April 24, 2019
No One Knows for Sure What the Original Matzah Was
Not packaged, not square, not oven-baked: that's what it wasn't. But what it was and where the name for it comes from is still something of a mystery.
Quite obviously, the matzah that Jews have been eating for the past several days differs from the leḥem oni, the “bread of poverty,” that their forefathers ate when leaving Egypt.
For one thing, that bread didn’t come packaged in boxes. The first commercially successful matzah-making machines were built in Cincinnati in 1888 by a Lithuanian immigrant named Dov Behr, who founded the B. Manischewitz Company. Before then, Jews everywhere bought their Passover matzahs from bakeries that made it by hand.
Nor, of course, were these pre-industrial matzahs square or rectangular, which you need them to be to fit into a box. When dough is patted out between the palms or rolled out with a rolling pin, it tends to assume a circular shape. The Middle Eastern pita, the Mexican tortilla, the Indian chapathi, the Ethiopian injera, the Georgian puri, the Afghan naan, and most of the world’s other traditional breads are round.