Rafram Chaddad on Djerba & the Jewish Culinary Traditions of Tunisia

Interview by Jade GEORGE

Rafram Chaddad is a Tunisian-born artist whose work explores the intersections of identity, culture, and food. Growing up in a Djerbian Jewish Tunisian household, he developed a deep connection to the culinary traditions of his homeland, where food is intricately tied to history, land, and memory. Part of his art practice reflects this connection, delving into the complexities of cultural appropriation, particularly in relation to food, and advocating for the respect of provenance. Through his work, he challenges the notion of a singular, homogeneous identity and emphasizes the importance of understanding the diverse histories behind food, from its origins to the way it is adapted by different communities. For Rafram, food is more than just sustenance—it's a cultural artifact, a symbol of belonging, and a vehicle for storytelling. With his focus on the food of his hometown and the broader North African and Jewish diaspora, Rafram invites us to reconsider how food shapes our identities and our understanding of heritage.

Jade George: A lot of the work you’ve done and have been featured in is rooted in speaking up against cultural appropriation – food appropriation – and respecting provenance in general. Obviously, this is a huge topic right now, given the history in the region, but more so our current story that’s in the making. You’re Tunisian; you grew up in a Jewish household. Could you plainly identify the origins of the food you grew up with?

Rafram Chaddad: First of all, there’s something out there that’s referred to as Jewish food, but this doesn’t really exist. Because food is not Jewish – but food can be a place: it’s based on land, soil, weather, climate, mentality, and not about if you believe in Christianity, Islam or Judaism. It's about where you are: if you are in Saudi Arabia, you're on the spice route, which means that you have rice and spices from India, the desert and camel meat. If you are in Lebanon, you have maadnous (or baqdounis, Arabic for parsley) and you have freshness, and so on. A Russian Jew will not be connected to the food of a Tunisian Jew, who would have mostly grown up with Tunisian food, which could have a Jewish variant, but that’s totally connected to the culture of the place. This food cannot exist in a different climate. That's just how food works.

JG: Tell us about some of these variations.

RC: So there are all kinds of possible additions, or the opposite – omissions. Sociologist Sami Zubaida, who’s a regular participant at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, points out that Jews used to fry in zeit zaytoun (olive oil) not in semna (ghee) because of kosher restrictions, and when frying oils came about, they switched. It was firstly because frying in olive oil is very stinky, so people would smell: at the market, they would call them “the smelling Jews.” All their walls were black from frying olive oil – people make ink from this kind of olive smoke. I did a work in my last exhibition about it, that’s not even connected to food. The point is, food is never about religion. Just like how at a Tunisian iftar or on Eid there would be specifics that are clearly of the region.

Equally, there would be variations, like in our island in Djerba where we would have food cooked for 24 hours like Jews do all over the world for Shabbat. But we’re going to have fish and qamah (wheat), and it's going to be very different from the ones you find in France or Spain. The categories may be known, but then it's all about land and memory. When you're an immigrant, you cook from memory, which connects you to where you come from. The Chinese food in New York is Chinese with some adaptations to the ingredients you can find in America and what they can fly in; Italian cuisine in New York is Italian with some American adaptations…Land and memory are very important in food.

“If you use the idea of ‘what your grandmother cooked’ to confront the propaganda of Israel, you will find that absolutely no dish has anything to do with Israel, since it just started to exist a few years ago.”

JG: Why this sudden obsession with Jewish food do you think?

RC: What happened with Jewish food and Israel is mostly a nationalistic agenda, not related to food history or traditions. The idea of Israeli nationality is completely new; and they tried to connect many people from different backgrounds – Tunisians, Iraqis, Russians, etc. – into one culture. You can build a fake national image, but with food it's much harder.

JG: Why is that?

RC: Because food is a very important factor in history and identity: people eat what their mothers and grandmothers cook. It's taste; it's sensitivity; it’s many things. It's about what grows around you also. They make big efforts flying in bloggers to talk about what they call “new Israeli cuisine”, pushing the idea of, let’s say, Tunisians who immigrate to Israel and start making shakshuka there…whatever. More Tunisian Jews exist in France, and they don't call it a French dish. But they do try to call it Israeli because they believe Tunisian Jews have no agency.

They actually started a museum recently called the Jewish Museum of Food, in the attempt to focus more on the Jewish stuff as related to Israel, but they have lots of contradictions. Because when they start to understand what Jews eat, they see how different it is from background to background. They could call it multicultural or multinational if they wanted to, but this doesn't go well with their narrative of a new one nation that claims to be a place for people who have been waiting to go back.

JG: Does anyone really buy it?

RC: I don't think it's even a debate, because no one believes that hummus was invented after 1948. Same for shakshuka, which is a Tamazight word of course. It was not invented there. It’s never been a debate – it's a political position and it's ridiculous. The food of my island, Djerba, in Tunisia is completely different from the food of the capital, Tunis. Djerba is really close to Tripoli in Libya and has more common dishes and flavors with it. So it's really about land; it's about vegetables; it's about the type of fish, the type of meat… If you're in the north, it's colder, so you cook heavier food. You make lighter food in the south because it's hotter – these are the characteristics of food. 

“They say, ‘We Jews are all one and we need to delete our individual cultures.’ They want to delete the whole culture, especially for Arab Jews.”

JG: What is local food?

RC: I was talking to Anissa Helou many years ago about this actually. I asked her, “What is local food?” For her, one of the definitions is “what your grandmother cooked.” If you use this idea to confront the propaganda of Israel, you will find that absolutely no dish has anything to do with Israel, since it just started to exist a few years ago. Maybe you read this article that I published a few years ago about shakshuka and the Mediterranean diet that became very popular in the 90s. In New York, they started to love olive oil; and we’re like, “Yes, olive oil, we’ve had it for generations.” And in Israel, they used to laugh about this kind of food. The food of the Jews coming from Arab countries they called “spicy,” “red,” “bad food,” “very low,” and things like that.

Racism was not only towards Palestinians but also towards Jews from Muslim countries. Once they discovered that they had it under their noses, they started to magnify it and talk about it like it’s theirs – like it’s “local food.” And this is very interesting, because olive trees in this region are taken from Palestinians, through this thing called JNF where they rent it to Israeli Jews for 99 years. We’re talking about 300- to 400- (and even more) year-old olive trees. When they talk about local food, to them this means, “Oh we managed to grow a strawberry here.” This is the misconception, and again, this is not what their grandmothers cooked. When a Chinese guy cooks in New York, he’s going to make his local food from China; he’s not going to make a crab bisque or an apple cake.

JG: What did your grandmother cook? 

RC: Djerba is a very closed community, and a very patriarchal one. The women cook and clean, and the men sit in a cafe. The same idea applies to everything else in Djerba. My father will never eat a cooked meal that was not prepared by my mom: it's impossible for him. Grilled meat is the only thing he would eat outside. When my mother was in the hospital, his sister cooked for him, and he wasn’t thrilled about it. My mother strictly cooks Djerbian food – not even food from other parts of Tunisia. It’s very very basic but it’s completely different from any other region.

We have a different food for each day, because it's all connected to our seven days. We eat couscous twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. On Tuesdays it’s couscous hout (fish couscous) – this is a famous thing. Friday night is always a big dinner: everyone sits around the table and we bless the wine that people make in their houses, and there’s kémia, which is like muqabbalat or mezze of cooked things like aubergine and tomatoes, some salads, and bread which my mother bakes. We sit down and eat these small plates for hours. Then comes the couscous of meat and chicken together, with hummus (chickpeas) and many vegetables. The day after is Shabbat, and there is a long-cooked dish called harissa. It’s made with fish in the summer and lamb in the winter, and cooked for 24 hours with wheat.

Everyone comes back from the synagogue sla, make their blessings on the bread, and eat this dish. In the afternoon, there’s usually sardines, bread, harissa, zeytun (olives), and things like that. Sunday is leftovers of the Shabbat food, because making it was exhausting. There will be some slight additions like bread and, maximum, some eggs. On Mondays there is moqli, like fried fish and vegetables. So every day has its own rhythm and it's the same food for hundreds of years; there’s no way to even try anything else.

JD: Did you appreciate this food growing up?

RC: I actually started to be interested in food because when I was young, I didn't eat a lot of couscous from my mother. It was a rebellion: we wanted street food like fried chicken; we wanted something that wasn’t spicy – not with red sauce. I really refused to eat that food when I was young. And when I started my art practice, I started to look back on things and understand stuff. And food was part of that. My mother cooked something called P’kaila, a dish usually made by Jews, but Muslims also make it  and call it “madfouna”. It’s a confit of spinach cooked for hours in olive oil. It's a black dish because of the iron in it. There were spinach leaves all over the living room; she put spinach leaves everywhere because she was cleaning them and drying them, since you couldn’t start with wet spinach – it had to be very dry. And that was an incredible thing that I was ignoring because I was a kid; I was an idiot. So I did a kind of tribute to this in Munich: a big glass box with a spinach-drying machine. Things started to come back to me, like my mother insisting on eating barley (شعير) couscous (malthut) instead of wheat couscous because it was rare and healthier.

“This food is slavery, basically. Every time I tried to imitate the stuff my mother made, it was literally two days of standing in the kitchen – it’s impossible. [...] There’s generational suffering and disease both psychological and physiological that’s carried in our women’s legs.”

There was a big hit of diabetes in the south of Tunisia. My grandparents died from diabetes in Tunis in their early fifties because they changed their diet to white rice and white wheat because it was more fashionable to have white food – who wants to eat this horse food anyway, right? But now I’m trying to imitate this because it's all connected to color, to culture, to many many things which are very interesting to me. My ancestors were living in the same place for thousands of years. They hadn’t moved even one kilometer away from their natural habitat. We’re talking 2000 to 3000 years of eating the same grain, and then you have this Russian or Ukrainian grain coming in: it's a death sentence for them. And it’s immediate. The body is not capable of processing it. Everything is changing: a chicken is completely different – it's white, the bones are soft. The bread is different. 

JG: Do you try to replicate these traditions, or do you think that this old type of laborious cooking is something for the museums?

RC: It's hard to say that we can continue something from 50 years ago. This food is slavery, basically. Every time I tried to imitate the stuff my mother made, it was literally two days of standing in the kitchen – it's impossible. In the south they still do it because it's still primitive there in a way. And it's a good thing because we can still look at it, but I’m always thinking, “Is it fair?” My mother will slave away for two days in the kitchen to cook something that everyone will eat in 10 minutes and leave the table. Women have problems in the legs anywhere there is traditional cuisine here in Tunisia because they stand all day and cannot complain because of the fear they will be replaced – other women can be wives.

I'm talking as somebody who's in the culture and who respects a lot of our food traditions. But I don't think they should continue. Yes, they should be remembered. There should be adaptations and celebrations of these kinds of dishes. We should understand where they come from, how they were born, what's the result of them, and what their varieties are – that's very important. That's why we write books and do art; we’re basically trying to bring these traditions to light. But there’s generational suffering and disease both psychological and physiological that’s carried in our women’s legs, even if we work on computers now, because our mothers and grandmothers used to be sick and nobody took care of that. And we see it, it's still going in the family, and this needs to stop; it's completely unfair.

JG: How much of these traditions inspire your art practice? 

RC: I'm trying to separate the food part from my art work a bit. They do meet in culture. But for me, in Djerba especially, the crafts, the way of clothing, and the food are all simply a reality. I don't even want to call it shared reality; nobody was thinking about sharing their culture because it was just there. My great-grandmother was a popular animal doctor. She made all kinds of liquids for camels and lambs when they were sick, and all of it was from the land, region and climate. She wore the same clothes her neighbors wore. She never thought not even for a second that she was different, or whether she was Muslim or Amazigh. We never thought about these things. We think about these things now because we work in culture; we try to articulate and analyze things. And I actually don't want to be stuck in the past, because I'm not living in there; I'm doing contemporary work that’s about freedom of today, about happiness of today, about reality today. I'm only watching the past to understand.

People mostly use the past for wars, but I'm trying to use it to understand some materialistic things. I try to look at people without fetishizing groups. People label me as “Jewish” because I'm probably the only Jewish visual artist that’s doing exhibitions in institutional places in the Arab world. People like to fetishize origins thinking that there is something similar between me and another Jew or Tunisian. But it's not about being Jewish or whatever. I'm very individual in what I do and I have layers of identity: it's Arabness; it's North Africaness; it's Jewishness. It also shuffles – it's changing all the time. I think all of us are like that. We always try to magnify if it's manhood, if it's North Africanism. People do it for money also, you know, “call yourself Mediterranean if you want to make money.” You will not call yourself North African. People hear “Arab” and they are afraid of that; they don't want to hear about you. My artichoke recipe is Mediterranean, because it's softer. Some people will prefer “Jewish.” 

JG: Do these memories come to you visually?

RC: It’s many things. They come visually, sensorially… In 2004 – my first comeback to Tunis – I was with my mother’s neighbors in Lafayette who served me bread and olive oil, and that completely threw me back to my childhood. Bread and olive oil, that's it. It's something that’s very simple and good. Not in the way olive oil is today with its chicness, and the tastings. It’s olive oil, why do you need to taste it? Just eat it. All of it is Westernization and fetishizing 

JG: How is your work around food different from your art?

RC: Food is very different in that it’s not only individual; it's also communal. It's connected to memory; it's connected to parents; it's connected to community. Art is more individual, and it isn’t functional. Food is functional, and the mother is the center of the house.

JG: Is there something typical to all the Jews of Tunisia?

RC: In Tunis I’ve interacted with Jewish and non-Jewish families, and their cuisine is very very different from the south for example. Eggs are probably the only typical thing. Shakshuka, for example, is Amazigh and is connected to the area: let's say Libya, Jazayer (Algeria), and Tunis – or the triangle in the south. Shakshuka was already shakshuka before tomatoes were even in this region, but eggs were not focal in shakshuka. Shakshuka is really leftover khodra (vegetables) which can be ful akhdar (green fava beans), pumpkin, batata (potatoes), anything from the land. You just cracked eggs on top of that. That’s connected to our Andalusian heritage: in al-Andalus they loved eggs and put them everywhere.

JG: Why eggs?

RC: Because it's easy, and everyone had chicken in the house so there were a lot of eggs. Take mhamsa, for example, which is the pasta we do here. All Tunisians make it: it’s this small mhamsa grain on which we put eggs. Or take brik (phyllo pastries typically stuffed with tuna fish in Tunisia), a street food in which we also use eggs. Some people here have a kind of “Jewish fetish” I call it. They like to say, “Ah, this is Jewish!” But people also eat brik at the end of Ramadan. These things are embedded in Tunisian culture, which says a lot about how culture works: people eating together, and communities sharing and exchanging rituals shows trust.

Going back to your point about food being typical of a group of people: in general it's very hard to differentiate communities that live in the same territory. Because the janoub (the south) of Tunisia is very similar: Djerba, Tataouine, Medenine, Gafsa, resemble each other and don’t have as much in common with Tunis. They’re far from the influence hubs and very modest in a way – the way the people dress and eat. The north is something else: cities in the north share similar food and heritage even within communities with different beliefs and religions. I’m not saying that it can’t happen where two communities don’t talk to each other – even in Djerba it can. When you have more Western influence, the separation is more visible. You see it in France where they try to make everyone seem the same, and this is where you take out all the particulars.

“Even in Tunisia, the food has really low esteem, because of Westernization and globalization, and because of the penetration of mayonnaise, melted cheese, and plastic food.”

JG: Anytime we publish anything on afikra that is related to North Africa, the comments section becomes out of control. Especially when we use terminologies like “Arab” and “Amazigh.”

RC: Yeah, people are nuts. Especially when you talk about couscous which is another Amazigh dish. It’s interesting because Amazigh is all about freedom: we’re talking about a region covering so many places, and naturally, couscous is everywhere – it’s like pasta. It’s also not important actually; what’s important in couscous dishes is the soup. That’s what gives taste to the dish; otherwise you can think of it as plain rice. We make it with a red soup because we’re a red cuisine – a spicy cuisine. Moroccans make it yellow because they’re a sweeter cuisine. They don't like things too spicy so they use saffron and curcuma. Also Tunisia’s is more of a fish cuisine than other Arab countries.

We have many similarities and many differences, and that’s normal; and it's not related to countries, because couscous of Sfax is not couscous of Djerba, and couscous of Djerba is not couscous of Bizerte. And even inside Djerba you have many varieties. It's never been about countries – it's about variety. My friends – two brothers from El Djem – have a harissa brand called Zwita. We recently did a post about shakshuka together, and the comments section is fucking crazy. I refer to both sides, of course, which to me is the same side, almost. From anti-Semitic, to anti-Islamic, to anti-everything. It’s stupid; it’s ignorant – whatever you can call it. The text was very clear: I was talking about regionality and identity, and people really lost it. 

JG: Do you think it’s important to make these distinctions? 

RC: The thing is that we never really cared about this stuff, actually. We don’t care if brik is Tunisian. We don’t because we just ate it. My mother doesn’t care what her food is. But when Israel politicized food that's what happened. It's not just food: it’s the whole culture; it’s language; it’s many other things. They say, “Okay, we Jews are all one and we need to delete our individual cultures.” They want to delete the whole culture, especially for Arab Jews. They need Syrian Jews to delete their Syrian past, and want the same from Russian and Polish Jews: “You don't have a culture anymore, this is your new culture.” This is when the differences started.

I was  judging some food thing with Anissa in Adana in Turkey, and she saw the Lebanese pavilion and it was all about hummus. She was very frustrated. She told me, “Hummus is really not the most important thing in our cuisine.” But because of the wars, and blood boiling over “this is ours,” people started to focus too much on the flag and less on important things.

I'm always trying to dilute this border thing, to talk about the region, because it speaks more truth to food. When I say these things they tell me that I’m politicizing food and what I say back is, “We didn’t talk about these things until you started to do it.” And we need to protect it because it’s not only about food; it's about how people live together. And I’m not talking about coexistence and all these fake words. It's people that just live together. You know in Europe, they didn't have this. The Jews were completely isolated. They were assaulted all the time. But in North Africa, it was different; and that’s the story they want to hide – they want you to forget about it. But it exists and shakshuka is part of this story.  

JG: You mentioned cooking a lot with fish and that that’s a big part of food in Tunisia. Any favorite fish regions?

RC: In Djerba we have this spicy fish dish called hraimi – which also exists in Tripoli in Libya – but not in Tunis, mainly because it's spicy and because the fish comes from the Bay of Bibane, a very famous Bay with some of the best fish in the Mediterranean. Ben Ali ate fish from this place every morning; they would fly it in for him. Because the fish is so fresh, they make a fresh red sauce and eat it right at noon so that it’s the freshest possible. It's like a ceremony that happens to take place in two countries. Djerba and Tripoli are one region and the food similarities say it all.

JG: You haven’t spoken much about street food, which is a huge part of Tunisian cuisine.

RC: I don’t want to annoy anyone and get flags in the comments, but for me street food in Tunis is really phenomenal: there are at least 25 items. It's hard to find this number in the Mediterranean, or many countries outside Asia. I’m actually in the process of working on a street food book on Tunisia. I’m trying to cover all the street food here. Mostly in photography and the whole notion of “outside”.  I’m focusing on portraits of people who make the food and of people eating it. It's focused on the seasons as well, so there will be a summer shooting and winter shooting, etc. It’ll show when we have bisbess (fennel) in the streets. The Tunisian sandwich will be in there, of course. The idea is to make it a book that feels like a piece of art when you’re holding it – almost like an object – and to give it a lot of respect. Even in Tunisia, the food has really low esteem, because of Westernization and globalization, and because of the penetration of mayonnaise, melted cheese, and plastic food. It’s all over the world: it’s in Karachi, in Mumbai… It’s also TikTok and the internet. So I’m really trying to do something a bit different.

JG: Do you recommend other Tunisian cookbooks?

RC: My friend Malek Labidi is doing some incredible work around Tunisian cuisine. She already published a few books, and a regional series – each one is an incredible bible of food from that particular region. She’s done some work with Fondation BIAT and published a book about the northern coastline, which is also an incredible piece of work, with hundreds of types of couscous. It really is a versatile cuisine. I would die if I tried to do that, especially since I’m not very organized. I also think that she did it at a very critical time in history because we’re losing lots of stuff: we’re losing recipes and techniques. And even though I said that women should not cook the way they used to cook before, it’s very important to at least document it all. Another book is a known one by Odette Touitou, my friend’s mother. It’s hard to find a copy, but it’s an important milestone in the messy, hard to navigate, Tunisian cuisine. 

JG: You had an art book published not too long ago, The Good Seven Years?

RC: Yes, it's an art book with six recipes in it. We’ve run out of the physical copies but an e-book version is available to get online.

RC: What are you working on right now?

I'm working on a show in London for next year. It's called the Mother of Dates and is about the house where my mother grew up in Metameur, in the south close to Medenine. It’s a small village that really no one knows, with 300 people living there. The house is like a triglyph, like the ones in Star Wars. Metameur means “the mother of dates”, which is where a date starts. This “birth” perspective is really interesting for me. My mother was born in this village by chance. She's from Djerba, but they had to move there because they had no money and her uncle was fixing bicycles. It’s a weird story, but she basically lived there until she was 12. I worked on a piece while I was there which was documented in a video I exhibited in Tunis. People see me in the street and recognize me from that video: they call me weld al-Janoub – kid of the south. Looking south is very interesting for me. There are lots of palm trees starting from the village all the way to the sahra (the desert). In this project I'm working with food, black magic and sorcery, with bkhour and all kinds of healing liquids. It's like an architectural piece and there's going to be recipes in a small art book with things like how to deal with a sick chicken, or how to deal with a tummy problem. All kinds of medicine bottles will be in the exhibition. There will also be food from the south, which is poor food, so a lot of smid (semolina) in our kind of porridge which we call asida in Tunisia and Libya. It will have dry bread inside, olive oil, and anchovies. Very very simple food made with the stuff southerners found around them.