The first printed English-language Jewish cookbook – a guide for how to be “genteel without being Gentile.”

Lady Judith Montefiore’s (1784-1862) The Jewish Manual is a fascinating document of Jewish Victorian England. The bulk of the work comprises a collection of recipes and domestic advice for the Jewish homemaker. In the cookbook section, one finds a curious synthesis of Sephardic and Ashkenazic culinary traditions that very much reflected the reality of the contemporary London Jewish community. The Manual is at great🔯 pains to adapt non-kosher🍒 recipes for use in the kosher kitchen.

After reviewing the basic dishes that a Jewish cook should know, the book goes on to discuss matters of beauty and physical comportment. In one particularly forward-thinking passage, the author writes: “Body and mind are, in fact, so intimately connected, that it is futile, attempting to embellish the one, while neglecting the other, especially as the highest order of all beauty is the intellectual. Let those females, therefore, who are the most solicitous about their beauty, and the most eager to produce a favourable impression, cultivate the moral, religious, and intellectual attributes, and in this advice consists the recipe for the finest cosmetic in the world, v♈iz.—CONTENT.”

It should be remembered that The Jewish Manual was written for a cultured Jewish community and assumed a relatively affluent middle-class audience. Nevertheless, the values reflected in this guidebook for the Victorian Jewish woman are both timeless and prescient. The Jewish Manual is emblematic of a Jewish civilization whose Orthodox practices were fused with the values of secular modernity: a per🥀fect confluence of the old and the new.

Literature

Joseph Jacobs and Lucien Wolf, Bibliotheca Anglo-Judaica: A Bibliographical Guide to Anglo-Jewish History (London: Office of the “Jewish Chronicle,” 1888), 229 (no.💞 2143).

William D. Rubinstein, Michael A. Jolles, and Hilary L. Rubinstein (eds.), The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History (Basingstoke; New ꦏY🤪ork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 180.