Moshe ben Maimon or Maimonides was the most important Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages His writings on the Torah are well known What is less well known is the fact that he was also the most important Jewish physician of the Middle Ages When forced to convert to Islam by the Almohad dynasty in Córdova [...]

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 [...]

In crossing the Atlantic Ocean en route to the Iberian Peninsula I could imagine the journey my ancestors made from Barcelona to the New World in the eigthteenth century In many ways my journey to Madrid Spain can be described as a return journey to an obscure homeland It is from this obscure homeland that [...]

The Society of CryptoJudaic Studies like most academic organizations devotes most of its attention to the written word either findings from scholarly research or personal stories by descendants of the Jews of Spain and Portugal (Sephardim) many of whom had to keep their heritages and identities secret in order to survive Poetry and dramatic plays [...]

Reviewed by Arthur Benveniste Almost every day headlines announce another story of sectarian violence somewhere in the world And in most cases radical Moslems are involved Their advisories are Jews in Israel Hindus in Kashmir Christians in the former Yugoslavia and Christians and Animists in Sudan Travel the world and you will find churches converted [...]

On September 8 of this year the impressive Kadoorie synagogue (Mekor H’aimfountain of life) in Porto Portugal came alive with singing and dancing on the occasion of the dedication of a sefer torah donated by a rabbi whose grandfather was saved from the nazis by the then fledging anusim community founded by Captain Barros Basto [...]

The history of the anusim while often not on the forefront of Jewish historical studies is well known to many scholars Oftentimes Crypto Jews are considered the primary example of a culture and religion kept alive by secretive cultural and religious expression during an era of extreme oppression and genocide (Jacobs 2002) What is less known [...]

Being raised Catholic didn’t seem to make me Catholic Some how I never felt as if I fit in to what seemed to be the religion of my ancestors I can remember praying with my Granny three times a day when we were around one another At her house she had a little altar facing the [...]

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 [...]

This article concerns the commonly shared ideology of those Sephardim who were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula as well as those who were forced to undergo conversion and remained there or immigrated to other countries The messianic hope for religious and national restoration was for them a commonly held one that would bring an end [...]