The lemon's ancestor is the citron, or esrog, a native to India. More than 2,000 years ago, the Jews discovered the citron in Persia and Babylonia, and brought it to Palestine, where it became a central part of their harvest festival, Sukkot. Jewish demand for the fruit--required for the holiday blessing--led to its diffusion around the Mediterranean.
The lemon's origin is a mystery, but we know that the Arabs, who discovered lemons in India or Persia, fell in love with lemons and brought them to the West. They brined and candied lemons, made them into syrups, lemonade and perfume, celebrated them in poetry, and planted lemon trees wherever they went, adapting the latest irrigation and agricultural techniques they'd learned in their travels. Islamic gardens and courtyards were filled with the fragrance of lemon blossoms, from Spain to Sicily and Northern Africa.
The English word "lemon" retains traces of these journeys, with roots in Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic.
A lemon tree, depicted in an anonymous work on natural history, in a fourteenth-century manuscript. The earliest written reference to lemons is a tenth-century Arabic text on farming.
Citrus was unknown in the Americas, which have no native species, until Columbus brought lemon, orange, and citron seeds from the Canary Islands to Haiti on his second voyage, in 1493. The climate was so favorable that the orchards swelled into citrus forests within a few generations.
