Jewish Invention Myths: The Cherry Tomato

Returning to a reader favourite; we have another food-related ‘Jewish Invention Myth’ in the form of the jewish claim that jews first created cherry tomatoes.

Sarit Gervais at ‘Kosherica’ claims that:

‘7. The Cherry Tomato

Delicious, pretty and sweet, two Israeli professors from the Hebrew University modified the regular tomato and created this beautiful, beloved staple.’ (1)

This is true in the sense that two Israeli scientists Nachum Kedar and Haim Rabinowitch of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem are credited by jews and the Israeli government with ‘inventing the cherry tomato’ in the 1970s. (2) Ironically part of the story that is left out – seemingly deliberately – is that the cherry tomato they created was actually at the behest of jewish-owned and operated British retailing giant ‘Marks and Spencer’. (3)

That said this claim of the cherry tomato being a jewish/Israeli creation has been deliberately pushed by the Israeli government as part of its hasbara propaganda effort as Wexler notes:

‘Since 2003, mentions of Israel having “invented” the cherry tomato have appeared in both Israeli and international media.’ (4)

Evidence of this is not hard to come by as the Israeli government released and mass-produced free leaflets in 2010 claiming Israel invented the cherry tomato as one of its ‘famous inventions’ (5) and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs also published an article on their web page in December 2010 repeating the claim. (6)

Further Israel-based editors tried to insert these propaganda-based talking points into the ‘Cherry Tomato’ page on Wikipedia over a dozen times between 2010 and 2016. (7)

Yet – perhaps predictably – this is complete and utter nonsense as the cherry tomato is first attested in Swiss botanist Caspar Bauhin’s 1623 book ‘Pinax theatre botanici’ (‘Illustrated Exposition of Plants’) (8) with its discovery being generally dated to the 1500s in South America. (9)

Indeed, British botanists described the cherry tomato again several times in the eighteenth century (10) and it is mentioned repeatedly in US botanical and agricultural literature as early as the 1840s. (11) By the late 1800s there are literally ‘dozens of mentions’ of cherry tomatoes in American farming literature (12) and by the 1950s and 1960s cherry tomatoes are frequently mentioned in US cook books before further exploding in popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. (13)

Santorini cherry tomatoes – which is incidentally likely where Israel’s cherry tomato industry originally comes from - began to be widely cultivated on the Mediterranean island of Santorini and more widely in Greece from the late 1800s onwards. (14)

Wexler points out in her correspondence with one of the supposed Israeli inventors of the cherry tomato – Haim Rabinowitch – that even he disputes the Israeli government’s claims.

She writes that:

‘Rabinowitch fully acknowledged that the cherry tomato had existed prior to the 1970s and 1980s; he even pointed me to an article about the cherry tomato being the ancestor of the modern cultivated tomato.’ (15)

And so did his ‘co-inventor’ Nachum Kedar in a 2nd May 2006 interview published in the ‘Jerusalem Post’:

‘Professor Nachum Kedar is often credited with inventing the cherry tomato. He explains, however, that is “not really the right way to call it.” More accurately put, Dr. Kedar’s work in genetics and breeding took the pre-existing cherry tomato and lengthened its shelf life enough for it to become a viable commercial product—his work made the cherry tomato available for mass consumption.’ (16)

Now this is the real claim made by Kedar and Rabinowitch: that they didn’t ‘invent’ the cherry tomato, but they did create a variety that allowed it to be available for mass consumption, but – as Wexler notes – there is no independent non-anecdotal evidence for this claim (17) and the fact that is was being widely referenced in US cook books in the 1950s and 1960s strongly argues against this claim because if it is in US cook books one to two decades before Kedar and Rabinowitch’s creation of their variety of cherry tomato in the 1970s then they cannot have made the cherry tomato ‘available for mass consumption’ at all as it was already being mass consumed!

So no jews didn’t invent or popularise the cherry tomato!

References

(1) https://kosherica.com/10-awesome-israeli-inventions/

(2) Anna Wexler, 2016, ‘Seeding Controversy: Did Israel Invent the Cherry Tomato?’, Gastronomica, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 1; 4

(3) Ibid., p. 8

(4) Ibid., p. 1

(5) Ibid.

(6) Ibid., p. 3

(7) Ibid., pp. 2-3

(8) Ibid., p. 5

(9) Ibid., p. 2

(10) Ibid., pp. 5-6

(11) Ibid., p. 6

(12) Ibid.

(13) Ibid., p. 7

(14) Ibid., p. 6

(15) Ibid., p. 4

(16) Quoted in Ibid.

(17) Ibid., pp. 8-9