The Secret Life of Challah Most of us know the joy of tearing off a soft, sweet handful of delicious challah - the Jewish wonder bread - but how many of us know the dark, mysterious past of the Queen of Loaves?

by alon

Alon is a prolific writer and co-creator of creativejewishliving.com. He is the father of three wonderful girls and the husband of Nishima Kaplan. As children, we imagined the miraculous mannah in the wilderness as challah, picturing it as row upon row of golden loaves descending from the heavens like a scene out of Magritte - the angelic product of God's own bakeshop.  Later, we read about the showbread in the Tent of Meeting, the twelve loaves set out as offerings and again, came the vision of twelve challahs laid out on golden baking sheets, their braids so perfectly symmetrical that no other proof of the divine need exist. Alas, both images were wrong (on numerous accounts.)  The mannah is described in the torah as a sweet, dewy substance while the showbread resembled most the humble matzoh of our Passover feasts. So what is challah?  And where did it come from? While there is no way of knowing who first combined honey, oil, flour, eggs and yeast into the fluffy diet-corrupter we know as challah, we can trace the development of the braided bread back to pre-Christian Ukraine. There, in the literal bread-basket of the steppes, ancient communities would appease their terrible river god by drowning young maidens.  (This is not to disparage the descendants of those people.  Many ancient people performed human sacrifice.)  As (relatively) more enlightened times dawned, the maiden herself was substituted by a sacrifice of her golden braids of hair. (Whether or not the god preferred blonds or brunettes is not recorded.)  Later still, when even parting with their hair became intolerable, loaves of bread woven in imitation of women's hair were placed upon the waters. With the advent of Christianity in Ukraine, the braided bread was preserved as kolach - or Christmas bread.  No longer linear, kolach is braided in a ring - like challah on rosh Hashanah - and placed in a stack of three to symbolize the holy trinity. (In an ironic twist, the glamorous President of Ukraine, Yulia Tymoshenko, received much attention for her braided hair style, which was compared to kolach.) By the time challah began to frequent Jewish tables, its disturbing pagan narrative was no-doubt forgotten, substituted instead by the bloodless  symbolism of the Trinity. How the braided bread entered into Eastern European Jewish tradition is fairly obvious - it's delicious.  No doubt, Jewish merchants brought the fragrant - and already religiously associated - bread into their homes, giving it a place of honor on the Sabbath table.  Later, Jewish women used the circular braids of the kolach to evoke the eternal cycle of the year at Rosh Hashanah and flavored the imagery with doughy ladders and birds. Although it is a strange beginning for an icon of  Jewish foodstuff, challah has successfully made its transition from ersatz sacrificial maiden to the delight of Jewish children (and adults) around the world.

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