Born to a converso family in Portugal, and raised as a Jew in Amsterdam, Isaac Aboab de Fonseca is best known to posterity for signing the rabbinic ban expelling Benedict Spinoza from the city’s Jewish community in 1656. But from 1642 to 1654 he served as the rabbi of the congregation in Recife, in Dutch Brazil. Most of Recife’s Jews were themselves from Portuguese converso families and had reverted to Judaism when northeastern Brazil came under Dutch rule. Oren Zweiter describes a remarkable work of Aboab’s:

[In] 1646, the Dutch colony was under siege by the Portuguese. The Jews of Recife were terrified at the prospect of Portuguese conquest, knowing that Portuguese victory would bring the Inquisition with it. To respond to the threat, Aboab composed a viduy, or confessional prayer, enumerating what he believed to be the community’s sins and beseeching God to spare them. He thereafter composed a second poem recounting the Jews’ suffering during the siege, as well as their rescue. . . .

At the very beginning of the poem, he depicted the Jewish residents of Brazil, himself included, as “dwellers in the shadows of the universe.” Brazil was on the fringes, in the shadows of the known world, far from any major center of Jewish life. Later in the poem, he makes a personal statement, claiming that, “For my sin, I have been tossed to a faraway land.”

For Aboab, the Americas were in the shadows, and the only reason that could explain his presence there was that it was a punishment of exile for sins he had committed. He was a young, rising star in the rabbinic world of Amsterdam, who was taken from the center of his community’s Jewish life and sent to the most remote place imaginable. Aboab’s sentiments reflect the feelings of later immigrant rabbis to the New World, whether from Germany, Lithuania, or Hungary. The Americas were far. The Americas were different. It was rabbinic exile.

Aside from his own personal feelings of exile, Aboab also . . . accused his community of forsaking God because of their material success: “My flesh stood up from fear of my adversaries, for from my wealth I forgot my Creator.” Aboab’s accusations of materialism, however, take on a clearer and harsher tone in the confession: “I have coveted . . . all of man’s pleasures at all times.”

Such laments, too, writes Zweiter, have been mainstay of rabbis in the Americas ever since.

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?