Hamentashen

Purim is often likened to the Jewish Halloween. You can dress up and eat sweets. For the adults there's a hefty amount of wine. It's a joyous occasion, a time to celebrate that time in history when the Jews were nearly ethnically cleansed, just like any other Jewish holiday. The story is long, so here's a simple summary. If you know the story, just skip it.

The king of Persia had a party and ordered his wife to come display her beauty to his friends. She refused so she was eventually killed. The king held a beauty pageant and a lovely woman named Esther won. Esther's uncle Mordecai overheard a plot to kill the king, and he warned the king through Esther. Mordecai was written in history as a hero. Meanwhile the king's vizier Haman became more and more powerful. He had it ordered that everyone was to bow to him when he passed in the street. Mordecai did not, since he only bowed to his God. Haman was furious and he planned to have all the Jews killed. He used lots, or purim, to select which dates the Jews were to be exterminated. Plus Haman built gallows to hang Mordecai. Mordecai told Esther she had to stop all this nonsense and so she fasted and prepared a feast for the king and Haman. Then another one. Finally she told the king that she was Jewish and that Haman was planning to have all her people killed. The king needed to think over this news and went for a walk in the garden. When he came back, he walked in on Haman pleading for his life, but it looked like he was trying to seduce Esther. The king gave an order that on the day the Jews were to be murdered, they could fight back. And Haman was hung on the same gallows he built for Mordecai.

Now Purim is celebrated by reading through the entire text of Esther with much excitement. Special cookies are made called Hamentashen.


Delicious yumminess. The oldest recipe of these cookies are made with a poppyseed filling. The mystery is, why poppy seeds? Some say it's all that Esther ate during her fast before speaking to the king. There's nothing in the book of Esther that mentions this tradition, and it reminds me more of Persephone eating pomegranate seeds in Hades. Some say it's a reminder of the promise to Abraham that his descendants would number the same as the stars in the sky or sands on the ocean.

The answer is actually simple. The cookies already were popular in Germany where Ashkenazis* lived. In German the cookies were called mohntashen or "poppy pockets." The word mohn sounds awfully like Haman, the wicked vizier, and the cookies came to be known as hamentaschen or "Haman's pockets" in the 11th century.

Poppy seeds are rarely used anymore, though you can find the ingredients online or in specialty shops. Prune butter is the more common traditional filling still used today. This tradition dates back to the 18th century. There was once a grocer from Jungbunzlau, Bohemia (now in Czech Republic) named David Brandeis. In 1731 he sold prune jam to a Gentile girl, the daughter of a bookbinder. Within a few days she and her family were sick and her father was dead. David, his wife, and his son were imprisoned for poisoning Christians, a common enough accusation towards Jews since Medieval times. The investigation proved her father died of tuberculosis, and David was finally acquitted. The local Jewish community began using prune preserves instead of poppy seeds for their Hamentaschen.

In Sephardic* tradition, the cookies are called "Haman's ears" and are pinched into a pointy ear. This term made it to Israel where the cookies are called Haman's ears in Hebrew, "Oznei Haman."

*Ashkenazim: Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe
Sephardim: Jews from Spain or Portugal. The word comes from "Spaniard."

Links
Jewish Federation of Greater Dayton
Reform Judaism Magazine