The archetypal French dish Fois Gras is not something you generally associate with jews but yet it is claimed by some jews to be a ‘jewish invention’; (1) with one example being the website ‘The Fois Gras’ which states that:
‘This tradition was spread and perpetuated by, amongst others, the Jewish people who, during their exodus, fattened geese to produce fat as a replacement for lard (considered unfit for human consumption).
The fattened liver became known as “Jecur Ficatum” in Latin (liver caused by figs). Foie Gras was first served at a Roman meal in the 1st century B.C., during a sumptuous banquet chronicled by Horace. The fondness of Romans for liver fattened with figs reached such heights that as early as the 4th century, “ficatum” (”with figs”) became the term used to describe the liver of all fattened animals. It would give rise to the French anatomical term of “Foie” (liver) several centuries later.’ (2)
With another being the food historian Alan Davidson who claims that:
‘The enlarged liver has been counted a delicacy since classical times when the force-feeding of the birds was practised in classical Rome. It is commonly said that the practice dates back even further, to ancient Egypt, and that knowledge of it was possibly acquired by the Jews during their period of ‘bondage’ there and transmitted by them to the classical civilizations.’ (3)
Now while it is true that it was the Egyptians were the fast to engage in deliberately fattening animals for consumption – which began around 2,500 B.C. – the knowledge of how to properly fatten animals to change the taste of their meat after slaughter has absolutely nothing to do with the jews.
Why is that?
Well for two reasons; in the first instance the Romans conquered Egypt (circa 160 B.C. but was only formalized in 30 B.C.) long before they conquered Judea (circa 63 B.C. but was only formalized in 6 A.D.) so would have learned from the Egyptians long before the jews, but also because the Greeks had also learned from the Egyptians and had been engaging in the practice since 376 B.C. at the latest and almost certainly had been doing so since the 700s B.C. given there is a possible mention of such a practice in Homer’s ‘Odyssey’. (4)
Secondly there is no actual evidence of – or reference to - the deliberate fattening of geese by the Israelites in the Exodus narrative that I can find; it would also be rather odd if this were the case precisely because in the Exodus narrative the Israelites are fleeing Pharaonic Egypt, travelling across difficult terrain, have significant food shortages – hence the whole reason for the famous miracle of ‘Manna from Heaven’ – and are not really able – nor have the resources to – fatten geese or ducks ‘for lard’ let alone do so to produce a special culinary delicacy that they’d learned from their time in Egypt.
It is also worth mentioning that the jews are generally believed to have only learned about foie gras (and the fattening of ducks and geese via force feeding) from the Romans – who had in turn learned from the Greeks who had in turn learned from the Egyptians – after their occupation of Palestine circa 160 B.C. (but probably later). (5)
I should point out however that – contrary to Ginor’s point - jews probably would have come into contact with such practices during the Greek occupation of Palestine – which began in 332 B.C. after Alexander the Great’s conquest of it and jewry’s submission to Alexander (although the jewish claims that Alexander personally reverenced Yahweh and visited Jerusalem are almost certainly spurious nonsense since our only source for them is the highly partisan jewish historian Josephus in the late first century A.D. [likely 93-94 A.D.] circa four hundred years after the events he describes) – (6) and likely the long Egyptian occupation of Palestine during the New Kingdom era (circa 1550 B.C. to 1070 B.C.) but whether or not the jews themselves actually engaged in such a practice – which remember didn’t directly impact jews given that at this point they were largely a series of obscure hill tribes with little of value to offer anyone – themselves is unknown but – to my mind – unlikely.
Thus while the jews almost certainly encountered foie gras; they also very likely saw it as a goyische food and thus would not been interested in learning the methods and secrets of its cultivation.
We can thus see that jews did not ‘invent’ foie gras at all, but yet the main bulk of the claim isn’t that the jews ‘invented’ foie gras – this is largely hubris from modern jews and/or them (deliberately?) misunderstanding the literature on this point – but rather that they acted as ‘guardians of the foie gras food tradition’ after the collapse of the (western) Roman Empire in the 400s A.D. and which was more or less complete by 476 A.D. Then the Renaissance chefs of Italy rediscovered foie gras via the jews who had been allegedly engaging in the practice between the fall of the (western) Roman Empire and the European rediscovery of foie gras in the mid to late 1500s.
For example, Margo Lestz writes that:
‘When the Roman Empire came to an end, the foie gras tradition seems to have been carried on by European Jews. They used goose fat to cook their meat since butter and lard were forbidden under their dietary laws. Then around the 16th century, Renaissance chefs rediscovered the dainty dish and started buying their fatted goose livers from the Jews.’ (7)
While the food blog ‘Kumo Café’ declares that:
‘Most sources I’ve found lead me to believe the Jews kept the practice of making foie gras alive throughout the Middle Ages, while everywhere else in Europe it was lost after the fall of the Roman Empire. Due to dietary restrictions, foie gras was used in place of butter and lard for cooking in the Jewish community.’ (8)
This is also echoed by Eileen Lavine writing for ‘Moment Magazine’:
‘Jews, too, are a part of the foie gras story: The practice spread to Greece and Rome, where legend has it that the Romans used Jewish slaves to feed the geese dried figs, calling the resulting product iecur ficatum, or “fig liver.” As Jews moved northward into western and central Europe during the Middle Ages, they took the tradition with them, carrying it to Alsace, then France, where the dish was named foie gras, or “fat liver.” New methods of feeding were developed, and throughout Europe, Jews sold the fattened goose liver to non-Jews. Joan Nathan, in her book, Quiches, Kugels, and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, says that by the 16th century, “Jews were seen as the best purveyors of foie gras.” A 1571 cookbook by the Pope’s chef praised the liver of a goose “raised by the Jews.”’ (9)
The problem with this is actually really simple: it completely rips the transmission of foie gras out of its historical context and makes claims for jewish references to foie gras – which occur primarily in the rabbinic literature as to whether foie gras is or is not kosher as well as a much smaller debate about the ethics of the animal cruelty involved – (10) that the evidence simply doesn’t support given that the first jewish reference to foie gras occurs in the rabbinic literature only in the 1000s A.D. and there is no other reference in the jewish literature between the 400s and the 1000s A.D. (11) despite this literature – especially concerning kashruth debates – being absolutely voluminous (the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud alone are vast sources that are curiously silent on this highly controversial practice).
This should immediately ring alarm bells for anyone who knows anything about jewish history and Judaism precisely because why would the rabbis not mention it between the 400s A.D. and the 1000s A.D. only to suddenly begin talking about it then?
What this suggests is not that:
‘As Jews moved northward into western and central Europe during the Middle Ages, they took the tradition with them, carrying it to Alsace, then France, where the dish was named foie gras, or “fat liver.”’ (12)
Or that:
‘Most sources I’ve found lead me to believe the Jews kept the practice of making foie gras alive throughout the Middle Ages, while everywhere else in Europe it was lost after the fall of the Roman Empire. Due to dietary restrictions, foie gras was used in place of butter and lard for cooking in the Jewish community.
Slowly, over the course of centuries, foie gras popped back up - and this time in France. You see, the Jewish people were a migratory bunch, not unlike the geese they force-fed, and by ~1100 AD they’d made their way into the southeast region of France.’ (13)
But rather that the jews had encountered Europeans making foie gras (probably circa 900) and had taken a liking to it resulting in the rabbis now having to make a ruling regarding concerns that foie gras was in fact not kosher.
This then makes a lot of sense when we put the transmission of foie gras back into its historical context as Ginor explains:
‘The long silence on foie gras following the Roman era coincided with a time of sustained political turmoil and cultural transformation. By the mid-fourth century, the once sprawling Roman economy had started to contract, Germanic tribes had pushed across the imperial borders, and well-to-do Romans were abandoning the cities for their country estates. Cosmopolitan culture was dying, and with it the era of Roman feasting. This period also saw the slow formation of a new kind of society. The manner of life in early medieval Europe was predominately agrarian, localized, and Christian. The monastery replaced the city as the centre of art and learning, and the teachings of the Church echoed through the popular culture. Following the footsteps of Plato, early Christians regarded the body with ambivalence; if the body was a temple, it was also the source of human corruption. The Christian ideal, epitomized by the monastic life, was to free the body – and the spirit – from the enticements of the material world. From within this framework, the pleasures of taste and texture were deeply suspect. At best they were distractions from spiritual matters; at worse they could lead the body to gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins. The purpose of food was to sustain the flesh for a life of work and prayer.
Despite the perils of fine food, Christian monks inadvertently preserved Rome’s sybaritic culinary culture. In the monastic scriptoria, or writing workshops, monks copied and recopied the writing of Roman agriculturalists, historians, and dramatists. The oldest extant manuscript of Apicius, dating to the ninth century, was produced in a monastery at Tours, France. Centuries later, when foie gras reemerged in the Renaissance, chefs to this body of literature for culinary inspiration. Still unknown are the extant historical conditions under which foie gras reappeared. After Rome’s collapse, the art of making foie gras may have temporarily vanished from Europe, and Renaissance chefs may have relied solely on the classical texts to revive it. It is also possible that Roman foie gras techniques were perpetrated through the Middle Ages by scattered communities of European farmer. In the fifteenth century, amidst growing interest in classical food, Renaissance cooks may have turned to these communities as a source for fattened lives along with knowledge about their production and preparation.’ (14)
So put another way: Western Europeans never lost the practice of making foie gras per se but rather it simply went out of fashion and resources were redirected towards other things rather than cultivating luxury foods such as foie gras. However, the knowledge of how to do so was retained in monasteries via their copying of classical texts and the practice itself almost certainly continued on in some form that we don’t have direct documentation of, which was then picked up by the jews in the 900s or 1000s depending on your interpretation.
This fits in nicely with the fact that the earliest manuscript of Apicius we have is from Tours in France and produced in a monastery in the 800s and Apicius – you guessed it – includes the Roman recipe for foie gras as Pliny the Elder explains:
‘Apicius made the discovery that we may employ the same artificial method of increasing the size of the liver of the sow, as of that of the goose; it consists in cramming them with dried figs, and when they are fat enough, they are drenched with wine mixed with honey and immediately killed.’ (15)
Thus, what we are looking when we see references to fattened goose liver that had been ‘raised by the Jews’ by Pope Pius V’s head cook in 1571 is not the fact that jews ‘transmitted’ foie gras back to Western Europeans, but rather that jews had cornered – deliberately or otherwise - the market on producing appropriately fattened geese for foie gras after learning how to produce it from other Western Europeans circa the 900s to the 1000s A.D.
Indeed, the jews were particularly brutal and cruel to the geese as to quote one food blogger:
‘The way the Jewish people did it back in the 12th century was truly sadistic. They used to blind the animals and nail their feet to the ground, making it easier to feed them.’ (16)
So thus, we can see that the twin ideas that jews ‘invented’ foie gras and/or were ‘guardians of the foie gras food tradition’ between the fall of the Roman Empire in the 400s A.D. and foie gras’ ‘rediscovery’ by Western Europeans in the 1500s is complete and utter nonsense.
References
(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/Jewish/comments/18q24ls/what_are_some_things_that_were_invented_by_jews/
(2) https://thefoiegras.co.uk/foie-gras/origins
(3) Alan Davidson, 1999, ‘The Oxford Companion to Food’, 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 311
(4) Michael Ginor, 1999, ‘Foie Gras: A Passion’, 1st Edition, John Wiley: New York, p. 3
(5) Ibid., p. 9
(6) On this please see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/alexander-the-great-and-the-jews
(7) https://curiousrambler.com/the-curious-history-of-foie-gras/
(8) https://www.kumocafe.com/2013/02/the-history-of-foie-gras.html
(9) https://momentmag.com/foie-gras-indelicate-delicacy/?srsltid=AfmBOopZvMXG1hktilpfaqss4LVR4Cl0Cq1X4zjasJFQHIjz5zGBs7OG
(10) Idem.; also https://www.foodunfolded.com/article/the-ethics-of-foie-gras; https://www.jta.org/jewniverse/2012/jews-and-foie-gras; https://outorah.org/p/123779/
(11) Ginor, Op. Cit., p. 9
(12) https://momentmag.com/foie-gras-indelicate-delicacy/?srsltid=AfmBOopZvMXG1hktilpfaqss4LVR4Cl0Cq1X4zjasJFQHIjz5zGBs7OG
(13) https://www.kumocafe.com/2013/02/the-history-of-foie-gras.html
(14) Ginor, Op. Cit., p. 8
(15) Pliny the Elder, Nat. Hist., 8:77
(16) https://www.kumocafe.com/2013/02/the-history-of-foie-gras.html