Published: 13 February 2025
Last updated: 13 February 2025
‘Don’t forget the pomegranate!’ my mother, Sarah, called after my father, Malcolm, who had been tasked with collecting fruit for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
As we often did, we were hosting friends for a celebratory meal at our home, and the pomegranate held particular significance. Along with wheat, barley, grapes, figs, olives, and dates, it makes up the Shivat Haminim – the seven species of fruit mentioned in the Torah as native to Israel. Historically, bringing these to the Temple in Jerusalem was considered a great mitzvah – a commandment in Jewish law, often understood as a good deed.
Speaking to Jews around the world, I have found that many of us ate pomegranates at Rosh Hashanah. This fruit was always significant to me on a personal level. It was a poignant indicator of my difference from those around me.
Although I attended Calderwood Lodge Jewish Primary School (the only Jewish school in Scotland), I went to a non-Jewish secondary school. In the UK, without a separation of church and state, our state schools were often Christian. My peers attended school assemblies in a church, and Christianity formed the foundation of the school’s culture.
Being Jewish, I always felt different from those around me. I knew that we observed different holidays, ate different food, and even spoke a different language – Hebrew – in synagogue and in various classes I took. Few of them routinely ate – or would have attached any significance to – pomegranates.
All of this is to say, I understood that although I was born in Scotland, that wasn’t where I was rooted. The pomegranate, very much not native to Scotland, helped me understand where I could truly call home. To this day, after living in Scotland, Hong Kong and London, the place where I feel I most belong is Israel.
I understood – even when I didn’t have the language to articulate it – that my family and my people are indigenous to Israel.
While notions like indigeneity aren’t inherently Jewish concepts, they can describe our story just as they describe that of others.
Comments2
Robert Richter19 February at 03:14 pm
I grew up in Israel till my bar mizva when my parents took me and my family to Australia. My identity is that of a secular australian Jew. Your article merely leads me to ask: are you for justice and freedom? If you are, don’t think about biblical fruits. You should be thinking about the defeat of an Israeli government dedicated to create a judeo-fascist theocracy. If you are not committed to resisting it then you are not, in my humble opinion a Jew whose ethics entitle you to deny the rights of other indigenous people when the Israeli government is in the process of ethnic cleansing. If you join the fight against a criminal cabal which seeks to destroy the rule of law and any remaining vestige of judicial independence, then please enjoy the seven fruits as much as the West Bank and Gazan Arabs do; that is if they can still salvage the fruit trees they have grown from time immemorial.
Wesley Parish13 February at 06:41 am
This is mere assertion. It seems that Judaism was very popular in the Roman Empire, before the Roman Empire’s formal conversion to Christianity under Constantine
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/no-pope-what-if-rome-had-become-jewish/
https://aish.com/the-surge-of-converts-to-judaism-in-ancient-rome/
Plus the presence of Jewish communities at the ends of well-known trade routes – Yemen/Ethiopia, Iraq/Iran, and even in China – indicate to me that religion followed trade, and there was a certain amount of conversion going on. Plus the link between Tarshish/Tartessos being the western end-point of the Phoenician/Punic trade empire and the Northern Kingdom of Israel being in close with the Phoenician city-states, suggests that the Sephardim go back in Spain for quite some time. Then you have the Ashkenazim originating in the Rhineland, and I suspect they were also congregations of converts from the time the Rhineland was the frontier between the Germanic tribes to the north and the Roman Empire – most probably severely harmed by the fighting at the break-up of the Roman Empire – but then reinforced by waves of migrants from Italy around the time of Charlemagne … and much later, reinforced by refugees from the breakup of the Khazar Empire.
All of which is bound by religious ties, not genetic.
Meanwhile the population of Judea, Samaria and Galilee, with the temple destroyed and subsequent revolts also unsuccessful, would’ve been approached by the early Christian Church and a fair number would’ve agreed with their message and converted. For proof, consider the Samaritans – they were never exiled from their land at the time of the Great Revolt.