Event details

The Program in Judaic Studies invites you to this year's E. Franklin Robbins/UJA-Federation Lecture, featuring Hélène Jawhara Piñer, on Thursday, September 3.

The greatest archive of Sephardic Jewish culinary history was created not by Jews themselves, but by the institutions that sought to eradicate Jewish identity. Paradoxically, the records of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions preserve an unparalleled account of the foodways they were intended to suppress.

This lecture explores how, from fifteenth-century Spain to the early modern Atlantic world, food became a powerful marker of religious identity and an instrument of political control. Inquisition trials reveal how everyday culinary practices—avoiding pork, preparing dishes associated with Jewish tradition, and observing Sabbath and festival meals—could lead to denunciation, prosecution, and even execution. At the same time, these records document the resilience of Sephardic Jews, whose culinary traditions endured through migration, adaptation, and cultural exchange across Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Curaçao, and the Americas.

By examining inquisitorial records as unexpected archives of cultural memory, this lecture argues that they provide the richest surviving evidence for reconstructing the evolution of Sephardic culinary heritage across the longue durée. They reveal how food functioned simultaneously as a means of persecution, a vehicle of cultural resistance, and a lasting expression of Jewish identity whose legacy continues to shape culinary traditions on both sides of the Atlantic.

Open to the public. Kosher refreshments will be available.


More about Hélène Jawhara Piñer

Hélène Jawhara Piñer holds a doctoral degree in Medieval History and the History of Food. She has lectured at Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, the University of Bar-Ilan University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and other places. She was awarded the Broome and Allen Fellowship of the American Sephardi Federation (ASF) in 2018, the David Gitlitz Emerging Scholar Prize of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies in 2021, and a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries to conduct her research in 2024. She teaches at the French universities of Tours and Bordeaux. Her articles are published in various international revues. She is the author of the historical cookbooks Sephardi: Cooking the History which relevance has been highlighted by the Los Angeles Times, El País and the Jewish Book Council, and Matzah and Flour: Recipes from the History of the Sephardic Jews. She also wrote an academic book Jews, Food, and Spain: The Oldest Medieval Spanish Cookbook and the Sephardic Culinary Heritage that was finalist of the Jewish Book Awards in the “Sephardic Culture” category, in 2023. She has been working with famous chefs like Michael Solomonov concerning Sephardic food and since 2022 she is a member of the Foodish Advisory Board of ANU Museum (Tel Aviv). Her academic research on the food practices of Sephardic Jews, based on the study of historical manuscripts, forms the foundation of collaborative projects with cultural and academic institutions dedicated to uncovering and bringing to light the Sephardic culinary legacy.