Indentured Immigrants
Flypaper Press, Ignacio, CA, soft cover, $19.95 reviewed by Gloria Trujillo Philip has self-published his book which has nine fact filled chapters of his Jewish family’s odyssey from Madeira, which is about 400 miles east of Casablanca Morocco, to the Sandwich Islands in 1885 aboard the Stirlingshire, a three-masted sailing ship. In the first three [...]
Another Desert:Jewish Poetry of New Mexico
reviewed by Gloria Trujillo Another Desert: Jewish Poetry of New Mexico edited by Joan Logghe and Miriam Sagan. (Sherman Asher Publishing, P0 Box 2853, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87504-2853. 174 pages, $15, 00, paperback.) Once I picked up “Another Desert” to read, I could not put it down. The book is an intriguing and moving [...]
Bimuelos: An Historical Recipe
Bimuelos: Honeyed Fritters from the time of the Inquisition Judging from Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition testimonies and from other documents relating to Iberian Jews, Hanukah seems to have been an extremely minor holiday in late medieval Iberia. Despite the holiday’s minor status in the lives of Iberian Jews, a memorandum was prepared as a guide [...]
A Messianic Epiphany: The Conversion of the Dönme Sabbateans
In 1683 approximately three hundred Jewish families voluntarily converted to Islam. This voluntary mass conversion took place in the Ottoman city of Salonika and was the largest conversion of its kind. There are several explanations as to why this conversion took place. The main reason stems from the fact that this group of Jews was [...]
Jewish Philosophy Influenced Crypto-Jewish Practice of Medicine
After the disruptions of the many expulsions of Jews from most West European kingdoms from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries¸ it is no wonder that Jews as medical practitioners tended almost everywhere to fade away. The two places where they remained in evidence, however, were those lands where major disasters had not yet taken [...]
Abuelita’s Secret Matzahs
Reviewed by Arthur Benveniste The pages of HaLapid have presented reviews of many books dealing with the history and culture of crypto Jews, some of them quite scholarly, others written in a more popular style, some fiction and some histories. But, until now, the books have been directed towards an adult readership. What a pleasure [...]
FENNEL – A FOOD RICH IN SEPHARDIC COOKING LORE
It was fortuitous that I decided to start researching both my Jewish roots and culinary practices in the sane year, 1992. It was the 500th anniversary of the Expulsion from Spain, and fortunately for me, that year’s related events created a lot of interest in Sephardic matters. My maternal grandmother’s family came from the Azores [...]
Women, Ritual and Secrecy:
This research focuses on the role of women in sustaining crypto-Judaism in twentieth-century American society. The historical significance of such women has been identified in the work of Cecil Roth (1932) and Renee Levine (1982), both of whom studied the role of women in sustaining hidden Judaism during the Spanish persecutions of the fifteenth and [...]
A Drizzle of Honey
David Gitlitz’s new book with co-author and wife, Linda Kay Davidson is A Drizzle of Honey: the Lives and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews. Suggested price is $29.95, discounted to $26.95. Published by St. Martin’s Press. When he was at the Summer 1997 Denver conference of the Society for Crypto Judaic Studies, Gitlitz said he [...]
The Poetry of Leonor De Carvajal and The Crypto-Jewish Tradition In New Spain
This is based on two articles. The prime source was: “La poesía de Leonor de Carvajal y la tradición de los cryptojudíos en Nueva Esapaña” by Michelle M. Hamilton (University of California, Berkeley) which appeared in Sefarad, Año 60, Fasc. 1, Madrid 2000. Additional information was obtained from an article by Moshé Shaul in Aki [...]
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