A Rabbi Held Gibraltar's Food Contract in 1727. The Borekas Are a Red Herring

3 October 2026 Last checked 2026-10-03

Gibraltar's Sephardic kitchen came from Tetuan, not Istanbul. 87 of the 111 Jewish men counted in 1725 came off the Barbary coast, and it shows on the table.

In 1727, with a Spanish army camped around the Rock and the land frontier shut, the man holding Gibraltar's sole contract to import food from Morocco was an ordained rabbi.

His name was Isaac Netto. The lieutenant governor, Brigadier Jasper Clayton, handed him the monopoly because the garrison had no other way to eat. That one appointment tells you more about the Sephardic contribution to Gibraltarian food than any list of pastries does.

This post was commissioned as a piece about borekas and bollo. Having gone through the sources, we are writing a different one, because the two dishes in that brief are the two with the weakest claim to be Gibraltar's Sephardic inheritance. Here is what the record actually supports, and where it runs out.

The garrison could not feed itself, and Spain would not help

Gibraltar fell on 4 August 1704, which was 27 July by the English calendar of the day. Prince George of Hesse held a town with no farmland, a hostile countryside behind it, and salt meat arriving from England and Ireland that would give his men scurvy if nothing fresh came in.

The arithmetic was brutal. On 23 October 1704 the commissary in charge of supplies, John Knox, wrote that the garrison was "about 2,600 souls including inhabitants which I victual and have no more left than will last above 10 weeks at short allowance". Ten weeks. That is the whole problem in one sentence.

The nearest place willing to sell was Morocco, and the foreign trade of northern Morocco ran out of Tetuan, largely in the hands of the Spanish speaking Sephardi Jews of that city. Tangier had only been handed back by the English twenty years earlier. So the supply line to Gibraltar's dinner table ran from Tetuan, and the people who could work it were Jewish merchants.

The historian Tito Benady set this out in Cuadernos de Gibraltar, published by the University of Cadiz, working from the Gibraltar papers at The National Archives. He opens with the plain version: the British occupation of 1704 brought in Jewish merchants from Tetuan to supply the fresh food the garrison required.

One man mattered more than the rest. Moses Ben Hatar was the Nagid, the head of the Jewish community of Sale, and treasurer and man of business to the Emperor of Morocco. Colonel Bennet of the Engineers reported in 1712 that Queen Anne declared Gibraltar a free port partly because the Emperor, after complaints from the Jews in Gibraltar, would not allow timber, lime and bricks through for the fortifications. Ben Hatar never settled on the Rock. He worked it through an agent, Samuel Alevy ben Suffat.

Then Britain signed the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which contained a clause saying no leave should be given to Jews or Moors to reside in the town. Jews were expelled in 1717. It did not hold, because by 1718 relations with Spain had broken down and supplies stopped coming across the frontier, and a fortress that cannot eat does not get to be fussy about its treaty obligations.

Captain Charles Stewart went to Tetuan Bay to fix it. The new Anglo Moroccan treaty was signed and exchanged on 17 January 1720, which is 1721 in the modern calendar. It ran to fourteen articles. Article 7 ends with the words that mattered: the subjects of the Emperor of Fez and Morocco, whether Moors or Jews, residing in the dominions of the King of Great Britain, shall entirely enjoy the same privileges granted to the English residing in Barbary.

That directly contradicted what Britain had promised Spain at Utrecht. Benady is blunt about why it was signed anyway: Stewart's main purpose was to ensure supplies from Morocco.

Which brings us back to 1727. The thirteenth siege ran from 11 February to 12 June. Nothing came from Spain. The Basha of Tetuan wrote to Clayton offering provisions, and Clayton made Isaac Netto sole contractor for importing food from Morocco. Netto held it for about a year, until his father Haham David Nieto died and he left for London to become rabbi at Bevis Marks. The monopoly passed to an English merchant, James Argatt, and was abolished in 1729 after questions in the House of Commons.

Where the cooks actually came from, name by name

A kitchen is carried by people, so the question of which Sephardic kitchen landed in Gibraltar is answerable. Colonel Richard Kane counted the civilian population in August 1725 and found 1,113 people, of whom 137 were Jewish, about 12 per cent. The breakdown is 111 men and 26 women, and the return records where the men came from.

Read that again. Nearly four in five came off the Barbary coast, and Benady's narrative is about Morocco throughout: Tetuan, Tangier, Sale. The 26 women's origins are not given in that return, so we are not going to guess at them.

Kane was not pleased about it. He complained three months later that every vessel arriving from Tetuan brought more Jews, that the number had reached 160, and that he intended to stop it. London told him to leave it alone. The instruction was that the Jews at Gibraltar "may for the present be connived at", because if the frontier closed the garrison would depend on Morocco, and nobody wanted to annoy the Basha of Tetuan twice.

The 1777 census makes the origins sharper still. Benady names the families and the towns they came from. Tetuan sent the Aboab, Anahory and Sananes families. Sale sent Anraleck, Bensusan and Bubdy. Tangier sent Benamor. Mogador sent Abudarham and Massias. Portugal sent Diaz Carvalho, Moreno and Nunez Cardoso, Holland sent Conquy, and Livorno sent Daninos and Tedescho.

Not one of those towns is in the Ottoman east. No Salonica, no Istanbul, no Izmir, no Rhodes. That list is a sample rather than the full roll, so we would not claim nobody from the eastern communities ever lived here. But the centre of gravity is not in doubt: Gibraltar's Sephardim came up the Atlantic coast of Morocco, not across the Mediterranean from Turkey.

By 1777 they numbered 863 of 3,201 civilians, 27 per cent of the town. One more figure is worth having. Only 50 per cent of Gibraltar's civilians in that census were born on the Rock. Among the Jewish population it was 72 per cent. They were the settled ones.

So about those borekas

Borekas are a wonderful thing and they are genuinely Sephardic. They are just not Gibraltarian by descent.

The origin of the bourekas is the Ottoman branch of the Sephardic story. Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 who settled in the Ottoman Empire adapted the Turkish borek to kosher practice and merged it with the empanada they had brought with them. The word itself is a Judeo Spanish loan from the Turkish borek, with the Turkish vowel flattened because Spanish has no sound for it.

Gibraltar's community arrived by the other road. Those families went to Morocco in 1492 and came north to the Rock after 1704, which is a different three hundred years and a different pantry.

You can buy borekas in Gibraltar today, as you can in most places with a Jewish community, and plenty of Gibraltarian families eat them. That is a real present tense fact and we are not disputing it. It is simply not the same claim as a three century local tradition, and conflating the two is how travel pages end up telling readers that a town's signature food is something it adopted in the last few decades.

And bollo is two different breads wearing one name

Ask for bollo in Gibraltar and you will probably be handed bollos de hornazo. The Gibraltarian recipe is a sweet aniseed bread, roughly 700 g of flour to 225 g of butter and 225 g of sugar with five eggs, and the tradition that goes with it is painting boiled eggs and baking them into the dough so they end up part of the loaf.

It is Easter food. That recipe is described as an Easter favourite and a tea time staple, and the egg in the bread is the Andalusian hornazo custom. No Jewish attribution is claimed for it anywhere we could find.

Separately, there is a Sephardic bollo, a round anise bread associated with Rosh Hashanah and the high holidays in several Mediterranean Jewish communities. Same word, same flavouring, two different calendars, and no evidence we can produce that one became the other in Gibraltar.

The same trap catches torta de acelga, the chard and spinach pie that outsiders routinely file as Jewish because it looks like something from a Sephardic table. In Gibraltar the chard pie comes from Genoa, and it is traditionally eaten on Good Friday.

What is genuinely on the Sephardic side of the ledger

Here is the part of the brief that survives contact with the sources, and it is better than the part that did not.

Adafina is the Sabbath stew, the Sephardi version of cholent, and it is cooked here. A Gibraltarian family recipe from the Attias family gives the method as at least twelve hours at 110 degrees Celsius, ideally overnight: soaked chickpeas, brisket, kosher salami, long grain rice with saffron, potatoes, onions, garlic, and whole eggs in their shells. The saying attached to it in the North African community translates as a Saturday without adafina being like a town without a king.

Those eggs have their own name. Huevos haminados are eggs cooked so slowly in the pot that the whites go deep brown through to the centre and the yolk turns almost fudgy. The name comes from the Hebrew ham, meaning hot, and the whole technique exists because the stew has to cook from Friday evening to Saturday lunch without anyone touching the fire.

Fijuelas are the other one. They are ribbons of thin dough wound round a fork, fried, and soaked in syrup, and they belong to Purim, where the coiled shape stands in for the megillah scroll. They are Moroccan and Spanish Sephardic, which is exactly the right road into Gibraltar.

The language carries the same cargo. Haketia was the Judeo Spanish of northern Morocco, spoken in Tetuan, Tangier, Larache, Asilah and Chefchaouen, which covers the northern towns several of the 1777 families came from. Its vocabulary is mostly Spanish, with 34.5 per cent from Arabic and 18.5 per cent from Hebrew. It is nearly gone now, down to about 1,000 speakers from 30,000 in 1900, with the decline starting around 1860.

It left deposits in Llanito, and the best one for a food post is bezzim, the local word for eggs, which is Hebrew. Gibraltarians use it without thinking about where it came from. There are more in our Llanito phrasebook, and the community history sits in our piece on the Jewish community and the walkable Shabbat and our piece on Aaron Cardozo and Nelson.

Calentita, where the honest answer is that nobody has settled it

Calentita is the chickpea flour bake Gibraltarians call their national dish, and its origin is the one question in this post we cannot close.

The standard account, the one we set out in our guide to the Calentita festival, is Genoese. Ligurian traders and fishermen settled here from the sixteenth century, farinata is the obvious parent, and the Genoese shaped Gibraltarian food more than any other single group.

There is a second account. The Wikipedia summary of Gibraltarian cuisine records that Sephardi Jews from the Barbary Coast became major food providers for the British here, and raises the possibility that they reintroduced the dish after the recipe fell out of use in Spain. It is written as a maybe, and we will not upgrade it.

What keeps the question open is across the water. Tangier has a chickpea flour street food called caliente, sold in slices, and its origins are traced to the Jews of that city. The name is said to come from the Haketia word caliente, meaning hot. Gibraltar's word is the diminutive of the same thing.

So we have two populations who both crossed into Gibraltar, both with a claim, and a dish whose name travelled at least as well as its recipe. We cannot tell you which came first and neither can anyone else we have read. What would settle it is an eighteenth or nineteenth century Gibraltar document naming the dish, and if a reader has one, we would genuinely like to see it.

What you can actually eat here, and what we will not pretend to know

Gibraltar runs its own kashrut authority. Gibraltar Kosher gives its head office as 91 Irish Town and certifies not just local businesses but producers across Spain, Portugal and Morocco. A territory of 37,936 people certifying a slice of the Iberian food industry is an odd and rather good fact, and it exists because the rabbinic infrastructure landed here first.

What we will not do is publish a list of kosher places to eat. Directory sites carry names that do not survive a phone call, and an address for a shop that closed is worse than no address when you have arrived on a Friday afternoon with children. Ask Gibraltar Kosher or the community office. One email beats any page, including this one.

Once a year the whole argument above gets cooked in public. The Calentita food festival fills Landport Ditch in June with community stalls, and the Moroccan, Genoese, Spanish, Maltese and Jewish strands of the town all turn up with a pan each. It is the single best evening to taste the sources rather than read them.

The rest of the year, the practical answer is a kitchen of your own. Fresh produce, a long slow oven for something that needs twelve hours, and no negotiation with a restaurant about Friday service.

Victory Suites runs 100+ apartments on Devils Tower Road, every one with its own kitchen, about fifteen minutes on flat ground from Irish Town and Engineer Lane where most of this history happened. Tell us when you are arriving and what you need the kitchen to do, and we will sort the rest.

If you find the document that settles calentita, send it to us. We will correct this post and say who found it.