European Judaism

Reform Judaism in the UK owes its origins to both Sephardi and Ashkenazi elements. When nineteen Sephardim and five Ashkenazim signed a declaration on 15 April 1840 that led to the creation of the West London Synagogue of British Jews it represented a coming together of the two traditions. The list of Sephardi names on the table of past presidents and chairmen of the congregation attests to the lingering presence of those early families till today over 150 years later. The prayerbooks that originated in the new congregation, up to the most recent ones that serve the British Reform movement as a whole, remain influenced by both traditions. However, because of the impact of refugees from Germany and the dominant East European Ashkenazi culture of British Jewry, the ethos of British Reform is today well within the Ashkenazi fold.

This is an excerpt from Gabriel Josipovici's life of his mother, Rabinovitch, who died in 1996 at the age of eighty-five. Sacha and her elder sister Vera, known as Chickie, were born in Helwan, near Cairo, in 1910 and 1909 respectively. Their father, a Jewish doctor from Odessa, died when the children were five and six, their mother was carried away by the epidemic which swept Egypt when they were ten and eleven. The greatest influence on the two little girls was their English nanny, who died the following year. After a brief period with their Syrian stepfather, Max Debbane, they went to live with their maternal grandparents, and it is here that the extract starts.

Anyone who observes the way the term 'Sephardi' is used will rapidly become aware that there is a fundamental contrast between its use to describe a group of second-class citizens in modern Israel, and its use to describe the creators of a 'Golden Age' in Spanish in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The modern Israeli press can even be found using the term 'Sephardim' to describe Jews from Ethiopia, Yemen and India, the first group of whom have never even lived under Muslim rule, and who have their own very distinctive traditions. In part, this turns on the confusion of terminology that was created by the emergence of two Chief Rabbinates in Israel, with one looking after the Ashkenazim, and the other, the Rishon le-Zion, concerned with Sephardim and the rest.

In memory of my friend Diane Dietchman Tong (1943–1998), an independent scholar who wrote her MA on the Judeo-Spanish language commonly called Ladino. There is a rumour in my family that when I was born in 1940 my parents thought about sending out a card that would read, 'Now we present our son Dick, one part kike, some parts spic'. Politically correct before everyone else, so avant-garde were they, my parents decided instead to print a more conventional announcement of my arrival.

Now I've reached the age you were when grandfather came back that morning to say they wanted the women too, and would you pack a small case and he'd go to the Cay Ancha to call a coach.

Father sprouted from that shoot of David which circumambulated Jerusalem's stones after the Dispersion which recognised Yahweh in all His other names which decked in Ottoman turbans helped raise the Levant as an ark for all races all cultures which shook hands with shepherds and artisans sipped tea with poets musicians and courtesans dressed janissaries and equerries waged war and peace on backgammon boards graced weddings circumcisions christenings funerals everywhere between Damascus and Sarajevo Algiers and Batumi

I would like to describe the nightmare of being a Jew or New Christian during a unique period in Portuguese history, beginning in the year 1492 and ending in 1536 – the era, not coincidentally, that corresponds to the events in a novel of mine that was recently released in Britain, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon.

One wintry day early in 1535, merchant banker Francisco Mendes Benveniste – the George Soros of his day – lay dying in his whitewashed, tile-roofed home near the Royal Palace in Lisbon. It was a pivotal moment for his elegant wife Beatrice, later known as Doña Gracia Nasi, and for their infant daughter, Anna. Not only were they losing a husband and father. The death of Francisco had larger implications that Doña Gracia, still in her twenties, feared almost more than widowhood.

The publication in 1554 of Bernardim Robeiro's novel Menina e Moça (A Young Girl) has traditionally been regarded as an anomaly in the publishing policy reflected in the many works printed by Abraham Usque in Ferrara. Virtually all the other works printed by this exiled Portuguese Jew are religious or philosophical in nature and are addressed mainly to a Jewish public. Even the XXIII Coplas (XXIII Couplets) of the Christian neo-Platonist Jorge Manrique were published as an addendum to Afonso de la Torre's Vision Delectable do la Philosophia y Artes Liberales (Delightful Vision of Philosophy and the Liberal Arts), a work influenced by the thinking of Maimondies and Aben Tofail and much more in accord with Usque's ideological preferences.

The Ottomans were descended from one of the many clans of Turkish nomads who swept westwards from the steppes of Central Asia and decisively defeated the enfeebled Byzantine Empire at the battle of Manzikert in 1071. The tribesmen converted to Islam and then slowly expanded their grip on Byzantine territory in Anatolia.

The Spanish Jews who fled to North Africa from the 1391 pogroms were joined a century later, in 1492, by a larger wave of exiles, the thousands of Jews who had chosen to leave Spain rather than convert to Christianity. These fellow Jews, the megorashim or expelled Jews, had been forbidden to take 'gold and silver or minted coins' out of Spain (Edwards 1994: 52). They did, however, take with them invisible assets: their Spanish language and culture. This Iberian presence in Morocco was further reinforced by the arrival of a third group of Spanish-speaking Jews fleeing the forced conversions imposed by Portugal in 1497.

A high point for numerous Jewish visitors to Paris remains a casual stroll along the Rue des Rosiers in the Marais district. For the better part of a century, this winding medieval street has represented the symbolic core of the Parisian Jewish community and, indeed, of all of French Jewry. Promenading along the dank, dimly lite street, one proceeds past a parade of shops that not only serve the sundry needs of the Jewish community but also provide intriguing clues to certain historical and sociological dimensions of that community.

Tracing the history of languages used among England's Sephardim, being the first study of its kind, presents a number of challenges. First and foremost, there is a severe lack of linguistic documentation prior to the seventeenth century, as Jewish communities were illegal on English soil between the mass expulsion of 1290 and the readmission under Cromwell in 1656. Although official records of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue do give some indications of language usage between the readmission of Jews to England and the late nineteenth century, actual linguistic monuments are few.

One of the most fascinating memoirs to appear in recent years is that of Elias Canetti, recipient of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature. his three-volume spiritual and intellectual autobiography is a complex and insightful rendering of his personal background and his creative development as a novelist, philosopher, and social critic. However, Canetti's autobiography is much more than a compelling account of the development of a great artist – it is a portrait of the tragic character of an entire era that witnessed the destruction of cultures and the way of life o many Jewish communities throughout Europe.

In August 1946, the Board of Deputies of British Jews received a report about the situation of the Jewish cemetery of Salonika, the city which only three years ago had witnessed the destruction by the Germans of one of the most glorious Jewish communities of the Balkans. This detailed report aimed at summoning support for the protection of what was left of the ancient Jewish burial ground.

This text transposes, in the form of an article, the main themes tackled by the director Ygal Bursztyn in his book Face, Battlefield (Tel Aviv, Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1990). Daniel Dayan thanks the author and the translator Sonia Hadida for their collaboration on this adaptation, reproduced with the kind permission of the review Hermes.

The severe mourning period after Shiva – the week following the death of a loved one – is Sh'loshim – thirty days. What shall we do thirty years after the death of one of the greatest Jewish poets of our century? He entered death freely, walking into the Seine and letting the dark waters carry him into the time beyond time; yet he remains one of the great gifts of the past century for us who are aware of the inheritance which is passed on to us by the poets and prophets of our people.

The Venetian Ghetto

A Cemetery in New Mexico

Mourning and Melancholia

Refusing to Explain

Trachoma

Glenduffhill Cemetery Easterhouse

Immigrants, Haifa 1998

After the Event

Akeda

Holy Grammar

Desecration

The Art of Public Prayer: Not for Clergy Only (second edition), Lawrence A. Hoffman, Sky-Light Paths Publishing, Woodstock, VT, 1999, 270 pp., $17.95, ISBN 1-893361-06-3

A Heart of Many Rooms: Celebrating the Many Voices within Judaism, David Hartman, Jewish Lights Publishing, Woodstock, VT, 1999, 298 pp, $24.95, ISBN 1-58023-048-2

Moses - The Prince, the Prophet: His Life, Legend and Message for Our Lives, Rabbi Levi Meier, Woodstock, VT, Jewish Lights Publishing, 1998, 224 pp., $23.95, ISBN 1-58023-013-X

Voices from Genesis: Guiding Us Through the Stages of Life, Norman J Cohen, Woodstock, VT, Jewish Lights Publishing, 1998, 179 pp., $21.95, ISBN 1-879045-75-3

These Are the Words: A Vocabulary of Jewish Spiritual Life, Arthur Green, Woodstock, VT, Jewish Lights Publishing, 1999, 304 pp. (hc), $21.95, ISBN 1-58023-024-5

New Voices in Jewish Thought: a collection of essays edited by Keith Harris with a foreword by Jonathan Webber. Volume Two, London, Limmud Publications, 1999, 101 pp., ISBN 0-9532273-2-4

Lebendiges Judentum II - Predichtung und Betrachtnung eines Rabbines 1990-1995, Israel Aaron Ben Yosef, Arbeiten von Ursula Harver und Rahel Rosenzweig, Erhaus gegeben von Erhard Roy Wien, Hartung-Gorre Verlag Konstanz, 1999, 219 pp., DM44. ISBN: 3-89649-382-5