[Avodah] popcorn

[Arie Folger]

RAM wrote:
> To get back to RDR's question, when one says that
> Ashkenazim don't eat Kitniyos, I don't take the word
> "Kitniyos" to be an exhaustive list of what it avoided.
> Rather, it is the name of the minhag. Perhaps there
> was a time when it was said that Ashkenazim avoid
> all sorts of grains. But when the ban was expanded
> to include legumes, that's when the minhag became
> referred to as "Kitniyos" -- not because it describes
> what is banned, but because it describes the *least*
> *obvious* of the things which are banned.

You seem to think that Kitniot translates as "legumes." That, however,
is AFAIK not correct. Kitniot is millet. It is in Ashkenazi Pessa'h
parlance that they took on the meaning of legumes, too.

Thus, when we speak of the prohibition on K, we do not particularly
mention what "describes the *least* *obvious* of the things which are
banned," but "what is banned."

However, we should consider the possibility (which I consider
unlikely) that a legume was the first to be prohibited: chick peas.
Tunisians eat rice but not chick peas, because they are called
'hoummous, which is very similar to 'hammess. It could be that they
were first, and that other legumes were subsequently frowned upon,
too, by people who no longer called the 'hoummous that way, i.e.,
Europeans who stopped using Hebrew as a vernacular. To them, there was
no more logic to prohibiting chick peas than kidney beans, and so
since one was prohibited, the other was, too.

The last paragraph above is pure conjecture and needs some historical
support before it is worth anything, KNLAD.
-- 
Arie Folger,
Recent blog posts on http://ariefolger.wordpress.com/
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