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!!