Did you have a bagel for breakfast? If so, you're not alone: a projected 202 million Americans ate the ring-shaped bread in 2020 alone. Anyone who butters a bagel, or piles it with lox and cream cheese, is part of a centuries-long tradition that began with Jewish bakers.
Legends abound about the origins of the bagel—for example, that it was created to celebrate a victory over the Ottoman Empire or as a result of antisemitic laws. But that’s not quite the full story. Here's the truth about how the humble food began, and why it retains its significance today.
How bagels were invented
One prominent bagel myth contends that a baker first created them in the aftermath of the 1683 Battle of Vienna to honor Polish king John III Sobieski who helped break a siege on the city. Another bagel origin story tells the tale of Jewish bakers in ninth-century Prussia or Poland who, hampered by an antisemitic law that forbade them from baking their bread, began boiling it instead.
Neither is true, writes Maria Balinska in The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread. In fact, she writes, bagels "began life as a bread of value and an object of respect."
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Balinska traces the history of the bagel to well before the Battle of Vienna, tracking the bread to 13th century Jewish bakers in a part of Eastern Europe that is now Poland. At the time, Jewish tradespeople's activities were carefully defined by antisemitic local laws largely designed to segregate them from Christians. But Jewish bakers were given more leeway: They were allowed to bake bread not just for themselves, but for their Christian neighbors.
The most popular of their wares was a boiled, lean, ring-shaped bread known as obwarzanek. During Lent, when Christians abstained from rich foods, they sought out this bread, which is thought to have originated in Germany. Jewish bakers’ guilds also made a smaller version for everyday Jewish consumption—and this single-serving ring of bread became known as as bajgielin Polish and beygal in Yiddish.
Soon, bagels took on a variety of meanings within Poland's vibrant Jewish encalves. They were fed to women who had recently given childbirth as part of folk traditions designed to protect newborn children and became part of Jewish mourning rituals. Eventually, Christians also began buying bagels instead of obwarzanek from Jewish bakers for everyday consumption, and the food gained popularity as Eastern Europe urbanized and modernized.
How bagels came to the U.S.
When European Jews began emigrating to the United States in the 19th century, bagels came along for the ride. But it would take decades for them to become a mainstream food eaten outside of Jewish immigrant enclaves. As historian Matthew Goodman notes, "bagels existed in America for decades as a purely ethnic phenomenon, virtually unknown to society at large."
But the food retained importance for Jewish immigrants—and played a key part in the American labor movement. In 1907, New York bagel bakers formed the International Beigel Bakers Union in an attempt to dissuade people from patronizing bakeries that forced their immigrant workers to toil long hours for low pay in hot, vermin-infested bakeries.
The all-Jewish union carefully guarded knowledge of how to bake the bread and urged Jewish customers to buy from all-union shops instead of giving their business to owners who exploited newly arrived immigrants. Members staged several successful strikes throughout the 20th century, becoming known as one of the most successful unions in the burgeoning U.S. labor movement.
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But the widespread adoption of the bagel-making machine—and the introduction of the bagel beyond the Jewish community—spelled the downfall of the powerful bagel unions.
First invented in 1918 by Canadian baker Meyer Thompson, the bagel machine was introduced to the U.S. in the 1960s. Thompson's son, Daniel,licensed the technology to Murray Lender, who wanted to boost sales at his New Haven, Connecticut bakery. With the help of the new machine, Lender pioneered pre-sliced, frozen bagels and bagel flavors that went beyond plain and salt.
The 'fastest-drawing bun in the yeast'
By 1965, bagels had become a phenomenon. The rolls were the "fastest-drawing bun in the yeast," according to one punchy headline in the New York Daily News from 1965. The bun "may soon take its place alongside the hot dog [and] the pizza...as an American delicacy," the article continued, documenting the growing number of "bagelophiles" nationally.
New bagel acolytes learned to eat bagels with another food tied to immigrant enclaves: lox. Food historians believe the pairing was in existence by at least the early 20th century, when Jewish delis began selling preserved salmon using recipes from Scandinavian immigrants. Soon, lox and cream cheese were a prized accompaniment to bagels—and a common offering at breakfast tables.
And so your morning breakfast was born—a uniquely American mash-up of immigrant ingenuity and traditional Jewish baking. But the bagel you enjoy with a shmear of cream cheese may bear little resemblance to the original breads produced in Poland by Jewish guildsmen so long ago.
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As Goodman laments, bagel machines introduced big changes to bagel recipes, introducing ingredients like dough conditioners and preservatives and cutting out the boiling process in favor of oven steaming.
"The bagel, which had once been small, flavorful, dense, and crusty, was now precisely the opposite: huge, insipid, and pillowy soft," Goodman writes. Mass-produced bagels may have opened up a new frontier for bakers, but they also stripped the bread of its Jewish heritage and its roots in smaller, local, union-owned bakeries. Nonetheless, every holey bite bears a connection to centuries of history—and the story of a surprisingly resilient kind of bread.
