English translation by Dr. Susan Weingarten from her article, in her article, “Medieval Hanukkah Traditions: Jewish Festive Foods in their European Contexts” (Food & History 8:1, 2010).

Torah as Milk: The Subversion of Predatory Appetite through Dairy Meals

As on Shavuot, dairy is traditionally eaten on Ḥanukkah. Why? In the Jewish etiology of predation, the predatory instinct survived in Nature (and human nature) after the Flood. The seventh Noaḥide law ever min haḥai (not eating the limb of a living animal), taught to humanity following the revelation of the Rainbow, was intended to circumscribe predatory behavior. According to a tradition witnessed first in the book of Jubilees (ch. 6-7), it was not until the lineage of Avraham that a people came forward to observe this command. If blood in meat signifies the satisfaction of the predatory instinct, then milk – the nurturing product of a living animal – represents the subversion of that instinct. Torah, thus, is poetically described as milk.

For Ḥanukkah, the motif of dairy foods as the means by which Jews subvert predators is strongly evidenced in the popular aggadot of Judith and Antiokhus, and substantiated by Jewish food traditions. The association of the infamous villains of Ḥanukkah’s chief stories with sexual predation and violence underscores the significance of dairy foods as symbols of the manifest powers of the Torah and its people in subverting the predatory impulse. In his commentary on the Rif,^[1] Rif on Shabbat 10a (referring to the page of the Rif), which itself is discussing Talmud Shabbat 23a. (Thank you, Aaron Marsh, for the corrected reference.)  Rabbenu Nissim from Gerona in Spain (the RAN) writes that ‘the daughter of Yoḥanan’ “gave the chief enemy cheese to eat to make him drunk and they cut off his head and everyone fled. Because of this there is a custom to eat cheese [on Ḥanukkah].” The RAN is later cited by the authoritative code of religious law, the Shulkhan Arukh (OH 570,2), which was written in 16th century Palestine: “There are those who say we should eat cheese on Ḥanukkah, because of the miracle over the milk which Judith fed the enemy.” As Dr. Susan Weingarten notes in her article, “Medieval Hanukkah Traditions: Jewish Festive Foods in their European Contexts” (Food & History 8:1, 2010):

Thus these two medieval Jewish sources note a custom of eating cheese on Ḥanukkah somehow connected to the story of Judith. However, there is no mention of Judith feeding Holophernes with cheese in the apocryphal book of Judith, or in most of the other extant versions of the Judith story. The only place where there are details of a connection between cheese and milk, and Judith’s encounter with Holophernes is in our Megillat Yehudit. Here, when Judith comes to meet Holophernes, she gets her maid to make levivot, salt them, and add pieces of cheese, haritzei ḥalav. The salty cheese makes Holophernes thirsty so he drinks more wine, which leads to his downfall. The reference to halav, milk, in this story of a woman defeating an enemy general in a tent, reminds us of the biblical Jael, who tempted the enemy general, Sisera, made him drowsy with milk, and hammered a tent-peg into his head to kill him (Judges 4.19; 5.25). The reference to cheese as haritzei ḥalav also alludes to the young David, who took haritzei ḥalav to his brothers’ captain, just before his encounter with Goliath – which ended in cutting off his head (I Samuel 17.17; 17. 51). This cheese is now being used to foreshadow Judith’s eventual triumph over the enemy. And the pieces of cheese are picked up at the end, in the details of the mishlo’aḥ manot, the list of foods to be sent as gifts by each Jew to her neighbour in the future commemoration of Judith’s victory.

Before potatoes entered the diet of Ashkenazi Jews, latkes were cheese pancakes, or cassola, as described in “Even Boḥan” (Touchstone), a poem by Rabbi Ḳalonymus ben Ḳalonymus ben Meir (b.1286 – died after 1328).

Weingarten explains:

Kalonymos has taken the name levivot, food fried in a pan, marheshet, from the biblical levivot fried in a masret, (a different sort of pan) in the story of Tamar in the book of Samuel (I Samuel 13.6. Biryah (line 4) also comes from the story of Tamar, where it seems to be a general term for food.). The biblical text gives us no details of what these levivot were made of, but Rashi’s medieval commentary on this passage says they were made of fine flour mixed with boiling water and then fried in oil (RASHI, commentary on I Samuel 13.6.). According to Kalonymos, they were large and round, covering the whole of the frying pan. Levivot, as noted, also play an important part in Judith’s victory over the enemy general Holophernes as related in Megillat Yehudit. When Judith first meets Holophernes he is smitten by her beauty. “Come lie with me my sister,” he says, using the words of the biblical Amnon to Tamar before he rapes her. Judith puts Holophernes off till the evening, when she asks her maid to prepare pancakes, levivot, just as Amnon asked Tamar to make him pancakes in the biblical story: telabev levivot. Judith is in grave danger of being raped by Holophernes, and the food described in Megillat Yehudit underlines this. However, although levivot from the story of Tamar are also used by Kalonymos in Even Boḥan, there this food term is simply used for what it is, not for what it signifies (Kalonymos juxtaposes levivot and biryah).

Ultimately, Jewish festivals eschewing meat strongly allude to a vision of the world that is completely just, a world in which there is no non-consensual taking. In Jewish mythic-history, this vision accords both with the antediluvian edenic world with its universal plant-based diet, as well as to the vision of Olam Haba described in Isaiah 11:6-9, where Nature is no longer managed by predatory diet. Whether read Isaiah literally or as metaphor, the realization of this comprehensive vision depends on societies committed to purusing compassion and justice.

[This essay was first published in Megillat Antiokhus and Additional Writing Concerning the Festival of Hanukkah (Aharon Varady & John C. Reeves, Dimus Parrhesia Press 2015).]

Source

“בְּכִסְלֵו – מאבן בֹחן | On Kislev, from the poem “Even Boḥan” by Rabbi Ḳalonymus b. Ḳalonymus ben Meir (1322)” is shared through the Open Siddur Project with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.

Susan Weingarten (translation)

Dr. Susan Weingarten is an archaeologist and historian who was formerly in the research team of the Sir Isaac Wolfson Chair for Jewish Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel. After publishing The Saint’s Saints: Hagiography and Geography in Jerome (2005), she decided to move from ascetic Christianity to Jewish food.

Aharon N. Varady (transcription)

Aharon Varady (M.A.J.Ed./JTSA Davidson) is a volunteer transcriber for the Open Siddur Project. If you find any mistakes in his transcriptions, please let him know. Shgiyot mi yavin; Ministarot naqeni שְׁגִיאוֹת מִי־יָבִין; מִנִּסְתָּרוֹת נַקֵּנִי "Who can know all one's flaws? From hidden errors, correct me" (Psalms 19:13). If you'd like to directly support his work, please consider donating via his Patreon account. (Varady also translates prayers and contributes his own original work besides serving as the primary shammes of the Open Siddur Project and its website, opensiddur.org.)

Ḳalonymus b. Ḳalonymus ben Meir

Ḳalonymus b. Ḳalonymus ben Meir (Hebrew: קלונימוס ב׳ קלונימוס בן מאיר, also romanized as Kalonymous or Qalonymos) (1286 – after 1328), born in Arles, was a Provençal Jewish philosopher, poet, and translator from a prominent and distinguished Provençal Jewish family. (The father of Kalonymus and Kalonymus himself each bore the title Nasi/Prince.) They studied philosophy and rabbinical literature at Salonica, under the direction of Senior Astruc de Noves and Moses ben Solomon of Beaucaire. Ḳalonymus also studied medicine, although they seem never to have practiced it.

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