Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Sabih

BY AMOS

Sasson Somekh (see post below) also gave me the definitive etymology for the popular fast-food dish known as "sabih" in Israel. While everyone agrees that it was brought to Israel by Iraqi Jews, there are various stories about the origins of the word. Somekh claims that he knows the person who first sold the delicious eggplant-egg-potato-in-a-pita sandwich (probably somewhere in Ramat Gan, but I did not ask). The man's name was ... Sabih, which Somekh tells me was a popular name among Iraqi Jews in the twentieth century because it was religiously neutral.

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