Who are the Jews from Mexico

A good reminder of the traces of our history. Driven far away from our land, leaving refuge after refuge in the quest for the way to return home. This time, it is about the Jews from Mexico, who, as I saw recently, are starting to return to Israel, together with the other Jewish communities from Latin America.

We are ready to go back home. 

Sephardim in Bosnia

Sarajevo is one of the places on the top list of places I would like to visit in Europe, a city whose present and recent past I am very curious to discover. Preparing this moment, I spent a couple of hours lately reading a book by the former chief rabbi Dr. Moritz Levy, one of the many victims of the Germans in the Balkans, published first in 1911.

Illustrated with pictures presenting Jews and their costumes at the beginning of the 20 century, the book is offering a couple of information about the history of a community we didn't have too much time to know. Landing in the Balkans from Spain at the end of the 16th century, the Jews from Bosnia established mostly in Sarajevo. Silent until the 18th century, they count among them names as R' Samuel Baruch or the first European-educated doctor in Bosnia, Isak Salom. The Jewish quarter has been built in 1851 and the inhabitants adopted many of the vestments and culinary customs from the Turkish majority, although the Ottomans required them - as to the Christians - to differentiate their ways of dressing. They were mostly traders, going regularly to Belgrade to sell their products, but from the 19th century, Sarajevo turned also into an important printing centre of the "Orient". The book is documented with financial and historical documents from the archives, pictures and analysis of responsa, written in an academic style but still attracting the reader by the rich information not too much known nowadays.

Although very much aware that the Sephardim in Bosnia are rather history, I am still curious to go there to discover with my own eyes their traces. Let's make a wish.

History of Jewish communities: Pale of Settlement

History Crash Course: Pale of Settlement, via Aish

For Jerusalem - Elie Wiesel

It was inevitable: Jerusalem once again is at the center of political debates and international storms. New and old tensions surface at a disturbing pace. Seventeen times destroyed and seventeen times rebuilt, it is still in the middle of diplomatic confrontations that could lead to armed conflict. Neither Athens nor Rome has aroused that many passions.

For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics. It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture-and not a single time in the Koran. Its presence in Jewish history is overwhelming. There is no more moving prayer in Jewish history than the one expressing our yearning to return to Jerusalem. To many theologians, it IS Jewish history, to many poets, a source of inspiration. It belongs to the Jewish people and is much more than a city, it is what binds one Jew to another in a way that remains hard to explain. When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it is not the first time; it is a homecoming. The first song I heard was my mother's lullaby about and for Jerusalem. Its sadness and its joy are part of our collective memory.

Since King David took Jerusalem as his capital, Jews have dwelled inside its walls with only two interruptions; when Roman invaders forbade them access to the city and again, when under Jordanian occupation. Jews, regardless of nationality, were refused entry into the old Jewish quarter to meditate and pray at the Wall, the last vestige of Solomon's temple. It is important to remember: had Jordan not joined Egypt and Syria in the 1967 war against Israel, the old city of Jerusalem would still be Arab. Clearly, while Jews were ready to die for Jerusalem they would not kill for Jerusalem.

Today, for the first time in history, Jews, Christians and Muslims all may freely worship at their shrines. And, contrary to certain media reports, Jews, Christians and Muslims ARE allowed to build their homes anywhere in the city. The anguish over Jerusalem is not about real estate but about memory.

What is the solution? Pressure will not produce a solution. Is there a solution? There must be, there will be. Why tackle the most complex and sensitive problem prematurely? Why not first take steps which will allow the Israeli and Palestinian communities to find ways to live together in an atmosphere of security. Why not leave the most difficult, the most sensitive issue, for such a time?

Jerusalem must remain the world's Jewish spiritual capital, not a symbol of anguish and bitterness, but a symbol of trust and hope. As the Hasidic master Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav said, "Everything in this world has a heart; the heart itself has its own heart."

Jerusalem is the heart of our heart, the soul of our soul.

For Jerusalem was published April 16, as a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, in the form an open letter to President Obama.

Laws, history and life

The debate between Ernest Nolte - whose 1963 Der Fascismus in seiner Epoche tried to go beyond both the Marxist and the Liberal patterns of interpretation of the WWII events and stir lots of controversy- and Francois Furet is impressive by the polite and extremely carefully worded exchange. It is a common place, indeed, but I really enjoyed the language of the letters exchange between the two, since 1995 in the last years of Furet's life. An island of academic freedom and distinctiveness, trying to solve by the force of the words painful and sometimes non-conventional ideas - as the insistence of Nolte regarding how to react to revisionists, not by laws, but by the force of the argument - but the problem is that a revisionist don't intend to change its perspective but to impose it in a well-known totalitarian way and they are not interested to hear arguments being already convinced of the absolute truth of their assertions.

For Furet, the 20th century totalitarianisms are twins, sharing are very much alike. And, Holocaust, as Furet wrote to Nolte (66) "was unique...in that it targeted for extermination men, women and children because they were born as they were". Nolte identified Fascism as a form of resistance to and reaction against modernity. By thus, "the final solution" was the logical outcome of an ideology, national-socialism, identifying the Jew with the modernity. As later Zeev Sternhell commented, national-socialism was reduced to the ideas of Hitler and the burden of Germany was eased. After the fall of communism, both points of view are disproportionately mixed by the new-nationalist ideologies, with an anti-semitic milestone, outlining among others that the communism was instaurated by Jews.

The destiny of ideas is often strange. Translated from books to reality, imposed to this reality with a meaning of change, read by people without education, culture and without the required wisdom they could be deadly weapons. Reading a religion book could be a revelatory experience: you find the answers, the recommended path to reach freedom, happiness, peace or to enjoy any other positive standards and feelings. Nothing similar to be found when you look about how religions are effectively working.

For me it was always complicate to look after laws of history or patterns likely to repeat at certain periods of time - Spengler's succesion of the epoch similarly with the seasons is, to be polite, at least childish. At the first lecture, a historical event is like an equation with a non-specified number of unknown details. Something you will never or aproximatively know - especially when it is about events who took place centuries ago - is how the main actors, the human ones, thought and felt and why they took some decisions, and not others. And it is why, for me, the explanation offered by Nolte is not satisfactory, even explained and explained again on hundred of pages: it is too simplistic, tailored as an intellectual relief, sequential and self-explanatory. Facts of life require more details and assertiveness.

A past

still denied by many, not enough considered in the whole implications, including from the point of view of understanding human nature.