Arab Colonizers Appropriated Biblical Jewish Foods Like Hummus and Zatar

In 2008, the Internet was flooded with the bizarrely-viral, so-called “Hummus Wars.” This was the euphemistic phrase for what became the subject of a heated debate between Israel, Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories and other predominantly-Arab regions of the Levant.

The argument, emanating from the Arab world, revolved around cultural copyright and questions of national heritage, as well as implicit economic considerations. In short, Arabs of the Levant claimed they had “invented” foods like hummus, tabouleh, falafel and the like, with particular attention — even fixation — on hummus.

They minced no words about it: Israelis eating, producing or celebrating hummus were “cultural appropriators” and were “stealing” what they termed “Arab” or even “Palestinian” cuisine. This became an interesting parallel to the broader accusation of Israeli Jews stealing previously-Arab-colonized land, in spite of that very land being the place of Jewish ancestry and ethnogenesis.

In spite of the heated online debate, the fact remained that hummus was indisputably the food of the Biblical Israelites. It did not come from the deserts of the Hijaz, and Arab Colonizers of the Levant did not discover hither unto ignored garbanzo beans.

The allegations of Jewish culinary appropriation were not limited, however, to hummus. Yet in spite of the accusations, Jews throughout the Levant and North Africa have been well-documented as having always eaten the same chopped salad and falafel as our Muslim and Christian neighbors. But as 21st century trends of social cancelation and virtue signaling have become more pronounced, the claims have been something of a proverbial “silver bullet” fired in debates to shut down any critical examination of modern, popular assumptions about demographics and origins related to the Israel and Palestine conflict.

The reality, however, is that people who lived in the Levant for any length of time naturally began eating foods and meals that were from the region. No one segregated the menu, and the idea that one group or the other should be able to prevent Arab newcomers, or indigenous Jewish residents of the Biblical Holy Land, from eating one or another of these foods, would have been laughable in any generation previous.

The Jewish people were in the region of the Levant before the presence of Arab Caliphatist colonizers. Thus, unless the argument is that such foods were bizarrely “discovered” by Arab Colonizers, it is similarly laughable to suggest that these foods originated in Classical Arabia itself, and thus should be “off limits” to Jews of Judean ethnogenesis.

Undoubtedly, Jews who had been in exile within Europe, had long abandoned many of these foods. Why? For the simple fact that the Jewish people have always — quite naturally — tended to eat foods from the regions in which we lived… much like other human sociological groups.

That works both ways. Arab Colonizers who imperially spread with the Caliphate Empires came into our homes, ate our foods we served them, asked for the recipes, (so to speak), and then began cooking them in their own neighboring homes they built in our Indigenous, ancestral lands.

This often confuses non-Jews, when they hear Jews of the Galut, or Exile, referred to as “European” or termed “Ashkenazi.” This latter term, however, is a Hebrew designation for Jewish families who fled to the region of the Ashkenaz, from the Roman Empire and its oppression of Judea.

The term Ashkenaz was simply the Talmudic term for the Rhineland, named after the progeny of the Biblical Gomer, from which we derive “German.” At the time, the Germanic barbarians were terrifying to Rome. This was one of the few regions Rome never seized control of — bearing in mind that there was even a strong Roman outpost in Britannia. Indeed, this latter example would later come to form the historical basis for King Arthur legends — as the British monarchy descended not from such a mythic figure (as claimed), but from the exiled Roman Commander and his “round table” of generals, who had been abandoned there, as Rome slowly but surely began to fall (apart).

A Jew being “of” Ashkenaz does not mean their ancestry is from the Biblical figure Ashkenaz, nor Gomer. Instead, it means only that they were residents in the region of Ashkenaz. It does not mean that Ashkenazi Jewish ethnogenesis was from the region in question.

In the same way, we speak of “American” or “Amriki” Jews or Muslims. No one is suggesting that these individuals, by and large, are indigenous to the Americas. Nevertheless, folks like Kanye West never seemed to have received the proverbial memo.

The Biblical Ruth Ate… Hummus?

With the aforementioned established, it is worth noting that claims of Jewish origination of Levantine foods like hummus are not culturally-wishful thinking. Instead, we need look no further than the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (what Christianity termed the “Old Testament”).

Popular translations of the Book of Ruth are rendered: “At mealtime Boaz said to her, ‘Come over here. Have some bread and dip it in the hummus (חמץ)!'” (Ruth 2:14).

The Biblical Hebrew does not indicate “vinegar” — as so many English translations incorrectly render it. The confusion here comes in, due to the relationship of the dish here to the “bite” provided by “acidic” (חומץ), lemon juice or vinegar.

The passage here specifically refers to chickpeas or garbanzo beans (חמץ), however, not to the acidic lemon juice vinegar (חומץ) in the chickpea dish. Chickpeas, as you may or may not be aware, are better known by their `Arabic name “hummus” (حمص).

Regarding the morphology of Hebrew to Arabic letters, we see many instances of words with the Hebrew letter tzadi (צ), changing into the hard-sad (ص) in Arabic cognates. Though this is not always the case, and the uniquely Hebrew tzadi (צ) can also morphologically change into a hard dhad (ض) — as in the case of the obvious cognates eretz (ארץ) and ard (أرض) for “land.”

Nevertheless, this bears witness only to the remarkable length of time that it took for Arabic to be written down as a standardized language, from the Arabian dialects of Aramaic, as well as the preexistence of the Hebrew, rather than Arabic, origin of these terms. This is further indicated by this variance of two letters alternatively employed in Arabic, for one letter in Hebrew, and the the hard-sad (ص) of Arabic being otherwise a direct 1:1 correlation with the Hebrew hard samekh (ס). Even the visual rendering between these two is obvious, as is the case with most directly correlative Hebrew to Arabic letters.

Arabic, nevertheless, very often renders the uniquely Hebrew tzadi (צ) with the hard sad (ص), as in the obvious examples of the Hebrew Tzadiq (צדיק) to the popular Arabic Sadiq (صادق), or in the case of the Classical Arabic of “Egypt” or Misr (مصر) and Mitzrayim (מצרים) in Hebrew. You may recognize the popular Palestinian family name Al-Misri, which means simply “the Egyptian” — indicating the family’s national origin, generations ago.

All of this morphological confusion is compounded by the fact that even once the first Arabic text in history was set to pen — the Qur’an itself — it was done so in a Syriac-Aramaic style of writing known as Kufic, and without any i`jam dots above or below the rasm of the letters, which are often only distinguished thereby in writing.

Thus, we have the Arabic cognate of “acidic” or “vinegar” (حامض) from the aforementioned Hebrew (חומץ). Without the dot over the letter dhad (ض), in Arabic, it is indistinguishable from the Arabic sad (ص).

If that wasn’t enough, the astute reader may have noticed that the Hebrew vav (ו) looks remarkably identical to the Arabic alif (ا). Thus when the alif (ا) occurs within words, rather than at the beginning of them, in Arabic, we find their earlier Hebrew cognates with a vav (ו) instead. Thus: shalom (שלום) becomes salaam (سلام); kofer (כופר) becomes kafir (كافر), and here, chometz (חומץ) becomes chamidh or hamidh (حامض).

Though a linguistic discussion of this topic deserves a full, dedicated work (and perhaps I will get around to that in time), the case has sufficiently been made by the brief examples shown above.

With this etymological origin of the later Arabic “hummus” thus demonstrated and borne in mind, it is clear that within the Biblical text, Boaz is thus inviting Ruth to share the common Levantine dish of hummus and pita, with him!

So much for the anti-Jewish “appropriation libel,” so intellectually embarrassing in its popularity today, with the descendants of the Caliphate Colonial project in the Levant.

Holy Za`tar in the Tehillim (Psalms) of King David

Those familiar with the Biblical narrative may be familiar with references to “hyssop,” even if they are not quite sure what plant this refers to. In Biblical Hebrew, the term ezov has been most often translated as hyssop, though this Biblical plant was something different altogether from the plant that today we call hyssop.

This, of course, enters us into a broader discussion of such translational variations, which could easily be expanded and explored in another article. Are you noticing a trend here? Languages change remarkably over time. It is pure cultural delusion to imagine otherwise.

The meaning of Qur’anic words today in many cases — if not most — are vastly different than they were in Late Antiquity. As such, it is insufficient to simply trust translations by default, as authoritative in their definitions of any number of ancient scriptural terms.

One could, for instance focus on the medicinal and shamanic herb Cannabis and the term Qaneh Bosem (קנה בשם) in the Torah — typically translated with the odd rendering of “Sweet Reed.” The term Suf (סוף) for “Reed,” of course, is not what we see at play here. Nevertheless, most translators go with whatever dominant renderings preceded their work, and do little investigation into terminological etymology.

The reader should understand just how significant the morphology and translational corruption of words can be when deciphering and rendering texts of Far Antiquity into modern languages. For instance, even the English language has changed almost beyond recognition since the days of Shakespeare (1564 – 1616). “Wherefore art thou, O Romeo?” is not a question asking Romeo to reveal his geographical whereabouts or hiding place from Juliette. Instead, it meant to Shakespeare’s audience, “Why must you be Romeo?”

Still, to this day, high school plays typically frame this scene with the female protagonist gazing to and fro, usually from a balcony, with Romeo nowhere to be found. If English could change so drastically, in such a short period of time, what makes anyone imagine Semitic languages would be any different?

The Torah uses the Biblical word ezov (אזוב), to reference za`atar. It does this much in the same way that it uses the Egyptian-derived Totafot (the Biblical term for tefillin phylacteries) — or “dodafot” (coiling serpent). The Rambam, Maimonides (1138 – 1204 CE), Rabbi Saadia Gaon (892 – 942 CE) and even earlier Jewish commentators unanimously identified ezov with za`atar. Rabbi Saadia explained ezov “is a plant known in Arabic as zatr.”

The ancient Egyptian word sufo, is well-known to be “oregano,” and not “hyssop” – as many Biblical renderings of ezov contend.  Even though the Greek word “hyssop” linguistically derives from ezov, it does so by a botanical confusion. That is to say that Hyssop officinalis, while common in Southern Europe, is almost never found wild in the Levant. Conversely, Origanum vulgare is extremely common in the Levant. The Biblical ezov is in fact “oregano” or Origanum vulgare — that is, za`atar. Just as Hummus a dish termed by its primary ingredient, so too do we see this as the case with the Biblical za`atar. 

The Only Logical (and Historically-Accurate) Conclusion

With the clear Biblical, Jewish precedence for both Hummus and Za`atar in ancient Israelite cuisine — vastly predating the Arab colonization of the Levant, it is clear that all claims of Jewish appropriation of either is pure fantasy on the part of those who project their own appropriation onto those their ancestors colonized.

Let us consider, in closing, that none other than Karl Marx, in his survey of Jerusalem demographics, made it clear that Jews were a notable presence in Syria Palestina a century before the State of Israel was established by the United Nations. Not only that, but the Jewish population was not merely significant, nor did it approach that of the Muslim and Christian Arab population, it was actually twice the size of the Arab Muslim population. In spite of that sizable majority, the Jewish people of Jerusalem remained powerless due to Caliphate subjugation and proxy power wielded through local Arab Muslims all too eager to relegate Jews to the role of dhimmitude.

Marx described a constantly invigorated Jerusalem population, which never relented in the millennia-old religious Zionist fervor that led even the “non-native” Jerusalemite Jews, to return to our ancestral home and land of ethnogenesis.

Of those Jews in Jerusalem alone — to say nothing of elsewhere throughout the Levant — Marx documented the following:

The sedentary population of Jerusalem numbers about 15,500 souls, of whom 4,000 are Mussulmans [Muslims] and 8,000 Jews. The Mussulmans, forming about a fourth part of the whole, and consisting of Turks, Arabs and Moors, are, of course, the masters in every respect, as they are in no way affected with the weakness of their Government at Constantinople [Istanbul]. Nothing equals the misery and the sufferings of the Jews at Jerusalem, inhabiting the most filthy quarter of the town, called hareth-el-yahoud, the quarter of dirt, between the Zion and the Moriah, where their synagogues are situated – the constant objects of Mussulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins.

There is no serious academic debate as to the region of Jewish ethnogenesis, nor the Arab origins in the Levant as being from the Arabian Caliphatist Colonial project, 1,400 years ago. Similarly, there is no debating the census date documenting the vast numbers of neighboring Arab migrant immigrants to Mandate Palestine in the 1920s. 

As the Zionist `Olim began creating cities like Tel Aviv, clearing former swamp lands of Malaria-ridden mosquitos, planting trees and reversing desertification that spread like an ecological plague with the Caliphate Colonizers, Arab neighbors eager for work and a better life in revitalized Palestinian towns, injected with a new European economic stimulus, rushed to the region. 

The Jewish `Olim were all too happy to live and work side by side such immigrants, so long as they were happy to live side by side with the returned Judeans. Still, other factions allied with the Third Reich, and before that emanating from the stark antisemitism of Rashid Rida’s religious Neo-Salafi Wahhabism, were committed to terrorizing the Jewish population, as well as any Arabs who were content to live in peace with Jewish neighbors during the Yishuv period. 

The Judeans returning to our ancestral home of Eretz Yisrael were decolonizing from not only European exile, but from the legacy of Caliphate-imposed dhimmitude. Part of the decolonization involved returning to our Biblical culinary heritage reintroduced to us by the existing Jewish majority populations of cities like Jerusalem, long before political Zionism was ever even conceived of by Theodore Herzl. Another aspect of that influence was from the massive influx of Mizrachi Jews who were expelled through ethnic-cleansing, from North Africa and Middle Eastern lands of Islamicate colonization, in the decades that followed. 

Today, the vast majority of Israel is comprised of Jews who are at least partially descended from those ethnically-cleansed Mizrachim. What do the pseudo-intellectuals of Palestinist academics suppose they were eating? Big Macs? KFC? Whoppers with cheese? No, they were eating the same food they had been eating for thousands of years. 

The same forces of erasure that pretend the sons and daughters of Caliphatist Colonization are somehow “indigenous” to the regions of their forefathers’ military conquest, have also sought to erase the origins and demographic make up of today’s Mizrachi-majority Israeli Jewish population. Indeed, anyone who has spent any significant time in the State of Israel and the Palestinian Territories will immediately notice that the average Israeli is much darker in complexion than huge swaths of Palestinian Arabs and Samaritans alike. 

Indeed, one town near Hebron was noted in the journal Nature, towards the end of the 19th century, to be home to blond-haired, blue and green-eyed Palestinian “whites” who looked much like Bella Hadid and Ahed Tamimi do today. 

In short: Arabs did not “invent” hummus, nor falafel. Arabs do not hold the intellectual property rights to za`atar, nor do the olives from the West Bank taste any different than any other olives in the Levant. Indeed, on the holiday of my own Jewish-calendar birthday — Tu B’Shvat — we celebrate the first blooming of the trees in Eretz Yisrael, and we honor this Holy Land of our ethnogenesis by planting trees, such as the olive, fig, pomegranate and so on. From traditions like this, the land has blossomed when we reside in it, and turned to sand and swamp when we have been much fewer in number, due to foreign colonizers, their ethnic cleansing and erasure of our indigenousness to the land. 

Meanwhile, the progeny of Caliphatist Colonizers have appropriated our prophets, our Biblical names, our religious laws, and so-called Isra’iliyyat appropriated ahadith from our midrashim, our culture and attire and yes even our foods. Out of all people, these are those with the least business speaking to us about “appropriation” of the very things which were ours from the beginning, which your ancestors appropriated from us, before erasing us as the source.

If you want a “Free Palestine” let us start by freeing it, and the world, from the Caliphatist Colonizer propaganda which erases the Jewish origins of all things you associate with “Palestinian” culture — aside from the now-infamous lust for death and burning hatred of the Jewish people which has so tragically surpassed love for your own children and the hopes for their livable future… im yirtzeh Ha’Shem; in sha Allah.