How food shaped the identity—and destiny—of Jews during the Spanish Inquisition
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Foods we eat and foods we avoid are so often tied to the cultures and traditions we come from. Culinary choices—in the kitchen and on the table—cue who we are.
Today, they might signal lifestyle choices, environmental values, or allergies. But historically, what got included or excluded from a plate had a lot more to do with religion. Eating certain foods let people identify with a group—or signal that they didn't belong to one. Sharing a dish creates a kind of shared language. And in cultures under threat, that language becomes a form of safety: a way to recognize who understands what sets you apart from everyone else.
A Cooking Fat and a Confession
In fifteenth-century Spain, olive oil represented more than a cooking ingredient, a trade good, or a cultivar. Where Christians cooked in pork fat and Muslims in clarified butter, Jews in Spain cooked in olive oil—fragrant, pungent, and unmistakable in the streets of cities like Córdoba, Toledo, and Seville. It was a smell that announced identity, whether you wanted it to or not. After 1481, using olive oil in your kitchen was effectively an indictment: a disclosure of Judaism practiced in secret. It stayed tied to "secret Judaism" until, eventually, it became so widespread it turned into something else entirely—a symbol of Spanish cooking itself, according to Claudia Roden. Olive oil's largely forgotten history shows how a persecuted people can reach for something as ordinary as a cooking fat to survive. Food tells a story about who we are. For Iberian Jews, olive oil told the story of assimilation.
Consumption or avoidance of certain foods has often served a religious function—in many traditions, straying from the rules around food is grounds for expulsion, a risk that shifts depending on the threat from outside the group. Pork, a classic treyf food, is prohibited under kosher law, along with mixing meat and milk—which made pork fat and clarified butter off-limits for Jewish Spaniards of the time. That's the old choice marginalized and migrant religious groups have always faced: hold on to your culture and risk persecution, or bury it in the name of survival.
Passing
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Jewish identity, as an ethno-religion, can't be fully shed just by converting to another faith. But Jews' proximity to whiteness gave some a kind of cover that other persecuted groups didn't have—some could pass depending on where they stood, while others were singled out on sight regardless. Many Iberian Jews, of Mizrahi ancestry that had fled the Middle East for Spain and Portugal generations earlier, could plausibly play the part of Catholic Spaniards. Many did—becoming conversos, or converts.
Centuries later and an ocean away, Ashkenazi Jews taking refuge in New York found a version of that same cultural cover in their whiteness—and, as Gaye Tuchman and Harry Gene Levine have documented, in a food of their own choosing: Chinese food.
“Where the Jews of lower Manhattan found camouflage in a cuisine they could adopt, the Jews of the Iberian Inquisition needed one that repulsed them.”
By eating something so viscerally forbidden, conversos could shed the label of Jewishness — Tuchman and Levine put it plainly: rebels disavow a food-oriented culture by eating what that culture forbids. And the smell of frying pork fat was about as plain a disavowal as it got. Most Jews in the region during the Middle Ages were Orthodox and kept kosher strictly, which meant eating pork was a far bigger leap for them than it was for the more secular Jews of twentieth-century Manhattan choosing egg rolls over gefilte fish. Still, eating forbidden food in public, as proof of acculturation, is a theme that runs straight through Jewish history.
Still on the Table
Much like Ashkenazi delis left their mark on the American Northeast, traces of Jewish cooking are still baked into Spanish food today. Adafina is thought to be the precursor to cocido, a stew found in every region of Spain—conversos are believed to have started adding pork to it specifically to prove the sincerity of their conversion, Roden notes. Empanadas, originally a Sabbath dish, are another holdover. So, arguably, is the smell of onion and garlic said to have filled Jewish homes—a combination that eventually became the basis of sofrito, before tomatoes arrived from the New World and joined the mix.
Before the Inquisition, Spain was a place where cultures blended without disappearing into each other. Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities coexisted, each holding on to its own traditions while weaving together a shared society—a period known as convivencia. But by the end of the fourteenth century, antisemitism had escalated to the point that Jews faced a choice: convert or die. Once the Catholic monarchs moved to purge Spain of Jews and Muslims in the late fifteenth century, the terms shifted again. Some who stayed, the conversos, renounced Judaism outright to assimilate. Others, the Marranos, kept practicing in secret while outwardly acculturating. Conversos were still targeted—accused of heresy, interrogated during the Inquisition's trials. And a striking amount of that interrogation came down to food.
Eating Under Surveillance
Because food is such an effective marker of identity, inquisitors used it as a diagnostic tool. Cooking in the Middle Ages was learned through experience, embodied and passed down—the way you cooked was a way of saying who you were and how you related to the people and the world around you. That's especially true in Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish tradition, where food and religious practice are deeply intertwined. Converting to a new belief system, as Eliot Singer has written, means suddenly restructuring beliefs that used to feel fixed—and for that kind of shift to take hold, the symbols involved have to carry real emotional and intellectual weight. Food is about as potent a symbol as there is. As conversos swapped olive oil for pork fat, they weren't just changing what was in the pan—they were dismantling and rebuilding a belief system, one meal at a time, using an ingredient that had once repulsed them until it didn't.
That surveillance—one group watching another, subsuming it—tells its own story of assimilation. It's worth comparing to what happened decades later in New York. Tuchman and Levine's research on Ashkenazi Jews and Cantonese immigrants in Manhattan found something closer to symbiosis: two groups with entirely different histories and needs, one with much closer proximity to the dominant culture thanks to whiteness, finding a kind of mutual benefit in each other's company. Iberian Jews got no such reciprocity from Catholic Spain. What they got, if they converted, was permission to stay. That's survival—not the friendlier kind of cultural exchange.
The Smell of Otherness
Andrés Bernáldez, chronicler to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, described the Jewish practice of frying meat in olive oil as "nauseating," as recorded by Gitlitz and Davidson: "Olive oil with meat and other fried things leaves a very unpleasant odor, and so their houses and doorways always stunk with the odor of that food. The Jews too gave off the same odor, on account of those foods, and because they were not baptized..."
Filth is a concept that gets reached for again and again to justify hatred of a minority group. It's a pattern that runs through the Jewish experience — the effort to distance yourself from whatever the dominant culture has decided is dirty or unsettling. Doris Witt's work on the Nation of Islam's dietary rules draws a direct line between Jewish kosher law and the NOI's own rejection of pork as a "filthy beast." Ideas like cleanliness and purity get weaponized against nearly every minority group at some point.
“They stomached a “dangerous” ingredient to prove loyalty. And those who didn’t were expelled, or lived in life-threatening secrecy for generations.”
Food tells us, and everyone around us, who we are. But it can also be used to tell someone who we're not.