Leah Koenig, a writer and cookbook author who focuses on Jewish diasporic food, told me once in an interview that, for the most part, Jews adopted the food of where they lived. We were talking about the special relationship between those Ashkenazim immigrants and Chinese food, which is a piece of Lower East Side history that has its origins on the Silk Roads, as I wrote for Whetstone.
What Koenig and Claudia Roden—another great scholar of Jewish food—point to is that Jews are a people in diaspora. We have wandered the desert for a lot longer than 40 years. We arrived in Persia around 700 BCE, by most accounts, free from the Babylonians. The Jewish Museum of London reports that Jews arrived in Ethiopia sometime after 587 BCE, with most reports saying they arrived around 2,000 years ago. The Jews of Kaifeng arrived in the Henan province of China around 1,000 years ago. In The Book of Jewish Food, Roden writes that one of India’s Jewish communities dates back to at least 1167 CE. For centuries, Jews spread out along the Silk Roads, working as merchants and traders. There have been Jewish communities in Central Asia, South Asia, and North Africa. There were those driven out of Spain and Italy who made their way to North Africa. In more recent history, hundreds of thousands of Jews moved to Argentina following World War II, and yes, some to Israel.
Some of these groups of Jews scattered around the globe have names, shorthands to identify them: Ashkenazi, Sephardic, some may say Mizrahi, although that’s considered a derogatory term by many. They all have their own food, too. These foods may be indistinguishable from the cuisines belonging to the regions where Jews have settled; they may be kosher versions of those cultures’ foods. In the case of Ashkenazim, they may be resourceful uses of scraps loosely influenced by the surrounding cultures.
In her introduction to The Book of Jewish Food, Roden cites a paper she gave at the Oxford Symposium of Food in 1981:
“There is really no such thing as Jewish food…Local regional food becomes Jewish when it travels with Jews to new homelands.”
She also references French historian Fernand Braudel, who said that Jewish civilization is “so individual that it was not always recognized as one.”
I believe all of these statements to be true.