Adventures in Jewish Studies

The Association for Jewish Studies Podcast

The World of Sephardic Food

About the Episode

Jewish food is no longer confined to what you’d find on a deli menu. Bourekas, shakshuka, adafina, jachnun, and harira have claimed their place on the Jewish dining table right alongside blintzes, cholent, kugel, borscht, and matzoh ball soup.

Join guest scholars Ari Ariel, Hélène Jawhara Piñer, and Noam Sienna, along with host Avishay Artsy as they explore the diverse world of Sephardic Jewish food, where recipes can tell us about immigration, assimilation, memory, identity, the Jewish past and potential futures, and so much more.

Transcript

Avishay Artsy: Welcome to Adventures in Jewish Studies, the podcast of the Association for Jewish Studies. In every episode, we take you on an entertaining and intellectual journey about Jewish life, history and culture, with the help of some of the world’s leading Jewish studies scholars. I’m your host for this episode, Avishay Artsy.

For this episode, we’re going to explore the world of Sephardic Jewish food. And we’re starting in my kitchen. I brought in an assistant.

Ada Artsy: My name is Ada.

Avishay Artsy: Tell me about your favorite soup.

Ada Artsy: It’s called chickpea soup. And what I like about it is, I just think it’s very yummy.

Avishay Artsy: Chickpea soup is our nickname for harira. It’s a Moroccan soup. It’s got chickpeas and lentils in a tomato-based broth with fresh herbs and spices. There are lots of ways of making it. I use a vegetarian recipe I found in Joan Nathan’s cookbook, “King Solomon’s Table.”

Ada Artsy: “A Muslim staple to break the daily fast of Ramadan, it has crossed over to the Moroccan Jewish tradition of breaking the fast of Yom Kippur. Although many cooks make this with meat, I have turned it into a vegetarian version and make it whenever I can.”

Avishay Artsy: We make it a lot in our house too. Making harira is pretty straightforward. Chop up carrots, celery and onion… Sauté them in olive oil… add cumin, turmeric and salt. You can also add harissa, a spicy red chili paste, to give it a kick. Add parsley and cilantro, lentils, chickpeas, tomato sauce, and stock. After it cooks for a while, whisk together flour, egg, lemon juice and water and add it to the soup. Serve it topped with cilantro and parsley, and voila, harira!

Ada Artsy: It’s very yummy. And nutritious!

Avishay Artsy: Making harira at home got me thinking about the food I grew up with. I was raised in an Ashkenazi home, and I had no idea how diverse Jewish food is. Making harira got me interested in learning more about the food of Sephardic Jews, who are the descendants of the Jews from Spain and Portugal who settled across North Africa, the Middle East, and beyond. So I called up Noam Sienna. He’s a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and his research focuses on the things that made up daily Jewish life, like food.

Noam Sienna: When I was working with Moroccan Jewish immigrants for one of my projects, I was doing some oral histories and I remember one elderly woman telling me that she remembered quite distinctly that growing up in Morocco, they had a harira pot that they would use to make soup and that the pot would actually travel back and forth between her family and the Muslim family that was living next door. When the month of Ramadan began, her family, the Jewish family would make a big pot of harira soup and deliver it for the Muslim family to eat for the iftar, for the break fast. And then that Muslim family would then at the end of Ramadan return the harira pot with harira in it to break the fast of Yom Kippur. So, it's a break fast soup. It's both Jewish and Muslim at the same time. And in this case, it's literally, it’s the same soup pot. But it has both Jewish meaning and Muslim meaning as it moves between communities. So, I loved hearing that story because it really pointed out to me how these foods can kind of be two things at once. They're both uniquely Jewish and that they carry uniquely Jewish meaning, but they're also shared. It's the same recipe. It's the same significance. And in some cases, it's even the same, literally the same food that is moving between communities like that. 

Avishay Artsy: Harira is a good example of what makes studying the history of food so fascinating. As I learned more about Sephardic Jewish food, I realized how much these recipes can tell us about immigration, assimilation, memory, identity, the Jewish past and potential futures, and so much more.

Part of the reason, I think, that I didn’t know more about Sephardic Jewish food is demographic. The Pew Research Center polled American Jews in 2020 and found that two-thirds identify as Ashkenazi. Just three percent identify as Sephardic; one percent as Mizrahi, or Middle Eastern; and six percent as a mix of those. Twenty-five percent didn’t identify with any category.

Even though Sephardic Jews make up a small percent of American Jews overall, their food has taken off in popularity.

Hélène Jawhara Piñer: Well, Sephardic Jewish food is rich. It's healthy. It has a lot of vegetables and it's colorful and it's a bit spicy sometimes. And I'm not specialist of Ashkenazi food, but it seems like according to my Ashkenazi friends, it's totally different.

Avishay Artsy: This is Hélène Jawhara Piñer. She’s a food historian with a focus on medieval Spain, and has written three books about Sephardic Jewish food.

Hélène Jawhara Piñer: Sephardic cuisine, I would say definitely olive oil, garlic, eggplant and cilantro, and a lot of vegetables like Swiss chard, a large amount of eggs for example. And concerning the spices, you have cinnamon and cumin. If you just mention this it's like, ‘wow, this is Sephardic cuisine.’

Avishay Artsy: Her latest book is “Matzah and Flour: Recipes from the History of the Sephardic Jews.” That history was largely about survival through adaptation.

Hélène Jawhara Piñer: The Jews of Spain had to live under different kinds of dominations. They never ruled the territory. So they had to adapt their practices including their food practices to survive and to be able to share and allow this transmission from generations to generations… But our cuisines are totally different according to the places where we decided to settle from the 15th century to today.

Avishay Artsy: A term like “Sephardic food” is a construct. You can say generally that Sephardic food features ingredients like eggplant, chard, and chickpeas. Ashkenazi food is more likely to contain beets or cabbage or potato. But both terms encompass a wide variety of foods. The differences are partly a product of geography and climate. Jews living in or near the warm and sunny Mediterranean were more likely to eat olives and olive oil, vegetables and nuts, and to drink wine. Jews in northern, central, and eastern Europe relied on root vegetables, legumes, and fermented and pickled foods, like fish and vegetables, because of the shorter growing seasons and longer winters, and they drank liquor made from grains and potatoes. But they were also influenced by the foods of their neighbors.

Jawhara Piñer traces the earliest known examples of the food of Spanish Jews to a cookbook published in the 13th century in Arabic called Kitab al-Tabikh, or “The Book of Dishes.” 

Hélène Jawhara Piñer: So this cookbook is the first evidence of the existence of cuisine made by and for Jews in the 13th century Spain. 

Avishay Artsy: Beginning in 1492 in Spain and 1497 in Portugal, the Inquisition forced Jews to convert to Catholicism or be expelled. Some Jews stayed and converted, either willingly or under duress. These so-called New Christians or “conversos” sometimes practiced Judaism in secret… including how they ate.

Hélène Jawhara Piñer: They continued to eat what they used to eat before 1492. But what changed is that they had to hide those food practices because the other ones knew about those food consumptions. 

Avishay Artsy: Food became a tool for catching conversos who held onto their Jewish identity. Neighbors and informers would keep a close eye on the conversos’ dining and cooking practices. To deceive the inquisitors and their informers, these secret Jews came up with a trick.

Hélène Jawhara Piñer: Some converso Jews, they used to have a bit of lard and pork in a very special place of the house, at home, and when some guests or some non-Jewish people showed up… so this piece of pork meat or lard were just placed in a very separate plate just in order to highlight the fact where, ‘we are Christians because we have this piece of lard on the table. So you cannot just testify against us or judge us because we are Jewish. So you can see this, so we are not Jewish.’ And then this piece of lard or pork was just placed back to a very special place in the house.

Avishay Artsy: The Jews who refused to convert were forced to leave Spain and Portugal. They scattered across southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and South America.

Hélène Jawhara Piñer: So the Sephardic diaspora include Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Italy. You have in the Balkans as well. You have also Tunisia, you have Algeria, you have also Turkey in the Sephardim. When you go closer to the east of the Mediterranean, you are closer to the Mizrahi culture which is different from the Sephardi culture, even if sometime the border between the two cultures isn’t so easy to define. And then you have all the Sephardim who after 1492 crossed the Atlantic and settled in the new world, like Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and all those countries.

Ari Ariel: So in terms of flavors, we're really thinking of things like tomatoes and olive oil and what we think of as Mediterranean, maybe sort of Spanish, Italian, are the best examples, combined with things like Syrian and Middle Eastern foods. In the contemporary world that might even mean things like falafel and hummus and things of that nature.

Avishay Artsy: This is Ari Ariel at the University of Iowa, where he directs the International Studies Program and is an associate professor of International Studies and History. Most of his work is on Middle Eastern Jews, ethnicity and nationalism. 

Ari Ariel: And I have a particular interest in foodways. Before graduate school, I went to culinary school and worked in the food world for a couple of years and now I'm combining my loves of academia and history and foodways to try to think about these things in a serious way.

Avishay Artsy: When talking about “Jewish food,” Ariel says it’s hard to separate it too much from what other, non-Jewish communities were eating.

Ari Ariel: Most of the foods that Jews eat are common among the people that they live around, right, or with. So, there aren't that many foods that are sort of uniquely Jewish. And when there are, they tend to be foods that are Jewish in the sense that they're used for holidays or for Shabbat or something like that.

Avishay Artsy: So the falafel and meat stews and breads that Sephardic Jews ate are similar to, if not the same as, what their neighbors ate. Let’s go back to Noam Sienna.

Noam Sienna: Let's take couscous, the kind of poster child of Moroccan food.  So obviously Moroccan Jews and Moroccan Muslims both eat couscous in different ways. Couscous was traditionally eaten in Morocco about once a week. So Muslims would eat it for the big Friday meal after the mosque after going to the jama’ prayers. And Jews would eat couscous on Friday for Shabbat, either for their Friday night meal or for Shabbat lunch. And you'd have a festive couscous for holidays with pumpkin or with almonds and cinnamon or with different kinds of nice vegetables or of course with meat, lamb. So you say, ‘okay is this special holiday couscous? When it's being made for a Jewish holiday then it has a Jewish context, it has a Jewish function to it, it's serving to be part of the family's holiday celebration for Sukkot or for Shavuot or for Shabbat, so it's a Shabbat couscous. That makes it Jewish.’ At the same time on a functional kind of material level it's not really that different from what the Muslim family next door is serving for Friday prayers.

Avishay Artsy: Jews also influenced their neighbors. Some Christian foods have secret origins as Jewish food. Buñuelos are a Mexican Christmas dessert of fried dough topped with sugar and jam. Some historians trace it back to the Spanish conversos who settled in Mexico. Other Christmas and Easter delicacies descend from Jewish recipes: Greek donuts called loukoumades, a Roman baked ricotta cheesecake called cassola, and salted cod, battered and fried, called filetto di baccalà.

Ariel’s research looks at the foods of Jews in the Middle East, particularly in Yemen, and how their food changed after emigrating to Israel. The terms Sephardic and Mizrahi are often used interchangeably, but Sephardic comes from the Hebrew word “Sfarad” for Spain, and refers specifically to Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent. The term “Mizrahi” means “Eastern” in Hebrew and refers to Jews from Arab and Muslim countries. Ariel says “Mizrahi” is actually a relatively modern term.

Ari Ariel: It doesn't really become an important term of identity until the ‘70s in Israel. And it's really constructed out of the different Middle Eastern communities that migrate to Israel. And then once in Israel, they live in the same neighborhoods. They share some commonalities. They share a background maybe in the Islamic world and they kind of reform into a new ethnic identity. So the term for that is Mizrahi, but that's not really an important term until the 70s.

Avishay Artsy: Ariel’s family comes from Yemen, and the food that these immigrants brought with them were adopted by Israelis in general.

Ari Ariel: I guess the ones that people are most familiar with are things like jachnun, which is a Sabbath dish that is essentially a rolled dough that's then baked overnight. So, it gets sort of caramelized and delicious. Mulawa is another one which is actually a similar dough but is similar to an Indian flatbread that's pan-fried. There are lots of meat stews. And the most typical dish in Yemen, now sort of the national dish of Yemen, is something called saltah, which is essentially a stew made with vegetables and meat and lots of spices in it, or at least can usually have meat in it. It is akin to what those familiar with food in Israel would think of as Yemenite soup, which might be a soup that's cooked for a long time with meat in it. In Yemen, it's usually thickened a little bit more, but it's the same flavor profile.

Avishay Artsy: Sephardic Jews can differ from their Ashkenazi counterparts in what they eat on Jewish holidays and on Shabbat.

During the eight days of Passover, Ashkenazi Jews traditionally avoid eating kitniyot, but Sephardic Jews do not. These include beans, peas, lentils, rice, corn, buckwheat, and other seeds.

The Passover dish of charoset is also prepared differently. A sweet mixture of finely chopped fruits and nuts, Ashkenazi Jews typically make it with apples and walnuts. Sephardic Jews make theirs with dates and figs. Jawhara Piñer was combing through records of Inquisition investigations and trials when she came across a 15th century description of charoset. 

Hélène Jawhara Piñer: I was totally astonished and I was so happy to find this source, because it's an Inquisition trial that tells a story of a very young guy, Diego. He was 27 at that time and he told the inquisitors… that he saw her mother making this very thick paste made with dates and figs and that her mother used to make like a meatball.  So the word is albondiga in Spanish. So it's a meatball, but it's a meatball made with dates and figs. And she used to roll it and to have this special shape. And she used to eat this paste with vinegar and lettuce and celery. This is to me the more meaningful and the most representative element that highlights how Sephardic food is adaptation without losing your identity and your faith. So she was making charoset with the shape of those meatballs but still using vinegar and lettuce and bitter herbs.

Avishay Artsy: I asked Hélène Jawhara Piñer what she might make for a Shabbat dinner to highlight the richness of Sephardic cuisine.

Hélène Jawhara Piñer: Obviously I'm going to make, as I’m Spanish, I'm gonna make adafina, because it’s, to me, it's really the most iconic Shabbat dish because it is mentioned in Inquisition trials that date back to the 15th century and it is still one of the iconic Shabbat dish nowaday.

Avishay Artsy: Like the traditional Ashkenazi stew, cholent, or the Iraqi version, t'beet, adafina is prepared before the start of Shabbat and slowly simmered overnight. It’s a combination of meat, chickpeas, fava beans, spices, herbs, vegetables and eggs, and topped at the end with spinach or Swiss chard. The word adafina comes from the Arabic word for “hidden” or “buried,” because the pot was cooked overnight on the hearth and covered with embers.

Hélène Jawhara Piñer: Then I would make as a dessert some hojuelas, they are those pastries rolled like scrolls and they are made mainly for Purim, in fact. But also according to other Sephardic communities that are not Spanish Sephardic communities, they are made in Argentina for example, but also for Yom Kippur.

Avishay Artsy: Hojuelas are a flour-based batter, shaped into strips, fried in oil and topped with sweet syrup or sugar. 

Hélène Jawhara Piñer: And I would make some matzah because the Sephardic communities used to make some soft matzah made with different kinds of herbs and other things and different kinds of flour, chestnut flour or chickpea flour. I would make this only to share that the matzah made in the 15th century was much tastier than the matzah nowaday.

Avishay Artsy: In fact, the matzot described in Jawhara Piñer’s book “Matzah and Flour” are made with a startling variety of sources: corn, wheat, chestnuts, barley, freekeh [free-kuh] and almonds, to name a few. They look more like tortillas or Indian naan bread than the bland, dry crackers we’re used to – but they’re still unleavened.

Sephardic Jewish food is intensely local. Jewish communities ate the foods specific to their country and region. As they moved, those identities shifted. For example, Yemeni Jews associated more with the particular city or village they were from. Migration to Israel created a new national identity. That led to the creation of a national Yemeni cuisine. Jachnun, for example, was mainly made by Jews in the south of Yemen, but in Israel it became associated with all Yemeni Jews.

Ari Ariel: It's really the paradigmatic food in what we think of as Yemeni Jewish cuisine, but it's a food that was unknown to a large number of Yemeni Jews before they got to Israel.

Avishay Artsy: But as their foodways began to homogenize, the community also adapted to their new surroundings.

Ari Ariel: So for example, olives. Yemeni Jews apparently really didn't like olives when they got to Palestine and Israel. It was a new food for them. They thought they were bitter and weird. They thought the black color was kind of weird. There's even a great quote in a memoir where a woman compares them to goat dung and says, ‘We were revolted by these things and we refused to eat them at first.’

Avishay Artsy: Yemeni Jews had to try other items that were new to them, like margarine or powdered milk, and those became part of their diets. Israel’s early leaders were Ashkenazi, and they also pressured new immigrants from the Middle East to adopt Western customs.

Ari Ariel: There's a real obsession that develops at the beginning of the migration period with getting Middle Eastern Jews, particularly Yemenis and Iraqis, to stop eating with their hands and to use a knife and fork.

Avishay Artsy: Israeli food incorporated the foods of Jewish migrants from around the world. Shawarma and falafel were common to several Middle Eastern groups. Bourekas, a pastry stuffed with cheese or vegetables, was an Ottoman Sephardic staple.

Noam Sienna: As they land in Israel, that food then becomes incorporated into this project of building this new Israeli Jew out of the mixture of all of these different diasporic groups blended together and taking on this orientalizing local flavor, plus the Ashkenazi European backbone that was what structurally defined Israeli society. All of that together is the equation that is going to create what becomes Israeli food.

Avishay Artsy: That’s also the story of shakshuka, the classic Jewish food of North Africa.

Noam Sienna: So shakshuka is at its most basic form a vegetable stew with eggs poached on top. And the idea of this vegetable stew with eggs is not unique to Jews and it's not even unique to North Africa. So it's actually basically the same as, for example, ratatouille from southern Europe, kind of Provence region, ratatouille. There are Italian analogs to this as well as, Turkish, Spanish, right? Everybody kind of around the Mediterranean has some version of a dish that is stewed vegetables broiled with an egg on top.

Avishay Artsy: The dish we now know of as shakshuka has gone through many variations and permutations. It’s evolved to accommodate the ingredients that were available.

Noam Sienna: By the early modern period we have this idea of a vegetable stew usually including tomatoes and peppers. And then in the summer you would have more summer vegetables, tomatoes and peppers. And then in the winter you would use winter vegetables, fava beans, carrots, potatoes, cauliflower, okra sometimes, things like that. And then the eggs. So the ingredients are not necessarily what makes it a shakshuka. It's the technique of preparation. The word itself, shakshuka, as you can kind of hear from the sound, is basically an onomatopoeic verb for scrambling things up together, chopping up a lot of vegetables and scrambling, mixing them up together, like shuk shuk, you know, kind of, ch ch, and then baking with the egg on top.

Avishay Artsy: Shakshuka was a popular North African dish by the early 19th century. Jews and non-Jews alike enjoyed it. But then it got a second life as immigrants from Tunisia and Algeria arrived in Israel in the 1950s and 60s. 

Noam Sienna: As far as I've been able to tell, and I've looked at a lot of old cookbooks and restaurant menus and newspapers, there is no record of anyone eating shakshuka in Israel at all before the late 1950s, early 1960s. Right, we think of it as such a classic Israeli dish, but it really emerges after this wave of migration from North Africa. 

Avishay Artsy: And from there, shakshuka also became a popular Palestinian Arab dish. Unlike hummus and falafel, which Israelis acquired from Palestinian Arab cuisine, shakshuka came from North African migration to Israel before entering Arab cuisine. But shakshuka also became part of the formation of Israeli identity.

Noam Sienna: And even before shakshuka in the 1930s and 1940s where things like hummus and falafel come in, the Zionist movement, the Yeshuv, is trying to create a new kind of Israeli Jew who is both deeply Jewish but also rooted in the local landscape and a large part of that is adapting to the local foodways. And they were explicit about saying ‘we need to create a kind of Israeli diet that is based in the local Mediterranean, Arab, oriental foodscape, that we need to be eating these kinds of foods. And that's what's going to help us evolve into, or maybe re-evolve, like, return to what Jews are supposed to be, which is like a native people of the Middle East, a native Levantine people.’

Avishay Artsy: Israelis were drawn to the foods and cultures of Jews whose customs appeared closer in proximity to their ancestors’, with the idea that their foodways might be more indigenous and therefore authentic practices of Jewish eating, and would bring them closest to living a biblical life. And American Jews have responded in kind to Israeli culture, Ariel says.

Ari Ariel: There's a way in which Israel, I think, at least since the 60s, has become a kind of cultural reservoir for American Jews when they're interested in amplifying their ethnic identity… and particularly things that are Middle Eastern because they were new to the American Jewish community. So really early on, I mean, in the 50s and then full blown in the 60s, American Jews are really interested in things like falafel and hummus and are writing about it in American Jewish newspapers and slowly incorporating it into holidays, celebrations of Israel, but also religious holidays and things of that nature, and that's continued.

Avishay Artsy: Ashkenazi Jewish food is going through its own revival, with trendy restaurants that serve a modern spin on classic deli dishes. But alongside that, Jewish food from Israel, Morocco, India and elsewhere continues to appeal.

Ari Ariel: There's a kind of hip cultural cache to being global, to being international. And that means finding Jewish foods that are not just European.

Avishay Artsy: Even as Sephardic Jewish food gains cultural cache, it continues to evolve, Sienna says.

Noam Sienna: Sephardi and Mizrahi communities in North America and in Israel today are still very much alive and they're still very much engaging in evolving food traditions and all kinds of new exciting foods that are being developed here and in Israel. And at the same time, engaging in them is always an act of nostalgia and an act of recollection for some kind of imaginary past that these foods tie us to. 

Avishay Artsy: In recent years, high-end chefs and cookbook authors like Yotam Ottolenghi, Michael Solomonov, Joan Nathan, Adeena Sussman, Einat Admony and others have put Sephardic Jewish food on the global culinary map. But you can also find plenty of instructional videos on YouTube.

Sonya's Prep: “This week's video is going to be all about my favorite Sephardic Shabbat recipes so come along with me. Let's do our shabbat preparations together.”

Sephardic Flavors: “Hello everyone and welcome back to Sefardic flavors. Chef Yaffa here and today I have for you…”

The Little Ferraro Kitchen: “Have you heard of binuelos? They are sephardic fried donuts and my mom would make them during Passover, so these actually have matzah in them…”

Avishay Artsy: Jewish food is no longer confined to what you’d find on a deli menu. Bourekas, shakshuka, adafina, jachnun, and harira have claimed their place on the Jewish dining table right alongside blintzes, cholent, kugel, borscht, and matzoh ball soup.

Adventures in Jewish Studies is made possible with generous support from The Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation and the Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation. The executive producer of the podcast is Warren Hoffman. I’m the lead producer for this episode.

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Executive Producer: Warren Hoffman, PhD

Producers: Avishay Artsy and Erin Phillips