Tag: Sephardic Jews

Sephardic Jews Receive a Spanish Embrace

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.

A Jewish Sephardic leader dies – an Israeli ayatollah

Ovadia YosefMore 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