"According to legend, the bagel was produced as a tribute to Jan Sobieski, King of Poland, who had just saved Austria from an onslaught by Turkish invaders. In gratitude, a local baker shaped yeast dough into the shape of a stirrup to honor him and called it a ‘beugel’ (Austrian for stirrup). The roll was a hit and it’s [sic] shape soon evolved into the one we know today and it’s [sic] name converted to ‘Bagel’."
‘History of Bagels’ handout, Boston area supermarket Building 19
It would not be surprising if, on his death bed, Jan Sobieski, King of Poland, had hoped that he would be remembered by posterity for his magnificent defeat of the Turks in Vienna in 1683. What he might have found puzzling, however, is how his name and his victory have become an enduring part of bagel folklore, so much so that they now figure in the promotional literature of an American supermarket chain in the Yankee stronghold of Boston.
The pairing of a Polish warrior king and a small Jewish bread roll is not only incongruous but is also entirely fictitious. Written evidence of the bagel’s existence in Poland seventy-three years before the Battle of Vienna and nineteen years before Sobieski’s birth proves the story is false. But that is not to say that it is insignificant. Polish kings in general and this Polish king in particular play significant parts in the bagel’s story and in the story of the Jewish community who made this bread their own.
From as early as the seventh century Jews were living in the lands which would come to constitute Poland, but it was only from the twelfth century that they began to arrive from Western Europe in substantial numbers. For the Jewish community the pull of pastures new was enhanced by the push of the increasing precariousness of life in Germany and France. There, Christian guilds were making life impossible for Jewish artisans and traders, and Jews had to a large degree been relegated to the occupation of money-lending. A hostile Church fulminated against the Jewish religion and Jews became the scapegoat for all manner of calamities, most notably for the devastating Black Plague of 1348–9, during which hundreds of innocent Jews were murdered. Scores of German cities threw their Jewish inhabitants out altogether. The general consensus among the Jews of Northern Europe at this time was that life was safer under the protection of the Polish kings.
The official safeguards offered by the rulers of Poland were designed to reassure the new Jewish inhabitants that they could go about their business in safety while also enjoying the freedom to practise their religion and set up their own autonomous communal structures. In the first of these documents, the Statute of Kalisz of 1264, Prince Boleslaw the Pious shows his awareness of the potential for communal tension. ‘We resolve,’ reads article 35, ‘that if a Jew in an extreme predicament is forced to cry out in the night and his Christian neighbours do not attend to give him help then every neighbouring Christian will owe a payment of thirty soldos.’
When, in the fourteenth century, the discrete Polish principalities were united in the Kingdom of Poland, the privileges as outlined by Boleslaw became the basis for the legal relationship between the Jewish community and the crown. King Kazimierz III established the precedent by extending the Kalisz privileges to Jews across his new realm, which he doubled in size during the course of his reign. The only Polish monarch to have the soubriquet ‘great’ attached to his name, Kazimierz has legendary status in Jewish folklore, credited (erroneously) with having been the first to bring Jews to Poland and believed to have fallen in love with a beautiful Jewish woman, Esterka, and had four children by her. There is no evidence to support this romantic liaison but its existence is a sign of the verifiable fact that Kazimierz relied on a number of Jews in his court, as indeed would most of Poland’s kings.
Within the walls of the royal city of Kraków, however, Jews still encountered Christian antagonism. Confrontations were fuelled by the fiery rhetoric of a succession of Catholic clerics. Moreover, as home to one of Central Europe’s oldest universities, Kraków was a hothouse of religious polemic and an entry point for European anti-Jewish literature. The potent message of these clerics – that the Jew was a dangerous economic rival, increasing his wealth at the expense of his Christian neighbour – resonated keenly with many of Kraków’s merchants and artisans, whose campaign to close down their Jewish competition reached a climax in the summer of 1494.
The trigger was a fire which swept through the town one June evening, burning down houses, churches and many of the city’s gates. It started, so the Kraków City Council alleged, in a Jewish baker’s oven. Over the next few days Jewish shops were pillaged and one Jew died trying to defend his property. By September, most Jews had moved out of Kraków to the nearby city of Kazimierz, leaving behind homes, synagogues, a public bath and a hospital the traces of which have all but disappeared.1
Kazimierz (which had been founded by and named after King Kazimierz III) was, however, very near, so near that despite its autonomous status it was generally considered to be part of what one might call ‘greater’ Kraków. It was, therefore, easy for Jewish merchants and artisans to continue to ply their trades back in Kraków where there was still demand for their goods and services, a turn of events that was looked upon none too kindly by their Christian competitors. The Kraków Bakers’ Guild, for one, was acutely conscious of any bakers from outside the city walls. In 1496, just one year after the Jews left Kraków, King Jan Olbracht signed a decree that white bread and obwarzanek could be made and sold only by members of the Guild.2 Such an edict would only have been necessary only if non-Guild obwarzanek (and, one assumes, non-gentile bagels) were undercutting sales.
In fact, despite the daily frustrations of dealing with Christian guilds, the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century would prove a golden age for Poland’s Jews, and indeed for Poland generally. From a difficult start, Poland’s economy had blossomed. The reason for this transformation was one commodity and one alone: grain.
Western Europe was looking for cheaper sources of grain; Poland with its expanse of fertile wide plains, particularly in the south-east, could oblige. For a century and a half Poland would be one of Europe’s principal breadbaskets, its cereal reaching as far as Portugal and Cyprus. Most of that cereal was rye but there were also oats and, when the harvests were plentiful, wheat. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to find in this period of plentiful grain the first written evidence of the existence of the Jewish bagel.
The cultivation of grain brought prosperity to the Jewish community.
Enterprising noblemen who wanted to develop their farming estates needed to borrow money, so they turned to Jewish bankers. Jewish traders who knew how to deal with international customers were at a premium. Other Jewish merchants were able to make a handsome living from importing into Poland more expensive goods such as citrus fruits and wine, now desirable and affordable for noblemen flush with grain money. And in the east of the country, in what is now Ukraine, Jewish administrators were being hired by noble magnates to run their vast agricultural estates, newly established to meet Western demand for Polish cereal. The Jewish population in the east increased accordingly. From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, the number of Jewish residents expanded more than tenfold.3
Most importantly, at this time Poland could offer its Jewish inhabitants peace and safety – in marked contrast to the rest of Europe. This had much to do with the country’s distinctive system of government. The Kingdom of Poland–Duchy of Lithuania, the largest country in Europe, united formally under one parliament (or sejm) and one king in 1569. But this was a king like no other in Europe: he did not inherit the throne but was elected to it by the noblemen of Poland. An astonishing innovation in an age of hereditary monarchy, it was introduced because of the lack of a male heir. The establishment of a democratic vote sent out a strong message: the power of the monarch was not absolute. While other kings in Europe were busy centralising their authority, in Poland power was being devolved. This was the nobility’s moment of glory. Their strength lay in their numbers and in their rural way of life. Unlike their French counterparts, for example, the Poles were less amenable to royal diktat for the simple reason that they spent very little time at the royal court. Uniquely in Europe there was a formalised balance of power in Poland. One political writer of the time boasted: ‘[other countries] have the riches of copper, gold and silver while [the Polish nation] considers its genuine freedom to be its greatest treasure’.4
The strength of Poland’s nobility made for a weaker central state but a more tolerant society. While other Europeans were killing one another in the Reformation and then the Counter-Reformation, in Poland noblemen were peacefully converting to Calvinism (another means of proving their independence from the king), marriages between different faiths were not unheard of, and only one person was burnt at the stake. ‘Heretics’ from across Europe flocked to Poland, attracted by what one of its detractors called ‘its devilish freedom of conscience’.5 The towns and cities of Poland were the setting for a cacophony of languages and a wide variety of physical features, with their Italian anti-Trinitarians, German Lutherans and English Quakers mingling with the local Catholics, Russian Orthodox, Tartar Muslims and Jews.
Compared with England, France and Spain where ‘much Israelite blood has been shed without the slightest reason’, Poland, wrote the Karaite6 scholar Isaac ben Abraham Troki in 1594, treated its Jewish inhabitants well:
… here Jews are even assisted with favourable privileges so that they can live happily and peacefully. The kings of these lands and their officials are lovers of magnanimity and righteousness and do not do the Jews living here any harm or wrong which is why God granted this land such great power and peace so that different faiths do not breathe hatred towards one another and do not condemn one another.7
Poland’s particular political structure was ideal for the development of an autonomous Jewish life within Polish society. The Jews had their own councils and court system. They chose their own chief rabbi whose authority was recognised and enforced (on pain of death) by the king. Like other subjects of the realm, the Jews regularly paid taxes to the royal treasury but these taxes were collected by Jewish officials, not representatives of the king. The royal court was regularly frequented by Jewish bankers (most useful during expensive military campaigns), merchants, jewellers and doctors. Indeed, the Jewish community in Polish lands was becoming known across Europe for its scholars, its wealth and its standing. Poland was, as the popular seventeenth-century proverb put it, ‘paradise for the Jews, hell for the peasants and heaven for the nobility’. But not for much longer.
In 1648 embittered Cossack noblemen led by Bohdan Khmielnytsky launched an uprising of murderously resentful peasants against the Polish landlords in the southeast of the country. As the landlords’ agents, or the people with whom the peasants had the most regular contact, Jews were especial targets of the marauding gangs. The massacres were widespread and the violence savage: tens of thousands of Jews were killed. This marked the beginning of a period so disastrous that it came to be referred to as ‘the Deluge’. From the east the Russians attacked; from the north the Swedes. There was an outbreak of plague. As battles raged across Polish territory, the grain trade was devastated and with it Poland’s economy, which would not recover for two centuries. The civilian population was decimated. Whole cities were destroyed. Tolerance was eroded as an atmosphere of suspicion and fear descended on Polish lands. Jews became the target of blood libels, falsely accused of murdering gentile children in order to use their blood during the Passover ritual – accusations that were entirely without foundation. Poland had become, in the words of one Jewish poet, Moses of Narol, ‘a widow, abandoned by her own sons’.8 For the first time Jews began to leave Poland for Western Europe in significant numbers.
Internal peace was restored in 1656 but the damage was done. The golden age of Poland’s grain trade, and the ‘paradise’ it had offered its Jewish inhabitants, was destroyed. Poland and its Jews were in dire need of a hero. That they found one in Jan Sobieski is fortunate; that he would be honoured with a bread roll requires a little more imagination.
Born in 1629, Jan Sobieski was the embodiment of the seventeenth-century Polish magnate. Generous, impetuous, wedded to the knightly virtues of honour and hospitality, Sobieski was a son of south-eastern Poland where his family had been granted land in return for their service on the battlefield. He, too, was expected to follow in their military footsteps. At the same time, he was aware that the economic fortunes of his family – and therefore his career – depended to a large extent on the Jewish administrators of his vast estates and the Jewish population of the towns which his forebears had established on these estates.
Sobieski cut his military teeth during the Deluge, fighting against Russians, Ukrainians and Swedes, as well as fellow Poles. By the age of twenty-seven he had risen to be one of the country’s foremost military commanders. Poland was now at peace but the hostilities had left it weakened and its borders ill-defended, a fact that the Turks began to exploit in the 1670s. As strategically important towns and noble estates fell to the Ottoman troops, Commander Sobieski prepared for war. Lulled into complacency by the poor Polish defence of years past, the Turks were taken by surprise by the blow that Jan Sobieski dealt them one bitterly cold day in November 1673. The Ottoman troops were annihilated: of the 30,000 Turkish soldiers who woke up in the fortress town of Chocim on 10 November only 4,000 survived to see the morning of the 11th. Such was Sobieski’s tactical brilliance that it would be fêted two hundred years later by no less a military expert than Carl von Clausewitz.
With the death of Poland’s reigning monarch the night before the Chocim victory, the triumphant Sobieski was suddenly thrust forward as a candidate for the throne. The favourite that year was a foreigner, Carl of Lorraine, but the mood among the thousands of noblemen gathered to vote for the new monarch in a field outside Warsaw dictated that the new king should be Polish.
As the king of Poland and the victor of Chocim, forty-five-year-old Jan Sobieski was already becoming a well-known figure across Europe. And how very different he looked from the powdered and bewigged monarchs of the West with their lace neckwear, fussy jackets and stockings. Sobieski made a point of dressing in what was then known as the ‘Polish style’, a style so distinctive that his Irish doctor, Bernard Connor, ‘thought an account of it would not be unacceptable’:
They have all their hair cut round about their ears like monks and wear furr’d caps, large whiskers and no neckcloths; a long coat hangs down to their heels, and a waistcoat under that of the same length tied close about the waist with a girdle … instead of shoes they always wear both abroad and at home Turkey leather boots with very thin soles, and hollow deep heels made of a blade of Iron bent hoopwise into the form of a half moon.9
The ‘Polish style’ may have been mocked by the denizens of the French court in Versailles (where it was used as fancy dress for masked balls), but the French ambassador to Warsaw along with the rest of the diplomatic corps was soon making the long trip south-east to pay their respects to the new king at his favourite palace in the town of Żółkiew.
Named after its founder, Sobieski’s grandfather, Stanisław Żółkiewski, Żółkiew had a substantial and prosperous Jewish community. From the very beginning of its existence, the town’s owners had used their power to foster its economic growth not only by encouraging local trade but also by promoting religious co-existence.10 The lesson that greater tolerance could engender greater prosperity was not lost on Sobieski, a man always keenly aware of the state of his coffers.
Today Żółkiew is the small, sleepy town of Zhovkva in Ukraine. The royal palace is a municipal building. The pink synagogue, built with a loan from Jan Sobieski, is empty and unused. But in the seventeenth century Żółkiew was famous across Poland and beyond. Foreign visitors wrote about its prominence and of the well-appointed homes of its Jewish residents. Indeed, the house pointed out by Sobieski himself as the model to be followed by all was that of his Jewish factor, Jakub Becal. Becal, who rose to become the administrator of royal customs, was a controversial figure. Despite the resentment he provoked among the Polish nobility, Sobieski steadfastly defended Becal at no insignificant cost to himself and his family. Portrayed in one caricature of the time with pockets bulging from the money provided by Becal,11 Sobieski became an object of ridicule and his stubborn association with Becal may well have undermined his son’s chances of being elected the next king.
The fact that Sobieski ‘energetically defended Jews and surrounded himself with them from a young age’,12 as the leading Polish-Jewish historian Majer Balaban put it, does not mean, however, that he treated his Christian and Jewish subjects as equals. Ever the pragmatist, Sobieski upheld a number of Christian guilds’ requests for monopolies. Nor did he revoke the de non tolerandis Judaeis statutes which banned Jews altogether from certain cities. But the overall balance was positive, especially in light of what was to come. In the wake of the devastation wrought by years of war, Poland needed its Jews and it needed them to be working. Sobieski’s reasoning is plain to see, for example, in his decree giving Jews the right to trade in the town of Piotrków:
Having taken into consideration the desolation of our cities and towns – and wanting to return them through Our Royal providence to their former perfection, so that they could have the benefit of trade, of people who are so skilled in trade.13
Furthermore, Sobieski took action to protect this right and ensure the physical safety of Jewish traders and artisans across Poland, his intervention in Kraków’s ‘great student riot’ of 1682 being the most prominent example.
Angry at the alleged sale of stolen church silver by a Jewish trader, students and townspeople armed with sticks, swords and axes began looting Jewish shops.
In the ensuing chaos, one of the Jewish merchants grabbed a rifle and fired a shot into the crowd. One young boy fell. The crowd went wild and the town was in uproar. Once the king learned of the riot he took matters into his own hands. Outraged by the behaviour of the students he focused his ire first on the university’s rector and professors and then on the local authorities, informing them that he was rescinding their autonomy and establishing his own commission of inquiry in order to identify and punish the guilty. The commission dealt severely with the riot’s student ringleaders sentencing one of them to death while Sobieski personally remitted the debts of the Jewish merchants whose merchandise had been ruined during the looting. Sobieski would be the last Polish king to protect his Jewish subjects in this way.
Acceding to the throne after the Deluge and preceding a period of painful economic and political decline, Sobieski would have been accorded a place in Jewish cultural memory had he displayed even a modicum of goodwill towards his Jewish subjects. In hindsight his reign would be seen as the last gasp of Poland’s golden age and he himself a figure to be yearned for. In Yiddish the expression ‘in meylekh Sobieskis yorn’ (‘in King Sobieski’s time’) became synonymous with the good old days. Over two hundred years after his death, Sobieski would be the hero of a poem telling the story of how, as the adopted son of a Jewish father, he was taught the Talmud before becoming king.14 In Żółkiew, another legend had it that Sobieski was working as an errand boy in a Jewish household when one day the rabbi came to visit and saw a halo over the little boy’s head. ‘He is a godly person,’ said the rabbi and fed and cleaned him. Later, the story concludes, that little boy became king and built the synagogue in Żółkiew by way of thanks.15
The Jewish community of Żółkiew had special reasons to be grateful to Jan Sobieski. But so did the Jewish bakers of Kraków. Sobieski was the first king not to confirm the decree issued by Jan Olbracht back in 1496 limiting the production of white bread and obwarzanek to the Kraków Bakers’ Guild. Bagels, in other words, could now be sold inside the city walls. Sobieski’s connection to the bagel is thereby confirmed. It is not, however, a particularly exciting tale. What is needed is a heroic narrative.
The Battle of Vienna of 1683 is a seminal moment in the confrontation between Christianity and Islam: the victory that turned back Ottoman ambitions in Europe forever. The significance of this event has been invoked by public figures on many occasions through the centuries, most recently during the debates over whether Turkey should become a member of the European Union. It has also been commemorated by no fewer than three separate food legends – the bagel’s included. The fact that this battle should have done so is testament not only to its geopolitical importance but also to the dramatic and compelling story of how the battle was won.
It was into a decidedly unsettled Central Europe – decimated by the Thirty Years War, its once fertile fields abandoned – and with Louis XIV at the apogee of his power and determined to expand France’s borders that the Ottoman forces launched a campaign against the Habsburg Empire. Sultan Mehmet IV ruled over the whole of the Balkans and half of Hungary, and was eager for more territory. The Habsburg Emperor Leopold I had focused his attentions firmly on his principal rival, France, and was thus largely unprepared for an attack from the east.
The sultan declared war on 31 March 1683. As the Ottoman troops marched steadily towards Vienna, the city walls (which had been declared ‘unsatisfactory’ after an official inspection) were frantically patched up. Ammunition and grain poured into the city cellars. Leopold, by all accounts a cautious man and inexperienced in the ways of war, left his capital city to fend for itself. By 14 July the Turkish forces, which numbered at least ninety thousand, had reached the outskirts of Vienna.
Contemporary illustrations give graphic testimony to the starkly uneven contest. In the flat, broad plain of the Danube basin, the city of Vienna huddles behind its thick fortifications. On every side, as far as the eye can see, are the Ottoman Turks and their allies. Close in to the city walls are teams of men digging a network of trenches as intricate as any maze. Smoke hangs in the air as the Turkish cannons regularly discharge their firepower into the city. And further back from the battle front is a vast encampment of tents, soldiers and camels – Istanbul brought to the banks of the Danube.
The siege would last for two months. Despite the carefully devised plans of the city fathers, the starving populace began to eat donkeys and cats. Dysentery and other illnesses were rife. By the beginning of September the situation was desperate.
Leopold I, however, who was installed over 200 kilometres away in the safety of the city of Linz, had not been inactive on his country’s behalf, and had recruited an alliance of armies from Austria, Bavaria, Franconia, Saxony and Poland. Individual officers too, from Ireland, England and France volunteered to serve in the ranks of Christendom’s armies. Later these soldiers would be instrumental in disseminating the exciting story of the lifting of the siege to their home audiences.
Unusually, it was not the Austrian Emperor who was the commander of the imperial troops but the King of Poland, Jan Sobieski, the most experienced warrior among Europe’s monarchs and the most knowledgeable in the ways of the Turk. This was just the kind of contest Sobieski relished, and which he knew would serve to enhance Poland’s reputation abroad.
Finally, by the beginning of September, at the same time as the desperate Viennese were lighting their flares from St Stephen’s Cathedral, the imperial troops assembled north of the city. Down in the valley, in his sumptuous tent-city with its travelling gardens and harems, the grand vizier was not unduly worried. He certainly did not think it necessary to send reinforcements to his lightly manned outposts on the two hills in the Vienna Woods closest to the city. This would be his first mistake.
At 2 a.m. on 11 September Sobieski’s second-in-command, the refugee French prince Carl of Lorraine, launched an attack on these outposts. Within hours they were in the hands of the Alliance. Now for the first time Lorraine and Sobieski could survey the camp of their enemy: they were terrified by its vastness.16 For the first time, too, the inhabitants of Vienna could see with their own eyes the troops that had come to their rescue. The premature rejoicing on the city’s barricades was loud with the explosions of rockets and cannonfire. Still the Turks did nothing.
At 6 a.m. on 12 September, the Alliance attacked again. It was an attack described by a Turkish observer in terms of awe and wonder: ‘they poured down like black tar which destroys and burns everything in its path’. The Turks rallied. Fighting was fierce and the shelling on both sides incessant, a fact confirmed by Sobieski’s son Prince Jakub who described in his diary how their breakfast became covered by a thin black layer of ash.
Eleven hours later, sounding the trumpet himself, King Jan Sobieski launched one of the largest military charges in European history. Twenty thousand cavalry galloped down the slopes, jumping over the trenches and breaking through the Turkish artillery. The noise alone must have been impressive: the pounding of horses’ hooves, the yells of ‘Jesus Maria!’ and ‘Bij, zabij!’ (‘strike, kill!’) and the distinctive sound made by the decorative ‘wings’ worn by the Polish Hussars – the eerie whistle of millions of eagles’ feathers beating the air. Their appearance would have been hardly less imposing. With their richly coloured gowns and fur capes of leopard, tiger and wolf skin, the Poles looked just as exotic as their enemy. Indeed, it was from the Turks (as well as the Tartars and the Persians) that the Poles had been borrowing their fashion sense for over a hundred years. Polish officers informed their troops that the distinguishing feature of the enemy would be their turbans, this being the only item of clothing the Muslim Ottomans and the Catholic Poles were sure not to have in common.17
Within a few hours, Sobieski had entered the Turkish camp and sent the first news of the victory to his queen. ‘This was a calamitous defeat,’ wrote the seventeenth-century Ottoman chronicler Silhadar. ‘So great that there has never been its like since the first appearance of the Ottoman state.’18 In Europe, however, it was a victory that was to be savoured, and not only by kings and princes. The wider public was fascinated by accounts of the arduous siege and its dramatic lifting. In the decades following the Battle of Vienna, hundreds of pamphlets and books would be published: anonymous accounts by soldiers who fought in the battle; signed correspondence of officers; and poems, both heroic and satirical. Mass-produced pictures in the form of engravings also spread the word and the triumph even inspired a theatrical production: Vienna Besieged opened on the London stage in 1686. After decades of war and hardship, the Battle of Vienna was a story worth commemorating.19
As for the Polish king who led the victorious troops, it is no exaggeration to say that after 12 September 1683 Jan Sobieski became a celebrity throughout Europe. Although in German-speaking countries the Poles and their king became famous, or rather infamous, for their allegedly greedy looting of the Turkish treasures, the majority verdict was positive, the printing presses from Italy to Sweden busily churning out likenesses of the moustachioed warrior framed by the words: ‘My hand saved, I can truly say, Vienna, Germany and the Empire.’ And for those with more homespun tastes, tankards and tablecloths decorated with Sobieski’s image were also available.
So pervasive was the fame of the Battle of Vienna, so widespread the renown of its principal combatants, that it is little wonder that the triumph of 1683 is celebrated in local gastronomic folklore. The croissant or kipfel is said to have been created when the emperor, grateful for their defence of the city, gave Vienna’s bakers the right to make a delicate bread in the shape of the Ottoman crescent. As for the coffeehouses for which Vienna is justly renowned, the Viennese claim that the very first one was established thanks to the discovery of how to make a palatable drink out of the little brown beans left behind by the Turks in 1683.
Nor were these stories confined to Vienna. Immigrant German-speaking bakers who dominated the baking profession in the United States for many years were proud of their ancestors who had played their part in defending Vienna against the Turks, and not just by fighting on the ramparts. Legend has it that a Viennese baker making bread in his cellar bakery foiled an underground invasion of the city when he discovered a Turkish solider tunnelling his way in. To this day the German city of Münster claims this brave baker as one of its own and every year celebrates his contribution to saving Vienna and Europe.
The Siege of Vienna was an event known to all German-speaking bakers in America and therefore one from which many a tall tale could be hung. In time, Jewish immigrant bakers would join the same trade union as the German bakers, the similarities between the German and Yiddish languages creating a particular affinity between the two groups. The legend of a baker commemorating the dramatic victory in Vienna by creating the bagel in the shape of Sobieski’s stirrup would have been a worthy counterpart to the legends told about the kipfel. It would also have had wide appeal to those immigrants with a link to Polish lands (which so many Jews had) because of the reputation of Jan Sobieski. It is an attractive proposition; it is also entirely speculative.
Whatever its origin, the story of the bagel being created in honour of Jan Sobieski and his victory in Vienna has endured. Something about it – the disconcerting notion of a Polish king saving Vienna or the strange image of a stirrup serving as inspiration for bread – has continued to capture the imagination. Polish-Jewish historians such as Majer Balaban who wrote so positively about Jan Sobieski’s relations with Jews would no doubt have been pleased (and amused) that a small Jewish roll is keeping Sobieski’s name alive for generations of Americans.
Notes
1. The accepted version of the 1494 episode has been that the Jewish community was banished from Kraków by the Polish king. But recent scholarship reveals a more complex story. It may well have been advantageous to both the king and the Jewish community for the latter to resettle in Kazimierz. Further discussion can be found in Bożena Wyrozumska, ‘Czy Jan Olbracht Wygnał Żydów z Krakowa?’, Rocznik Krakowski (Kraków 1993) and Hanna Zaremska, ‘Crossing the River: How and Why the Jews of Kraków Settled in Kazimierz at the End of the Fifteenth Century, Polin 2008.
2. Information cited in the Kraków Bakers’ Guild submission to the European Union for the classification of the obwarzanek as a regional product, 23 October 2006.
3. H.H. Ben Sasson, A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge MA 1969), pp. 641–2.
4. Janusz Tazbir, Kultura Szlachecka w Polsce (Poznań 2002), p. 63.
5. Janusz Tazbir, Państwo bez stosów i inne szkice (Kraków 2000), p. 148.
6. The Karaites are a Jewish sect that came into being towards the middle of the ninth century. Their doctrine is characterised primarily by the denial of the Talmudic–rabbinical tradition (from the Encyclopedia Judaica (2007), Vol. II, p. 785.
7. Cited in Paweł Fijałkowski, Dzieje Żydów w Polsce XI–XVIII wiek (Warsaw 1993), p. 87.
8. Moses of Narol cited in ibid., p. 51. Moses of Narol would become Rabbi of Metz, France.
9. Dr Bernard Connor, The History of Poland in Several Letters to Persons of Quality (London 1698).
10. Stefan Gąsiorowski has written in great and interesting detail about Christian–Jewish relations in Żółkiew at the time of Sobieski; see his Chrześcijanie i Żydzi w Żółkwi XVII i XVIII wieku (Kraków 2001).
11. Adam Kaźmierczyk, ‘Jakub Becal: King Jan III Sobieski’s Jewish Factor’, Polin Vol. 15, 2002.
12. Majer Bałaban, Historia i Literatura Żydowska (Lwów/Warsaw/Kraków 1925), p. 316.
13. Maurycy Horn, ‘Król Jan III i Żydzi Polscy’, Biuletyn Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego 1983, nr 4/128.
14. Veronica Belling, ‘“Ahavat yehonatan”: A Poem by Judah Leo Landau’, Polin Vol. 15, 2002.
15. An interview with Philip Kraus in the American Jewish Committee Oral History collection at the Special Collections, Schaffer Library, Union College.
16. François Paulin Dalérac, Polish Manuscripts of the Secret Histories of the Reign of John Sobieski (London 1700), p. 68.
17. Janusz Tazbir, Kultura Szlachecka w Polsce (Poznań 2002), p. 155.
18. Cited in Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? (Oxford 2001), p. 16.
19. Muzeum Narodowe w Warszawie, Chwała i Slawa Jana III w Sztnce i Literaturze XVII–XX (Warsaw 1983).
Written by Maria Balinska in "The Bagel - The Surprising History of a Modest Bread", Yale University Press, UK, 2008, chapter 2. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.