By Masha Vernik and Spencer Roberts
What is a Jewish seed? This question sparked the Jewish Seed Project, a project of the Jewish Farmer Network through which a collaborative of Jewish growers, seed keepers, organizers, storytellers, and researchers are stewarding culturally relevant seeds.
Jews are a diasporized people. Our intersecting histories of displacement, legal restriction, genocide and forced migration have made it hard to develop long-term intergenerational relationships with land and the practice of seed keeping.
Masha’s ancestors are Ashkenazi, who lived in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement in modern-day Belarus and Ukraine. They fled their shtetl (Jewish village) before the Nazis bombed it and later settled in Moscow, from which our family moved in the 1990s to New Jersey in search of a better life. Spencer has ancestors from the Pale of Settlement and Austria-Hungary (Vilna [Lithuania], Ukraine, Galicia [Poland], and Carpathian Ruthenia [Slovakia]) who fled during the pre-and inter-World War periods. Eventually, they settled in cities on the East Coast with significant populations from these places so that it felt more like home.
While these are pretty typical stories of Ashkenazi Jewry, the branches of the Jewish diaspora are seemingly endless, and every family’s story is different. Our Collective’s ancestors have moved throughout the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, South America, and beyond.
Even as our relationship with land has been disjointed, the land-based foundations of Judaism are still present. Our prayers, rituals, and cycles of time are rooted in the flow of the agricultural movements through the seasons. Even if tangible seeds were not handed down from generation to generation, this connection to land has sustained us even when reduced to mere metaphor. At times, this has manifested through connecting to land and the local environment; other times, it has manifested through storytelling and dreams. The journey of the Jewish Seed Project helps us remember lands that our ancestors have lived on. In keeping seeds, we honor their history, passed down from generation to generation, connecting us to those who have kept seeds before us.
The Network began our inquiry with the hairy qishua, a melon like a cucumber eaten at a young stage. This seed was selected for its connection to biblical times and its power to unite all branches of the diaspora together. In the story of Exodus, as the Jews were wandering the desert, they yearned for the foods of their past. In the parched desert, they cried out, “We remember the foods we used to eat in Mitzrayim (Egypt), the fish and the “Quishua” and melons and garlic and leeks. And now, our gullets are shriveled. There is nothing at all (Numbers 11:5)!” Later on, botanical and linguistic texts have linked the biblical word qishuim (plural of quishua) to the ‘chate’ group of melons, sp. Cucumis melo (In modern Hebrew, qishuim means zucchini) (see Janick et al. 2007). It is also mentioned in the Talmud, ancient teachings and commentaries that serve as the basis of Rabbinic Judaism (see a Talmudic tale). Today, the various descendants and diverse varieties of this melon species are grown in the Caucasus, Mediterranean, Middle East, and Europe and are called by many names, including Armenian cucumber, fakkous, adzhura, and carosello, among others
According to our ancestral texts, the qishua was a seed our ancestors were forced to leave behind. We are estranged relatives, meeting each other again.
This project began in 5781 (Hebrew calendar) (2021) at the instigation of K Greene, a prominent Jewish seed keeper and co-founder of the Hudson Valley Seed Company. We spent that first season getting to know each other and the seed while six varieties were grown out by growers across North America/Turtle Island. We looked for phenotypic traits that closely resemble the descriptions of qishuim provided by botanical texts – a hairy, oblong fruit. We recorded how the plants and fruit looked, smelled, tasted, and felt, as well as our reflections on the experience of growing this ancestral seed.
In the second growing season, 5782 (2022), we defined two branches of growing projects: single variety trials and diaspora gardens. For the single variety trials, growers isolated, tended, and saved seeds from one variety in order to increase our seed stock. For the diaspora gardens, growers tended a mix of varieties to cross-pollinate. Just as modern Jews are reconnecting across different branches of diasporic history, so too are the seeds reconnecting after millennia apart.
Our third growing season, 5783 (2023), focused on diaspora gardens and intentionally mixing seeds from past years’ grow-outs, previous seed exchanges, and the Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN). We also developed a curriculum for the various educators who grow with us, from Jewish summer camps to high schools.
Our seed collective developed a guiding values document, which affirms that we approach the seeds with intention and the desire to share in their sustained life. These values guide how we choose, distribute, share, and care for seeds, as well as how we build relationships with other stewards and tell stories. We do not claim ownership or exclusive access to these seeds and understand that we are just one of many groups who have spiritually, historically, culturally, and geographically significant relationships with them. As such, we aspire to share these seeds with others who are connected to honor their full stories. We recognize that we grow these seeds on colonized land in North America/Turtle Island and honor the many Native peoples who have stewarded these lands since time immemorial.
Defining our values shifted the way we think about our work. At the onset of this project, we focused on selecting fruit seeds that most resembled our descriptions of the ancient varieties. We have since shifted towards cultivating a variety that both honors the past and is adapted to our present. We select specific varieties to cross-breed in the diaspora gardens to eventually develop stable varieties that preserve hairiness and sweetness while adapting to local growing conditions. This project carries our history into the present and creates something for the future.
Seeds are a throughway, weaving together people and stories from across time. Seeds help us consider ourselves future ancestors, leaving a legacy that descendants can mold to their needs and contexts. Only time will tell how we – and our seeds – will evolve.
Shani Mink is a farmer on the East End of Long Island and the Executive Director of the Jewish Farmer Network and can be reached at shani@jewishfarmernetwork.org. Masha Vernik, she/her, is from Seattle, WA and Spencer Roberts, he/him, is from Philadelphia, PA and the Jewish Seed Project.
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