Paper Matters: Jewish Recipes and Ephemeral Objects in Early Modern East-Central Europe

Abstract

Paper has long been recognized as a crucial resource for knowledge production in post-medieval Europe. Historians have emphasized its importance in accumulating intellectual and political capital through practices such as learning and information management, which heavily relied on the material availability of paper in early modern Europe. Recent research on ‘recipe knowledge’ has expanded this narrative of premodern knowledge-making by exploring household know-how and common folk traditions underlain by ephemeral ‘paper-stuff’ technologies. This article builds upon this research by examining a previously unexplored corpus of early modern Jewish recipe books from East-Central Europe. These books, written in a functional patchwork of languages including Hebrew, Latin, Yiddish, Polish, and Ruthenian, provide insights into the affordances of paper as a medium for local cross-cultural contact and the lived experiences of its users, transcending national, religious, or linguistic divisions defined through modern scholarly categories. Premodern Ashkenazi (i.e., Jewish East-Central European) recipes archive everyday attitudes towards powerful paper objects that used to furnish working environments and households, participate in rituals and daily habits, negotiate social identities and control human health and bodies. While these paper objects are barely visible today, extant recipes for creating them reflect complex social and cultural ecosystems of premodern Europeans that were attuned to the lasting effects of momentary experiences, intertwined with paper and other similarly evanescent materialities. This article emphasizes the materiality of deliberately ephemeral objects that no longer exist, highlighting the significance of seemingly insignificant items that once connected the East-Central European world through its local Jewish inhabitants.