456 A History of Judaism
night; cholent (a meat stew left to cook overnight) for Saturday lunch;
cold fried fish, pickled herring, sliced cucumbers, smoked salmon,
cheesecake for Saturday afternoon and evening. Yemenite Jews leave the
jahnun, a pastry with a slightly sweet taste, in a slow oven overnight
and eat it for Saturday lunch with hardboiled eggs and a spicy sauce.
Iraqi, Persian, Libyan, Egyptian and Syrian Jews all have their own
distinctive culinary traditions. For Hanukkah, to celebrate the miracle
of the oil, Ashkenazim eat deep- fried potato latkes, Sephardim eat frit-
ters in syrup or doughnuts, Italian Jews have fried chicken pieces dipped
in batter, Moroccans eat couscous with deep- fried chicken. On Purim,
Sephardi communities have pastries shaped like Haman’s ears dipped in
syrup, and Ashkenazim have hamantaschen, a three- cornered pastry
stuffed with plum jam or poppy seeds. Shavuot is celebrated with cheese
blintzes, cheesecake and milk puddings. And Pesach, for which so much
of the festival concerns the preparation of food without leaven in order
to commemorate the exodus from Egypt when the Israelites were
required to depart at such speed there was no time for the dough to be
left to rise, a huge range of cakes, pancakes, dumplings and fritters using
ground almonds, potato flour or matzah meal or (in the Arab world)
kibbeh with ground rice has turned culinary restrictions into a celebra-
tion of gastronomic ingenuity.^23
In many families, recipes for such food, fondly remembered from
previous generations, constitute the main link with a religious past
which no longer otherwise resonates. But a decline into nostalgia and
sentimentality about the world of Fiddler on the Roof which was always
in part imaginary and has now disappeared is not, as we shall see, the
whole story of modern developments within Judaism.