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Food

Turkey’s collision of cuisines

Colourful Turkish cuisine borrows a lot from the influence of Sephardic Jewish cooking

October 20, 2022 17:30
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Traditional Turkish food stuffed eggplant, meat, tomato and spices, karniyarik
4 min read

There’s a Turkish saying that goes along the lines of “don’t mix meat with milk”, meaning that it’s better to play it safe than interfere with things that may prove problematic. Kosher rules don’t apply to Turkish food, but could this be just one example of the many Sephardic traditions found in contemporary Turkish culture?

“It seems kashrut made sense to our community too,” says Aylin Öney Tan, a Turkish food historian and food writer. “Few people in Turkey know this common saying originates from the kosher rules, but it means the same thing: if you mix the meat and the milk you’ll be in trouble.”

How did something so quintessentially Jewish make its way into modern Turkish parlance? It probably has something to do with the events that followed 1492, when Catholic zealots King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Castille and Aragon exiled anyone who refused to convert to Christianity. As explained in this week’s Essay on page 23, the then Ottoman sultan, Bayezid II, sent his navy across the Mediterranean to evacuate the Sephardim to his empire, where they were invited to settle.

This was not the first time Jews had emigrated to Ottoman lands, but they had never arrived en masse before. According to the Harvard Divinity School, most of the roughly 100,000 Jews that fled the 1492 Spanish expulsion were drawn to the Ottoman Empire, with 60,000 people arriving in 1492 alone.

Today, some 20,000 Jews still live in Turkey, mainly in Istanbul and in Izmir, on the Mediterranean coast. Many have maintained the medieval Judeo-Spanish language Ladino and the ancient Sephardic traditions and recipes.

Elda Sasun is a writer at Şalom newspaper, a Jewish weekly published in Turkey. Her family tree on both sides can be traced back to Spain, via the Jewish communities in the Turkish cities of Edirne and Bursa, while Sasun herself was born and raised in Istanbul.