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
Thanksgivukkah: A Mash Of Two Holidays That’s Easy To Relish.
Hannukah and Thanksgiving in the USA coincide once again in 76,000 years or something like that.
What’s wrong with Thanukkah?
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
I wrote I would not spend time listening to all the talk about government shut down and debt ceiling but the talk and news reports are everywhere.
I am really becoming frightened by the threatened default of the U.S. government. You see reneging on its debt obligations would make the U.S. the first major Western government to default since Nazi Germany 80 years ago.
Germany unilaterally ceased payments on long-term borrowings on May 6, 1933, three months after Adolf Hitler was installed as Chancellor. The default helped cement Hitler’s power base following years of political instability as the WeimarRepublic struggled with its crushing debts. We all know where that led.
Today we are faced with have similar situation. A small group of congressmen (the Tea Party) have taken control of the Republican Party and consequently are holding the government hostage. They want to stop government borrowing and paying out only from the revenue received. The Tea Party members do not believe that there will be any consequences to a default. If only I could get away without not paying back my loans and meeting my commitments.
Will we see chaos in America that leads to a dictator in the name of stability? Dictators frequently need a scapegoat. Will it be the Jews? Perhaps they will blame Hispanics and specifically Mexicans as the result of the influx of illegal aliens.
I predict that a default on America’s commitments will reduce this country’s credibility. The world is on a de facto dollar standard, similar in some respects to the British pound sterling standard of the 19th and early 20th century. The U.S. dollar will not be the world’s reserve currency if there is a default.
Coast Contact 