A knish for those who don’t know is a small deep-fried filled dough bun – kind of like the better-known Japanese large steamed bun (the Nikuman) but deep-fried rather than steamed and a lot smaller – but it is another ‘traditional jewish food’ that is widely believed to be of ‘jewish origin’ and thus ‘invented by jews’ with jews claiming that they invented them sometime in the fourteenth century. (1)
Despite this claim the origin of knish is not jewish at all, but is rather a food that jews appropriated from their Slavic neighbours and then called something else resulting in the widespread jewish belief that because they associate it with themselves: they ‘invented it’.
As Steven Loewenstein explains this belief is completely and utter false since he writes:
‘Eastern European Jewish cuisine included not only foods borrowed from Slavic cookery, like blintzes or knishes, but also foods they had imported from Germany or Austria, like strudel, kreplach, and farfel.’ (2)
He also states that:
‘Blintzes and knishes, two popular foods now considered characteristically Jewish, are examples of Jewish modifications of foods eaten by their Christian neighbours.’ (3)
The Yiddish word ‘Knish’ itself comes from either the Ukrainian word ‘Knysh’ or the Polish word ‘Knysz’ (4) and the foodstuff itself is a simply a jewish copy of the nearly identical Ukrainian dish ‘Knysh’, the Russian dish ‘Pirozhok’ and/or the Polish dish ‘Piroshki’.
So no knish is not a ‘jewish invention’ at all but rather something that the jews copied from the Poles, Russians and/or the Ukrainians!
References
(1) https://www.thejc.com/life/food/everything-you-could-wish-to-know-about-the-knish-lfyzddu1
(2) Steven Loewenstein, 2000, ’The Jewish Cultural Tapestry: International Jewish Folk Traditions’, 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 123
(3) Ibid., p. 141
(4) https://localhistory.org.ua/rubrics/word/shcho-take-knish-istoriia-odnogo-slova/
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