Posts by Ian Pomerantz
109 posts
Buen shabbat, everyone!Does anyone have the dates for Madamoiselle Ester Campos, fl. 1756? I am intrigued, and would love to know what became of her.
I imagine that there are many years of cataloguing and preservation work to be done here. This cemetery was used by both the Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities, and the oldest confirmed burial is from 1467 during the reigns of Ștefan the Great and Vlad III, even before the expulsion. I hope that enough will exists in the Jewish community to preserve and catalogue these artifacts so they aren’t ag...
This is the grave of Abigail Monis, the husband of Judah Monis, architect of the first collegiate Hebrew curricula in the North American English colonies, in the Old Cambridge Burial Ground, Cambridge, MA. He was either born in North Africa or in Livorno. He made his way to Amisterdam, then to Jamaica, and eventually to New York, and from thence to The College in New Cambridge, now known as Harvar...
So who is Nick Cannon’s great-grandfather?"My mother has been calling me every single day since this has happened with so much family history.... My great-grandfather was a Spanish Rabbi. He's a Sephardic Jewish man," he revealed.
I've heard mixed reports over what is transpiring in Portugal at the moment. From what I have gathered, a bill effectively halting Jewish immigration to Portugal could pass in as little as two months.Is it expected to pass? Does anyone have more information about what is likely to happen?
What is the earliest record of the “Yave de Espanya” myth?I have two. One dates from 19th-century Turkey and is a gate key, and my other (pictured) dates from 16th-century Italy and most likely belonged to a cabinet.
This topic was brought up first in a comment by our Monique R. Balbuena. I think it would be productive to start a much-needed fund to open a trust dedicated to salvage and curation of objects of importance to Western Sephardic material and literary culture. There will be repeats of the Touro rimmonim fiasco, and there should be a safe place for manuscripts, printed objects, ritual objects, and ot...
Another curious case of an eccentric American Sephardi. Moses Elias Levi was born to the ibn Yuli family of Essouaria, Morocco in 1792. He immigrated to the island of St. Thomas and then the UK, he eventually made it to Florida where he intended to establish a utopian agrarian refuge for European Jews. Active in abolitionist causes, he died on a trek into the mountains of West Virginia.
This seems like a beautifully-written family memoir. Has anybody read it?
For those in Boston-I'm co-curating these concerts running this weekend about Black and Jewish musical cultures. I made sure to program some New England premiers of works by Sephardi and Italki composers, including Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Giacobbo Basevi, and Salamone Rossi. It promises to be great.
Strangely, Wikipedia quotes Lea, Henry Charles (January 1896). "Ferrand Martinez and the Massacres of 1391". The American Historical Review. 1 in claiming that 100,000 Jews in Aragon converted and 50,000 Jews in Castille alone were killed in the anti-Jewish violence of 1391. I would think these numbers are greatly exaggerated. Are there any current secondary estimates of victims and forced convert...
Leo Miller in Milton Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 2 (MAY 1984), pp. 41-46 claims that English poet John Milton spoke Sephardic Hebrew. How likely is it that S&P Hebrew could have infiltrated non-Jewish British manifestations of Hebrew so early?
Hilarious. Apparently the tradition of random Ashkenazim claiming illustrious Sephardic ancestry with ersatz certificates is nothing new; one Samuel Solnik in 1942 attempts to convince British authorities of his descent from Don Isaac Abarbanel, and therefore King David and his right to claim personal dominion over the entirety of Mandatory Palestine.“To this day there are families who live among ...
We've already established that Handel's librettist Nicola Haym was most likely not Jewish. But here is a postulated librettist of Handel's who definitely was Jewish, though it has yet to be proven that the anonymized texts of the oratorios Susannah and Solomon were indeed authored by his hand.
I had a spirited argument today with a wishful musical colleague who claimed that Handel's Italian librettist, Nicola Francesco Haym, was Jewish or a descendent of Jews. I replied that there is no evidence at all of Haym being Jewish. All I can find on Haym suggests that he was of gentile German descent, and that the similarity of the name Haym with the Hebrew Chaim were superficial. Is there any ...
SUCCESS! I've spent about three years trying to find these "Illuminations on the speech by Swindon before the City Elders on the Enfranchisement and Civil Rights of the Jews" of Amsterdam by Citizen David Friedrichsfeld. The are three extent copies; one in the National Library of Israel, one in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and one now in a *cough* private collection.
Francis Cardozo was an influential figure in 19th-century American life. Born of a Sephardic father and a free Black mother, he was the first African American to hold statewide office in the US. He was also the first official in the South to advocate for integrated education. My current neighborhood in Washington, DC is named after him.
I still have the ojomalo that hung over my crib.
I'm in the 16th-century Spanish colony of San Agustín, Florida. No Sephardim here (I've corrected that myth several times already today). However, the settlement does illustrate the politics of the colonial Southeast. In Charleston, religious freedom, but an economy largely based on plantation slavery. In Saint Augustine, a diverse society, under the thumb of the Inquisition.
Is there anyone here well-versed in Jewish history in Calabria?
TOI has discovered the Chuetas, though their article repeats mythology. For instance, "And they turned their kosher challah breads into what is now known as ensaimada – a dessert that, bizarrely, is made of pork lard, according to ensaimada connoisseur Tomeu Arbona."...challah is an Eastern European invention.
I am very skeptical, but at least the methodology is interesting; The author claims to have focused on specific cases in the archives of the Holy Office where the consumption of certain food associated with Jews was used as evidence against the accused. They then claim to find period recipes for the dishes from primary sources and then publish it along with a modern adaptation.
The Libretto of Lidarti's Esther was written by one Jacob Raphael Sarava. Do we have info on him?