A dark-haired, well-fed chef on a dark blue cover smiles at us. Holding a wooden spoon and a saltshaker, his arms wrap around a globe that announces the book’s title: Recipes Around the World. Across its yellowed pages, the book contains recipes accompanied by numerous illustrations and advertisements. Published in 1959 by the Women’s Auxiliary of the Philippine Jewish Community and now held in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society in New York, this is more than a community cookbook. It is a record of a global yet little-known Jewish history that took place in Manila.
Across just under two hundred pages, Recipes Around the World gathers around 270 recipes from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, the Americas and the Pacific. This variety is no coincidence but reflects the community’s diverse backgrounds, networks and trajectories. The contributors, forty-eight women and one couple, are listed at the beginning. Their names and biographies illuminate a history of movement bound up with empires, global trade, persecution and the Holocaust.
Although scarce, Jewish connections to the Philippines reached back to the period of Spanish colonization from 1565 to 1898. Predominantly Sephardic Jews found their way to the Pacific islands, fleeing the Spanish Inquisition or later upheavals such as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71; others arrived from Turkey, Syria and Egypt following Sephardic trade networks. Only a few women on the contributors list represent the Sephardic strand, among them Fern Landau from Morocco or Julia Picciotto from Syria. Although both had migrated to Manila only a decade earlier, they likely did so through those old Sephardic networks that connected the Mediterranean and the Western Pacific. Picciotto and Landau, along with Grace Haber, Sylvia Braka and Sarita Tani, contributed recipes such as tamarind sauce from Syria, almodrote from Turkey, and couscous from Morocco.
The multinational community, which numbered around fifty members by the end of the nineteenth century, grew after the violent US-American takeover of the Philippines following the 1898 Spanish-American War. Jewish servicemen from the United States as well as Jews fleeing the Russian Revolution gradually made their way to the American colony, adding more Ashkenazi influences to the mix. By 1930, the diverse community had built a synagogue, though it remained religiously unorganized, with some even joining Christian churches in the predominantly Catholic country.
Minna Gaberman represents the wealthy and influential Jewish families who had come from the United States in the early twentieth century. She was the niece of Emil Bachrach, who had migrated from the Russian Empire to the United States as a teenager and later built a flourishing trading business in Manila. His prominence lived on in the naming of the synagogue, Temple Emil, and the community Bachrach Hall. Gaberman was born and raised in Manila, yet her recipes reflect her family’s American background: an orange cake from the United States, a pie from Mexico and a fish balboa from Panama.
The names of two contributors, Simke and Eulau, represent the beginning of the largest wave of Jewish immigration from Europe. Ernest E. Simke and Dr. Karl Eulau, both from Germany, arrived in the 1920s and built successful businesses in the Philippines. With Hitler’s rise to power and the intensifying antisemitic persecution under the Nazis, these established German immigrants sponsored friends and family to flee to the islands. Among them were Eulau’s cousin Karl Nathan and his wife Margot Nathan, who contributed recipes of several German dishes, such as dill pickles and lentil soup.
This was only the beginning of the refugee influx. In 1937, following the Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised the Jews of the Reich, the community in Manila convinced President Manuel Quezon and US High Commissioner Paul McNutt to establish a visa program for persecuted Jews from Europe. Supported by Jewish American refugee organizations, the community accepted financial responsibility for the newcomers and, therefore, carefully selected professions needed in the Philippines.
About 1,300 refugees landed in the Philippines before the Japanese invasion in late 1941. With the arrival of a rabbi, a cantor, kosher butchers and artists from Europe, Jewish religious and cultural life blossomed. Rita Broniatowski and Gerda Haurwitz, both from Silesia, arrived in Manila through the visa program, where they met their respective husbands and became Rita Simke and Gerda Eulau. Other former refugees involved in the cookbook were Gerda Brauer and Ruth Geoffey from Berlin, Charlotte Goldhagen from Hanover, Viennese Paula Brings and Margot Preiss from Silesia. They contributed dishes from Germany, Poland and Austria, including liver pâté, gefilte fish and rye bread.
From late 1941 to 1945, the Philippines endured the brutal Japanese occupation and the Pacific War, culminating in the devastating Battle of Manila, which destroyed most of the city and cost the lives of roughly a hundred thousand civilians. Although published more than ten years after the war, the cookbook reflects the postwar rehabilitation efforts. A calorie chart appears in the very beginning – most likely advising not how to stay slim, but how to stay well-fed. Those who had suffered through the war were well familiar with hunger; in the same spirit, one advertisement promoted nutritional supplements to »check malnutrition«.
The postwar period saw a wave of European refugees departing for the United States, while the shrinking community rebuilt itself. Despite Philippine independence in 1946, both the country and the Jewish community remained closely linked to the US. The cultural and economic influence is evident throughout the cookbook. Written in English, the language was not only the lingua franca within the polyglot community but also remains the official language of the Philippines alongside Tagalog to this day. Similarly, the cookbook’s advertisements are predominantly for imported American goods: household items, foodstuffs and baby products. Tailored to a female audience, these adverts reflect the 1950s ideal of a modern American housewife.
A look into the women’s section of the Philippine Jewish community bulletin shows that food bazaars and recipe-swapping were regular events that brought people together, socially and symbolically. Cooking and eating foods from home countries preserved familiarity, culture and identity. On the other hand, migration also meant adapting eating habits and recipes to new surroundings, available ingredients and local tastes. Several contributors to the cookbook included recipes from the Philippines, such as chicken loaf, sotanghon or laksa.
On the surface, Recipes Around the World is a practical, seemingly mundane object. Yet its pages reveal stories of migration and flight, of building and rebuilding a community in the colonial and postcolonial tropics and of a distinctly women’s sphere and agency. As migrants and refugees from all over the world, the exchange of recipes was an intimate act of remembering faraway, lost homes, on the one hand, and of creating a new home, on the other. The little cookbook, a rare source produced solely by women, reflects the community’s diversity, identity and activity from the intimate perspective of home-cooked meals.
Lena Christoph is a PhD candidate at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on the Philippines as a place of refuge for Holocaust refugees and anti-Communist Russian displaced persons between 1933 and 1953. | lena.christoph(at)univie.ac.at
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