From Prins to Prinz: The mysteries of the chocolate trail

My choco-dar (internal radar for chocolate experiences) led me to a hauntingly personal story.

By DEBORAH R. PRINZ
A portrait of Isak Prins by his son. (photo credit: Courtesy)
A portrait of Isak Prins by his son.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Little did I realize when working on my book, On the Chocolate Trail, how eerie the connections between Jews and chocolate might become. My choco-dar (internal radar for chocolate experiences) led me to a hauntingly personal story.
In 2009, a kind scholar, learning of my interests, mentioned a Dutch archival collection of a Jewish scholar who had researched chocolate.
I deferred investigating it then because plenty of material in English from American archives and libraries already inundated me. The thought of yet another archive, in Jerusalem no less – and even more challenging, in Dutch – almost pushed me to forgo chocolate altogether. Though I longed to sample the tidbits hidden there, I had resigned myself to the fact that On the Chocolate Trail could not capture every story. Whatever might be in the Dutch documents would just have to be a byway.
Three years later, with the book about to be sent off to the printer and a couple of free days in Jerusalem, I could finally delve into the Dutch trove. I scanned the online listing at The Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, to find that the collector’s name was Isak Prins, the Dutch variant of my last name. As I glanced at the substantial list of the Prins holdings, I speculated about whether this would be a satisfying venture or not. Finally my husband, Mark, and I trekked down a windy hillside pathway to a barely marked caravan in an isolated corner of the Hebrew University’s Givat Ram campus to survey the Isak Prins collection of Joden en chocola, Jews and chocolate.
We rummaged through Prins’s chocolate wrappers, publications, photos and notes obsessively scratched on slips of paper. Deep in those 141 boxes we found an article authored by Prins, in which he wrote: “The present writer has written a book on ‘Jews and Chocolate – Explorations in Cultural History in the Diaspora’ and a history of Israel chocolate making is in preparation as the second part of the work” (The Jerusalem Post, March 1, 1957).
I flushed with a mix of surprise, disappointment, curiosity, embarrassment and jealousy that On the Chocolate Trail would not, after all, be the first book about Jews and chocolate as I had thought. Yet happily it also meant that there could be even more stories to unwrap.
So began a hunt for Prins’s book. Since I had seen in his papers that Prins had written to Brill Publishers, I contacted them. No, the acquisitions editor politely replied, they had no record of publishing such a book. I checked online. Nothing. I queried libraries in America, Holland and Israel, including Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, the Special Collections at the University of Amsterdam and the National Library of Israel. No record of a book or a manuscript on the topic at all, much less by Prins.
In April 2013, I contacted Prins’s grandsons, David and Daniel, who were completely unaware of their grandfather’s research about Jews and chocolate and knew nothing of his book. Also in April, my blog, Jews on the Chocolate Trail, registered a comment from a distant cousin of Prins, a man named Henry Joshua, who confided that as a child he and his mother had visited Prins at his home in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Bayit Vagan in 1958. Joshua further recalled that Prins had mentioned his book about chocolate. And then he added definitively: “Prins died in 1968 without finishing his book.”
Isak Prins and I share a family name and an interest in chocolate and Jews. Oddly we also claim the same birthdate, February 24. (He was born in 1887 in The Netherlands and moved to Israel in 1948.) My choco-dar had led me to a scholar with my surname, my interests and my astrological sign. Mysteries remain: Is Prins related to me? Did he actually write the book? If so, where is it? What did he really discover about Jews and chocolate?
For now, I have to leave it this way: From Prins to Prinz, the Jewish chocolate trail broadens.