Q. I recently overheard a conversation about food in which someone mentioned “Jewish Champagne.” What is that?

A. We’re going to assume the speaker was not referring to the French region, centered on Troyes, whose rabbinical scholars led an intellectual flowering in the 12th century.

Closer to home, “Jewish Champagne” is a reference, dating from the 1930s, to seltzer or, more specifically, to Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Soda, a carbonated drink flavored with celery seeds and sweetened with sugar. Ethel Merman and Guy Lombardo were among the celebrities who swore by it.

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See the rest of the answer here.

תחילה יקבל הבחור על עצמו כי ראש הישיבה יהיה מעתה אביו הרוחני, מחשבתו תהיה כמחשבתו, ופיו כפיו. והריהו מקבל על עצמו מעתה ועד עולם כל מנהג, השקפה ודעה שיחליט עבורו ראש הישיבה. וכל מנהג, השקפה ודעה שידע ושמע וראה בבית הוריו ורבותיו עד עתה, הרי הם בטלים ומבוטלים כחרס הנשבר וכדבר שאין בו ממש.

First, the young man must accept upon himself that from now on the rosh yeshiva will be his spiritual father. His thoughts will be like his thoughts, his speech like his. He must now accept upon himself every custom, worldview, and opinion, that the rosh yeshiva decides is for him. Every custom, worldview, and opinion, that until now he heard about and saw in his parent’s and teacher’s homes, they are null and void like broken ceramic and like something that has no signficance.

1) Jewish populations do have a common ancestral affinity.

2) But, that affinity is complemented by admixture with the populations amongst whom the Diaspora settled.

3) There is a suggestion that in the case of Ashkenazi Jews the European contribution was more likely to be from southern, and not northern, Europe. This is somewhat surprising in light of the fact that the Ashkenazi group crystallized during the medieval period in northern Europe, amongst German and Slavic speaking peoples. These data would imply that in fact there was a relatively strong separation between these groups and the Jews, at least when it came to gene flow into the Jewish group (other data from Poland does show the effect of Jewish assimilation into the gentile majority). Therefore, the admixture may have occurred within the bounds of the former Roman Empire, during the Imperial or early post-Imperial period.

4) The close relationship of Jews to Palestinians is not surprising. Jews are reputedly a Levantine population by origin, and the historical and genetic evidence points to Arabicization in the Levant and Mesopotamia as having occurred through acculturation, and not population replacement. Many of the Palestinians are likely of original Jewish or Samaritan origin, though I would guess that they were likely at least nominally Christianized during the Byzantine persecutions of the 6th century.

5) There remain questions as to which groups the Ashkenazi Jews admixed with, and when they admixed. There should be a different pattern of genetic variance if the admixture event was early and ceased, or if it was constant and gradual gene flow. The phylogenetics implies the former, because of the lack of much allele sharing with northern Europeans specifically, amongst whom the Ashkenazi Jews were resident for the past ~1,000 years. Within the text of the paper there are also hints of possible relationships to a population of the Caucasus, opening an avenue for some validity of the Khazar hypothesis. There have been other data which also point to the Khazar hypothesis. The origins of the Jews then likely are complex.

The common denominator of all the Halakhic codifiers who mention this minhagh is easy to spot: they all resided in France.
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What of Germany (Ashkenaz)? The medieval authorities there were either silent or openly opposed to the custom, exemplified by this statement of R. Ya’aqov, son of the Rosh, in his famous work the Tur: “This is an extreme stringency and it is not the custom”.

This is incorrect for two reasons. The first is that the custom was also known in Provence which is NOT the same geographic, cultural, nor halakhic area as Northern France. They must be treated as two distinct areas. The second reason is that we know that the prohibition of not eating kitniyot was already an established custom in Germany in the early 13th century. Dr. Simha Emmanuel has published from a ms. the sermon on Passover of Rabbi Eliezer of Worms (1176-1238). In his sermon Rabbi Eliezer states that “ומה שאין אוכלין פולין ועדשים, מפני שיש בהן חיטין” (“And that which they don’t eat beans and lentils is because they have in them wheat.”) See here. Not only does he state as a given the existence of this custom, but he also gives a different reason and this being that mixed in with “beans and lentils” is wheat. This reason for the prohibition reflects the reality of the most important new agricultural practice of this time period, the three-field rotation system. See the following quote from here.

Still another component of the Agricultural Revolution of the Middle Ages was the development of the three-field rotation system. The classic two-field farming system of the Mediterranean regions of antiquity typically involved farming one field while leaving another fallow. In the new three-field pattern that arose on the European plain, arable land was divided into three fields with plantings rotated over a three-year cycle: two seasonal plantings employed two fields, a winter wheat crop and a spring crop of oats, peas, beans, barley, and lentils, with the third field left fallow.

As I said before, do whatever you want regarding the customary prohibition of eating kitniyot during Passover, but the claim that it has no basis in reality is now known to most likely be untrue.

A new book by David Malkiel, Reconstructing Ashkenaz: The Human Face of Franco-German Jewry, 1000-1250

Reconstructing Ashkenaz shows that, contrary to traditional accounts, the Jews of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages were not a society of saints and martyrs. David Malkiel offers provocative revisions of commonly held interpretations of Jewish martyrdom in the First Crusade massacres, the level of obedience to rabbinic authority, and relations with apostates and with Christians. In the process, he also reexamines and radically revises the view that Ashkenazic Jewry was more pious than its Sephardic counterpart.

Soloveitchik’s book is a study of the subject of yayin nesekh (or “idolatrous wine,” that is, wine that has been touched by gentiles and is therefore forbidden to Jews) as it affected the day-to-day lives of medieval German Jewry. In the author’s words, it “traces the development of halakha [Jewish law] as it relates to each stage of production, from the vat to the chalice: winemaking, transport, household use, and wine vessels and their purification.” This fascinating volume touches on two areas that are impossible to separate: halakhic research and the history of the Jews of Ashkenaz in the Middle Ages. The halakhic matters it discusses are not simple, but the author presents them in a clear fashion, such that a layman can also understand them. As a rule, the book, which includes numerous colorful maps and illustrations, is written out of a kind of delight and joyfulness that can’t help but infect the reader. Soloveitchik, a professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University, in New York, presents what amounts to a portrait of the everyday lives of the Jews in Ashkenaz and France in the Middle Ages.

See here for the full review.