Responsum on Latkes

This post first appeared in the 100 Centre Street Journal in December, 2017

Q: I know that Hanukkah is already over, but I’ve been wondering why Jews eat latkes on Hanukkah? How long has that been the tradition and how widespread is it? And what about those jelly donuts?

A: As with many cultural practices, we often assume that since we (or perhaps our parents, or perhaps our friends’ parents) grew up with a particular custom (such as latkes on Hanukkah), that custom must date from time immemorial. In Judaism, we have a term for such a thing: mi-sinai (pronounced mee-see-nigh), which means “from Sinai,” which is to say that Moses received it from God along with the 10 Commandments, so who so we we think we are to suggest that we do something different!?

There are significant problems with declaring latke-eating a “mi-sinai” tradition, however, not least of all the fact that Hanukkah was not declared an official Jewish holiday until very late in Jewish history, so it’s not mentioned at all in the Torah (or anywhere else in the Bible). Perhaps an even bigger problem, however, is that even if we wanted to claim that Judah Maccabee fried the first latke, we would have to figure out where he came up with potatoes during the second century BCE (before the common era): potatoes are a New World crop, and did not arrive in Europe until the 16th century, when Basque sailors brought them from Peru to Northern Spain. Presumably, they arrived in the land of Israel even later than that.

To get to the story of latkes, however, we need to address another mi-sinai tradition in Judaism, namely the practice of eating special foods on Shabbat and Holidays, most universally matzo for Passover. The vast majority of other holiday culinary traditions, however, are specific to particular groups of Jews and are usually based on the local and seasonal foods available where they lived. So, when Hanukkah began to develop as a holiday, there were all kinds of questions about what it meant and how one should light the candles; the famous question in the Talmud is “Mai Hanukkah?”: what is this Hanukkah business? Among the questions (although I’m not sure it’s in the text of the Talmud itself) was: well, what are we going to eat?!

According to scholars, among the first answers to that particular (and crucial!) question was list that appeared in a14th century liturgical poem by Rabbi Kalonymus ben Kalonymus ben Meir (b.1286 – died after 1328), which, among other foods, talks about levivot, pancakes fried in a pan, presumably in olive oil. These pancakes tended to be made of cheese and/or flour, and indeed, throughout the Jewish world, people tended to eat sweet cheese treats at Hanukkah time, including cheese blintzes in Ashkenazi traditions and cassola (ricotta pancakes) in Italy.

The olive oil makes sense, given that the Talmud’s Hanukkah story emphasizes the miracle of the oil. But cheese? A bit later in the 14th century, in a gloss to the Talmudic discussion of Hanukkah in Tractate Shabbat, a Spanish authority, Rabbi Nissim of Gerona (ca. 1310-1375), writes: “it says in a midrash that the daughter of Yohanan [the High Priest] fed the enemy leader cheese to get him drunk and cut off his head and they all fled, and therefore it is customary to eat cheese on Hanukkah.” 

Here Nissim is conflating two traditions: the Maccabean revolt (thus Yochanan) in 165 BCE and the legend of Judith, whose story was first written down some sixty years earlier (115 BCE). Judith was the heroic widow who lured Holofernes, the Assyrian general whose forces were besieging her town, into her tent with the promise of food and drink. In medieval versions of the story, Judith gave the general levivot, pancakes, studded with salty cheese and plied him with wine (the more cheese, the more wine). When he was completely drunk, she cut off his head with his own sword, which so frightened his troops that they all ran away. A miracle indeed!

In the European context, however, where olive oil was scarce outside of Spain and Italy, fried cheese presented a challenge, however, since the primary cooking oil came from animals. Non-Jews used lard, of course, derived from pigs, but Jews tended to use chicken and especially goose fat for cooking. Therefore, dairy foods gave way first to buckwheat and grains. The final step was the shift from grain to potatoes as the primary food crop in Eastern Europe during the in 17th  and 18th centuries. So the Ashkenazi ancestors of the majority of American Jews would have had access to potatoes (and a few onions and maybe a little flour or matzo meal for binding) to make latkes. Given that they were fried in schmaltz, however, I doubt that sour cream was a common condiment--I assume that was a non-Jewish custom that caught on among Jews when vegetable oil took pride of place from animal fats.

As a final note, you may be wondering about sufganiyot, the ubiquitous (in Israel) Hanukkah jelly donut that is seen as the usual alternative to latkes. Although fritters of various descriptions populate the Hanukkah table in many traditions, the specific forbearer of sufganiyot hails from much the same place as the latke: the Polish ponchik, which travelled to Palestine in the early 20th century with Eastern European Zionists and quickly monopolized the Hanukkah season.

So indeed, the tradition of eating latkes (or sufganiyot) for Hanukkah is both temporally and culturally specific, which is wonderfully liberating, since we can feel free to enjoy them (or not!) as well as to experiment with other traditional Hanukkah foods, such as cassola and blintzes. Happy New Year!!

Joseph, Pharaoh, and the Perpetual Stranger

Published on Hebrew College's Blog "70 Faces of Torah" on December 12, 2017.

This year, as is often the case, we read Parashat Mikeitz on Shabbat Hanukkah, a celebration of light that affirms the durability of our Jewish identity even in periods of assimilation and even oppression. During one such period--of assimilation in the United States and of genocide in Europe--Muriel Rukeyser spoke about the gift of being a Jew:

To be a Jew in the twentieth century
Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse, 
Wishing to be invisible, you choose
Death of the spirit, the stone insanity.
Accepting, take full life. Full agonies: 
Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood
Of those who resist, fail, and resist: and God
Reduced to a hostage among hostages.

The gift is torment. Not alone the still
Torture, isolation; or torture of the flesh.
That may come also. But the accepting wish,
The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee
For every human freedom, suffering to be free,
Daring to live for the impossible. (1944)

This poem, which later entered Reconstructionist and Reform prayer books, reads as a gloss, not only on the ambiguities of Hanukkah, but also on Joseph’s story in Mikeitz, where he faces the choice of embracing the gift of “torment” and “human freedom” or remaining “invisible.”

At the outset, Joseph is a Hebrew--an ivri. As scholars point out, this unstable word toggles between a geographical (“the one from beyond,” or “the migrant”) and an ethnic designation (derived, perhaps, from the sons of Eber in Genesis 10:21, although it refers only to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob). In the context of Joseph’s (and later Israel’s) sojourn in Egypt, however, it distinguishes a Hebrew from an Egyptian as a marker of foreignness, itself an ambiguous concept. Joseph proudly declares himself a Hebrew in Genesis 40 even though a chapter earlier, Potiphar’s wife upbraids her husband for bringing a Hebrew into their house for sexual dalliance.

After Pharaoh reports his impenetrable dreams about cows and corn, his royal cupbearer recalls a person who might interpret them: “a young man, a Hebrew, servant to the captain of the guard” (Genesis 41:12). Rabbinic tradition understood his words differently than this modern translation, casting aspersions on the cupbearer for describing Joseph as a lad--na’ar, a foreigner/Hebrew--ivri, and a slave--eved, all assertions of his inferiority. More troubling, to my mind, is that he stops short of calling Joseph by name, as though his status as a Hebrew and a slave relegate him to namelessness.

Joseph’s transformation from a Hebrew slave to an Egyptian vizier begins immediately upon his release from prison, as he shaves and receives new clothes in preparation for his audience with Pharaoh. When he offers both an interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams and a plan for addressing the impending seven years of famine, Joseph accepts Pharaoh’s signet ring, another set of even finer clothes, and a gold chain, raiment that conveys his newly elevated status among the Egyptians. Finally, Pharaoh gives Joseph an Egyptian name and an Egyptian wife (although Rabbinic tradition insists that his wife, Asenath, was actually the daughter of Dinah and Shechem). For all intents and purposes, Joseph’s transformation from ivri to Egyptian is complete. He has become invisible. But has he accepted the “Death of the spirit?”

Intimations that he has not include the narrator’s continuing references to Joseph by his Hebrew name. And when Joseph becomes a father, he chooses for his sons not Egyptian names but Hebrew ones, connecting them to God’s grace in helping him overcome the suffering of both his early upbringing (Menashe) and of his affliction in Egypt (Ephraim). Beyond this ongoing connection to Hebrew, we find that after the birth of Joseph’s sons, Pharaoh himself seems to refer to Joseph by his Hebrew name. That name, however, could not have been the one that gained worldwide fame, since if it were, the sons of Jacob would have known that this Egyptian vizier was named Joseph and might have reasonably recognized him as their brother.

Despite these hints at an ongoing Hebrew identity, however, the word ivri itself remains submerged until the fateful scene of Joseph’s banquet with his brothers. As many commentators point out, both the brothers and the Egyptians find it astonishing that Joseph invites these Hebrew sheep herders for a meal, because both Hebrews, at least during meals, and shepherds (in Gen. 47) represent for Egyptians a toevah, a contested term which has traditionally been translated as an “abomination” (and as such stands at the center of the contemporary debate about the bible’s attitude towards same-sex intercourse in the book of Leviticus), but which, as Jay Michaelson and other scholars have argued recently, is in many contexts more likely to mean “foreign cultic practice.”

The verse reads: “[The servants] served [Joseph] by himself, and [the Hebrew brothers] by themselves, and the Egyptians who ate with him by themselves; for the Egyptians could not dine with the Hebrews, since that would be abhorrent to the Egyptians” (Gen. 43:32). Modern commentators tend to see this verse as evidence of the Egyptians’ xenophobic feelings of religious and cultural superiority. Targum Onkelos, however, suggests that the source of the toevah was the fact that the Hebrews were eating lamb, an animal that Egyptians worshiped, which would make it impossible for them to eat at the same table as the Hebrews (Onkelos likely bases his reading on Exodus 8, where Moses doesn’t want to make an animal sacrifice among the Egyptian population for fear that they would take it as a toevah and stone the Hebrews to death). Onkelos’s suggestion, however, seems off as well, since no one among Joseph’s Egyptian staff appears to find it off-putting that he calls for an animal to be slaughtered for the banquet. Most likely, the prohibition, much like Kashrut in many traditional Jewish communities, served to maintain the boundary between Egyptian and foreigner--to prevent an expansion of the kind of cultural blending that Joseph and his family seem to represent.

If that is the case, however, why does Joseph also sit alone--neither with the Hebrews nor with the Egyptians. Is his isolation a result, as again many commentators suggest, of his own superior position over his Egyptian advisors and retainers? Indeed we have no evidence from the text that Joseph ever sat together with his staff--or that he didn’t. However, I want to speculate in the context of cultural boundaries that Joseph here is following the narrow path of the ivri with an Egyptian name: the one who crosses cultural boundaries must maintain these cultural distinctions internally, struggling to maintain their own identity while also remaining safe and alive. It also represents his place “in between,” in the liminal space between cultures that brings him such danger and such power.

Ultimately, like Moses after him, Joseph will reveal his full, composite identity in order to deliver his family and his people from affliction to freedom. That liminal status, however, will never leave him. And here perhaps we begin to understand that the fullest embrace of the identity of an ivri is not solely ethnic but also geographical and cultural: one who crosses over, stands forever in between, a perpetual stranger.

At Hanukkah, we celebrate his composite Jewish identity--Hebrews thoroughly mixed not only with Hellenists but also with all the cultures that we’ve assimilated and influenced over the centuries. And as Rukeyser’s poem reminds us, the choice to be a Jew is no simple gift, no stable identity; indeed it often feels easier to remain invisible, both personally and communally. Joseph’s full embrace of his liminal identity will deliver his family from affliction but eventually lead the Israelites into slavery and near genocide in Egypt. So too Moses, who in recognizing his status as both Hebrew and Egyptian, will face much “torment” and “labyrinthine blood” in “daring to live for the impossible” and “suffering to be free.”