Another food-related ‘jewish invention’ myth is the claim that Spanish Tapas has a jewish origin; (1) having looked round the claim is of rather recent vintage and seems to be an embroidered version of a method used by the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition to smoke out – pun intended – Marranos (jewish converts to Christianity who still practised Judaism in secret).
Susan Barocas for example writes in ‘Lilith’ magazine that:
‘These special food traditions included snacking on cold appetizers and small dishes called “mezé” during Jewish family gatherings for Shabbat and holidays. Some common Sephardic hors d’oeuvres were cheese dumplings, yogurt soup, fried pumpkin, simple salads with fresh ingredients from home gardens, olives, pickled and preserved fish such as anchovies in vinegar. Many of these are still popular today. This Sephardic tradition influenced the famous Spanish custom of tapas, dining on small appetizers, that became particularly popular on Sunday afternoons after Mass when Spaniards gathered in homes and bars. With the Inquisition, hosts would sometimes test to see if any of their guests were secret Jews by serving slices of cold ham, still a popular tapa today.’ (2)
She goes on to add in and give some additional colouring to this narrative by adding in the aforementioned story about the Spanish (and Portuguese) Inquisition ‘persecuting’ the Marranos.
She writes how:
‘In the end, most of what we know about the food of Spain’s medieval Jews comes from the tragedy of the Inquisition, both the decrees of the Edict of Expulsion—1492 in Spain, 1496 in Portugal—and from vivid testimony against accused individuals over the ensuing years.
There are detailed decrees related to food and customs around food as a way of revealing if someone was Jewish, even if the person had converted and was living as a secret Jew. These telltale decrees about what to suspect in your neighbor or employer included keeping the Sabbath by slow-cooking food on Fridays to be eaten on Saturday; cleaning meat of fat, nerves and sinew or soaking it in water to remove the blood; avoiding pork, rabbit, cuttlefish, eel or other scaleless fish popular among the Christians; and even eating hard-boiled eggs and olives after the death of a parent.
Inquisitors were especially attuned to the preparation of Shabbat and holiday foods and also ordinary foods that were eaten or displayed in some ritual observance or as part of keeping kosher. One of the most common dishes used to identify Jewish observance was adafina, still a popular dish in Spain and North Africa. Similar to hamim and cholent, adafina is a traditional Sabbath stew of meat, chickpeas or fava beans, onions, garlic, cumin and other spices, often with eggs hard-cooked in their shells in the stew. The ingredients weren’t as important as the method of slow cooking in banked coals, starting before sundown on Friday and eaten for lunch on Saturday. In one case, in 1570, Inquisitors recorded a maid testifying that she witnessed her mistress cooking “mutton with oil and onions, which she understands is the Jewish dish adafina.”
The more I learned the more I realized that the testimony of the Inquisition often turned woman against woman; it was hard for a Jewish woman to hide food preparation from a maid. In another well-known testimony of a maid, a simple salad of lettuce and radish was used against Juana Nuñez at her trial in the early 1500s, because she would serve it to her women friends who came to visit nearly every Saturday afternoon. Not only was Doña Nuñez serving only uncooked food, but all the women were relaxing and not working to take care of households at that time, as was customary when observing the Sabbath.
In the spring, a woman making any kind of flat bread with small holes poked in it was damning evidence of Passover preparations. More fatal evidence, mentioned often in Inquisition testimony, was quajado, a vegetable-egg casserole, often prepared with Spanish white cheese for a dairy meal. Other names for the dish are sfongato (sponge) and asquajado, meaning “coagulated” in Ladino. The long history of these vegetable casseroles that started in Spain became an element of Sephardic cuisines throughout the Ottoman Empire where quajado continued to be made. A version with spinach, onions and matza, called anchusa, became part of Passover menus.’ (3)
This is all well and good, but the problem here is the obvious: if the origin of Spanish tapas is meze – as is possible – then because meze is actually just a very old food custom/style from the Middle East in ancient times – we are talking pre-Roman Empire here – then its transmission to the Spanish would have absolutely nothing to do with jews and everything to do with either the Carthaginians (circa 575 B.C. to circa 205 B.C.) [who were Phoenician transplants remember], the Roman Empire (218 B.C. to 472 A.D.) and/or the Arabs (711 A.D. to 1492 A.D.) since they would be the vectors of the transmission of meze to the Iberian peninsula given they all had versions of the meze concept.
The story about the Marranos is fine and dandy but it is fundamentally irrelevant to the history of tapas if the origin of tapas is meze which is the basis for the ‘jewish invention’ of tapas claim.
So thus we can see that Spanish tapas is not a ‘jewish invention’ whatsoever!
References
(1) https://www.reddit.com/r/Jewish/comments/18q24ls/what_are_some_things_that_were_invented_by_jews/?rdt=58394
(2) https://lilith.org/articles/when-food-betrayed-the-jews/
(3) Idem.