Two of the most iconic names in chocolate today, Nestlé and Hershey, launched their brands right just as secular political Zionism got underway.
Jerusalem, August 11 – Scholars of Jewish history, Jewish lore, and cultural anthropology made a startling discovery last month: that the first traceable development toward fulfillment of the Biblical prophecies of Redemption began at the same time as the dissemination of the cacao plant product beyond the Americas, and that each subsequent advance in the manufacture and economics of the product occurred at much the same time as landmark events in the Ingathering of the Exiles and the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland.
A team of researchers from the Hebrew University shared their insights in an article in the upcoming issue of the history journal Trendlines. In it, the group laid out its observations that the spread of chocolate from the New World to the Old, the addition of sugar and milk, the transformation of the beverage from the province of the super-rich into a product accessible to the middle class, the revolutionary step of producing solid bars, and the geopolitical developments that saw American soldiers bring chocolate to people who had never encountered it, among other phenomena, closely paralleled the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 – then from Portugal in 1497 – many of whom resettled in communities in the Land of Israel, then under Ottoman control, that formed the backbone of a lasting robust Jewish presence in the land that laid the groundwork for the success of the Zionist project hundreds of years later.
The article begins with the observation that Christopher Columbus’s delivery back to Spain of cacao beans from the Caribbean in 1502, his fourth voyage to the West Indies, as Jews were resettling around the Mediterranean and elsewhere following their expulsion from Iberia. The decades following that calamity saw the establishment of renewed Jewish communities in the Land of Israel by Ottoman invitation. Several of those communities remained strongholds of Jewish life in the land for centuries.
That growth occurred in parallel to the spread of chocolate through Europe, mostly among the upper classes; initially, cacao beans fetched a higher price than gold. However, increased production in the New World under European conquest increased the product’s availability and put it in reach of the non-aristocrat.
The eighteenth century saw a drive among followers of the early Hasidic movement to reclaim messianic longings following the Shabtai Tzvi debacle, just as the consumption of solid chocolate began to take hold. The popularity of the solid form of the foodstuff grew as similar redemptive fervor seized followers of the Gaon of Vilna and the Hatam Sofer in the early nineteenth century – just as the process of adding alkaline salts to chocolate was discovered, reducing its bitterness.
In the mid-nineteenth century both the introduction of moldable chocolate – and the first mass-market chocolate bar – came into being contemporaneous with Jewish religious thought that explicitly called for proactive measures to spark the prophesied ingathering of the exiles. Two of the most iconic names in chocolate today, Nestlé and Hershey, launched their brands right just as secular political Zionism got underway in the form of mass immigration to the Holy Land from Russia and the advocacy work of Theodor Herzl.
The authors also note the post-WWII spread of affordable chocolate throughout the world that parallels the establishment, growth, and increasing power of the State of Israel, the first sovereign Jewish entity in the land since Roman times.
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