Rice and lentils are an earthy, filling combination that appears again and again in cookbooks around the world. In Egypt, koshary is a national food; in the Hindu religion, kichidi is an auspicious meal; in a tenth-century, Abbasid-era Arabic cookbook, thulathiyya is a nutritious meal.[1] In my own mother’s kitchen, too, khichuri is a comfort food, served steaming hot on rainy days.
            According to Claudia Roden, a Sephardic Jewish cookbook author raised in Egypt, koshary rose in popularity in the mid-twentieth century, around the time of the 1952 Free Officers Revolution.[2] During this period, the government questioned the “Egyptianness” of many Jews. Yet the recipe for koshary in The Sephardic Jewish Cookbook is nearly identical to recipes in other cookbooks by Egyptian authors. The cookbook layers rice and penne pasta with chickpeas and lentils bathed in a tangy, cumin-spiced tomato sauce and garnished with crispy, fried onions.[3] A similar recipe appears in Samia Abdennour’s best-selling Egyptian cookbook, published in 1998, but Abdennour uses macaroni instead of penne pasta.[4] Other Egyptian food blogs call for different rice grains or pasta types, but do not alter the basic ingredients or cooking methods.[5] These similarities confirm historian Joel Beinin’s argument in The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, a study of the mid-twentieth-century displacement of Egyptian Jewish communities, that Jews largely ate the same things as other Egyptians.[6] Koshary reflects a shared everyday culinary culture, and its inclusion in the Sephardic Jewish Cookbook prompts a closer examination into the history of Sephardi Jews in Egypt.

            The Jewish population in Egypt increased rapidly from 6,000 in the nineteenth century to 64,000 in the twentieth century, but it was not a monolith.[7] While the majority of Jews were Sephardi, some were Ashkenazi and others were Karaite. They hailed from a variety of regions, including the former Ottoman Empire, and spoke a plethora of languages, including English, French, and Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish of Sephardi Jews.
            Nationality was a complicated matter for many recent Jewish immigrants to Egypt. They found upon their arrival that “being Egyptian was not necessary to live in Egypt as long as [they] did not want to become civil servants or start a career in politics.”[8] Then in 1929, the government restricted Egyptian citizenship only to those whose father was born in the country or in another Arab, Muslim country, which prevented many Jewish immigrants from obtaining Egyptian citizenship. By the 1930s, 25% of the Jewish Egyptian population had citizenship, another 25% were foreign nationals, and the rest were stateless.[9]
            Tensions heightened in 1948 with the onset of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and a period of increasing anti-Semitic persecution ensued in Egypt, boiling over in 1956 with the Suez Crisis. After President Nasser declared Jews to be enemies of the Egyptian state, the government expelled 13,000 British and French nationals, many of whom were Jewish.[10] Jewish refugees moved to a variety of countries, such as France or England, depending on their citizenship status and personal connections.   
            Within their new homes, Jewish migrants used food to remember Egypt. After her family moved to France from Egypt, Claudia Roden remembers watching her parents and other expelled Jews exchange recipes “in a kind of desperation,” worried they “might never see Egypt or each other again.”[11] These recipes formed the basis of her subsequent cookbooks, including A Book of Middle Eastern Food[12] and The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York.[13] Like The Sephardic Jewish Cookbook, Roden’s cookbooks were motivated in part by a sense of nostalgia. While the government may not have granted Jews in Egypt citizenship in 1956, their culinary practices were still very much Egyptian. After their expulsion, Egyptian Jews cooked the foods they had enjoyed in Egypt to remember their former homes. Similarly today, the act of cooking koshary allows Sephardi Jews in Los Angeles to remain connected to their Egyptian heritage. Their understanding of this Egyptian identity may have changed through the generations, but across time and space, a love for koshary remains.
            Once more, a simple dish of rice and lentils is at the heart of a complicated story of identity, memory, and food.



                                                                                                Works Cited

Abdennour, Samia. Egyptian Cooking: And Other Middle Eastern Recipes. New&rev. Ed. Cairo ; New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2005.

Aranjo, Alexander de. “Assets and Liabilities: Refugees from Hungary and Egypt in France and in Britain, 1956-1960.” University of Nottingham, 2013.

Beinin, Joel. The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Ben-Ur, Aviva. Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Ben-Ur, Aviva, and Jessica Hammerman. “What Did Sephardic Jews Eat?: Myth, Memory, and Reality.” Food and History 17, no. 2 (July 2019): 223–47. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.FOOD.5.121251.

Ibn-Saiyār al-Warrāq, al-Muẓaffar Ibn-Naṣr, Nawal Nasrallah, and al-Muẓaffar Ibn-Naṣr Ibn-Saiyār al-Warrāq. Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens: Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq’s Tenth-Century Baghdadi Cookbook. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

Ginat, Rami. “Jewish Identities in the Arab Middle East: The Case of Egypt in Retrospect.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46, no. 3 (2014): 593–96. doi:10.1017/S0020743814000646.

Karadsheh, Suzy. “Egyptian Koshari Recipe.” The Mediterranean Dish, 23 May 2019, https://www.themediterraneandish.com/egyptian-koshari-recipe/.

Maldonado, Pablo Jairo Tutillo. “How Should We Remember the Forced Migration of Jews from Egypt?” University of Washington Stroum Center for Jewish Studies (blog), March 27, 2019. https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/global-judaism/how-we-remember-forced-migration-jews-egypt-1956/.

Roden, Claudia. A Book of Middle Eastern Food. London: Nelson, 1968.

———. The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York. 1st ed. New York: Penguin Random House, 1996.

Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel (Los Angeles, Calif.), ed. Sephardic Heritage Cookbook: Ottoman, Persian, Moroccan, Egyptian Recipes and More. North Charleston, South Carolina: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016.

Sen, Mayukh. “Claudia Roden tells her immigrant story.” Food52. December 21, 2021. https://food52.com/blog/19228-claudia-roden-tells-her-immigrant-story