“Challah at Ya from Vienna!” The Austrian Origins of The Classic Jewish Braided Eggy Yeast Bread (Recipe) #IconicJewishFood (2024)

[Updated February 2023]

The best challah recipeyou’ll ever taste!

This is your traditional can’t-get-enough, soft, tearing-long-strands, perfectly sweet, Bubbe’s-childhood-memory-evoking deliciousness!

The special treat has a rich history behind it, so let’s get some definitions and historical facts straight before we create and enjoy our beautiful challah.

As one of the most iconic of all Jewish foods, challah is assuredly more ritual than recipe. Though it incorporates special covers, boards, trays, tins, cookbooks and (sometimes) knives, making challah is about more than just “things;”perhaps more importantly, it’s about prayers, initiation rituals, recipes and secrets.

Challah is omnipresent in Israel and in the Jewish diaspora, especially in the United States where, in many places, it’s a deli and supermarket staple, be it in the form of the ultimate French toast or even in akugel, a Jewish baked pudding.

Braided, egg-enriched bread is made in many other European cuisines. In Vienna, as in many other parts of Central and Eastern Europe, the locals claim their own local bread, presenting their own version of traditional braided bread asshtritsls,kalacs, and what-not. InGerman-speaking regions like Vienna, there’s even a so-called Zopf, which is German for “braided hair.” And don’t even start with the French about their wonderful brioche!

Most of these rather sweet, yeasty, and egg-rich delicacies are eaten on Sundays and holidays with butter, honey, and jam. The main difference between the gentile and the Jewish version is the absence of dairy products in the latter. This is to confrom to Jewish religious laws, which do not allow the mixing of dairy and meat.

Traditional challah recipes use oil instead of butter and milk, and add eggs. (Water challosis German with a distinct sourdough flavor and added potatoes to help the action of the yeast.)

What’s particular about the Jewish tradition and where’s the strong connection to Vienna? Let’s start at the beginning.

In 2008, a third-century amulet inscribed with the central Jewish prayerShema Yisraelwas discovered in a Roman child’s grave in a burial ground near Vienna. This “archeological sensation,” as it was called in the headlines, remains the earliest trace of Jewish inhabitants in present-day Austria.

Thus, there were already Jews on the site of modern-day Vienna before the city existed officially, or at least since the late Roman Empire, when Jews made up a sizeable portion of its population.

A couple of hundred years earlier, before Christian persecution of the Jews, when the temple in Jerusalem was still standing, the word “challah” exclusivelyreferred to the portion of a bread or dough donated, to the Kohanim(priests), from every dough that was preparedas described in the Book of Numbers15:18-20.

These donated portions, each about the size of an olive, had to be handed over in the form of loaves befitting the status of a priest. It was meant for their sustenance, “in order that the priests, who are always occupied with Divine service, should live without any exertion,” (Sefer ha-Hinnukh, no. 385). However, they were nothing like what we know as challah today. How they really looked is the object of interesting and long discussions in the Talmud.

After Titus’ Roman legions destroyed the second temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, and the priests could no longer officiate, the rabbis decreed that the priestly portion had still to be taken from the dough in order to keep the memory of this holy obligation alive. With no temple though, the dough had to be destroyed — most often via burning— which some communities see as protection from the “evil eye.” Challah— or any bread from which this small portion has not been taken and destroyed— is not considered kosher. Thus, the priestly portion itself became an unconsumable rest.

Since then, the table in every Jewish home is seen as a little temple, and the Shabbos challah loaves represent the so-called twelve showbreads displayed in the templein Jerusalem before its destruction as described in Leviticus 24:5-8. Those loaves of bread were flat, round, and made from semolina-like flour, but the exact shape and form is also subject of discussion.

Meanwhile, Jewish Vienna resurfaced from the dark middle ages with written evidence from the twelfthcentury onwards — as such a Jew named Shlomo is mentioned as Duke Frederick I’smint master in 1194. That’s when one of the leading rabbis of those times was born: Vienna’s rabbi Yitzhak bar Moishe, aka Isaac ben Moses of Vienna (ca. 1200-1270), also called the Riaz, was the author of Or Zarua (אור זרוע), which literally means “the arm of light.”

And it is here that in the early fourteen-hundreds Israel Isserlein(1390-1460), the famous author ofTrumas HaDeshen(תרומת הדשן), an important foundation of Jewish law, for thefirst time extended the meaning of the word challah to the whole of the Shabbos bread, so that it no longer referred only to the small priestly portion.

This usage of the word challah came about because, first, Rabbi Isserlein miraculously escaped death during the VienneseGzerah(גזרה), Vienna’s decree from 1421 in which the local authorities had decided to systematically annihilate the Jewish population and among other horrors, to burn two hundred Jews alive.

Second, as noted in John Cooper’s wonderful 1993 book,Eat and Be Satisfied: A Social History of Jewish Food, we learned about the rabbi’s use of the word challah because it was later compiled together with many other customs of Rabbi Isserlein by his student Joseph ben Moses of Austria (1423–1490?) in the latter’shalakhic (Jewish Law) collection,Leket Yosher (לקט יושר), which dates back to 1488.

Later, all of this spread to the rest ofAshkenaz(Jewish central and eastern Europe) and beyond, back to Israel and onto the new world. And that’s how challah, as we know it today, came from a book by a Viennese rabbi.

https://youtu.be/Pjh67rIB6Zs

Notwithstanding Vienna’s (at times) extremely hostile environment, challah took on its particular shape and form in Austria and southern Germany at around the same time, according to Gil Marks’ Encyclopedia of Jewish Food. The distinctive embellishment of loaves of bread with various styles of braidings was seemingly adopted from surrounding populations. Some argue that the reason so many separatist laws and decrees were put in place by authorities on both Christian and Jewish sides was that there was quite a lot of mingling going on, at least in the public space. Anyway, that’s how, when, and where the braided strands of dough started to make up challah loaves.

In Vienna, often four strands are braided to form a challah, but six became very popular as the two customary loaves for each meal made up a total of twelve strands representing the twelfth showbreads of the temple. There are two loaves for each meal because of the double portion of manna that fell from heaven and was bestowed upon the Jews in the morning before Shabbos so as not to make them work. They would then collect the manna on Shabbos itself.

Vienna was at the heart of the Western Yiddish region, and it is the resemblance of Yiddish’s “monn” (poppy seed) to the Yiddish pronunciation of “manna” that is at the root of the use of poppy seeds as topping for challah. French medieval Talmudic and biblical commentator, Rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki (Rashi), held that manna somewhat looked like sesame, which is why there’s often sesame on a challah.

In some areas, it is also common to use saffron in challah because manna was yellow, though eggs fulfill the same purpose. For a classic challah recipe however, this would amount to eight ingredients together with flour, sugar, yeast, salt, water, eggs and oil — a highly undesirable number. Why this? According toThe Haimische Kitchen, written by the pious Ladies’ Auxiliary of Nitra (Mount Kisco in New York) named after the city 60 miles northeast of Vienna from where they were murdered and chased during World War Two, a true challah recipe “includes seven ingredients, corresponding to the seven days of the week.” At this point, we should remember the many other challah traditions that were lost forever due to the annihilation of European Jewry.

Coincidentally, another major ingredient for challah, yeast, though used since the Egyptians, in its modern form is also a Jewish product that was first perfected in Vienna by Hungarian Charles Louis Fleischmann, before he moved to the United States. There, he founded the well-known consumer and industrial yeast brand Fleischmann’s Yeast.

So we see that challah’s name and shape date back to the Viennese middle ages. But the real sweetness came to challah much later as an additional allusion to manna, which had originally tasted like honey when pounded into cakes. Sweetnessbecame affordable with the industrial revolution, in fact, parallel to the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment (ca. 1770-1881). Around this time, sugar prices dropped due to its large-scale mechanical extraction: it no longer had to be imported, as it would now come from locally grown sugar beets.

One cannot but notice the synchronicity with enlightenment’s secularist push precisely when religious practices, like eating challah, had to become even more addictive to keep the pious flock at the table.

With the big smile of one that just had deliciously sweet challah — meaning not overly sweet — I understand that the distinctive form of cultural Judaism, which is culinary Judaism, surely is a result of this fight between enlightenment and its reactionary antagonists. Challah is not only an expression of an actively practiced religious belief, or even the fond memory of a passing tradition; it’s also the expression of a living culinary culture.

Traditionally, Jewish mothers would teach their daughters how to make the sweet braided bread. Even though some tend to romanticize a women’s role in the shtetl world, women were (typically) marginalized in areas like religion, family, work, education, culture, and political life. To this end, the act of setting aside the challah portion, together with the obligation to light the Shabbos and festival candles and keeping in-line with laws pertaining to menstruation, was seen as a punishment for the original sin, as an atonement for female disobedience in the garden of Eden (Genesis Rabbah 17:8). Hassidic ideas directed especially at women may obviously present things quite differently to their audience. It was a general trend to sacralize popularrituals, like bread-making for Shabbos and holidays, thus lending greater value to female religious rituals (see Encyclopedia Judaica on Women).

In our age and time, Jewish and non-Jewish crowdsflockaround bakers treated likeguruswhen they show how to makechallah to a crowd of mostly newbies and those (re-)discovering their childhood memories and culinary heritage. Indeed, there’s a strong religious and rich cultural background to the tradition, which is all the more important as we remember the mass murder and destruction of European Jewry during World War Two. Keep in mindhow this little Viennese historical overview of ours ends: Those few but lively challah bakers still left in the city of Vienna today are highly valued remnants of what used to be Europe’s third-largest Jewish community!

For a Vegan Hasidic Water Challah and even more info on challah turn to my addendum to this post.

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Footnotes

1. To take challah with a brucheh, you need at least 1.66 kg of flour:
   • 640g lukewarm water
   • 24g active dry yeast
   • 160g sugar
   • 182g eggs (ca. 3 large eggs)
   • 120g neutral oil
   • 32g salt
   • 1.6kg flour