Five hundred years ago Spain implemented the Inquisition. The Inquisition was originally intended in large part to ensure the orthodoxy of those who converted from Judaism and Islam. This regulation of the faith of the newly converted was intensified after the royal decrees issued in 1492 and 1501 ordering Jews and Muslims to convert or leave. The following report is a fascinating situation that evokes one question for me. Why would the decendants of the Jews of Spain want to return to a country that persecuted them so severely?
David Bancroft
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By Aran Heller, The Associated Press
MADRID» They were burned at the stake, forced to convert or chased into exile. Now Spain is moving to right a half-millennium old “historic mistake” against its onetime flourishing Sephardic Jewish community: the European Union country is on the verge of offering citizenship to descendants of victims estimated to number in the millions.
The Spanish conservative government plans to make amends with a law expected to be passed within weeks or months in Parliament that offers citizenship to the descendants of legions of Jews forced to flee in 1492. Asked whether the new law amounted to an apology, Spanish Justice Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon replied: “Without a doubt.”
“What the law will do, five centuries later, is make amends for a terrible historic mistake, one of the worst that Spaniards ever made,” Ruiz- Gallardon told The Associated Press in an interview.
Descendants of Sephardic Jews, he said, will be considered “children of Spain.”
The term “Sephardic” literally means “Spanish” in Hebrew, but the label has come also to apply to one of the two main variants of Jewish religious practice. The other and globally dominant one – being Ashkenazic,” which to Jews whose lineage, in recent times, is traced to northern and eastern Europe.
Because of mixing between the groups and other factors, there is no accepted figure for the global Sephardic population, but reasonable estimates would range between a fifth and a third of the world’s roughly 13 million Jews.
The largest community is in Israel, where almost half of the 6 million Jews are considered Sephardic.
It is not completely clear how much of a historical link Spain will require. Most of Israel’s Sephardics hail from North Africa and southern Europe, which were early ports of call after the expulsion from Spain, and so they may be able to easily show direct links. But other communities, from places like Iraq and Yemen, are considered Sephardic by religious practice yet may have trouble proving a connection to Spain.
Hundreds of Israelis claiming Sephardic ancestry have contacted the Spanish Embassy in Tel Aviv, begun researching their family histories and taken to the airwaves to discuss their newfound citizenship possibilities.
There have been some articles sprinkled in the media discussing Antisemitic Boycotts. This web site that I have copied is worth your attention. The web site is at http://www.amchainitiative.org/academic-boycotts-israel-antisemitic/.
Israel, the Jewish State, is predicated on a decisive and stable Jewish majority of at least 70 percent. Any lower than that and Israel will have to decide between being a Jewish state and a democratic state. If it chooses democracy, then Israel as a Jewish state will cease to exist. If it remains officially Jewish, then the state will face an unprecedented level of international isolation, including sanctions, that might prove fatal.
— Michael Oren, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S.,
May 2009
David Bancroft
More than 1,000 Faculty and 2 Academic Organizations have Endorsed the Academic Boycott of Israel
In the 1930’s, thousands of Jewish professors were kicked out of German universities, simply because they were Jews. Shamefully, today it is in the United States that Jewish professors are threatened with being thrown out of scholarly conferences, prevented from publishing in scholarly journals, and denied research or employment opportunities, simply because they are citizens of the Jewish state.
Today’s academic boycott of the Jewish state and its scholars is no less antisemitic than the academic boycott of Jewish scholars in Germany 70 years ago.
Academic boycotts of Israeli academic institutions and scholars, like virtually all anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns within the last several years, have been established in response to the Palestinian political call to join the BDS movement against Israel. That call was issued in 2005 by a coalition of Palestinian organizations that include the terrorist organizations Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and its purpose was to facilitate the elimination of the Jewish state. It is not surprising that most of the American founders of academic boycotts of Israel have publicly expressed their opposition to the Jewish state.
Hannah Rosenthal, the former U.S. State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, has unequivocally condemned academic boycotts, saying: “when academics from Israel are boycotted – this is not objecting to a policy – this is anti-Semitism.” In addition 446 American University Presidents signed a statement published in the New York Times entitled “Boycott Israeli Universities? Boycott Ours, Too!”
Alarmingly, more than 1,000 faculty members, teaching students on over 300 US college and university campuses, have endorsed an academic boycott of Israeli universities and Jewish Israeli academics.
http://www.amchainitiative.org/academic-boycott-of-israel-map/
Click on the map link to see the names of faculty
who have endorsed the academic boycott of Israel
Even more disturbing is that well-known academic organizations are embracing the academic boycott of Israel. Last April, the general membership of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) unanimously approved the resolution put forward by the AAAAS National Council to endorse the boycott of Israeli universities.
On December 15, the American Studies Association (ASA), which claims to be the nation’s oldest and largest association devoted to the interdisciplinary study of American culture and history, approved an anti-Israel academic boycott resolution put forward by the ASA National Council.
The ASA’s recent endorsement of the academic boycott of Israel has drawn scathing criticism from many organizations, including the American Association of University Professors, the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesental Center, Zionist Organization of America, American Jewish Committee, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and Stand With Us.
In addition, two universities — Penn State Harrisburg and Brandeis — have officially withdrawn their membership from the American Studies Association, after the ASA’s endorsement of the academic boycott of Israel, and the Chancellor of University of California San Diego, one of the ASA member organizations, has issued a statement condemning the boycott.
Near the end of “Band of Brothers” there is a scene where the American troops are suddenly confronted with a concentration camp. They are stunned by the sight of the starving people in the camp.
It is a matter of history that when the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps, he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead.
He did this because he said in words to this effect:
‘Get it all on record now – get the films – get the witnesses – because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened’
The has UK has debated whether to remove The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it ‘offends’ some in the Muslim population which claims it never occurred. It is not removed as yet.. However, this is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.
It is now almost 70 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This i being posted as a memorial to the Six Million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians, and 1,900 Catholic priests Who were ‘murdered, raped, burned, starved, beaten, experimented on and humiliated’ while many in the world looked the other way!
Now, more than ever, with Iran , among others, claiming the Holocaust to be ‘a myth,’ it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets.
How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade Center ‘NEVER HAPPENED’, Because it offends some Groups???
Posted by David Bancroft
The nice Jewish mother-in-law comes over and finds
her son-in-law furious, and packing his suitcase.
“What happened ??” She asks.
Jacob screamed, “What happened? I’ll tell you what happened!
I sent an email to my wife saying that I was coming home from my trip today.
I got home and guess what I found?
My wife, yes my Ruth, your daughter, with a naked guy in our marital bed!
This is the end of our marriage. I’m leaving!”
“Calm down!” says the mother-in-law. “There’s something odd about this story.
My Ruth would never do such a thing! Wait a minute while I check what happened.”
Moments later, the mother-in-law comes back with a big smile.
“You see, I said that there must be a simple explanation:”
“Ruth never received your email!”
Author unknown
David Bancroft
Sent to me by a friend. Ms. Glick’s historic information is a little long but interesting. This is an accurate tale of Iraqi Jews and the Jewish Archive now in American hands. Contacting your congressman and senator would be the appropriate things to do.
David Bancroft
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By CAROLINE B. GLICK
Restoring the Iraqi Jewish archive to its Israeli owners would be tantamount to recognizing that the cause of the Arab world’s conflict with Israel is Arab anti-Semitism.
If you happen to be in Washington, DC, between now and January, you can see a piece of Jewish history that was never supposed to see the light of day. The National Archives is now exhibiting restored holy books and communal documents that belonged to the Jewish community of Iraq.
In 1940, the Iraqi Jewish community numbered 137,000 people. Jews made up more than a quarter of the population of Baghdad. A 2,500-year-old community, Iraq had for centuries been a major center of Jewish learning. The Babylonian Talmud was written there.
The yeshivot in Karbala and Baghdad were considered among the greatest in the world.
According to Dhiaa Kasim Kashi, a Shi’ite Muslim interviewed in the 2008 book Iraq’s Last Jews, by the 1930s, the Jews of Iraq had become leaders in every field. “All of Iraq’s famous musicians and composers were Jewish,” he said.
“Jews,” he continued, “were so central to commercial life in Iraq that business across the country used to shut down on Saturdays because it was the Jewish Shabbat. They were the most prominent members of every elite profession – bankers, doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, etc.”
All of this began to end with the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. Due to rampant Islamic Jew hatred, Arab leaders were drawn to the Nazis. For their part, the Nazis were quick to capitalize on their popularity. The German ambassador to Iraq, Fritz Grobba, cultivated Nazi sympathizers in the Iraqi military and organized a pro-Nazi military coup in April 1941.
On June 1, 1941, as Jews celebrated the festival of Shavuot, the pro-Nazi government carried out a massive pogrom. Estimates place the number of Jews murdered at anywhere between 180 and 900. Nine hundred Jewish homes were destroyed. Hundreds of Jewish shops and businesses were looted and burned.
The pogrom, which came to be known as the Farhud, or “violent dispossession,” marked the beginning of the end of the Iraqi Jewish community.
Iraq was one of the five Arab states that invaded Israel on May 15, 1948.
The immediate victims of Iraq’s unyielding rejection of Jewish national liberation were the Jews of Iraq. In 1950, the exodus began. By the end of 1952, when the government shut the remaining Jews in, 124,000 Jews had fled Iraq, mainly to Israel. Forced to abandon their private and communal property, their possessions became hostage to the regime.
The few thousand Jews left in Iraq lived in utter terror. But even in their reduced state, they tried to protect the property of their phantom community.
In Baghdad, only one synagogue remained in operation. The Jews brought all the communal documents and holy books there for storage.
But as Harold Rhode, a recently retired US Defense Department cultural expert, reported in August at PJM Media, in 1985 Saddam Hussein sent his henchmen to the synagogue with several trucks. They stole the documentary history of the community in broad daylight.
Rhode explained that Saddam ordered the theft of the Jewish community’s property both to humiliate the Jews and Israel and to impress his fellow Arabs. As he put it, from a local cultural perspective, “Humiliation – i.e., shaming another’s personal reputation – is more important and more powerful than physical cruelty.
“By capturing the Jewish archives, Saddam was humiliating the Jewish people. He was showing how powerless the Jews were to stop him.”
From a pan-Arab perspective, Saddam demonstrated that he “was in the vanguard of protecting and regaining Arab honor, and was therefore more worthy of Arab/Muslim leadership than were the others.”
Rhode was deployed to Iraq shortly after the US-led overthrow of Saddam’s regime. By the time he arrived in May 2003, there were only a dozen Jews still living in Iraq.
Rhode was the first American official informed of the existence of the archive. It was stored in the cellar of the headquarters of Saddam’s mukhabarat, or secret police. When Rhode arrived at the building with a small detail of soldiers and New York Times reporter Judith Miller, the building had just been flooded by an unexploded shell that had punctured the water main.
When he realized the dimensions of the archive, now largely underwater, Rhode moved heaven and earth to save it. Due to Rhode’s action, and the support he received from Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi, vice president Dick Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the archive – which included everything from school records to 500- year-old copies of the Bible – was saved on Shavuot 2003 and sent to the US.
Once the archive was safely in the US, the State Department spent $3 million restoring the 2,700 books and tens of thousands of documents. In the meantime, back in Iraq, there are still hundreds of Torah scrolls languishing in a government cellar, inaccessible to the public, and in a horrible state of disrepair.
The fact that the archive was rescued from Saddam’s vault and is now being shown to the public is a miracle.
But if nothing changes, on Shavuot 2014, the miracle will come to a tragic and scandalous end. In an act of cultural aggression, the US government has promised to return the Jewish communal archive – stolen from the Iraqi Jewish community by the Iraqi government – to the Iraqi government by June 2014.
The State Department insists that the archive is Iraqi government property, since it was found in an Iraqi government building. But if that is true, then all the Jewish property stored in the Gestapo’s dungeons should have remained German government property after World War II. And even the comparison to the Nazis is too facile.
Jews could safely enter Germany, and even live there after the Nazis were defeated. Jews cannot safely enter, let alone live in, Iraq.
The difference between Jewish property stolen by the Nazis and Jewish property stolen by Arab regimes is political. It is politically acceptable to acknowledge that the Nazis were criminals. But the Arabs have never had to pay a price for their persecution and eventual destruction of their Jewish communities. No one wishes to recognize the fact that it is anti-Semitism that drives the Islamic quest to destroy the Jewish state.
The only lawful owners of the Iraqi Jewish archive that is being shown in Washington are the Iraqi Jews and their descendants, who are now overwhelmingly Israelis. The only place the archive should be sent is the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center in Or Yehuda, the only museum in the world dedicated to preserving the cultural heritage of the 2,500-year-old Jewish community of Iraq.
Yet for the American foreign policy establishment, besotted by a quasi-religious belief that the establishment of a Jew-free Palestinian state on Israeli land will cure everything from Islamic jihad to the common cold, recognizing this simple truth is a bridge too far. Restoring the Iraqi Jewish archive to its Israeli owners would be tantamount to recognizing that the cause of the Arab world’s conflict with Israel is Arab anti-Semitism.
A petition is now circulating demanding that the US government return the archive to its rightful owners in Israel.
At this point, it would be a great miracle if they would just agree to keep it safe in Washington until an American government comes along that decides to base its Middle East policies on the truth.
More than 700,000 Israelis, many rending their clothes, packed the streets of Jerusalem two weeks ago to mourn Ovadia Yosef (died October 7,2013), the ultra-Orthodox rabbi who once led Israel’s Sephardic Jews. Yosef, 93, founded the influential Shas party to speak for working-class Jews from the Middle East, who had less clout in Israel than Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. A polarizing figure, he paved the way for peace with Egypt by ruling that territorial concessions were permissible, yet he also denounced Muslims as “ugly” and “stupid,” and said Jews who died in the Holocaust were being punished for ancestral sins. Non-Jews, he said in a 2010 sermon, “were born only to serve us.”
Jeffrey Goldberg, a Bloomberg columnist, called Yosef “the Israeli Ayatollah.” Goldberg went on to write:
In the manner of the crudest fundamentalists everywhere, Yosef blamed misfortune and death on apostasy, irreligiosity and homosexuality (gay people, in his eyes, were “completely evil”). About Israeli soldiers who fell in battle, Yosef once said, “Is it any wonder if, heaven forbid, soldiers are killed in a war? They don’t observe the Sabbath, they don’t observe the Torah, they don’t pray, they don’t put on phylacteries every day. Is it any wonder that they’re killed? It’s no wonder.” Even more famously, he blamed the deaths of Jews during the Holocaust on the spiritual deficiencies of their ancestors.
In 2005, he argued that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for the Gaza withdrawal and for the alleged godlessness of the black residents of New Orleans. “There was a tsunami and there are terrible natural disasters, because there isn’t enough Torah study,” he said. “Tens of thousands have been killed. All of this because they have no God.” He went on to argue — if that’s the word for it — that the deaths were also punishment directed at President George W. Bush for pressuring Sharon to remove Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip. “It was God’s retribution,” he said. “God does not short-change anyone.”
Sorry, no: Prejudice is prejudice, whether it comes from an imam in Qatar or from the man whose Jewish critics labeled him, correctly, the “Israeli ayatollah.”
David Bancroft
Why can’t more Arabs recognize that Israel is not their enemy and if they would ever make peace with Israel, their lives would be forever improved… but then they are, well, Arabs.
David Bancroft
Very interesting article by an Arab about the Arab Spring and Israel
The article was published in a Saudi newspaper – Arab News – on 9 July 2013
Arab Spring: Mirror, mirror on the wall ABDULATEEF AL-MUHLIM
Published — Tuesday 9 July 2013
In the past, whenever an American secretary of state arrived in any Middle Eastern country, it would be primetime news. He would meet the highest political figures and his/her visit would be given the maximum news coverage with everyone hoping for an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
John Kerry, the current US secretary of state, came and went and no one knew about his many visits. He wanted to restart the negotiation process, but the Arabs are busy with their never-ending Arab Spring and the Israeli military and political figures are in no rush because they are watching Arabs kill each other. Whenever they have extra time, they watch an Arab TV show called, the “Arab Idol.”
Ofir Gendelman, spokesman for the Israeli prime minister and Avichay Adraee, Israeli Defense Forces spokesman, said it is part of their job to watch “Arab Idol.” I thought their job is to keep an eye on the threat that Arab Spring countries pose to Israel. However, why would the Syrians have killed hundreds and thousands of their own people and displaced more than four million? The Israelis couldn’t pull something like this off, but the Arab Spring did it for them.
According to news media, the Arab Spring caught the world by surprise on Dec. 18, 2010. I will, however, add that the Arab Spring didn’t come out of the blue. It is an accumulation of years of political corruption, human rights violations, sectarianism, poor education systems and unemployment. To sum it all up, the Arabs were not fighting the enemy, they were sleeping with it. This is why it is impossible to analyze and forecast the outcome of the Arab Spring. The Arab world never looks at mirrors. We don’t like to say mirror, mirror on the wall because mirrors don’t lie and we don’t want to know the truth. We can’t handle it.
During the Arab Spring, I read a lot of analyses about the root of the Arab Spring — it is decades of hiding from reality, chasing a mirage of enemies, conspiracies and blaming the outside world. We never blamed our systems for the many failures to develop the Arab mind. We talk about Sykes-Picot, imperialism and Zionism, but we never look at the mirrors on the wall. Some people, however, did.
On June 15, 2013 a Saudi columnist who I have never met wrote an article in the Saudi newspaper Al-Sharq titled “Israel, the everlasting Arab treasure.” The columnist, Abdusalam Alwael, is a very highly educated Saudi who gained a bachelor’s degree from a Saudi university, his master’s degree from a university in California and his doctorate degree from a university in Virginia. He basically said that Israel was a bounty for Arab dictators who use the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to rule their countries and make a lot of money by just issuing hollow threats to Israel. Israel is a moneymaking machine for Arab dictators and many Palestinian corrupt officials. In other words, the Arab dictators have forgotten to develop their countries and innocent people have paid for it with their own lives. This is the reality of the Arab Spring.
Everyone knows the truth, but we won’t admit it. During the Arab Spring, we saw our real faces in the mirrors. It showed that the Arabs were never united and are now divided beyond anybody’s imagination. We hate each other more than we hate the outside enemy. This is why no one in the Arab world showed any sympathy to the Syrians when Israeli planes attacked Syrian targets a few weeks ago. As a matter of fact, even hardcore anti-Israelis wished the Israeli planes had continued eastward and attacked the Syrian Presidential Palace and killed an Arab leader named Bashar Assad. In other words, many in the Arab world sided with Israel against an Arab country. After the attack, we saw many Syrians approach the Israeli-fortified checkpoints in the Golan Heights, not to attack Israeli soldiers, but to seek refuge and get medical attention. I am not talking about simple medical care. I am talking about major surgeries like the four-year-old Syrian girl who got a heart transplant at Wolfson Hospital in Holon, Israel.
This is the real Arab Spring. Syrians are hurting Syrians and the Israelis are the ones who treat the Syrian wounds. Yes, the Arab Spring is a joke and I mean a very bad joke. The Arab Spring is not about seeking democracy, it is about Arabs killing Arabs. And this is why Israeli soldiers are busy on the Golan Heights. They are not busy with loading ammunition; they are busy picking cherries and other fruits. What is more, they are also busy giving guided tours to show the world Syrian planes targeting civilians, Scud missiles destroying villages and tanks attacking schools and mosques. What goes inside Syria is more horrific. Syrian men humiliate Syrian women in front of their relatives, rape and kill them. It is not only the killing that is ugly. We saw a Syrian kill another Syrian and then open his chest with a knife and take a bite of his heart. It can’t get any uglier.
Now, mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the ugliest of them all? Well, they are all ugly. It has turned out that the Arab Spring is not about a search for democracy, social justice and better standards of living. The Arab Spring is all about hate and sectarian violence. The world didn’t hear anything about rebuilding the countries or eradicating poverty. The talk is all about fighting among the same people from the same country.
Just look at the land of one of the oldest civilizations, Egypt. A country that failed to bring one, just one iconic figure like Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King — individuals who talk about peace and harmony and are respected the world over. Not someone who enjoys destroying his own country and killing his own people.
More than five centuries after Portugal’s Jews were compelled to convert to Catholicism, the Torah has finally returned to Trancoso. Today visitportugal.com recognizes the history of the Jewish population of the town.
by Michael Freund
Slowly but energetically, the festive procession made its way through the narrow and winding alleyways of the ancient Portuguese town.
The sounds of buoyant Hebrew song cascaded off the cool stone walls, prompting residents to open their windows and stare inquisitively at the unfamiliar sight, as dozens of people from across the country danced and clapped in a rousing surge of emotion.
Among the participants, who were all swept away in the moment, many a moist eye could be seen glistening in the midday sun at this remarkable and most unexpected turn of events.
More than five centuries after Portugal’s Jews were compelled to convert to Catholicism, the Torah has finally returned to Trancoso.
In a moving ceremony organized with the local municipality this past Sunday, Shavei Israel, the organization I founded and chair, arranged for the dedication of a Torah scroll to inaugurate the village’s new Jewish cultural and religious center.
It will serve the large numbers of B’nai Anusim (people whose Iberian Jewish ancestors were forcibly converted to Catholicism in the 14th and 15th centuries and whom historians refer to by the derogatory term “Marranos”) who reside in the area.
The facility, named the Isaac Cardoso Center for Jewish Interpretation, is named after a 17th-century Trancoso-born physician and philosopher who came from a family of B’nai Anusim. Cardoso later moved to Spain with his family and then fled to Venice to escape the Inquisition, where he and his brother Miguel publicly embraced Judaism.
He went on to publish a number of important works on philosophy, medicine and theology, including a daring treatise in 1679 titled The Excellence of the Hebrews, which defended Judaism and the Jewish people from various medieval stereotypes such as ritual murder accusations and the blood libel.
The initiative for the center came from Trancoso’s mayor, Julio Sarmento, who invested more than $1.5 million in erecting the modern structure, which will include an exhibition about the Jewish history of Portugal and the renewal of Jewish life in the region in recent years.
At Sarmento’s insistence, the building also contains a new synagogue, Beit Mayim Hayim, “the House of Living Waters,” whose name was suggested by Rabbi Raphael Weinberg of Jerusalem, the first rabbi to visit Trancoso.
Near the entrance to the synagogue is a memorial wall filled with the names of B’nai Anusim who were tried and punished by the Inquisition for secretly practicing Judaism, including some who were publicly burned at the stake in the 18th century, nearly three centuries after their ancestors had been dragged to the baptismal font.
Located in the Guarda district in Portugal’s northeastern interior, the charming village of Trancoso was home to a flourishing Jewish community prior to the expulsion and forced conversion of Portugal’s Jews in 1497.
A local journalist and historian, Jose Levy Domingos, who has spent decades lovingly recording and preserving the town’s Jewish past, has discovered well over one hundred stone etchings and other physical traces of that bygone era in Trancoso’s old Jewish quarter, some of which are poignant and emotive.
On typical Jewish homes, for example, the windows were laid out in a decidedly asymmetrical fashion, at varying heights and lengths, creating a sense of architectural imperfection and inadequacy.
Domingos explains that this was done intentionally because the Jews wanted to underline that only the Temple which once stood in Jerusalem embodied perfection.
Many of the medieval homes have crosses engraved adjacent to the entrance as an ostensible statement of piety. Fearful of running afoul of the watchful eyes of the inquisition, Trancoso’s B’nai Anusim also engaged in this practice, albeit with a twist.
Domingos points out that at the bottom of the etching, they added what appear to be three prongs, as if holding up the cross. But to Jewish eyes, it is clear what their real intention was as the three spokes clearly form an inverted “Shin,” the Hebrew letter that is often used to denote one of the Divine names.
This was how Trancoso’s hidden Jews sought to cling to their heritage, subtly indicating that they had not forgotten, nor abandoned, the faith of their forefathers.
The Jewish spark cannot be extinguished. We truly are the immortal nation.
It is in memory of their tenacity that we gathered dozens of their descendants, all of them Portuguese B’nai Anusim, to take part in the ceremony this past Sunday. Symbolically, we began the procession with the Torah facing a large and imposing cathedral in the very same public square where the Inquisition had once tormented Trancoso’s hidden Jews.
Speaking to the assembled crowd, my voice cracked with emotion as I pointed at the basilica and told the B’nai Anusim, “we are here today because your forefathers did not surrender to those who sought to force them to abandon their faith. They bravely and stubbornly clung to their Jewishness in secret, risking everything. Let us all take inspiration from their example.”
As we neared the synagogue, I noticed a young man, one of the B’nai Anusim from a nearby village, looking longingly at the Torah, but seemingly shying away from it at the same time. Taking the scroll, I went over to him and offered it to him to hold. He hesitated for a moment, the surprise on his face giving way to joy as he lovingly embraced it and danced it towards its destination.
It was, I later discovered, the first time since his ancestors had converted to Catholicism in 1497 that he or anyone else in his family had ever held a Torah in their arms, as far as he knew.
And then I understood as clearly as I have ever felt before: the Jewish spark cannot be extinguished.
We truly are the immortal nation.
David Bancroft
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