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    Pizza – Ask the Rabbi

    Q. Everyone knows that Jews invented sandwiches, but who invented pizza?

    A. The Haggadah seems to suggest that Hillel invented open sandwiches, since he took paschal lamb and bitter herb and placed them on matzah.

    According to Chaya Burstein’s Jewish Kids’ Catalog, Roman Jews invented pizza when they put cheese and olive oil on matzah. But whether they then baked it in a pizza oven we do not know.

    There are of course many characteristic Jewish foods (both Ashkenazi and Sephardi) but most are merely tasty Jewish adaptations of the cuisine of the environment.

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