodman probes further: “In Tunisia Jewish cooks have made couscous, in India curries, in Yemen flat breads, in New York cheesecake. So what, then, might legitimately be considered ‘Jewish food’? How would we even go about defining such a thing? If we were, for example, to restrict ourselves to foods made by all of the world’s Jewish communities . . . ,” he admits, “the menu would be a very short one indeed, scarcely sufficient for a single meal.”
Like Roden, Goodman concludes that “Jewish food is that which has sustained the Jewish people for countless generations, wherever they happened to be.” And he observes, “Food, after all, carries the past within it, is in fact a kind of repository of a community’s history.”2
Der Shokhet (1923) by Issachar Ber Ryback. In Shtetl, Mayn Khorever Heym:A Gedenkenknish (Berlin: Farlag Shveln, 1923). Courtesy of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. In The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 8: Crisis and Creativity between World Wars, 1918–1939, edited by Todd M. Endelman and Zvi Gitelman.
Historian Aviad Kleinberg takes thinking about food in a completely different direction. In Full Belly: A New Look on Food and Society, he writes: “We eat in order to impress, to belong to the right kind of people. How many sets of knives and forks are laid on each side of the plate? Are they designer plates, or mass-produced? Is the wine served in the right glass and at the right temperature? Do we know what to do with each fork and knife? Do we open the bottle of wine correctly, and is it the correct wine?”3 In short, class consciousness shapes food preferences.
Jewish food, Kleinberg contends, was basically a cheaper and kosher version of the popular dishes preferred by the majority, non-Jewish society.
And just to tempt your palate, in the forthcoming Volume 5, The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, the Early Modern Period covering the years 1500 to 1750, edited by Yosef Kaplan, can be found a lovely Ladino ode, “On the Glory of the Eggplant,” that lovingly describes recipe after recipe after recipe by woman after woman after woman for a total of 35 different recipes from 35 different women!
Lest you think that The Posen Library only talks about the culture and sociology of food, check out some of the recipes, including potato salad with herrings and apples; tortilla soup; Pesach fried green tomatoes; rhubarb, fig and ginger jam; the ultimate challah; and, of course, bagels.
Wishing you abundant and tasty food this holiday season,
Deborah
Deborah Dash Moore
Editor in Chief, The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization
What is The Posen Library? (video)
P.S. And if you will be in Boston for this year’s Association of Jewish Studies Conference, please be sure to stop by our booth. We will be participating in two sessions:
Cultures on the Road, Sunday, December 18, 2022 2:30 pm – 4:00 pm
Related to the content of upcoming Volume 7: National Renaissance and International Horizons, 1880–1918, edited by Israel Bartal and Kenneth B. Moss (2024).
The Challenges of Digital Humanities in Jewish Studies — Siloing and Synergy, Tuesday, December 20, 2022, 8:30 am – 10:00 am
Related to the upcoming release of the Posen Digital Library 2.0 in 2023.
Credits
1 Claudia Roden, from The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York: A Cookbook (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997; London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1999), pp. 3 and 9, copyright © 1996 by Claudia Roden.
2 Matthew Goodman, excerpts from pp. x–xv, 306–310 from Jewish Food: The World at Table (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). Copyright © 2006 by Matthew Goodman.
3 Aviad Kleinberg, Beten meleah: Mabat aḥer al okhel ve ḥevrah [Full Belly: A New Look on Food and Society] (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House and Tel Aviv University Press, 2005), pp. 7, 10–14.
