Women, latkes bind culture

Like all the best Jewish traditions, a latke is a savory bite of history, tradition and memory. Its seeds are found in the story of Judith and the Maccabees, who triumphed against overwhelming odds.

“Food is very serious,” said David Gitlitz, a scholar of Jewish food history. “It’s a kind of glue that holds the culture together.”

That puts the Jewish woman and her kitchen squarely at the center of the culture, and of Hanukkah, which begins at sundown today.

“Women’s faith and courage are instrumental in the story,” said Chanala Kornfeld, daughter and wife of rabbis. “Judith’s act was the turning point of the Hanukkah story.”

This week Kornfeld, of West Palm Beach, invited a dozen women to watch her prepare latkes and sufganiyot — jelly-filled yeasty cake doughnuts favored by Israelis at Hanukkah — and talk about how women have held their culture together.

An accomplished cook and teacher who could star in her own cooking show if she had the time, Kornfeld admits she is still struggling to master sufganiyot, which take time and concentration, a rare commodity for a young mother of two small sons.

As she prepared the food, her 3-year-old son, Levi, wearing a crocheted kippah, recited the Hebrew alphabet at the dining room table.

“God entrusted the continuity of people to women,” she told the women.

Kornfeld used her encyclopedic knowledge of history to tell her guests the Hanukkah story. By this time, all the women had left the dining room table to cluster around the kitchen.

When the Assyrians overran the Holy Land in the year 165, they first banned kosher food practices, observing the Sabbath and teaching Torah to children. Later, they destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem and let pigs graze there.

The Maccabees, Jewish patriots, massed their forces to fight the Assyrians.

But it was a woman who turned the tide.

When it seemed that the outnumbered Jews would certainly be crushed, the beautiful Judith visited the tent of the Assyrian general Holofernes, bearing gifts of wine and cheese. Trying to slake his thirst from the salty cheese, he drank too much and fell asleep.

Judith cut off Holofernes’ head with his own sword and returned her trophy to the camp of the Maccabees, who displayed it on a pike.

Holofernes’ leaderless soldiers were so dismayed that the Maccabees were able to overpower them and regain Jerusalem.

Judith has fascinated artists — da Vinci, Rembrandt, Caravaggio — and her story can be linked to latkes.

Potatoes — now latkes’ key ingredient — didn’t arrive in Europe from the New World until the Conquistadors brought them back in the 16th century, long after Hanukkah became a tradition. The first latkes might have been cheese, to recall Judith’s ruse, or turnips, cabbage or whatever the woman of the house could grate and fry.

The only constant, said Kornfeld, is to fry the latkes in oil, symbolic of the never-ending oil of Hanukkah.

To resanctify their ruined temple after defeating the Assyrians, the Jews wanted to light the menorah. But the Assyrians had broken all the seals on jars of oil. One jar was found intact, but it was not enough. It would take eight days to produce the quantity of wine they needed. But they lit the menorah and — a miracle — the oil renewed itself for eight days.

Scholars also have noted the connection between food and safety in Jewish history.

Gitlitz, a professor at the University of Rhode Island, specializes in the secret Jews of Spain, who masqueraded as Catholics to escape the wrath of the Spanish Inquisition in the 13th century.

The Inquisitors’ spies thought they could uncover Jews by watching what they ate — or didn’t eat.

One of the suspected foods, bimuelo, was fried for Hanukkah in olive oil, whose distinctive odor the Inquisitors’ spies thought they could sniff out in the homes of secret Jews. The modern-day descendant of the bimuelo is the churro, a crunchy sugar-covered pastry.

Gitlitz recalls a 16th century novel in which a Jewish girl tried to locate the other hidden Jews in a new town. She watched a group of women cooking and spoke up: “At home, we make bimuelos. You take a handful of dough, pop it into boiling olive oil and it’s delicious.”

The cooks looked at each other. One of them spoke: “She’s one of us.”

For most Jews, lineage passes through the mother. And just as nurture reinforces nature, carrying out many of the laws was the responsibility of the woman, Gitlitz said.

“To be a good Jew, you had to live up to the multiple laws that were home-centered — cooking, cleaning, hygiene, festive meals, the clothes you wore,” he said. “And the early education of children was almost exclusively in the hands of women.”

So the Jewish home, particularly the kitchen, plays its role as an irreplaceable repository of aromas, memories, traditions and teaching.

“Anytime you spend quality time with the family, anything you do together, solidifies the tradition,” said Rabbi Alan Sherman, chaplain of the Morse Life Center in West Palm Beach.

Cooking skills, whether soup or latkes, need to be passed along. When someone once asked Jackie Faffer, executive director of Ruth Rales Jewish Family Services in suburban Boca Raton, why she insisted on making all the food fresh for Hanukkah instead of cooking and freezing it beforehand, she answered, “Because this is how my mother always did it.”

Then she questioned her own habit and asked her mother, “Mommy, how come you did that?”

“Because that’s the way grandma did it,” her mother answered.