Cheese and Spirituality, Part 4: Sephardic Jewish Cheese History

 

Over the centuries the Kosher requirement that dairy and meat are to be kept completely separate left an indelible imprint on chéese and cheesemaking in Jewish communities across the globe. These restrictions also influenced the ways in which Jews engaged with their non-Jewish neighbors. The latter seems to be particularly evident when one compares the culinary history of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews, and it seemed to me that these were stories worth investigating. This post will focus on Sephardic cheese history, to be contrasted with Ashkenazic cheese history in a future post.

The term Sepharad is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as a place where Jews exiled from Jerusalem lived. Eventually, Sepharad came to be identified with the Iberian Peninsula, and the Jewish diaspora in Spain and Portugal took the name Sephardim as a statement of identity. Thus, the term Sephardim in its narrowest sense refers to the Jews of Spain and Portugal and their descendants who were expelled during the Inquisition and forced to regroup in various locations as a widely dispersed diaspora possessing a common cultural heritage. Many of the Sephardim relocated to longstanding Jewish communities in Muslim controlled lands throughout the Mediterranean and Southwest Asia, especially Turkey and the Balkan Peninsula, where cooking traditions were assimilated back and forth between communities. Therefore, with respect to Jewish cooking traditions, Sephardic cuisine evolved to a significant degree in areas across the Mediterranean rim and the Middle East and is quite diverse. This post will use this broader definition to refer to Sephardic cooking and Sephardic engagement with cheese.

The founding of the Jewish diaspora in Spain probably preceded the time of Jesus. Even before the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, far more Jews lived outside of Eretz Israel proper than within, mostly in Mesopotamia, the Eastern Mediterranean region and Italy. A great wave of emigration to the Iberian Peninsula took place after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD. In Spain, the Jews were able to integrate into the broader community alongside a Christian minority there, which at that time was the target of intermittent fierce suppression by Roman authorities. The incoming Jewish refugees were quickly able to establish stable roots and even thrive by the 3rd Century AD. As Christianity eventually emerged to become the state religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD, the Jewish diaspora in Spain continued to live in comparative peace with their Christian neighbors until the Visigoth conquest of Spain in the 5th Century. Thereafter, as the surrounding Christian culture became more deeply entrenched and all powerful under the Visigoths, antisemitism and eventually outright persecution of the Jews by the Visigothic Christian ruling class commenced.

Allow me to stop here and comment on the word “persecution” because we will see this word repeatedly come to the forefront in this and especially the next post on Jewish cheese history. I will use the term persecution (of the Jews) by the surrounding Christian culture to refer to a broad group of behaviors ranging from relatively mild discrimination, to restrictions imposed on land ownership and thus the means of the minority Jewish community to be food secure and self-sufficient, to restrictions on the right to worship openly according to one’s tradition and conscience, to overt coercion to convert to Christianity under threat of expulsion and confiscation of property, and violence, and even under threat of death.

Given the well documented historical frequency and intensity of Jewish persecution by surrounding European Christian culture across some 1,500 years, it is necessary to stop and pose the question: Why did an increasingly Christianized European culture give birth to virulent antisemitism? As a committed member of the Christian faith community, I am deeply grieved by this dark aspect of my spiritual heritage and have been perplexed by the question of how such a history could even be possible, one that is so clearly and unequivocally in opposition to the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Apostolic Cannon of Truth, which are the bedrock of orthodox belief for all followers of Jesus. How can we make sense of this history, so that the Christian faith community can securely say, “never again”? As I delved into Jewish cheese history and its intersection with the darkness of Christian antisemitism, I found myself taking a side trip/deep dive into early Christian church history to disentangle the thought process that led to this deeply troubling theological disconnect. Perhaps there will be opportunity to delve into that side path in a future post. But for now, let’s return to Sephardic Jewish cheese history.

Jewish communities perhaps experienced a certain level of relief when invading Muslim forces triumphed in Spain during the early 8th Century, which ushered in a period of relative peace that supported notable Jewish cultural development and relative prosperity on the Iberian Peninsula. In Sicily, a parallel robust growth of Jewish communities took place during Byzantine and Muslim rule. By then, Sicily had been renowned for its export of hard aged pecorino (rennet coagulated) grating cheeses for a thousand years, and Jewish merchants in Sicily developed a substantial trade in gentile cheese during the High Middle Ages. Please don’t misunderstand me, this was not a “golden age” for the Jewish diaspora, but in the historical scheme of things the centuries of Muslim rule represented a time of relative peace and relative advancement for Jewish minority communities.

For Spanish and Sicilian Jews, as for all Jews of the diaspora, securing supplies of Kosher foods was a challenge; the ability to do so affected family nutrition, shaped kitchen and cooking practices, and carried deep religious and cultural implications. Certain processed foods that required significant human handling and manipulation to produce, and which were vested with special religious meaning, such as wine and cheese, were especially problematical because of kosher restrictions on gentile involvement in their production. Therefore, there was strong incentive among Jewish communities to develop a formal religious infrastructure to enable the production and trade of Kosher cheese, when possible. A well-developed Kosher cheese trade could serve as a cultural lifeline for local Jewish communities spread out over vast geographical areas and generally lacking sufficient access to the means of production and processing to supply their own needs.

Therefore, it is perhaps not surprising to find ample evidence of a robust trade in Kosher cheese around the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages, with Sicily, Crete and other eastern Mediterranean regions of Byzantium becoming centers for the production and export of Kosher cheese. Many, perhaps most, of these Kosher cheeses were rennet-coagulated types, formed and pressed in the ubiquitous ceramic Roman press molds to produce small (1 – 5 lb) cylindrical cheeses. Shipments of Kosher cheese from Sicily to Egypt, recorded in the surviving business records of Jewish merchants during the Middle Ages, tabulate shipments as number of “molds of cheese”, each cheese being roughly 1 – 2 pounds in weight, a likely reference to the Roman press mold used in manufacture. Surviving records from Syria also indicate the production of Kosher cheese for trade there, but these were smaller cheeses (ca. 0.5 lb), likely the highly salted and dried acid coagulated types typical of the Levantine region.

Rennet coagulated cheesemaking was widely practiced in the Roman Empire, and the Romans officially recognized two classes of rennet-coagulated cheese for tax purposes: caseus aridus (dry cheese) and caseus mollis (fresh cheese). The former comprised the ubiquitous and beloved hard aged, lightly pressed, pecorino cheeses often used for grating purposes, whereas the latter were soft fresh unpressed variants of the same pecorino cheeses for immediate consumption. Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, the noted Spanish-born 1st century AD Roman agricultural writer, wrote in detail about the technology for making these hard and soft cheeses. In addition to describing the use of animal rennet as a milk-coagulating agent, Columella wrote about rennet-like coagulants derived from the sap of fig tree branches and from the flowers of the cardoon thistle. (See Cheese and Culture for detailed information on Roman cheesemaking.)

The use of animal rennet in Kosher cheesemaking presented considerable challenges for the Jewish diaspora living amidst a sea of gentiles. For example, acquiring a continuous supply of Kosher-approved suckling animals to furnish the rennet needed for cheesemaking across the milk-producing season was a perpetual challenge. Unless the local Jewish community had access/ownership rights to relatively large tracks of grazing land that would support the raising of sizable flocks, the number of suckling young available for slaughter and rennet procurement would be very limited, as would be the supply of Kosher milk.

For regions engaged in the production of Kosher cheese for trade in distant markets, the community also needed to maintain a suitable infrastructure of religious functionaries who could oversee all aspects of cheesemaking (including the slaughter of approved animals used to supply rennet) and certify that all requirements had been properly met. Therefore, Jews in Spain and Sicily no doubt gravitated early towards utilizing plant-based milk coagulants in cheesemaking because fig sap, and especially cardoon thistle flowers, were widely available in the greater Mediterranean region and obviated the need for animal rennet.

Indeed, the use of plant-based rennets in Kosher cheesemaking seems to have become widespread among the Sephardic diaspora and even persisted into the modern era as Sephardic Jews migrated to Northwest Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean islands after the nightmarish persecution of the Spanish Inquisition. For example, Joseph Lopez, a Sephardic Jewish merchant living in Newport, Rhode Island during the 18th century, endeavored to establish a Kosher cheese production facility using plant-based rennet coagulation technology. In a surviving letter to Sephardic coreligionist merchants in New York and London, Lopez sought to acquire a supply of dried cardoon flowers, which he intended to use specifically in the production of Kosher cheese destined for the Sephardic Caribbean market. Lopez noted that cardoon was used widely in Europe for the making of cheese, in contrast to America where animal rennet was used; he also stated that animal rennet, unlike cardoon, produced strong, disagreeably flavored cheese. Lopez’ mention of the widespread use of cardoon in Europe was probably a reference to Kosher cheeses produced by gentile cheesemakers for the Sephardic diaspora in Northern Europe, such as “Jews’ cheese” in Holland, a sweet milk cheese variant of Gouda; there is scant evidence for any other use of cardoon by gentile cheesemakers north of the Alps that I am aware of.

Cheeses made with plant-based rennet were evidently so popular that Sephardic Jews in the Mediterranean region even came to accept the practice of consuming gentile-produced cheeses that were made with plant-based rennet. By the late Middle Ages Jewish religious authorities became alarmed by numerous reports of Jews consuming gentile cheeses made with plant-based rennet, for example in the coastal city of Provence near the border of modern Spain and France. The practice was widespread enough to attract the attention of the prominent 16th century Sephardic rabbi Yosef Karo, who composed the legal code known as the Shulhan Arukh. In that code, rabbi Karo specifically forbade the eating of non-Jewish cheese not made with animal rennet. Remarkably, however, this blanket prohibition included an exemption, contained in responding comments by the Ashkenazic rabbi Moses Isserles, for regions that had a long history of consuming such cheeses (presumably aimed at various Sephardic communities), so completely assimilated had such cheeses evidently become in these communities.

How did the Sephardic diaspora arrive at this more flexible interpretation of the Kosher restrictions so as to accept certain plant-based rennet cheeses produced by their gentile neighbors? The answer seems to relate, at least in part, to whom those neighbors were over long periods of Jewish history. The Muslim conquest of vast regions of the Middle East and southern shores of the Mediterranean in the 7th century, and further conquest of Spain and Sicily in the 8th and 9th centuries, surrounded Sephardic Jews with a comparatively familiar hegemonic Islamic culture. Even the food cultures of Jew and Muslim shared many commonalities including some of the key dietary restrictions relating to cheese; Muslim requirements for the slaughter of animals are very similar to those of the Jews, and Muslim religious authorities debated animal rennet use and infidel “contamination” much like the Jewish rabbis and sages debated animal rennet use and gentile “contamination” in the Mishnah and Talmud.

Again, although Jews living in Muslim controlled lands did not experience a “golden age”, they lived in relative harmony with their Muslim neighbors when compared to their Ashkenazic coreligionists in the developing Christian culture to the north, making it easier for Sephardic Jews to lower the Kosher barriers that separated Jew from Gentile. It may be that this more favorable social environment influenced the more lenient attitude of the Sephardim towards food laws regarding cheese, while the Ashkenazim took a stricter approach, as we will explore in the next post.

In the Sephardic world, Jewish-Muslim business partnerships became common and even occurred in cheesemaking ventures. For a Jew, an important advantage of having a Muslim partner was that the latter could perform the necessary work of milking and cheesemaking on the Sabbath. This kind of close working relationship between Jew and Muslim facilitated the establishment of an extensive Kosher cheese trade during the High Middle Ages. To meet the sizable demand of the Jewish diaspora throughout the Mediterranean, Jewish merchants often needed to procure Kosher cheese from non-Jewish cheese producers, an impossibility unless the restrictions against gentile involvement in cheesemaking were lowered.

The solution to the dilemma was to develop a sophisticated infrastructure of religious functionaries in cheese producing and export regions such as Sicily, Crete and the Levant, that would oversee the production process and certify that the Kosher requirements had been met. In medieval (as in modern) times, the Kosher cheese trade was profitable, and this solution was win-win for both the Jewish merchants, keen to acquire consignments of value-added Kosher cheese, and the religious authorities who stood to generate income through certification services.

Consequently, hard aged rennet coagulated Kosher cheeses, well suited for export and made from both animal and plant-based rennets, circulated widely among Sephardic Jewish communities around the Mediterranean during the High Middle Ages and became beloved ingredients in Sephardic cooking, which is still evident in Sephardic culinary traditions to this day. And perhaps not surprisingly, Sephardic Jewish merchants continued the trade in Kosher hard rennet coagulated cheeses into the modern era. For example, Aaron Lopez, father of the Newport RI merchant Joseph Lopez mentioned earlier, engaged in a sizable export of Kosher cheese to the Sephardic diaspora in the Islands of the West Indies during the 18th century. Lopez’ cheeses were produced to Kosher specifications by local gentile cheesemakers and certified by a local religious functionary.

In the next post, we will explore a remarkably different cheese history for Ashkenazic Jewish communities.