Bringing the Lost Prayer Book of Catalonian Jewry Back to Life

In the Middle Ages, the Jews of Catalonia had a distinct liturgy, shared by their brethren in nearby Valencia and the island of Majorca. Using partial manuscripts, the Israeli scholar Idan Perez has reconstructed a complete prayer book reflecting this liturgy, writes Chen Malul:

Perez, now head of the rare-books department at the National Library of Israel, worked on the restoration project for three years. The prayer book, which had never been printed in its entirety . . . was recreated based on six separate manuscripts. The earliest, preserved in the Ginzburg collection in Moscow, dates to around 1352, more than 100 years before the expulsion [of the Jews from Spain]. The latest of the manuscripts, preserved in Rome in the Biblioteca Casanatense, was copied in the year 1507, less than twenty years after the expulsion. “I didn’t add a single word of my own, everything came from the manuscripts,” he explains.

Perez elaborated further on the origins of the Catalan rite:

As we know, this ancient prayer style did not survive because the communities of the Catalan Jews did not survive centuries of [persecution]. Today, there is no community that prays according to this [liturgy]. I began my historical research about the Jews who fled Catalonia after the riots of 1391 and the expulsion in 1492 and reached important findings about the communities of expelled Catalan Jews in Italy, the Ottoman empire, and Algiers.

Read more at The Librarians

More about: Catalonia, Prayer books, Sephardim, Spanish Expulsion

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF