Latkes
Fried pancakes eaten at Hanukkah, now usually of grated potato. They are fried for the oil of the Hanukkah story; the older Hanukkah pancakes were made with cheese, in memory of Judith.
Meaning
A latke (plural latkes; levivah, plural levivot, in Hebrew) is a fried pancake, today usually of potato. Jews eat them during the eight nights of Hanukkah, when the hanukkiah is lit, because they are fried in oil: My Jewish Learning calls them “emblematic of the olive oil that miraculously lasted eight days”, the cruse of oil of the Talmud. Chabad.org gives two reasons for the custom, the oil and, for cheese latkes, the heroine Judith. In the United States latkes are the Hanukkah food eaten most; in Israel it is the jam doughnut, the sufganiyah. The word latke, Susannah Brodnitz writes, comes from the Slavic oladka, a small fried pancake, and was in use by the mid-15th century. Levivah is older: Elon Gilad of Haaretz finds it in the Second Book of Samuel.
Origin and history
The potato latke is the newest form. The earliest written reference to fried pancakes at Hanukkah, according to Brodnitz, is a poem of 1322 by Rabbi Kalonymus ben Kalonymus, with “levivot large and round, the whole size of the frying pan.” The food historian Gil Marks found two kinds of Hanukkah food on record from the 14th century, dairy foods and fried foods. Italian Jews in the 15th century fried ricotta pancakes, cassola, which Aly Miller of My Jewish Learning calls “arguably the first ‘latkes.’”
In Eastern Europe the cooking fat was schmaltz, chicken fat, and since kosher law keeps meat and milk apart, cheese pancakes gave way to ones made of turnips and other roots, or of rye or buckwheat flour. Potatoes became common there late. After crop failures in Ukraine and Poland in 1839 and 1840, Brodnitz writes, people planted them in huge numbers; they became cheaper than flour, and potato latkes became the default. Schmaltz stayed with them: a 1927 issue of The American Mercury, which Yoni Appelbaum of The Atlantic says has the first use of the word “latke” in English, says to fry them “in schmaltz”. In America the fat became vegetable oil, helped by Crisco from 1911.
Cheese, and the story of Judith
The Book of Judith, part of the Catholic Bible but not the Hebrew one, tells of a widow who saved her town from the general Holofernes. She came to his banquet with her own food, he drank “much more than he had ever drunk in any one day since he was born”, and she cut off his head with his own sword. Some ancient manuscripts add cheese to the food her maid carried (Judith 10:5).
The Book of Judith was read with Hanukkah from at least the 14th century, Brodnitz writes. The medieval commentator Rashbam wrote that Judith was as responsible for the miracle of Hanukkah as Esther was for Purim, and oral tradition made her a relative of Judah Maccabee, though her story is set a few hundred years earlier. People ate cheese at Hanukkah to remember her. Susan Weingarten links the 1322 poem to a copy of Judith made in Provence in 1402, in which Judith feeds Holofernes fried cheese pancakes.
The tradition and the historians tell it differently. Chabad.org sets Yehudis, as it calls Judith, in 164 BCE, makes Holofernes a Greek general, and says Jews ate cheese pancakes fried in oil at Hanukkah “for many generations”. My Jewish Learning and JTA call Holofernes an Assyrian general. Appelbaum’s summary of the latke’s career: “a shredded Andean tuber, fried like a buckwheat pancake, which was substituted for Italian cheeses, once eaten to honor a mistaken reading of obscure variants of an apocryphal text.”
Read next
- Next in Hanukkah symbolsSufganiyotJam-filled doughnuts eaten at Hanukkah, above all in Israel, where they became the festival’s food in the 1920s. They are fried in oil, for the oil of the Hanukkah story.
- Eaten on the eight nights the hanukkiah is litHanukkiahThe nine-branched lamp lit at Hanukkah: eight lights, one for each night of the festival, and a ninth, the shamash, that lights the others.
See also
Sources
- The Real History of Potato Latkes Will Surprise You (Susannah Brodnitz, 2022), Susannah Brodnitz, The Nosher, 8 December 2022, My Jewish Learning, article
- Why Do We Eat Latkes on Hanukkah? (Aly Miller, 2016), Aly Miller, The Nosher, 20 December 2016, My Jewish Learning, article
- The true story of the modern latke (Gabe Friedman, JTA, 2015), Gabe Friedman, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 14 December 2015, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, article
- Why All the Oil and Cheese (and Potatoes)? (Chabad.org), Chabad.org, Chanukah section; archived October 2023, Chabad.org (Internet Archive copy), article
- Judith 10, 12 and 13 (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition), Judith 10:5; 12:17–20; 13:6–8, Bible Gateway, Judith 10:5 and note a; 12:20; 13:6–8
- Sufganiya: The Doughnut That Used to Be a Latke (Elon Gilad, Haaretz, 2013), Elon Gilad, Haaretz, Word of the Day, 29 November 2013, Haaretz, opening paragraph
- How Jelly Donuts Took Over Hanukkah in Israel (Rachel Ringler, 2017), Rachel Ringler, The Nosher, 12 December 2017, My Jewish Learning, article
- The Hanukkiah (Hanukkah Menorah), My Jewish Learning, article
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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