The Eggplant Rabbis Debated for 1,000 Years

For nearly a thousand years, Jewish rabbis argued about one question: Can you eat an eggplant? This is not a metaphor. The eggplant came west from India, carrying its name with it. Its Sanskrit name became Persian bādēngān, then Arabic bādhinjān, the word by which Jewish communities from Baghdad to Cairo first encountered it. The first major ruling came from Babylonia. Rav Hai Gaon of Pumbedita ruled that eggplant was a vegetable and required the standard blessing for vegetables: borei pri ha-adama. Rabbeinu Chananel of Kairouan agreed. For centuries, that seemed to settle the matter. Then a fourteenth-century rabbi in the Land of Israel, Eshtori HaParchi, ruled the opposite. Eggplant, he said, was forbidden under the laws of orlah, the produce of young fruit trees. The argument spread. In sixteenth-century Egypt, the Radvaz tried a compromise: black eggplants were forbidden, but white eggplants were allowed. In eighteenth-century Jerusalem, the Khida pointed out that the Ari had eaten eggplant without hesitation. The debate still continued. Only in the twentieth century did the Chazon Ish and Rabbi Ovadia Yosef help settle the question for good. Today no observant Jew thinks twice about eggplant. But a vegetable that now appears in every Israeli kitchen once forced rabbis across the Jewish world to ask a difficult question: When a completely new food enters Jewish life, where does it fit? A thousand years later, the answer is the same one Rav Hai Gaon gave at the beginning. Borei pri ha-adama. Now you know.