Readers of the history of cryptoJews secret Jews or Marranos as they are also known (I use Marrano sparingly as it has for me pejorative connotations) come to understand that many of them wavered in their commitments to become permanent members of a formal Jewish community This phenomenon repeated itself from the 16th to the [...]

McFarland & Company Inc Publishers Reviewed by Ron DuncanHart Although the title and subject matter of The Sephardic Jew of Spain and Portugal make it sound like a traditional history book in fact this book shows Dolly Sloan’s skill as a story teller More than half of the book narrates the personal lives of four [...]

Translated from Portuguese For a traveler who arrived in Torre de Moncorvo in the TrásosMontes province of northern Portugal in the 1550’s the best place to stay in town was Isabel’s Inn To do justice to her fame it must be mentioned that her Inn functioned like a central clearing house for information on Marrano practices [...]

In Memoriam John Paul Abranches who spearheaded efforts to honor and "rehabilitate" his father Portuguese diplomat and Righteous Gentile Aristides de Sousa Mendes passed away in Antioch California on February 5 2009 after a long illness John Paul was 78 He was the last surviving son of his parents Aristides and Angelina de Sousa Mendes (His full name [...]

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 [...]