From Josh W:
I have heard reports of a troubling minhag this coming Shabbos, one with seeming pagan origins — a minhag which has become widespread in recent years — to bake or eat challah.
To explain, etymologically, to call the braided Shabbos bread bchallah is a bit confusing. Chazal referred to Challah, but as the portion which was removed from the dough and given as a present to the kohen. (See Bamidbar 15:20 — maybe it refers Biblically to a type of bread itself, as Philologos wrote.) It is only some time later (in a 15th century German work) that the Shabbos bread itself was called “Challah”. (See also Otzar Ta’amei Haminhagim’s explanation.)
To cite Menachem Mendel, who cites others:
The braided bread loaves of Germanic tradition were invented by the women of Teutonic tribes, who used to make offerings of their own hair to their Goddess. Eventually they learned to preserve their braids by substituting the imitative loaf, which was called Berchisbrod or Perchisbrod, bread offered to the Goddess Berchta, or Perchta. The name of the braided Sabbath loaf among German Jews, Berches or Barches, was copied from this tradition.
Could it be that those nice braids that my wife makes when she bakes ?allah really have their source in pagan goddess worship? The linguist Paul Wexler thinks that the original name was actually the German Holle which was the name of a pagan Germanic goddess to whom braided bread was once given in offering. [The German] Holle was replaced at a later date-under the pressure of Judaization-by the [Hebrew] ?allah, which bore formal and semantic similarity. (See his book The Non-Jewish Origins of the Sephardic Jews, pp. 68-69 and numerous other places in his writings.)
If so, we must protest this perversion of Judaism and introduction of pagan rites into our Shabbos festivities.
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