Cumin, Camels, and Caravans

  I climbed and climbed, spiraling up narrow roads until I came to the address the man had given me. There I saw what feira, or “market,” has come to mean for most Portuguese. It was what Americans might call a flea market or a swap meet for the poor. Although a few drinks and some fresh watermelons were sold by a couple of vendors, the rest of the merchandise was made up of piles of cast-offs from the last half century of Western civilization. No aromatic herbs, not even a cheap aphrodisiac. Why look for such a thing when there are pornographic videocassettes and piles of CDs? There were cell phones and electric mixers, transistor radios and boom boxes. There were stalls full of fake leather accessories—belts, collars, and bracelets—and heaps of used auto parts, battered motorcycles, and scooters.

  So, other than some piri piri hot sauce, cumin, and coriander, this is what globalized trade has ultimately provided to the Portuguese? These are the treasures that da Gama bestowed on his people by freeing the trade routes from the hands of the evil Muslims.

  Fortunately, da Gama was followed by a man who was less brutal and more of a naval strategist. Afonso de Albuquerque first arrived in the Indian Ocean in 1503. It was about the same time that the last Banu Nebhani, a poetry-writing ancestor of mine named Sulayman ibn Sulayman al-Nebhani, was ruling Oman. He heard through the grapevine that Omani dissidents dissatisfied with his reign had begun clandestine negotiations with the Portuguese to overthrow him, and within a year’s time of the rumors, the 350-year control of Oman’s spice-trading ports by my Banu Nebhani tribe had collapsed.22 It was an earlier season of Arab Spring.

  By 1507, de Albuquerque had closed off the Gulf of Hormuz so that Persian and Arab ships could not easily reach India. He soon closed off all of the spice trade by other nations between the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Red Sea on one side, and the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, and Pacific Ocean on the other. With less blood spilled than what da Gama had exacted, he had taken control of the ports of Muscat and Sohar from the resident Omani Muslims and Jews, and without incident had pressured Dhofar into surrender and into signing a treaty. In less than a decade, he turned the Indian Ocean into a mare clausum in which the Portuguese exclusively controlled the trade that the Turks, the Radhanites, and the Karimi had previously managed.

  He stormed into Malacca—the central port for the Spice Islands and the westernmost reach of Chinese sailors—shot a few elephants, and sent the Muslim sultan running for his life. He dispatched ambassadors to Siam and to Canton, the far reaches of the known world.23 The bridge between the Muslims of the Far East and of the Middle East had been closed on the overland routes of the Silk Roads by the Ottoman Empire around 1380, but it took more than another century for the bridge across the seas to come tumbling down. The pivotal role in the transcontinental trade of aromatics that my own tribe had been engaged in for centuries had apparently come to a close.

  As I have learned recently, however, some of the Banu Nebhani tribe had moved on from Oman not long before the fall of their dynasty there. In the fourteenth century, an heir to the Nebhani mercantile fortune in Muscat and Bahla absconded with some of his inheritance and established his own nation-state in the Lamu Archipelago off the coast of Kenya. His name was Sultan Ahmad Abu Bakar Nebhani and he called his new kingdom and spice trading colony Akhbar Pate (or Patta).24

  Native Kenyans as well as archaeologists who have visited Pate Island tell me that the prehistoric ruins from the era of Akhbar Pate continue to be impressive. On the eastern edge of the island are the remains of Shanga, a city built on white coral that was abandoned in the fourteenth century. Today, the site is littered with pottery shards and half-broken statuary that archaeologist James de Vere Allen believes came from Asia.25 At its center are the ruins of a large mosque and a strange stone tomb with fluted pillars decorated with green celadon bowls. Similar fluted-pillar tombs are found not only on Pate but also up and down the Kenyan and Somali coasts wherever ancient harbors of the spice trade once stood. One such tomb can be found amid the ruins of the centuries-old town of Gedi, between Malindi and Mombasa, the two greatest spice-trading towns of the East African coast.

  But what is even more curious than the archaeological sites on Pate are the appearance and customs of its current inhabitants. Community members of a fishing culture on Pate called the Bajuni were described by anthropologist Nello Puccioni in 1935 as having “a physical type absolutely different from other people of the region. The skin is rather light, in some, slightly olive. And in the men you can spot flowing beards; and the women part their hair in the middle and weave it into two side braids.”26

  Although no published genetic studies exist that confirm the probable multiple origins of the Bajuni people, linguists suggest that remnants of their dialect can be found in coastal Somalia and Kenya, and that they include loan words or grammatical structures from Somali, Arab, Indian, Persian, and possibly Southeast Asian languages.

  Customs and language point strongly toward multiple origins of the Bajunis of Shanga, though scholarly work in the past conjectured that they came directly from Shanghai and remain a relatively pure example of an early Chinese diaspora.27 Genetic evidence to date cannot confirm that. My own favored hypothesis, for a hybrid origin of coastal African peoples, with Arab, Persian, Indian, and Chinese traders, is at least as viable. It speaks to the fact that spice trade over millennia drove not only the structure, ethics (or lack of them), and culture of globalization but also brought various genetic populations back together again into a “rainbow” human family. The Lamu Archipelago on which my ancestors lived six centuries ago may have been inhabited by as many genetically mixed individuals from various continents as a place like Hawaii is today. Perhaps the ongoing underwater archaeological excavations in the Lamu Archipelago of a Chinese ship sunk roughly six centuries ago—when my Banu Nebhani kin were still on Pate—will eventually tell us something of that lost hybrid world, another island of convivencia where multicultural exchanges were perhaps virtuous for a while.

  • • •

  • CUMIN •

  Cumin (Cuminum cyminum) has merited inclusion in the title of this book exactly because it is so demonstrative of culinary globalization: it has been cultivated, utilized, and traded for so long that no botanist or archaeologist is sure where it originated. Although the broad-brush-stroke answer to its place of origin is western Asia, various historians have suggested Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Ethiopia, and even Southwest Asia as the locus of its domestication. There may be scant agreement as to when, where, or by whom it was domesticated, but there is little doubt as to why it began to be harvested, then managed, and finally cultivated. When toasted and ground, its khaki-colored seeds are so strongly aromatic that few can resist their lure. The cuminaldehydes in its oil have a warm, earthy aroma with a lingering pungency and a flavor that is pleasingly bitter at first, before melting into an aftertaste of sweetness. Cumin flavors are fitting complements to the flavors of many legumes, from garbanzo beans and lentils in the Old World to lima, pinto, and tepary beans in the New World.

  Many scholars have established that cumin was harvested and used in the Levant during the earliest Biblical times. Written records describing its inclusion in gardens and fields indicate that it was already well entrenched in the Tigris-Euphrates region when the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations emerged. It appears that Arab spice traders first took it to India, Phoenicians carried it westward through their North African colonies to the Iberian Peninsula, and Berbers transported it across trans-Saharan trade routes into the semiarid Sahel.

  The origin of the English term cumin lies in the Semitic languages, including the Amharic kemun, Akkadian kamûmu, Aramaic kamuna, Arabic al-kamoun, Old Hebrew kammon, and Egyptian kamnini. The Old Greek kyminon and Latin cuminim are clearly derived from the Semitic cognate and not the other way around. Most Romance languages retain some variant of these ancient terms, including cumino, comino, cominho, and cumin. In Chinese, cumin is kuming except when speaking of herbal medicin
e. Then cumin becomes xiao hui xiang, which likens it to fennel, just as in some other languages it is confused with caraway. In and near the Indian subcontinent, it appears that most names are rooted in the Sanskrit jri, which means to “digest,” or “ferment.” Indeed, cumin seeds are used as a digestive in many parts of the world.

  Once it has been introduced into a new land and culture, cumin has a way of insinuating itself deeply into the local cuisine, which is why is has become one of the most commonly used spices in the world. When an Israeli student whom I was hosting told me that cumin was the signature spice of hummus bi-tahini in Tel Aviv, I was taken aback at first, since at that time I believed it was primarily a Mexican spice! Ask chefs in southern India to imagine garam masala without toasted cumin, and they might tell you that jira has been in their spice kit since Indians began to cook! Its use in China is championed among the Turkic-speaking Uighur of Xinxiang Province, who likely first received it from Sogdians, Persians, and Arabs traveling the Silk Roads. Cumin is essential to complex savory spice mixtures such as the Berber ras el hanout, Georgian svanuri marili, Yemeni zhoug, and Arab baharat. It is also a key ingredient in Cajun spice mixes, seven seas curry in Malaysia, and Indian masalas. It has made the fewest inroads in Europe, where it is largely limited to flavoring cheese, such as Gouda and Leyden. In fact, in Finnish, juusto means “cheese,” and cumin is called juustokumina.

  Gambrelle, Fabienne. The Flavor of Spices. Paris: Flammarion, 2008.

  Green, Aliza. Field Guide to Herbs and Spices. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2006.

  Katzer, Gernot. “Gernot Katzer’s Spice Pages.” http://gernot-katzers-spicepages.com/engl/index.html. Accessed September 3, 2011.

  Sortun, Ana, with Nicole Chaison. Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean. New York: Regan Books, 2006.

  Weiss, E. A. Spice Crops. Wallingford, UK: CABI Publishing, 2002.

  CHAPTER 12

  Crossing the Drawbridge over the Eastern Ocean

  It was almost too outrageous to record when it occurred at two o’clock in the morning on October 12, 1492, in the misty seascape surrounding a scattering of islands. On that now-legendary expedition westward led by Christopher Columbus, who was bankrolled by the fervently intolerant Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, the very first man to catch sight of previously undiscovered land was not a Catholic Spaniard but a converso, one whose father was a morisco hidalgo. It is not clear whether Rodrigo de Triana had become a voluntary convert, or cristiano nuevo—what other Jews called a meshummadin in Hebrew or marrano in vulgar Spanish—or an involuntary convert, known as anusim in Hebrew. As for his Moorish father, he may have taken on a Christian pseudonym in order to be recognized as a descendant of nobility, or hidalgo, a term derived from hijo de algo, “a son of someone (of stature).” But to get on one of Columbus’s three ships that departed from Palos earlier that year, the man born in Seville in 1469 at least had to feign being a Christian.

  A few days after spotting what were likely some American golden plovers and Eskimo curlews that were presumably heading toward land, Rodrigo de Triana was up in the crow’s nest when he caught a good glimpse of the islands that we now call the Bahamas. The first spot of land he saw was quickly named San Salvador, and by a leap of faith, Rodrigo “discovered” what were soon to become known as the West Indies and the Americas.

  Yes, it was the same Rodrigo de Triana whom Columbus knew back in Spain as Juan Rodríguez Bermejo de Triana, the man whom he had personally selected for his expedition to the Indies because of his sharp eyes and broad training. But on this October morning, Columbus gave him no mind. Instead, he quietly recorded in his own journal that he himself had seen the first evidence of land the day before, thereby qualifying for the cash reward of ten thousand maravedíes that his sponsors had put up as an incentive for the discovery of a shortcut to the Spice Islands.

  When Rodrigo later realized the fiction that his commander had perpetrated, he left the Catholic faith “because Columbus did not give him any credit, nor did the King give him any recompense for his having seen light in the Indies before any other man in the crew.”1 So troubled was de Triana that, on his return to Spain, he did not reconcile himself with his mother’s Judaism but instead embraced Islam. De Oviedo, the expedition’s chronicler, claimed that de Triana immediately moved off the Iberian Peninsula to live in North Africa, probably in coastal Morocco.2 Remarkably, there is some evidence that he sailed with other Muslims to the real Spice Islands (the Moluccas) in 1525, before dying and being buried in the traditional fashion of a certain Muslim tribe of Moors called the Mudarra. He died with another bitter taste in his mouth, as well, for the Catholics had burned his morisco father at the stake for trading with Jews.

  This odd set of occurrences reminds us how intertwined the fates of Jews and Muslims were in the days immediately following the onset of the Spanish Inquisition. Although in some ways they were treated differently, both groups were targeted in the edicts and decrees of expulsion emanating from the prejudicial policies of Ferdinand and Isabella, through what followers of Harvard psychologist Gordon W. Allport have come to call the “rejection of out-groups.”3 But the eight hundred thousand to one million Jews and Muslims who left Spain to escape the Inquisition did not all slink into North Africa and the Middle East to live out their days as their ancestors had done. Instead, some extended their spice-trading network by traversing the Atlantic Ocean, as if a new drawbridge had suddenly been firmly lowered onto American soil. By some scholarly estimates, at least one-fourth of the European settlers of Mexico prior to 1545 were Jews (and no doubt Muslims as well) escaping the Inquisition.4 Few of these immigrants to the Americas became directly engaged with the spice trade, but there is little doubt that many of them craved the aromas and flavors of their homeland.

  Muslim historian Saulat Pervez has said it simply and succinctly: “Columbus’ 1492 expedition coincided with the fall of Granada, the very last Muslim stronghold in Spain. This led to some very harsh times for Spanish Muslims [and Jews], culminating in the Spanish Inquisition. This turn of events encouraged many displaced Muslims [and Jews] to go [first to the Canary Islands and then] to the New World in the hopes of freely exercising their religion once again.”5

  In short, they quickly got as far away from Rome, Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, and Granada as possible. In 1497, Portugal began to expel Jews and Muslims from its soil, and its own inquisition started in 1506. Because the Canary Islands had been filled to capacity, escape to the recently named West Indies seemed more inviting.6 An estimated five thousand Jews and an equal number of Muslims fled to South and Central America as soon as they were able, that is, within just decades of Columbus’s first voyage from Spain.7

  That the Americas and the islands in the Caribbean were inhabited largely by indigenous peoples with strong place-based religions was probably of no immediate consequence to these religious and economic refugees. They could hardly imagine anything worse than the surge of religious intolerance and economic disruption that their Jewish and Muslim communities had recently experienced. As noted earlier, like Rodrigo de Triana, Luis de Torres, a Jew who had been born Yosef ben Ha Levy Haivri, traveled with Columbus on his first expedition. He had converted to Christianity just a few days before leaving Spain and then remained in Hispaniola, where he became the first Jewish-born converso to live in the New World. Joining the first expedition to the New Spain mainland undertaken by Hernán Cortés, Sephardic Jews and Muslims helped secure Mexico for Spain in 1521. Within seven years, a merchant named Hernando Alonso became the first of Cortés’s company to be burned at the stake for Judaizing.8

  But did these Jews and Muslims play a significant role in establishing the trade in spices between the New World and the Old World? It is odd that we know that Christopher Columbus and his crew had chiles in their hands by the last days of 1492, but historians do not agree on how chiles moved from the Antilles and the Americas to Africa, Asia, and Europe in less than fifty years after Columbus first wrote abo
ut them on January 1, 1492.9 Nor are there shipping records to verify chiles, vanilla, allspice, and cacao coming through the hands of merchants of Jewish or Muslim ancestry in the first decades after 1492. But is there other evidence? Columbus had gone looking for a westward route from Europe to find the mother lode of black pepper but had accidentally discovered chiles instead. When he declared them to be potentially “more valuable than either black or melegeuta pepper,” he had trusted Jewish and Muslim conversos in his presence, ones whose families had already played a role in the spice trade for centuries, if not millennia.

  When Columbus returned to Spain, some of those Jews, Arabs, and Berbers stayed on in the New World, establishing colonies that later attracted others of the same ethnicities or faiths. While their early presence as immigrants in the Americas is unquestionable, that fact alone does not assure that they played roles in restructuring spice trade and other commerce similar to those they had assumed in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The question that has hardly been asked in any history of the spice trade is this: could crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims have played critical roles in taking chiles, chocolate, and other aromatics back to the Old World and then disseminating them? If not, why were they accused of the “sins of chocolate and chiles” by the Mexican Inquisition?10

  At first glance, it is indeed curious that early Jews in Mexico and New Mexico were accused by New Spain’s Catholic clergy of drinking “inebriating” chocolate beverages on Christian fast days and of hanging wreaths of dried chile peppers over Christian crosses. But those scandalous acts do not, in and of themselves, suggest that immigrants of Jewish and Arab ancestry controlled the trading of these goods. They simply used them in a manner that piqued the curiosity and wrath of the Spanish-speaking Catholic establishment. To answer this question more deeply, we must ascertain the roles Jews, Moors, and Arabs played not only in Mexico and what is now the U.S. Southwest but also in the Caribbean and Central and South America. And we must remember that the Aztec, Toltec, Mayan, and Incan empires had independently advanced their own forms of culinary imperialism, taxation, and tribute that preceded the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese by centuries. The Aztecs, in particular, had engaged traders known as pochteca in the long-distance transport of spices and other aromatics. Clearly, European spice merchants who emigrated to the Americas were not entering “virgin” territory with regard to long-distance spice trade; they were simply opening up new markets for neotropical plant products for which there were already in place sophisticated means of harvesting, processing (including fermentation), extra-local distribution, and ritualized consumption.