Tkhine of the Matriarchs for the Shofar

In this article they talk about the blowing of the Shofar and how the sound of it is used to blow your sins away and confuse Satan so he can't accuse us. I didn't know that any Jews ever believed in Satan. This is an interesting fact and it makes it sound like the Jews were extremely scared and thought their family members would look down on their sorrow. They were also afraid of having their children lose their mother or father because it caused anguish when Isaac was taken from Sarah. They are praying more for the future than asking for forgiveness from their past which is the whole reason of Rosh Hoshanah and blowing the Shofar.

Sachar vs. Katz on Jewish life in Europe

According to Jacob Katz, Professor Emeritus of Social History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem he believes that there are many differences between traditional and modern Jews which can cause many different clashes in different spheres of activity. He discusses the term “traditional society” and they base their existence and aspirations on the values and on the knowledge yet to be discovered and developed. They assume that all the practical and theoretical knowledge that they require has been inherited by them from their forefathers and that it is their duty to act in accordance with the ancient customs. Katz brings up an interesting point that it is difficult for modern man to attribute value to anything just by virtue of its being inherited from the past. The fact that our forefathers acted in a certain way does not provide modern man with the confidence that this is indeed the correct manner. Man in modern society feels compelled to justify his behavior on another level altogether, on a rational, scientific base, that does not rest on the acceptance of the values of the past. Katz discusses different customs such as, dress, language and manners which are all in accordance with traditions. There are two different opinions on the validity of tradition. On the one hand, there is traditionalism based on the direct acceptance of the tradition conveyed through social channels. Then there are the Jewish cultures that have their own local traditions, which were conveyed by generations by unmediated personal contact, rather than through the impersonal and formal literature. The child gets a sense of the tradition not by studying it but by being brought up within traditional society. Katz talks about the social interactions and gatherings in society and he brings up that young men in modern society see no harm in the fact that a man, at the end of his working day, goes out and looks for relaxation in an activity for which there is no explicit religious or moral justification. This is an example of the transition occurring from traditional to modern conditions. To sum Katz’s article a society is classified as traditional, not because it has no future or present. Society can only continue to exist by virtue of the past that molds its present, and each generation adds its particular contribution to the heritage of the past. Traditional society is thus compelled to adjust to changes that occur in its midst and all of this raises problems and inevitable clashes between to two worlds.

In Sachar’s article he discusses how Jews were treated in the 16^th - 19^th centuries. He talks about how Europeans were determined to exploit this Jewish talent for producing liquid wealth, substantial numbers of rulers were willing intermittently to protect their Jews as dependable sources of taxes and loans. Thus, Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II, although a militant early-seventeenth century defender of the Counter-Reformation, was unwilling to dispense with Jewish funds for his military campaigns. Neither would Protestant kings and dukes. It was strictly as a quid pro quo for their money, therefore, that Jewish communities were allowed to revive in a succession of Protestant and Catholic dominions. By the mid-1700s, the Jewish demography in Central and Western Europe may have approached 300,000 - 400,000. For being able to return, the Jews paid a price that transcended loans and taxes. Responding to the demands of clergy and of local guild members, state and local governments limited Jews to vocations disdained by gentiles. For this reason, perhaps as many as three-fourths of the Jews in Central and Western Europe were limited to the precarious occupations of retail peddling, hawking, and street-banking, that is, money lending. Some Jews managed to earn enough to establish small shops but most did not. In their struggle for a livelihood, they generated a sizable underclass of beggars, fencers, pimps, even robbers, thereby creating a self-fulfilling gentile scenario of Jews, one that would be endlessly invoked by Jew-haters throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless, there remained constraints on Jewish life that eventually became insupportable. One of these was the ghetto. These walled slum-shanty neighborhoods effectively barred Jews from all but the narrowest, commercial, daytime interaction with the gentile citizens. Although, the first Spanish and Italian ghettos of the late medieval era actually had been requested by the Jews themselves as private, self-governing “territories”. In this new and open terrain, Jews preserved and developed their own religious and cultural traditions even more freely than in the German-speaking world. Jewish settlement was densest in eastern and southern Poland, especially in the Ukrainian and Belorussian areas that had been annexed in the sixteenth century.

After reading both of these articles Katz doesn’t discuss the way Jews are treated as much as Sachar. But Sachar discusses how Jews were exiled and basically pushed around Europe for 3 or 4 centuries until they came to eastern and southern Poland where they were able to start their own tradition. Unlike Katz who discussed the values and where our traditions come from as Jews whether we grow up with them or are they just engrained in us from our forefathers.

The Arrival of the Sefardim

The Jews were such an integral part of Salonica that it seemed impossible to imagine they had not always been there. There were Jews in the city before there were any Christians. So in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella forced thousands out of their homeland, and shortly after Sicily, Sardinia, Navarre, Provence and Naples did the same. By the mid 16th century Jews had been evicted from most of western Europe. Many of the Jews from this area converted or went underground as Marranos, still practicing Judaism. The entire Jewish world shifted eastwards to the safe havens of Poland and the Ottoman domains.
The expulsion of the Jews formed part of a bitter struggle for power between Islam and Catholocism. In the midst of this bitter conflict the Ottoman exploited their enemy's anti-jewish measures. The Balkans remained overwhelmingly Christian, Asian and Arab lands. and all the towns in the empire, it was Salonica which benefited most. Since 1453, while Istanbul's population had been growing at an incredible rate thanks to compulsory resettlement and immigration by Muslims, Greeks and Armenians, tuning it into perhaps the largest city in Europe, Salonica lagged far behind.
Through religious devotion and study, they turned Salonica into a "new Jerusalem", wrapping their new place of exile in the mantle of biblical geography was a way of coming to feel at home. "The Jews of Europe and other countries, persecuted and banished, have come to find a refuge".

The Origins of Sephardic Jewry in the Medieval Arab World

1. The Sephardim are Jews of Spain or of Spanish descent.

2. Jewish history under Muslim rule should be seen in a more balanced, realistic light because of its sense of noble descent; its tradition of service to gentile rulers; its high cultural achievement in philosophy and poetry; and its history of crypto-judaism.

3. Jewish life under Muslim rule was generally easier than under Christian rule according to Cohen because Jews were accepted as peers and were able to practice Judaism without question.

4. Jews living under Muslim rule felt much greater security than Jews living under the cross. Jews would normally bring up legal cases before the Jewish bet din.

5. The economic roles of Jews in Muslim during the Middle ages was well integrated they participated in every walk of life characteristic of society at large versus the Jews in Christian lands where Jews were almost always economic pariahs. They were long-distance merchants in the early medieval Europe, where predominantly rural society frowned upon the alien merchant and his profit seeking acquisitiveness.

6. The Christian Reconquista led to the downfall of Jews in Christian Spain.

7. Spanish Jews fled to Muslim territories, stretching from nearby Morocco and Algeria, to Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, as well as to the Muslim Ottoman Empire in Anatolia, Turkey and the Balkans after the expulsion. The ottomans welcomed them in because they had an enemy in common, and the Jewish immigrants now applied their political and economic talents toward Ottoman interests.

8/29/08 - The Expulsion from Spain

1. According to the Italian Jew the last few days of Spanish Jewry were not as bad compared to the beginning when they were expelled from Spain or forced to convert to Christianity. The King of Naples was very accepting of the Jews and supplied them with as much food as he could unfortunately due to the large numbers of Jews many died from famine.

2. The main reason for the expulsion of the Jews was that they were encouraging the Marranos to persist in their Jewishness which would not allow them to become good Christians.

3. The leaders of the Jews were Rabbi Dan Abraham Seneor, leader of the Spanish congregations. Also, Rabbi Meur Melamed, who was the secretary to the King and Don Isaac Abravanel, who fled to Castile from the King of Portugal. In response to the order they converted to Christianity.

4. Don Abraham Seneor - converted to Christianity at the age of eighty
Don Isaac Abravanel - fled to Castile from the King of Portugal, and occupied an equally prominent position at the Spanish Royal Court until he was later expelled. Then he went to Naples and was highly esteemed by the King of Naples.

5. The refugees went to Portugal, North Africa (Fez, Tlemcen, Berber provinces), Sicily and Naples.

6. The refugees were treated very poorly everywhere they went except Naples where they were actually given food and not robbed of every cent they had on them.

7. The Jews of Northern Africa acted very charitable toward their fellow Jews. Fellow Jews in Naples supplied them with food as much as they could, and also tried to collect money to sustain them in Naples.