Jerusalem bagel
Israeli bread
Jerusalem bagel or Jerusalem ka'ak (Arabic: كعك القدس, romanized: ka'ak al-quds; Hebrew: בייגל ירושלמי, romanized: beigel yerushalmi) is a type of bread baked in Jerusalem. It has a ring shape but is otherwise only baked and not boiled unlike a traditional boiled bagel. It is related to Middle Eastern ka'ak bread.
Typically, this is a yeasted, crusty bread which is shaped into an oblong ring and covered in sesame seeds. The dough has a lighter texture than a traditional bagel. It can be sliced and served with various toppings. Countless variations of it exist across the Eastern Mediterranean, but the oblong one from Jerusalem remains the most iconic and is thought to date back to the Middle Ages.
History
Ottoman Period
While the precise origins are unknown, Jerusalem bagels are often traced back to the Ottoman period; similarities are drawn to Turkish simits. Ottoman records (sijil) from the 16th and 17th centuries contained references to a bread known as ka'k, this bread is sometimes described as hard and dry, and sometimes described as a soft bagel.
According to one story, a primitive form of Jerusalem ka'ak first spread in the city during the visit of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent's wife Roxelana to Jerusalem in 1552, when she ordered the creation of the "Khaski Sultan" charitable kitchen.
“Jerusalem bagel” enters the record as israeli bread. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jerusalem, bagel and Israeli can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6564586. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1552.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jerusalem bagel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.