The Not-So-Humble Artichoke in Ancient Jewish Sources
Susan Weingarten is an archaeologist and food historian living in Jerusalem. This is an adapted extract from her paper ‘The Rabbi and the Emperors: Artichokes and Cucumbers as Symbols of Status in Talmudic Literature,’ in When West met East: the Encounter of Greece and Rome with the Jews, Egyptians and Others: Studies presented to Ranon Katzoff on his 75th Birthday. Edited by D. Schaps, U. Yiftach and D. Dueck. (Trieste, 2016). There has been a lot of discussion of artichokes…