Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History

by Heinrich Eduard Jacob

Give us this day our daily bread. From ancient Egypt to modern times, bread is the essential food, the symbol of fundamental well-being. H.E. Jacob takes readers through the history of this staple, examining its role in politics, religion, and technology, and answering such questions as how bread caused Napoleon's defeat. The fascinating voyage begins with "The Bread of Prehistoric Man," and continues with an exploration of the plow, the discovery of baking, the Grecian passion for seed corn and reverence for the bread goddess Demeter, the significance of the Bible's many references to bread, and how bread contributed to the outcome of World War I. In a poignant conclusion, Jacob describes his own experiences subsisting on bread made of sawdust in a Nazi concentration camp.

Genres: History, Food, Nonfiction, Cooking, Cookbooks, Food History, Cultural

416 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 1943

About the author

German and American journalist and author. Born to a Jewish family in Berlin and raised partly in Vienna, Jacob worked for two decades as a journalist and biographer before the rise to power of the Nazi Party. Interned in the late 1930s in the concentration camps at Dachau and then Buchenwald, he was released through the efforts of his future wife Dora, and emigrated to the United States. There he continued to publish books and contribute to newspapers before returning to Europe after the Second World War. Ill health, aggravated by his experiences in the camps, dogged him in later life, but he continued to publish through to the end of the 1950s. He wrote also under the pen names Henry E. Jacob and Eric Jens Petersen.

Reviews

[Davide · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's not a book I necessarily recommend to anyone because it's almost like a text book. But it's the history of the world (literally) told through the lens of bread. The author describes its invention, production, religious and nutritional significance, and then spreads out to show how it sparked and shaped agriculture, engineering, wars, policy, commerce, and still dictates the balance of world power. History is only recently becoming a favorite subject of mine. But the way this book links economics, civics, population shifts, and the everyman's daily life had me wishing this book was used in my highschool history classes. It gave seemingly unrelated ideas, people, events, and eras context by which to relate them to eachother. The fact that the author wrote this book on the eve of WWII gives many of his hypotheses chilling resonance. It wanders all over the place, but if you're up for the trip and the education, go for it!

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 4 out of 5]

বাইরেটা মুচমুচে ভিতরটা নরম, এমন সেরা পাঁউরুটি বলতে এখনও ফ্রান্স, পর্তুগালের কথা মনে পড়ে।

এই বইয়ের এক্কেবারে শেষে, Postscript-এ লেখক বলছেন:

History of Bread is a science whose roots are hidden in many other sciences, stretching from botany to agricultural economy, and from the technology of baking to politics and theology. If an author is really indebted to 4,000 works for facts and thoughts, but the lack of space permits him to mention a tenth of them only, he has to apologize to the nine tenths not mentioned, as herewith I do....

প্রাচীন ইতিহাস এই পাঁউরুটি নামক বস্তুর। পাঁউরুটি, যত সে তো রুটি নামক নিরীহ বস্তুরই নামান্তর।

আপনারা নিশ্চই জানেন যে তুরস্কের প্রত্নতত্ত্বিবিদরা ৮ হাজার ৬০০ বছরের পুরনো একটি রুটি খুঁজে পেয়েছেন বলে দাবি করেছেন? তাঁরা জানিয়েছেন, এখনও পর্যন্ত এটি বিশ্বের পুরনো রুটি। তুরস্কের কনিয়া প্রদেশের চাতালহুইকের প্রত্নতাত্ত্বিক এলাকার 'মেকান ৬৬' নামের অংশটিতে পাওয়া গিয়েছে এই রুটিটি।

এই বইয়ের লেখক বলছেন:

Long ago Occidental man acquired a definite preference for raised bread instead of cooked cereals and flat breads. Bread reigned over the ancient world; no food before or after exerted such mastery over men.

The Egyptians, who invented it, based their entire administrative system upon it; the Jews made bread the starting point of their religious and social laws. The Greeks created profound and solemn legends for their Bread Church of Eleusis.

And the Romans converted bread into a political factor. They ruled by it, conquered the entire world by it, and lost the world again through it.

At last the day came when Jesus Christ made consummate all the spiritual significance that had become attached to it, saying: “Eat! I am the bread.”

“ক্ষুধাকে তোমরা বেআইনি করেছ/ ক্ষুধিতদের আখ্যা দিয়েছ বিপজ্জনক/... হে পদমর্যাদায় অধিষ্ঠিত মহানায়কেরা/ আহা তোমাদের কী জ্বালা।/ আহা তোমাদের কী কষ্ট।” -- ক্ষুন্নিবৃত্তির প্রথম পরিপূরক রুটি।

বলা হয় যে প্রায় বারো হাজার বছর আগে নিওলিথিক যুগে প্রথম রুটি তৈরি করা হয়েছিল। আর তার সৃষ্টি হয়েছিল সম্ভবত জলে মিশ্রিত মোটা চূর্ণ শস্য দিয়ে। এই সময়ে 'আটা' সম্ভবত উত্তপ্ত পাথরের উপর বিছিয়ে এবং গরম ছাই দিয়ে ঢেকে বেক করা হত।

লেখক বলছেন: "For fifteen thousand years the epic of grain has been one with the epic of man. We may say that man has transformed the wild grain into a domestic animal.

It follows man everywhere because it needs the excrements of his economy—manures, phosphates, and nitrogen. And it would die at once without him.

Grain is more dependent than is the dog upon the kindness of its master, for its seed adheres so steadfastly to the stalk that the wind can no longer sow it; it can reproduce itself only by artificial sowing..."

কৃষির ইতিহাস, মানুষের খাদ্যাভাসের বিবর্তন -- প্রাচ্য ও পাশ্চাত্যে , বৈশ্বিক উর্বরতার ইতিহাস , নিরামিষ বনাম আমিষের দ্বন্দ , নিরামিষ, আমিষ, অম্লমধুর, তিক্ত-কষা কিছুই বাদ নেই এই বইয়ের ভাষ্যে।

আর সবকিছুই মামুলি রুটিকে কেন্দ্র করে।

পড়ে দেখতে পারেন।

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jacobs takes us on an odyssey of Bread, its impact on human cultures and religions through the age. He writes, not as an anthropologist or an archaeologist, but like a 19th century author, steeped in the classics. We are taken into the minds of those who first discovered that if flour and water stand long enough, it bubbles and rises. Yeast is formed by microbes, but Jacobs never gets that scientific, nor should he. He tells the story of bread through the stories of pagan religions, including the worship of Demeter in Greece. Her adherents, who were numerous, believed that by eating the holy bread during her annual festival, they would be granted eternal life.

The parallel with Christianity and communion is unmistakable. The worship of Demeter was flourishing at the time of Jesus' deification, and the Gospel writers were familar with it. Paul himself was a Hellenized half-Jew, and the Gospels were written in Greek, no Aramaic, Jesus' language.

Jacobs himself was a German Jew. Like many assimilated German Jews, even though he was sent to a concentration camp, he knew nothing about Judaism. But he did know about Christianity. Therefore, he repeats two charges against Jews that any Jew who knew their religion and also knew about Christianity, would never make.

The first is that he claims that the Jews wanted Jesus dead because he contradicted Judaism. For one thing, even if he had done that, it wouldn't be a capital offense in Judaism. Blasphemy was a Christian concept. In fact, however. Jesus did not say anything that wasn't accepted Rabbinical Judaism of his day or of ours. He was a follower of Hillel who formulated The Golden Rule 70 years before Jesus. Jesus called the Pharisees hypocrites because they didn't practice what they preached. What they preached is what Jesus was preaching. You call people hypocrites when they supposedly believe what you believe, but don't act accordingly.

The second charge, one that has caused 2000 years of bloody persecution is that the Jews were responsible for Jesus' death. It was the Romans who wanted him dead. The Jews were very rebellious towards Roman rule, and Jesus was being called The King of the Jews. So,the Romans saw him as a big troublemaker. I know the Gospels claim that the Sanhedrin met to condemn Jesus to death on Passover. However, the Sanhedrin would no more have met on Passover than the Supreme Court would meet on Easter. And, there's no reason the Sanhedrin would have wanted him dead. Crucifixion was a distinctly Roman form of death, not a Jewish one. The Catholic Church itself proclaimed about half a century ago that the Jews were not responsible for Jesus' death.

These facts don't lessen the main point of Jacobs' book: that religions through the ages have made bread the focus of their rituals, up to the practice of modern Christian communion. However, the damage done by ignorant assertions like Jacobs's cannot go unchallenged. Except for those, this is an interesting book

[Kara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best read while eating hot, fresh, homemade bread.

The writing style is very dated - very Victorian, which, to be fair, H.E. Jacob was. Although, it’s hard to take seriously as a book of history at first when the opening section reads like a tale from Just So Stories, as the hypothetical family of first humans discover agricultural, with everyone playing their roles along antiquated gender lines.

The book makes a good argument that grains and breads were the founding cornerstone of many of the world’s religions. H. E. Jacob makes a good case that the Egyptian and Abrahamic religions are obsessed with wheat, bread and yeast, both literally and metaphorically.

I like his explication of the story of Joseph, citing him as a metaphor for wheat, thrown deep into the ground and then later flourishing and providing nourishment for those in need of food. I also like that he describes the storied Joseph as embarrassed by his family showing up. (Who, after all, according to Andrew Lloyd Webber, “spent all of their days in the fields with sheep.”)

The author shows how the different religions differently interpret the same god through bread: Yahweh views bread as a curse, Jehovah declares it a duty, and Allah delights in bread.

H. E. Jacob really doesn't think much of the Ancient Greeks; he’s of the opinion they just borrowed from others, and improved none of it, although they made quite an interesting little secret club out of a bread based religion. The Romans, however, took bread and made it political.

Romans invented modern bureaucracy – they tried to dress it up in religion they way the Egyptians had, but everyone knew it was a pretty hollow dumb show. They also, as they created their huge empire, invited artificial created famines, as they drew lines on maps, declared them the bread baskets of the empire, and beggared and starved regions, stripping them naked, Jacob says, to feed the elite and the poor of Rome. Rome invented the unemployment system and, astoundingly, made it a heredity right.

The empire, Jacob argues, provide a framework with lots of material goods, but failed to provide for people’s spiritual needs. Bread and circus, he argues, does not feed the soul, and, therefore, the masses of the empire were more than ready to listen to a religion that promised to feed that. Hence, a religion springing up and taking over, practically overnight, in relative terms, that was filled with food metaphors.

The empire overreached itself and fell, and so we come to the Dark Ages, where bread becomes a vital part of the feudal system, and Jacobs makes sure to paint the world as being at an extremely low point – today’s’ revisionist historians talk a lot about how the dark ages weren’t all that bad, how there was some progress, and even a few mini Renaissances – Jacobs compares the beauty of the classical world with the Middle Ages and makes a good case for the middle ages being damn near post-apocalyptic, complete with killer rodents and a fear of technology.

Time marches on, and bread becomes a very important player both in modern warfare and the industrial revolution. Bread was the star player of the French Revolution, and later, a deciding factor in the Napoleonic wars, the American Civil War, and World War One.

Jacobs points out that while Science becomes interested in how to improve bread from the Enlightenment onwards, emotions are still heavily tied to the commodity, as bread is used in the psychology of getting a population whipped up into a frenzy.

Jacobs very calmly examines the importance of bread in WWII, and only in the last two paragraphs of the book mentions, almost off hand, that bread – or rather, a lack of it – was a central fact of life in the concentration camp he survived.

He does not talk about the political or psychological or religious or whatever factors of the Halocaust – he says that the “bread” was “a mixture of potato flour, peas, and sawdust” and that he is thankful he lived to be able to eat real bread again. His real emotions don’t come out until the next page in the Acknowledgments when he thanks his wife for hiding the rough draft of his manuscript during the war, and says that without her, “the barbarians would have burned it”.

Wow.

[Bambino · Rating 4 out of 5]

trabalho apenas minado por circunstâncias bélicas (segunda guerra do mundo) e pela medíocridade dos tempos modernos - qualquer livro que caminhe com a história pela trela, torna-se quase insuportável à medida que se aproxima deste presente em que tu e eu existimos.

o senhor Jacob também se perde um pouco, inevitavelmente, na tarefa descomunal em que se meteu - mas isto funciona mais como testemunha da enormidade da tarefa do que como crítica negativa.

verdade seja dita, o senhor Jacob tem um dom para transportar pessoas no tempo e enrolar as coisas em magia:

o templo de deméter.

tribos nómadas que ceifam o pecaminoso fruto sedentário com culpa, de espada em riste.

fogos de santo antónio (ergotismo)!

as descrições dos padeiros larápios e dos moleiros mafarriquenhos.

a chegada das monstruosas máquinas e o consequente estupro das planícies.

o gangrenar dos tentáculos bélicos devido às infecções da fome.

.

um livro belo e inteligente. leitura saborosa e ligeira - apenas o último quarto pesa um pouco.

.

o artigo em português do brasil, na wikipedia, diz o seguinte:

dê-nos o nosso pão de cada dia. egito antigo e pão, um símbolo de alimentos nativos modernos, tais como o bem-estar básico. é. a história principal é sobre o papel de james saiba política leitor, religião e tecnologia, e como isso leva ao fracasso de napoleão respostas pão. foi lançada uma viagem linda "pão velho", âncoras, explorando grego cozinhar, amor e respeito de pão grão de semente dmitry devi [deméter], a referência bíblica e o pão de referência contribuir para o sucesso da primeira guerra mundial continuam a achar muito. terríveis consequências, ele descreve a perseguição dos campos nazistas e pão serragem própria experiência.

[Fatima Sarder · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The threshing floor is the battlefield between the tenacity of the stalk and men’s hunger for flour.”
― Heinrich Eduard Jacob

The book is word heavy; and despite it's title, it's not a strict history of bread for it goes into the socio-political, cultural and religious associations as well. The history of bread, or rather what, starts with a fable-esque observation of how ants tilled the soil, planted seeds and cultivated grain. It ends with how Hitler used the famine pact (among other things) to bring Eastern Europe to it's knees during the war.

Also, the age old debate about Christ's body being bread (if it was meant in the literal or metaphoric sense) is given a good few chapters.

[Gaileh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Western Civ class from the perspective of bread. (Not anthropomorphized, talking bread, but a bread centered historical narrative by a Jewish emigre to New York city during WWII) Idiosyncratic. Not sure I trust his archaeology/anthropology--just a gut feeling. But interesting. It's one of those books I got to about 70 pages from the end and then was just like, eh, I'm done.

[Kristopher Aadahl · Rating 1 out of 5]

Firstly, this is NOT a history of bread: it's a telling of classical world history loosely through wheat. It is a historical perspective which is outdated and with unreliable information. This work seems to be a production of the author's haughty self-pleasure.

[Piyush · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really like 3.5. Can be very dry at times but overall decent read.

[Marcus Kazmierczak · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was not quite the book I was looking for, the book's focus is more on history than bread. There isn't a cohesive flow between all the pieces of history highlighted. Grain and bread is loosely the connecting piece but feels like it is missing a general idea for the book besides times in history bread and grain are mentioned.

I'm tempted to give it 3 stars because there is interesting information about different regions of the world and their different types of grain. Plus the later chapters on bread's role in WWI and WWII is put together better, I think since its from the author's own time. However, I found myself skimming large sections of the book, it is tough to rate that high.

A better book about a commodity through history is Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlanksky. I think this is what I was looking for with bread the focus. Considering I rated that book 3 stars. I'll stand by this book as 2 stars.

[Greg]

I'll update status later, but the first chapter's view of prehistory is a fantasy and not a great way to start off what's supposed to be a learned treatise on history. Hunting with stone clubs? Where do you even get one of those? Because I have never seen a naturally-occurring stone club. The cavemen go crack skulls with their stone truncheons and sprinkle woman-grains on top as seasoning, as opposed to eating a bunch of plants that one's run away as their sustenance and supplementing that with meat when available, if ever? There are just a lot of nonsensical statements laid out in the first chapter that made me roll my eyes. I know this book was published a long time ago, but I think you could get closer to the truth even using mere common sense as your guide.

[Tom Zalatnai · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you’re looking for a light, casual read full of little fun facts to share at dinner parties, this book might not be for you. If you’re looking for an incredibly well-researched, thoughtful, and thorough survey of the entire history of bread (or, well, until the mid-twentieth century publication date, anyway) then you should pick this one up. It took me just over a year to read it- not because it’s long, but because it’s dense. It’s a large amount of information, written in a less contemporary voice than I’m used to, and I found myself wanting extra time to digest between chapters.

[Melissa Helton · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's marked as a "cook's classic library" book but that is doing a disservice to this book. This is a book about religion, power, economies, revolutions, wars, empires, science, exploitation, and freedom. I can see this book being a text for many, many types of classrooms. The book took 20 years to write and cites hundreds of sources and the text has an interesting history itself-- his wife hid the manuscript while the author was in a Nazi concentration camp. Dense read. Very intense.

[Fraser Sherman · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked this up cheap despite suspecting Jacob would turn out to be the kind of airy synthesizer whose reach exceeds his grasp.
I was right. There's airy speculation about Paleolithic breadbaking presented as fact, storytelling presented as fact, wandering off the subject to address bigger issues in history and a lot of time spent speculating on whether the mass wafer really did bleed when broken. So I put it down unfinished.

[Nat Fassler · Rating 4 out of 5]

A history of the (mostly Western) world, told through the lens of bread, grains, and agriculture. I was hoping for more of a history of bread.

Overall, a bit dense and dry, but still interesting. I could have done without the roughly 50 pages on the Christian interpretation of bread as the actual body of Jesus versus just a metaphor.

[Jana Richards · Rating 3 out of 5]

So many interesting facts in this book. I got it on the kindle and never saw a publishing date. I was surprised about 3/4 thru the book when he starts talking about Hitler in the present tense. Although the book contained a lot of interesting historical facts, I still found myself skimming through some of the pages.

[Daniel Polansky]

The history of human civilization through the frame of wheat/farming generally. The sort of idiosyncratic work which had already become dated by the time our Austrian polymath wrote it in 1942 (having only recently escaped a concentration camp). There's lots of fun stuff in here but little of it really holds up to scrutiny.

[Theresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of it was a bit 'academic' for me, a little... uh, *too* boring; but I was surprised that the majority wasn't.

The man sincerely cared about bread, from the depths of his soul; was not expecting such a passionate take and I loved it.

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

Is this what once passed for scholarship? The author waxes hyperbolic and while uses the occasional fact the author seems mostly to rely on myth and conjecture. At best it’s meh read.

[Crew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great book! It really is amazing what you can learn about history and how cultures either changed or survived based on their treatment of bread. Or how wars have been won and lost because of bread. It's interesting to learn how much religious significance has been given to bread in all religions, and i like how when he speaks of the religions he does so in a matter-of-fact way that does not denigrate any one religion, nor does it exalt one religion. It also treats the deities of the religions as if each did in fact exist.

A few gripes:
- Sometimes the book is more about grain agriculture than it is about bread, and while the two are deeply related, I felt like something was missing.
- As you get closer and closer to modern times, the author gives less and less detail about what the actual bread looked like - I would have liked more info on how bread shapes evolved and about different bread types (the American bread loaf, bagels, etc,)
- The book ends right before WWII ends. It makes sense when you consider that it was first published in 1944, but I would love for some historian to write a part II to this book that picks up where he leaves off. But even more, I would like to get this author's perspective on the organic farming phenomenon and all of the non-bread or non-food uses of corn these days (sweetener and fuel).

Anyway, it's a great book. You don't need to read it straight through all at once, but very fascinating.

[Marty Manjak · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subtitle of this book is "Its Holy and Unholy History." And indeed, it turns out that bread plays a critical role in the story of many religions, not the least of which is Christianity.

In fact, it was in bread, that humble staple which for so many symbolized survival, that the contentious issue of transubstantiation was focused, resulting in the religious wars that ravaged Europe.

It seems that there is nothing that humankind will not use as a pretext for slaughtering. It may surprise people to learn how much blood was shed over bread.

The text is dense and somewhat stilted in style (the book was first published in 1944, but it reads like it was written in the 19th century). Nevertheless, as we move into a future that promises shortages of water, timber, oil, and arable land, it behooves us to understand how elemental needs can transform the mundane into the essential and drive people into a frenzy of killing.

[Jim Puskas · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating excursion into the long and very complex relationship of mankind with bread -- or in a greater context, the cultivation, processing and consumption of grain. Most intriguing to me was Jacobs' exploration of the cultural and religious implications of the choices people have made: which grain to use for different purposes; the implications of leavened bread as opposed to flatbread; the significance of nomadic versus settled lifestyles; the social status accorded to bakers in different societies; the symbolism attached to the breaking of bread. The critical importance of grain production in the ascendancy of Egypt is well known, but Jacobs takes this economic argument much further, exploring the impact of grain upon both the ancient world and modern societies.

[Jennifer Heise · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating text, apparently written while the author was in hiding during WWII. It suffers a bit from the lack of access to research resources, and harkens back to 19th century histories of domestic science. But still, a valuable piece full of nuggest of information, despite the datedness of its opinions and the near-century of research that has come since then... (The praise of commercial bread as more sanitary and also less work for everyone will tweak the nose of the home bread making enthusiast!)
I read it for its remarks on medieval and pre-1650 breadmaking, but there are more topical sources out now. Still, a read through this text is probably de regieur for the serious student of food history.

[Bryce · Rating 3 out of 5]

A history book that happens to be written in a time I'd consider to be a part of history. So for those interested in that sort of thing, there is twofold value to this book: a comprehensive discussion of the historical, religious, anthropological and societal importance of bread but also a peak into how a Victorian mind interprets things out of the past. I admit, reading the world "Mohammedan" used earnestly was a bit of a mind-blower.

[Laura]

My brother bought this for me and I feel a gauntlet has been thrown. I WILL read it. But you should know (when reading any non fiction review by me) that I do not really read much non fiction and never is it the only book I am reading. In other words, my thoughts on this book will come piecemeal, over a large span of time!

[B. Rule · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really great read. It's written in a sort of 19th century literary-historical style, but addresses the role of bread up to and including World War II. The last two paragraphs are really harrowing and show why the author would be so obsessed with bread as to write such a thorough, lyrical history of its role in human life and history. It's not a perfect book, but I would give this 4.5 stars.

[Mrs.Lady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book took a while, never expected it would be so intense. This was like taking a university history course. It is so detailer, the author said he used 40,00o sources! And to think he went on to write something like 40 other books, it´s mind boggling how some people can achieve so much in a life time.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in German in 1944 by an escaped Jewish scholar, the first half jumped around a little, which made it a little difficult to read. It was however really interesting, covering the role of bread in society, religion, war, and science.

[Mary]

I started this in Jan 06, and then gave up during jury duty the following month. I'd like to start over soon.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Six Thousand Years of Bread -- a history of the world that follows the triumphs and tragedies of the human experience in field and kitchen.