DAFNA HIRSCH The Open University of Israel “Hummus is best when it is fresh and made by Arabs”: The gourmetization of hummus in Israel and the return of the repressed Arab ABSTRACT In this article, I examine the “cultural biography” of hummus in Israel from the Mandate period to the present, focusing on the changing place of Arabness in the signification of the dish. Contrary to accounts that regard food consumption as metonymic of political relations, I argue that, because food items move in several fields, both their consumption and signification are overdetermined processes. Rather than taking hummus to be the essential “food of the Other,” I show that the Arab identity of hummus functions as a resource, employed by social actors embedded in various political, social, and economic projects. [food, national food, hummus, Israel, Arab–Jewish relations, cultural transfer, Middle East] N ine o’clock on a chilly Saturday morning. A group of 25 Israeli Jews is waiting in front of the Jerusalem municipality building for a tour to start. This is not an ordinary tourist excursion, how- ever, but a tour of Palestinian hummusiyot (hummus joints; sing. hummusiya) in East Jerusalem, organized, curiously, by Beit Shmuel—the Jerusalem branch of Progressive Judaism. Our friendly young guide looks more like the backpacker type than the average gourmet type. But like many other Israelis, he is a self-appointed hummus expert. The tour opens with a question: “So ... who does hummus belong to? Is it ours or theirs?” Except for a couple of dissidents, group members agree that it is “theirs.” “Hummus for Arabs is a different matter than it is for us,” ex- plains our guide. “We would describe any hummus as delicious. The Arabs have developed a taste for it for 2,000 years. In their mind, one has to keep high standards.” By citing the number 2,000—a constitutive number in the Zionist narrative of exile and return—our guide invokes the semiotic func- tion of hummus as a signifier of locality. The tour progresses as a pastiche of history, mythology, folklore, and hummus lore. Accompanied by an armed security guard, we walk from one Palestinian hummusiya to the next, sam- ple the hummus, discuss its qualities, and compare it to the others we have tasted. I begin with this tour of East Jerusalem hummusiyot because it exempli- fies two interconnected processes: the recent “gourmetization” of hummus in Israel and the reemergence of its Arab identity after a decades-long sub- mergence. At the same time, the “hummus craze” of which this tour is part owes much to the perception of hummus as “the most Israeli dish of all” (Zakai 1997). How has an Arab dish come to function as a foremost signi- fier of “Israeliness,” an identity associated in Israel with the Jewish major- ity? And how has this symbol of Israeliness regained its Arab identity for the Jewish Israeli public alongside its Israeli one? The case of hummus—a dish adopted by Jewish settlers from Palestini- ans and made a central element of the Israeli “national food” repertoire— raises questions about how the social life (Appadurai 1986) of food items that move across ethnic or national boundaries is shaped by these items’ cultural identity. What is the role of this identity in shaping consumption AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 38, No. 4, pp. 617–630, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C  2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01326.x