by Jahan Khan (Melbourne, Australia)
It’s sometime in Autumn, 2023, and I’m at Jeffery’s Bookshop, utterly moved to tears by a cookbook of all things. The shop attendant checks in on me, and I look at her and say, “My family had these recipes, just like these… I just wasn’t expecting to find them here.” I then turned the book over to look at the hefty price tag of $65.
“Oh, this is quite expensive,” I say with a sombre tone, moved by discovering one of my mum’s favorite recipes for pilaf, a Central Asian rice dish that is slow cooked in meat broth.
She quickly responded “Well, yes, but! It looks like there’s a real connection for you here.”
“Yeah alright… this is really special,” I say in a somewhat affirmative tone.
The book was the 25th anniversary edition of the cookbook The Book of Jewish Food. The main title itself is quite ordinary, but what makes it stand out from any other Jewish cookbook is its subtitle: An Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to the Present Day. The author, Claudia Roden, is a Jew of Middle Eastern background, and what began as a project to document recipes of her own family and community morphed into an ambitious globe-trotting culinary adventure. She didn’t just capture the recipes, but she captured histories, stories, and traditions of lesser-known Jewish communities in the Diaspora, communities that have existed in the unlikeliest corners of the globe, everywhere from Africa to China.
Of interest to me personally was the story of the Jews of India. The three Jewish communities of India each have their origin story, some even tracing their lineage back to biblical narratives. These stories, at times mythological in nature, were passed down like treasured inheritance. A more straightforward (and grounded) explanation, in terms of how Jews even made it to India and the multiple migrations in the centuries that followed, is quite simple: the Silk Road.
The Silk Road provided a connection to the world beyond and allowed the exchange of goods, knowledge, and innovations. Importantly, it gave people and communities an opportunity to carve out new homes and start over. For the Jewish people, this was the road they hoped would lead them to finding new homes and identities in a world that didn’t want them, or at best, tolerated their existence conditionally.
Among them were the Jews living in Persia (i.e. Babylon) where significant Jewish expression, writing, and religious tradition emerged. The Jewish-Persian connection runs deep, from foundational biblical narratives to contemporary cultural norms and practices. Today this once rich legacy barely survives as a marginalized and persecuted minority in places like Tehran, but in the ancient world the Jews there were once a formidable presence.
Long before the recent persecutions in Tehran, the experience of Jews walking on eggshells can be found in biblical accounts, most notably in the novella-style and almost theatrical story of Queen Esther. As attitudes towards Jews fluctuated like pharmaceutical stocks on the New York Stock Exchange, so too did the urgency of migrations out of Persia. These occurred several times during the 16-17th century, when Persian Jews travelled along the Silk Road and entered Northern India via Kashmir. The first time I heard any of this was as a child from my maternal grandfather. According to him and the traditions passed down to him from his forbearers, this was the community where we came from.
My late maternal grandfather was the first source of my Jewish education. He knew everything from the people to the customs, and how it all traced to the present day, and he was quite dedicated to keeping these stories alive and would repeat them often with pride. Since his passing, his children distanced themselves from their connection to ancient Israel via Babylon, and this is largely due to political tensions and deep antisemitism which escalates to this day. It took me a long time to find the motivation, and I dare say courage, to write any of it down.
Even though my family distanced themselves from the stories, the habits handed down from ancient times persist. Shortly after I was born, my mother had me circumcised at 16 days young (the Jewish custom is 8 days) where most other families in that region would wait until the boy was around 10 years of age. Then there was the food. Many of our recipes avoided mixing meat and dairy and even cautioned against shellfish. These could be coincidences, but to me it always felt like remnants of the people we once were, where customs had been passed down not as religious dogma but simply as family norms in a multi-generational game of Chinese Whispers.
In my mother’s household it felt like it was pilaf all day, every day. As a child, my sisters and I would absolutely loathe this dish. Decades later as an adult I can appreciate it more, but it’s still not a meal I would go out of my way to eat. Still, the nostalgia is there, and the sheer frequency and tendency with which we consumed it in our household was unlike any other family, and so to find it featured so prominently in Claudia Roden’s book as a staple of Indian/Persian Jewish diet really brought the many fragmented pieces of my identity together. (In the same cookbook I discovered a hideous lentil rice dish that was often prepared in my home to remedy an upset stomach, and Roden’s book mentioned the exact same thing.)
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On August 17, 2024, I attended an event at Glen Eira Town Hall (Melbourne, Victoria) called Of Ghosts and Golems, an opening night gala to launch Melbourne Jewish Book Week. It was Marina Benjamin’s story (explored in her memoir The Last Days in Babylon) that moved me in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
Marina Benjamin talked about her Iraqi Jewish family, and how it was difficult for her to connect with her Iraqi heritage for most of her life. There were certain mannerisms and behaviors in her family that troubled her during her childhood in London, and which made her feel less normal among her European Jewish peers. Speaking now with a deeper appreciation of her roots and context, she was able to come to terms with what it all meant even if it didn’t fully extinguish the hurt her inner child continues to carry.
She spoke about her family’s tendency to downplay achievements and importance, which hit close to home for me, too. My family was much the same way with me, to the point where even to this day I carry this lingering wound of feeling invisible in most settings; to be my own harshest critic, and to downplay or outright hide my achievements. I still struggle to advocate for myself. It’s a deeply rooted conditioning from childhood, but as it turns out for both me and Marina, it was a deeply rooted custom going back generations… centuries even.
Marina explained in her talk that these behaviors came from a superstition about the evil eye. For Jews living in the diaspora, especially those who were at the mercy of the fluctuating tolerances to their existence, the obsession with this evil eye was more about survival. To not be seen and heard meant they wouldn’t draw attention as a marginalized and persecuted minority.
Hearing her expound all her trauma in its rich historical context, I thought to myself “Oh… so that’s why it was like that at home.” It felt like a moment of closure, a moment of validation, and the beginning of a long-overdue healing journey.
I feel now like my Jewish story is still unfolding and yet, whenever I least expect it, I find new clues and evidence for all the fuzzy fragments. It is in these moments that the fog lifts a little and the compartmentalized memories become a tangible part of my Jewish identity. Advances in both historical research and DNA testing no doubt verified the journey of my ancestors, but it is my personal connection that feels more real than any cold piece of scientific fact. These were the stories that shaped my ancestors and the person I am today, driving my continued sense of wonder as I explore the world and the depths of my identity. True treasure is knowing who you are.
Jahan is a lecturer and writer. He has also been a video game critic for over 20 years. He loves to engage with the Melbourne Jewish community through cultural education and learning. You can learn more about Jahan by visiting his author website: https://virtuacritic.bearblog.dev
The Jewish Writing Project 