Jewish Chocolate.

Lest anyone misconstrue this as anti-Semitic, just sit it down before giddying up on their own bigoted high horse & consider… folks everywhere are insanely meshuga (crazy) for chocolate (ahem), Jews among them. Jews & chocolate go way back. That applies also to Judaism & just about everything for we live in a significantly Jewish world (& please, haters, no Elders of Zion comments). Though not quite at the heart of chocolate history, Jews provide important footnotes to it.

The little told story of Jewish chocolate begins when even conversos (Jewish converts to Christianity) were expelled from Spain during the Inquisition & a few beat it out of town by hopping on Columbus' boat to the New World (Maestre Bernal, Alphonso de La Calle, Roderigo Sanchez de Segovia, Luis de Torres, & Roderigo de Triana). Prior to sailing, Columbus consulted with Abraham Zacuto who developed a new type of astrolabe for determining latitude at sea & helped plot the route. A Judaic scholar, Zacuto no doubt encouraged the navigator that the Earth, rather than flat, is made as a ball, according to the Talmud. Of course both men in a sense were wrong too... Columbus never made it to his preferred destination -- India -- because America sat in the way.

The crew on Columbus' 4^th voyage in 1502 were the first known Europeans to ever encounter cacáo.

More Jews escaped the Iberian Peninsula overland & sea by heading north across the French border to Bayonne. There they formed guilds, including some of the earliest chocolate-makers in that country.

The cocoa “vice” wove into a riveting drama on these crypto-Jews, some of whom successfully bid for royal warrants as purveyors of the Spanish crown’s monopolized trading goods during the Inquisition. The life story of Diego Gómez de Salazar narrates but one example of hurdles surmounted to obtain inside access thru a labyrinthine network & clandestine attempts to remain faithful to “St. Moses”. For Gómez, it netted wealth but also incarceration at the behest of the Inquisition, then eventual escape to the safe-haven for conversos & Marranos in Bayonne, France to establish a budding Jewish chocolate scene that thrives to this day.

Folklore even has it that Jews introduced chocolate into France, a tale repeated by modern-day tourist offices & museums in the area (though no documents for substantiating it exist). This storyline may serve to play up the primacy of Bayonne chocolate vis-a-vis Parisian chocolatiers (such as La Maison du Chocolat, Jacques Genin, Patrick Roger, Michel Chaudun, et. al.) & more significantly the great Rhone Valley barsmiths (Bonnat, Pralus, & Morin). It also would establish Bayonne closer -- both culturally as well as geographically -- to the original entry point of cacáo into Europe (which was Spain), if not the very source (the Americas), bestowing upon it an edge of greater authenticity. Then again, the Jewish tale of Bayonne might simply atone for the Dreyfus Affair & Vichy France that continues to guilt the national psyche.

Later & elsewhere, Jews on the Chocolate Trail would include Benjamin Andreade de Acosta. He was deported from Portuguese Brazil in 1660 for being, well, Jewish; but not before leaving with some cacáo seeds which he transplanted to the French-controlled island of Martinique in the Caribbean of an Amazonian varietal known as ‘Martinique Creole’. Soon thereafter Martinique was the prime supplier of cocoa beans to chocolate makers back home in France further consolidating the Jewish-French connection.

And, in a side bar, most of the traveling salesmen roaming door-to-door, freshly grinding cocoa seeds with metates in southern France throughout the 19th century, were Sephardic Jews.

Judaism understands that chocolate captivates, connects & elevates all -- whether agnostic, atheist or believer -- nourishing the spirit. That is its higher power. In grasping what many miss, that chocolate serves up the original & ultimate ‘soul food’, The tradition still continues right there in the Basque Pyrenees town of Bayonne… where Cazenave itself operates since 1854.

Hashem bless them all.