The fiftyfive year old woman walked cautiously to the small bedroom in the back of the house situated in the juderá­a of Toledo Doña Robledo stroked the altar cloth her grandmother made for the synagogue It was a cream colored silk cloth embroidered with fine silk strands from Granada depicting the Tree of Life Her [...]

Introduction The universal history of Jewish people is full of constant oppressions and persecutions Portugal as no exception to this rule It was in TrasosMontes a rugged and isolated province of Portugal on the North East border with Spain that many Jews settled and were able to secretly maintain their ancestral culture and religious practises [...]

Jorge Lopes Amaral born in Mozambique of Portuguese parents from Mangualde (90 kilometres from Belmonte) was obliged to travel to New York to return to Klar Israel It’s hard to say when Jorge’s odyssey began but when he went to Israel in 1985 on a work assignment he found himself at home It felt as [...]

Órale! Hurry up! In slang it can mean HEY! How’s it going what’s happenin’ get it on ok etc The word comes from " ahora " (now) and the indirect pronoun for you " le" It is used when you want to get someone or something moving or to exhort someone to do something or [...]

Groups of judaizers arrived at the coast of New Spain in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century and in the hopes of escaping the persecution and repression promoted in the Peninsula thought the new continent would offer them a better life and greater freedom to practice their religion and keep their language and Hispanic cultural heritage at [...]

In 1962 Judy Frankel attended a Theodore Bikel concert in Cambridge Mass Bikel sang a song in Spanish but as Judy recalls "It didn’t sound like Spanish" After the concert she asked Bikel about the song He told her that it was in Ladino The song was "Los Bilbilikos" (The Nightingales) This was her introduction [...]

What happened to a celebrated scholar who refused to convert? And what happened to his descendants who became CryptoJews I was probably nine or ten and sitting in the synagogue when my father called my attention to an elderly gentleman located a few rows in front of us "Do you see that man over there?" [...]

The Jewish genealogist working in a Sephardic milieu has it easier than one who works with an eastern European family tree The Jews of Spain acquired family names beginning with the 10 th or 11 th century Most Eastern European Jews did not adopt family names until the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19 th [...]

(Also see A Messianic Epiphany The Conversion of the Dönme Sabbateans by Lillooet McDonnell ) Introduction In the following pages I would like to discuss the history of conspiracy theories about a cryptoJewish group Dönmes in Turkey I will start the discussion by describing the group’s story and then compare it with the conspiratorial accounts about [...]

In 1683 approximately three hundred Jewish families voluntarily converted to IslamThis 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 also [...]