Jewish Invention Myths: The Pizza

Yesterday I was made aware that jews claim to have actually invented pizza to my great surprise and I thought it’d be fun to address this particular historical myth here as it is another good example of how poorly reasoned many of these jewish invention myths are.

Aaron Reich writing for the ‘Jerusalem Post’ summarises the ‘jews invented pizza’ argument as follows:

‘One of the most interesting theories was brought forth in 1983 by Italian-Israeli Prof. Sandra Debenedetti Stow.

In an article, she cited a 14th-century Italian Hebrew scholar Yehuda Romano who had used a Hebrew spelling of pizza to translate the word hararah, which is a type of flatbread, when translating the work of Maimonides.

Others pointed out that this can't be the case, since the word pizza has been around since the 10th century in a Latin code in Gaeta.

But other evidence still exists, such as the existence of a pizzarelle, a cookie-sized version of pizza eagerly consumed by Jewish children in ancient Rome.

Others, like Abba Eban, the famous Israeli politician and diplomat, had cited the tradition that Roman soldiers added cheese and olive oil to matzah, the unleavened flatbread Jews eat on Passover.’ (1)

We can already see that this a weak argument at best from Reich given that – as he himself admits – the claim that Yehuda Romano first coined the term ‘Pizza’ in the fourteenth century is directly contradicted by the reference to ‘Pizza’ in a Latin codex from Gaeta in 997 A.D.

As Reich’s colleague at the ‘Jerusalem Post’ Henry Abrahamson observes:

‘Unfortunately, it turns out the story is a little more complicated, and our ethnocentric glee was premature. A 10th-century Latin code from Gaeta explicitly mandates the donation of “twelve pizzas” to the local bishop every Christmas and Easter, antedating Romano’s reference to the word by 400 years and, incidentally, providing evidence of the very first pizza delivery service.’ (2)

So, the jews cannot have coined the term ‘Pizza’ but then Reich proceeds to cite the claim that jewish children were eating a small pizza type dish in ancient Rome and also Abba Eban’s claim that the jewish Passover matzah were eaten by the Romans with cheese and olive oil in support of his argument that jews invented pizza.

This is further illustrated by Reich’s further argument that:

‘But regardless of these specifics, one thing is clear: Jews are, at the very least, partially responsible for modern pizza.

This is entirely due to the other ingredient involved that truly makes pizza what it is: The tomato.

Tomatoes are not native to Europe and were brought from the New World in the early modern era.

But tomatoes were not trusted by many Europeans. This is because they were widely believed to be poisonous.

The fear was not entirely without merit. Tomatoes are technically part of the Solanaceae family of flowers, also known as nightshades. Many nightshade plants are known to be poisonous.

Many people did start eating them eventually, but it took a while for it to really catch on everywhere.

But a Sephardi-Jewish doctor later changed that.

The plot (and pizza sauce) thickens

Tomatoes were brought to North America during the slave trade. At the time, slaves would eat them, as they had learned how to tell if it was poisonous or not.

But according to some, it wasn't accepted as an edible food until the work of the Jewish physician, Dr. John de Sequeyra, also known as Dr. Siccary by some, changed that. His family had lived in England but had once been court physicians to the Spanish and Portuguese monarchs.

Sequeyra believed tomatoes to actually be healthy and could help prolong life, and had told this to American founding father Thomas Jefferson, as he was taking care of Jefferson's father.

An account in the American Jewish Archives details how Jefferson, following the teachings of Sequeyra, ate a tomato in public before a crowd and lived to tell the tale.

In his book, My People: Abba Eban's History of the Jews, Volume 2, Eban also credits this doctor for proving tomatoes to be safe to eat.

"You can be grateful to Dr. Siccary... who in 1773 proved that tomatoes were safe to eat," Eban wrote.

Eventually, tomatoes became more popular and accepted. And all that culminated in the creation of pizza in Naples, specifically chef Raffaele Esposito in June 1889 making a dish in honor of Italy's Queen Margherita of Savoy for the Italian unification. He called it Pizza Margherita, and it remains popular worldwide.

So did Jews truly invent modern pizza? No. But did they inspire it? Maybe. Did they at least partially contribute to its creation in its modern form? Absolutely.’ (3)

Reich has introduced another argument here and one he clearly thinks is the best one in that he claims that Sephardi jewish doctor named John de Sequeyra argued that tomatoes were safe to eat – the belief they were unsafe came from confusion around tomatoes status as a nightshade and also the fact that they filched lead from plates so tended to seem to poison people – (4) so therefore he ‘proved’ to Americans via Thomas Jefferson that tomatoes were ‘okay to eat’ and thus because modern pizza is usually based on a tomato sauce therefore jews ‘contributed to its creation in its modern form’.

However, this is just a bunch of desperate nonsense.

Firstly, the argument that jewish children were enjoying pizza-type foods in ancient Rome is actually an argument against the ‘jewish origin of pizza’ precisely because pizza predates ancient Rome in that in the sixth century B.C. the Persian King Darius the Great’s soldiers baked flatbreads covered with cheese and dates on their shields when on campaign. (5)

Further something very like pizza was commonly eaten in ancient Rome since a cooked vegetable pizza of a sort is mentioned in Book 7 of Virgil’s Aeneid and we have found what has mistakenly been thought to be pizza in the ruins of the Roman town of Pompeii from 79 A.D. (6) but is in fact a similar popular Greco-Roman dish called ‘Adorea’ which was a circular flatbread served with sweet fruit on it. (7)

This means that those jewish children were actually enjoying a much older non-jewish pizza-like dish not a jewish one.

Secondly this arcs back in the Abba Eban’s claim about the Roman soldiers eating jewish Passover matzoh with cheese and olive oil which sounds very like the dish that King Darius the Great’s Persian soldiers were eating centuries before and also the vegetable pizza of Virgil’s Aeneid as well as the adorea of Pompeii.

So, neither of these arguments are valid since all they show is jews enjoying non-jewish dishes not the other way around.

Now let’s move on to Abba Eban’s argument from John de Sequeyra in 1773; this seems superficially strong until we note that firstly that the tomato was first recorded in Italy in 1544 and was cultivated there from the seventeenth century and had become a staple of Italian cuisine by the end of the eighteenth century. (8)

As well as that:

‘The modern pizza (bread, cheese, tomatoes) evolved out of earlier flatbreads served in Naples, the most common and inexpensive type we would call white pizza – flatbread topped with garlic, lard and salt. Slightly richer and more expensive versions were topped with grated caciocavallo (a type of hard cheese, initially made from horse’s mil, now made from cow’s or buffalo’s milk) and basil, or tiny fish in their larval stage, called cecenielli.’ (9)

Add to that the Italians were regularly eating pizza by the early eighteenth century:

‘Well known pizzerias in existence in the eighteenth century include: Zi’ Ciccio (1727), Ntuono (1732), Capasso (1750) and Da Pietro, also known as ‘Pietro e basta cosi’ (‘Pietro and that’s enough!’) (1760), which later became Pizzeria Brandi. By the mid-eighteenth century, many of the pizzerias installed tables so customers could sit down and eat.’ (10)

Thus if the Italians were regularly eating pizza by the early eighteenth century and also using tomatoes heavily in their recipes by the end of the eighteenth century; it goes to suggest that the addition of tomatoes to pizza must have been occurred well before John de Sequeyra’s argument was used by Thomas Jefferson to justify eating tomatoes as a non-poisonous food item in 1773.

Indeed, the first tomato on pizza actually dates backs to the early eighteenth century and specifically the creation of pizza marinara which occurred in 1734 in Naples a full fifty years before John de Sequeyra’s advocacy of the tomato as a non-poisonous food item. (11)

Liz Barrett in her history of pizza goes even further and asserts that:

‘In the sixteenth century, a full three hundred years before Queen Margherita took her first bite of pizza, Neapolitans were enjoying tomato-topped pies.’ (12)

She doesn’t offer a citation for this, but it is not an unreasonable position given the tomato was introduced to Italy in 1544 at which time pizza-like flatbreads were commonly eaten.

Since pizza only arrived in the United States from Italy due to mass migration in the late nineteenth century therefore Reich and Eban’s argument that John de Sequeyra’s advocacy of the tomato in 1773 contributed to the modern pizza is a red herring and completely unrelated to tomato-based pizza which had already been invented in Italy circa 1734 was only imported to the United States over a century and a half later!

So no jews did not invent pizza nor did they contribute to its creation in any way, shape or form!

References

(1) https://www.jpost.com/food-recipes/article-695956

(2) https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/did-this-ancient-jewish-scholar-introduce-the-world-to-pizza-589438

(3) https://www.jpost.com/food-recipes/article-695956

(4) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-tomato-was-feared-in-europe-for-more-than-200-years-863735/

(5) Liz Barrett, 2014, ‘Pizza: A Slice of American History’, 1st Edition, Voyageur Press: Minneapolis, p. 13

(6) Ibid., pp. 13-14

(7) https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230629-adoreum-the-newly-discovered-flatbread-fresco-of-pompeii

(8) Carol Helstosky, 2008, ‘Pizza: A Global History’, 1st Edition, Reaktion Books: London, p. 21

(9) Ibid.

(10) Ibid., p. 22

(11) Ibid., pp. 21-22

(12) Barrett, Op. Cit., p. 14

(13) Helstosky, Op. Cit., p. 48