Over the past week, the calorie count in many Jewish households will have gone through the roof. Millions of latkes and doughnuts will have been consumed in festive celebration, fried foods that commemorate the miracle of the Temple oil that burned for eight days. Whatever it is, Chanukah is not a dietician’s dream.
Enjoying oily foods goes back a long way; in the 12th century, Joseph ben Maimon, Maimonides’ father, commends the eating of sufganim — a kind of fritter or syrupy pancake — as an ancient custom on Chanukah. The word is close to the modern Hebrew for doughnuts, sufganiyot.
But there is another food associated with the festival. Cheese dishes are usually considered a Shavuot speciality, but they can also be eaten in honour of Judith, the eponymous heroine of a book in the Apocrypha.
The Book of Judith actually has no explicit connection with the Hasmonean revolt and scholars believe it was composed several decades later. It tells the story of a pious and beautiful widow who, when the city of Bethulia is besieged by the invading Assyrians, comes up with a cunning plan to deliver her people.
She steals into the enemy camp and offers information to the Assyrian general Holofernes that she promises will assure him of victory. He invites her to dine with the Assyrians, but she steadfastly will eat only the kosher provisions she has brought with her.
Smitten with her beauty, he drinks himself into a stupor; never did he drink so much on a single day, the text records. She goes into his tent, picks up his sword and cuts off his head, then steals out of the camp with the head in a bag. She then has the trophy displayed on the walls of Bethulia, which dismays the Assyrians and emboldens the Judeans, who rally in battle and rout their opponents.
Judith herself has echoes of Esther and Miriam but also of Jael, the non-Israelite woman who in Deborah’s time assassinates the enemy general Sisera by driving a tent peg through his skull. Nowhere is cheese mentioned in the Book of Judith — but in the Bible Jael makes the unsuspecting Sisera drowsy by giving him milk.
By early medieval times, Judith has come to be a Chanukah heroine. Rashi’s grandson, Rashbam, cites her role when talking of the miracle of the festival. In the 14th century, Rabbi Nissim ben Reuben, known as the Ran, alludes to Judith — though not by name — giving Holofernes salty cheese to make him thirsty.
Professor Deborah Levine Gera, a translator of the Book of Judith, notes correspondences between her story and the deeds of the Maccabees. Firstly, the similarity between her name, Judith, and that of Judah Maccabee. But also between her decapitation of Holofernes and what happens in another apocryphal book, the Second Book of Maccabees. When the body of the defeated Assyrian commander Nicanor is found on the battlefield, Judah has his head removed and fixed to the ramparts of Jerusalem.
Nicanor’s comeuppance is to be commemorated in a celebration on Adar 13, which also happens to be the day before Purim. This day of rejoicing nevertheless fell off the calendar, dispensing with what might have been a tricky conundrum for the rabbis: how to mark Nicanor Day at the same time as observing the Fast of Esther, which was established for Adar 13.
There is one other food, however, which has much deeper roots in the festival, a food not to be enjoyed but shunned: pork. It appears in an episode recounted in the Second Book of Maccabees and amplified in the Fourth Book of Maccabees.It tells of a Jewish woman with seven sons who are captives of the evil Assyrian King Antiochus. He promises to spare them if they eat the flesh of swine. But one by one, they choose torture and death rather than transgress the laws of the Torah, until the youngest boy finally throws himself into the flames.
According to 4 Maccabees, some say the woman followed her youngest’s example and cast herself into the fire too. Eulogised as “the mother of the nation” and a “soldier of God”, she is not named, although in the early medieval work, the Book of Josippon, she is called Hannah.
In the Books of Maccabees, the martyrdom of the mother and her sons is preceded by that of an elderly priest, Eleazar. Antioch tries to reason with him: “It is senseless to enjoy delicious things that are not shameful and wrong to spurn the gift of nature,” says the wicked king.
You may scoff at our philosophy, Eleazar replies, but it teaches self-control and the mastery of desire. And willingly he embraces death.
What is extraordinary about these archetypal acts of martyrdom is that the rabbinic requirement to accept death rather than disobey the Torah generally applies only in the extreme cases of committing idolatry, murder or gross immorality like incest. But for Hannah and her family, eating swine’s flesh symbolises the renunciation of their ancestral faith and capitulation to assimilation. Thus they endure unspeakable pain in order to demonstrate the unbreakable spirit of the nation.
In the Torah there is no particular hierarchy of forbidden foods or special revulsion reserved for the pig. But it is perhaps through this story of martyrdom at Chanukah that swine’s flesh comes to assume a whole new significance and why many Jews today, even if lax about kashrut in other respects, still resist the meat of a pig.
