3 ideas
There is no single Jewish cuisine; each community cooked the food of the land it lived in, then modified it to fit kashrut, Sabbath restrictions and the festival calendar. What makes a dish Jewish is the set of religious constraints it was bent around, such as no mixing of meat and dairy, oil in place of lard, and no cooking on the Sabbath, not its ingredients or origin.
Because lighting a fire or cooking is forbidden from Friday sundown, communities across the diaspora each developed a sealed pot of meat, grains, beans and whole eggs left on a low fire or in a baker's oven overnight to be eaten hot at Saturday lunch. Ashkenazi cholent, Moroccan dafina and Sephardi hamin are local versions of the same constraint-driven design, showing how one ritual rule produces parallel dishes in unrelated kitchens.
Read a community's dishes as layered sediment: every expulsion, trade route and resettlement leaves ingredients and techniques that survive long after the people have moved on. Sephardi families kept Iberian dishes for centuries after 1492, and emigrants carried their kitchens to new countries, so tracing a recipe's variants maps where a people has been and what they chose to keep.