Cheese and Spirituality, Part 5: Ashkenazic Jewish Cheese History

 

The term “Ashkenaz” is referred to in several passages of the Hebrew Bible as a distant land, but it wasn’t until the 12th century that it came to be identified with Germany. Eventually the term “Ashkenazim” came to be used more broadly for Jews north of the Alps throughout much of western, central and eastern Europe. This post will use this broader definition to refer to the Ashkenazim. The origin of the Ashkenazim extends back to the longstanding Jewish diaspora in Italy, a sizable community that became established even before the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire and eventual reestablishment of stability under Germanic rule (around the 9th century), Jews from the burgeoning Italian diaspora began to migrate across the Alps into France and Germany, settling along the trade routes of the great navigable rivers. Having lived in Italy for centuries, they brought various elements of Italian cooking with them, which seems to have included, for example, floden, or flat cakes stuffed with cheese. Ricotta cheese had been a staple of the Italian peninsula for a thousand years before the Roman era, and Italian Jews likely gravitated towards its use in cooking, Ricotta being a soft fresh acid-heat coagulated cheese that did not require rennet as an ingredient.

Jews in Italy were also known to consume much “salted cheese”, a possible reference to the beloved flavorful hard aged rennet-coagulated pecorino grating cheeses that were ubiquitous to the Italian Peninsula. However, under the influence of a variety of environmental, cultural and economic stressors, immigrant communities of the Ashkenazim, in contrast to their Sephardic coreligionists, would ultimately move away from any earlier cultural disposition towards strongly flavored hard aged rennet coagulated cheeses. Concurrently, soft fresh non-renneted acid-heat coagulated, and especially acid coagulated cheese types, would rise to preeminence in the culinary practices and traditions of Jews north of the Alps, even as aged rennet coagulated cheeses faded from culinary memory.

For example, because fig trees and cardoon thistles were non-native to the northern lands, plant-based rennets were largely unavailable to European cheesemakers north of the Alps. Therefore, whatever level of engagement, if any, that the Jewish diaspora in Italy may have had with plant-based rennet as an ingredient for Kosher hard cheese production probably came to an abrupt end and was soon forgotten following the northward migration Italian Jews for lack of available ingredients.

More importantly, restrictions on Jewish land ownership by the ruling Christian authorities north of the Alps became progressively severe as time went on, which meant that Ashkenazic Jews could rarely access large enough tracks of pastureland to maintain sizable flocks of sheep or goats, or herds of cows. Although Jews were often allowed to own milking animals, their highly limited access to land ownership and thus grazing resources meant that the typical Jewish family could keep only one or two goats or a cow at best.

Not only did this limit the amount of Jewish-supervised milk available for Kosher cheesemaking, but it also severely limited the availability of suckling young needed to supply Kosher animal rennet. With little approved surplus milk on hand, and lacking Kosher rennet sources, it was nearly impossible for Ashkenazic communities to establish hard rennet coagulated cheesemaking on the scale needed to support a Kosher cheese trade like that of the Sephardim unless they could develop an extensive collaborative Jewish-Christian Kosher cheesemaking infrastructure, like Jewish-Muslim collaborations that supported Sephardic Kosher cheesemaking. The absence of a paid Ashkenazim rabbinate (until around the 15th century) that could be mobilized to establish Kosher certification services, reflects the paucity of collaborative ventures between Jewish and Christian cheesemakers. This limiting factor to the development of a Kosher cheese trade, in turn, limited the opportunities for hard Kosher rennet-coagulated cheeses to establish a permanent presence in Ashkenazic cooking.

Indeed, the broader cultural climate between Jews and Christians in northern Europe strongly discouraged the kind of Jewish-Muslim collaboration and flexibility towards the Kosher laws that characterized Sephardic engagement with rennet coagulated cheese in the Muslim world of the Mediterranean. By the time of the crusades, persecution of Jewish minorities by the Christian ruling authorities in western and central Europe (e.g., France, England, Germany) reached a tipping point that even included incidents of mass-murder, which triggered wide-scale forced Jewish relocation to the shtetls of Poland to the east, and eventually to Russia. The trauma of life-threatening persecution and forced relocation must have left an indelible stamp of suspicion and fear of the surrounding Christian culture, which served as powerful barriers to Jewish-Christian collaboration. Thus, by the time Ashkenazic Jews were forced to leave France, England, and Germany, the chances for developing a Kosher cheese trade north of the Alps were nil. Rennet coagulated cheeses, which were deeply entrenched and passionately loved by the surrounding Christian culture, disappeared permanently from Ashkenazic culinary practices and perhaps even became a symbol of the surrounding hostile Christian world.

An interesting side path to this tragic story is that the sharp geographical separation between the Ashkenazim and Sephardim began to break down in the 15th century as ruthless persecution of Jews by Christian authorities in Iberia leading up to the Spanish inquisition resulted in the mass expulsion of Sephardic Jews. The Sephardim carried their love of aged rennet coagulated cheeses with them as many settled eastwards in the Ottoman-controlled lands of northwest Turkey and the Balkan Peninsula. There, they developed a flair in Sephardic cooking for strongly flavored Kosher aged pasta-filata cheeses such as Kashkaval and Kashar.

By the 16th century, Sephardic merchants had established trading relations northwards into Poland, forming small communities there and perhaps bringing with them an infectious appreciation for flavorful Kosher hard aged rennet coagulated cheeses that may have raised alarm bells within the Ashkenazic community. Whatever the cause, Ashkenazic religious authorities about this time revised the interpretation of Kosher laws regarding the separation of milk and meat, which effectively rendered Ashkenazic engagement with rennet coagulated cheeses even more onerous. 

The context for these revisions during the 16th century was a growing concern in Poland about Jewish relaxation of practices intended to prevent excessive social engagements of Jews with the surrounding Christian culture. The revised interpretation of keeping milk and meat separate involved the time required to elapse after consuming meat before one may consume dairy. The most stringent interpretation of this kosher restriction, to which the most strictly observant Jews aspired, was to wait six hours between eating meat and dairy to allow pieces of meat that might become trapped between the teeth to clear before eating dairy. Theses more stringent kosher rulings aimed at preventing the mixing of meat and dairy may have also had the effect of making it much more difficult for Jews to engage socially (over a meal, or in a setting where food was served) with non-Jews.

Prior to this time, there was no requirement for a waiting period when cheese was eaten first, followed by meat; the only requirements were to wash one’s hands and either wipe or rinse one’s mouth. Writing in the 16th century, however, the Ashkenazic rabbi Moses Isserles expanded the restrictions to include a six-hour waiting period between the eating of cheese, specifically hard cheese, and meat. The aim of this new interpretation evidently was to prevent any aftertaste resulting from eating the hard cheese from persisting to the time of eating meat. That is, the concern centered on preventing the mixing of tastes from dairy and meat, and this same concern (the mixing of tastes) was concurrently revolutionizing the Ashkenazic kitchen in Poland into distinctly separate meat and dairy sides to prevent the mixing of tastes transferred through cooking utensils, surfaces, etc. As noted in the previous post, the use of taste as an analytical tool to determine whether milk and meat (or rennet) had been combined in a forbidden manor during cheesemaking had already been codified in the Mishnah, circa 200 AD.

This new interpretation that extended far beyond cheesemaking may have come at a time when hard rennet coagulated cheeses were finding their way into the Polish Ashkenazi kitchen by the 16th century. Such cheeses, long beloved by the Sephardim, were pungently flavored and left a strong lingering aftertaste that raised concerns about subsequent eating of meat. It seems possible that Sephardic Jewish merchants who had recently settled in Poland may have introduced their beloved aged goat and sheep milk cheeses such as Kashkaval to their Ashkenazic coreligionists. These cheeses are known for their formation of abundant volatile short chain fatty acids during aging, which produce strong piquant flavors and strong aftertastes that may linger long after the cheese has been consumed. Long-lingering bitterness, due to extensive protein breakdown during aging, is also encountered in traditional cheeses of this type.

The entrance of strongly flavored animal rennet coagulated cheeses into the Ashkenazic world of mild clean-flavored acid coagulated cheese could have heightened concerns already fomenting over lapses in traditional Jewish practices, which rabbinical authorities feared were undermining the Polish Ashkenazim. Phasing in a six-hour restriction between eating hard cheese and meat made it that much more difficult for dining and social interaction to take place between Jew and gentile; for strictly observant Ashkenazim, the waiting period also attached a religious stigma to eating the beloved hard cheeses of the Sephardim (and the surrounding Christian culture). This action may have helped to contain the spread of such cheeses among the Ashkenazim for centuries to come.

Conclusions

Sephardic Jews lived in a world dominated by the climate, geography, and trade opportunities of the Mediterranean, along with the comparatively tranquil cultural environment of Islamic civilization. Under these favorable conditions, it was natural for Sephardic Jews to craft strategies to develop networks of trade in Kosher certified rennet coagulated cheeses, and to incorporate the aged rennet coagulated cheeses of the surrounding gentile culture into Kosher Jewish cooking. In contrast, Ashkenazic Jews of the north, with no maritime networks of trade to access and surrounded by an all-powerful Christian culture that presented real and perceived threats to Jewish identity and security, had few incentives and opportunities to develop a trade in Kosher rennet coagulated cheeses and to assimilate them into their cooking, even as the dizzying array of rennet coagulated cheeses that became so beloved by their Christian neighbors came to dominate the surrounding culture. This striking difference with respect to their engagement with cheese eventually may have intersected when Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews found themselves living side-by-side in Poland. History confirms that the Ashkenazim resisted the lure of aged rennet coagulated cheeses, and the distinctiveness of the cuisines of these two great arms of Jewish diaspora continues to this day.