The Secret Jews of the Age of Exploration

Based on the autobiographical writings of three Crypto-Jews who lived in Spanish and Portuguese colonies during the 16th and 17th centuries, Ronnie Perelis’s Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic explores their experiences and their relationships with Judaism. Here he describes one of the three figures, Manuel Cardoso de Macedo, who—unlike the other two—was not a descendant of Jewish converts to Catholicism:

Cardoso . . . starts his life as the son of a businessman in the Azores. He goes to England to study because his father does business there, then starts rethinking his life and religion. He rejects the Catholicism of his parents and countrymen and decides to become a Calvinist—this is his first transformation. When that’s found out, he gets arrested by the Inquisition and sent to prison in Lisbon, where he meets other prisoners accused of practicing Judaism. In prison his eyes are open to the possibility that Judaism is the true path he’s been looking for all along. After his release he escapes to Amsterdam and becomes a Jew. . . .

[Despite his very different story, Cardoso’s memoir shares with the others] a sense of spiritual brotherhood. These were spiritual believers joined together to form a community beyond their ethnic ties. . . . [Today], we often think religion is driven by theology—what do you believe? We forget the power of tribe, of blood, and of community in the making of what it means to be a religious person. You’re not alone with God. You’re always with someone, and we’re ultimately all hungry for brothers and sisters with whom we can share our faith. . . .

The centrality and nourishment that community offers aren’t in contradiction with the individual journey. We often see them in tension, but I think they’re an inevitable dialectic, constantly informing and remaking each other.

Read more at YU News

More about: Conversion, History & Ideas, Judaism, Marranos, Sepharadim, Spanish Inquisition

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society