Weekly D'var

CHANUKAH, JUDITH, AND CHEESE
Al Madansky, z”l
November-December 2011

In my coverage of the main themes of Chanukah in past bulletins, one of the details I discussed was the special foods of Chanukah, latkes and sufganiyot.  What I didn’t mention, though, is an additional tradition, that of eating cheese on Chanukah.  (No, I’m not getting Chanukah confused with Shavuot!)  In his 16th century commentary on the Shulchan Aruch, the Code of Jewish Law, Rabbi Moshe Isserles of Krakow said (Orach Chayyim 670:2), “some say that one should eat cheese on Chanukah,” citing as his authorities the Kol Bo, an anonymous 14th century halachic work published in Provence, and the Ran (Rabbi Nissim ben Reuven of Girona, a famous 14th century rabbinic authority).  Orach Chayyim goes on to give a reason for the eating of cheese, namely “because the miracle occurred through milk which Judith fed the enemy.”  An earlier cite, that merely links Judith to Chanukah, is the Tosefot to Megillah 4a, written in the 11th century, that comments on the law that it is incumbent upon women to hear the megilla on Purim by saying, “the main miracle on Purim was via the hands of Esther and on Chanukah via the hands of Judith.”

The obvious natural questions to ask are, “Who is this Judith, who is unmentioned in the Book of Maccabees, and what’s the reference to the milk she fed the enemy all about?”  Both the Kol Bo and the Ran tell essentially the same story, namely that Judith was the daughter of Yohanan the High Priest, who fed the Greek king a cheese dish in order that he become thirsty and drink a lot and get drunk and lie down and fall asleep, after which she cut off his head and brought it to Jerusalem, and when the Greek army saw that their king was dead they all fled.  This story may be a conflation of two other stories, one about Judith and Holofernes found in the apocryphal Book of Judith and the other the story of Jael and Sisera in the Book of Judges.

Let’s look at these stories in chronological order.  Judges 4:17-22 relates the story, set in the 11th century BCE, of how Sisera, the Canaanite commander, fled after his army was defeated by the Israelites under Deborah and Barak, got to the tent of Jael, a Kenite woman, and asked her for water.  Instead, Jael opened a bottle of milk and gave him this to drink.  Sisera fell asleep and Jael hammered a tent pin through Sisera’s temple and killed him.  The Book of Judith was written in the 1st century BCE and tells a story, set in the 6th century BCE, of how Judith, a beautiful widow, who was upset with her Jewish countrymen for not trusting God to deliver them from their Assyrian conquerors, went to the camp of the enemy general, Holofernes, slowly ingratiated herself with him, promising him information about the Israelites.  Gaining his trust, she was allowed access to his tent one night.  The text says “And Holofernes was made merry on her occasion, and drank exceeding much wine, so much as he had never drunk in his life.” (Judith 12:20)  As Holofernes lay in a drunken stupor Judith took a sword and decapitated him. The Assyrians, having lost their leader, dispersed, and Israel was saved.  So, we have two woman-kills-general stories, one involving “milk” and one involving “Judith.”  But neither took place on Chanukah, a 2nd century BCE event.

The Book of Judith, not being in the canon, was relatively unknown to medieval Jews.  But a story called Ma’aseh Yehudit, the Story of Judith, appeared in eighteen different versions in medieval times, and two of these versions had Judith feeding Holofernes milk or cheese.  One version, published in 1763, says that Judith “opened the milk flask and drank and also gave the king to drink, and he rejoiced with her greatly and he drank very much wine, more than he had drunk in his entire life.”  Another manuscript says that Judith asked her maid to make two “levivot’ (latkes), and the maid made them very salty and added slices of cheese, and Holofernes ate them and then drank his wine, etc.  So the Jael story got conflated with the Judith story.  Now we have a clue as to how the story got conflated with Chanukah: the cheese was mixed into the latkes!  To connect the story to Chanukah, Judith was given a pedigree, namely as the daughter of Yohanan the High Priest (and therefore Judah Maccabee’s aunt), and the Judith/Holofernes story was moved from the 6th to the 2nd century BCE.  Thus are midrashim and customs born.

HAPPY CHANUKAH