Eliezer Papo

<jats:p>The New Testament episode of the Last Supper has powerful images of the suffering Jesus; of Judas, the evil disciple who betrayed him; and of Peter, the good but fainthearted disciple, who—torn between his loyalty to Jesus and his self-preservation instinct—denied his master three times in the course of a few hours, only to re-emerge as one of Christ's most faithful apostles. This episode does not only reflect the relation of the early Church to the Jews but was also used for centuries to construct and reconstruct the relations between the two religious communities. Symptomatically, the name of the disciple who plays a diabolical role in the scene, Judas, is an eminently Hebrew (Jewish) name. Even more interestingly, it 'happens' to be identical with the ethnonym of the Judeans, the descendants of the biblical tribe of Judah, the inhabitants of New Testament Judaea, the later Jews. The anti-Semitic potential of the New Testament's Last Supper was often used in traditional Christian society for creation and nourishment of anti-Jewish sentiments; or, even worse, as a pretext for anti-Jewish actions on the part of the elites (legislation, mass expulsion, etc.) or the common masses (riots, pogroms, etc.).</jats:p>

Eschatological expectations and messianic hopes aroused by the expulsion of Jews from Spain climaxed in the seventeenth century with the appearance of Sabbatai Tzevi. In 1666, Sultan Mehmed IV, eager to halt the uproar without creating a martyr, offered Tzevi a choice between conversion to Islam and death. Tzevi chose life. Although many Jews were devastated by his apostasy, a nucleus of Sabbatai’s most ardent followers preferred to interpret it as the ultimate tiqqun. This article presents one of the most intriguing Sabbatian literary accounts of their Messiah’s apostasy, the internal Sabbatian version of the romansa “Tarquin and Lucretia.”

espanolLa forja del sabio sefardi Ribi Dawid Ben Ya’aqov Pardo toma como punto de partida los aspectos fundamentales que, tradicionalmente, habian ido configurando, desde un ambito general, la formacion intelectual, moral y social de la figura del rabino; otrosi, desde un punto de vista mas singular, se ha senalado como en este sabio sefardi han confluido aspectos tan notorios como el abolengo familiar, la vasta formacion intelectual y la erudita produccion bibliografica, sin soslayar su permanente disponibilidad e implicacion en el seno de las distintas comunidades judias de los Balcanes. EnglishThe forge of the Sephardic Rabbi Ribi Dawid Ben Ya’aqov Pardo takes as a starting point the main aspects that, traditionally, haven been shaping, from a wider approach, the scholar, moral and social background that nourished the rabbi as such. At the same time, from a much more specific point of view, well-rooted aspects as pedigree, erudition and treatises production have being clustering ...

Ḥam Ribi Avram Finci’s Ladino Translation of Selected Texts from the Zohar as a Rare Glimpse into the Methodology of Traditional Bosnian Sephardic Yeshivot (Adult Learning Clubs) and Its Relation to the Local Sufi Islamic Tradition of Ders In traditional Sephardic culture, theoretical Kabbalah was an exclusive patrimony of the rabbinic elite. From the 17th century onward, many Sephardic laymen found even the Hebrew liturgical, and especially speculative, texts to be impenetrable and incomprehensible. Consequently, the rabbinic elite began to translate liturgical texts and halakhic works into popular Judeo-Spanish. However, the Zohar was usually not included in these projects of cultural intermediation. Consequently, a Judeo-Spanish translation of the integral text of the Zohar, or even of one of its volumes, does not exist to this day. At the same time, different Sephardic rabbis translated selected excerpts from the Zohar into the vernacular. This paper analyses one such anthology,...

... Forja de un sabio sefardí Key words: Pedigree, erudition and piety; involvement and disposition; life story of Ribi Dawid Ben Ya'aqov Pardo. ... A precious light… the elder of law, a unique expert – who is an excellent rabbi, pious and saintly, a jewel crowned with modesty - his ...

... Forja de un sabio sefardí Key words: Pedigree, erudition and piety; involvement and disposition; life story of Ribi Dawid Ben Ya'aqov Pardo. ... A precious light… the elder of law, a unique expert – who is an excellent rabbi, pious and saintly, a jewel crowned with modesty - his ...

In traditional Sephardic culture, theoretical Kabbalah was an exclusive patrimony of the rabbinic elite. From the 17th century onward, many Sephardic laymen found even the Hebrew liturgical, and especially speculative, texts to be impenetrable and incomprehensible. Consequently, the rabbinic elite began to translate liturgical texts and halakhic works into popular Judeo-Spanish. However, the Zohar was usually not included in these projects of cultural intermediation. Consequently, a Judeo-Spanish translation of the integral text of the Zohar, or even of one of its volumes, does not exist to this day. At the same time, different Sephardic rabbis translated selected excerpts from the Zohar into the vernacular. This paper analyses one such anthology, Avram ben Moshe Finci's Leket a-Zoar, published in 5619 (1858/9) in Belgrade. The anthology contains 246 excerpts from the Zohar,

DUE TO THE EXTREME SECRECY of the Sabbatians who followed their messiah into apostasy, only five manuscripts containing their sacred poetry are available to scholars today. 1 The corpus of songs contained therein amounts to well over a thousand unique titles, and among them are found five poems of a particular type: romances.

Eliezer Papo: "Avia de ser, escena de la vida de un tiempo, kon romansas, de Laura Papo Bohoreta: Edision sientifika, anotada i komentada" (Avia de Ser, a Play from Past Times, With Ballades by Laura Papo Bohoreta: Annotated and Commented Scientific Edition [in Judeo-Spanish]) in Paloma Daz-Mas y María Snchez Preez (eds.) Mujeres sefardes lectoras y escritoras, Iberoamericana/ Vervuert, Madrid/Frankfurt, pp. 337 - 364.

Both sub-genres of the parodies of the Ladino translation of the Passover Haggadah, the Polemic and the War Haggadahs, make a neglected genre of the Sephardic humoristic literature. The main aim of the present article is to check the impact of the creation of the State of Israel on the self-image of the Sephardic Jews, as it is reflected in the lesser subgenre: in the War Haggadahs. Out of twelve known War Haggadahs, eleven were written before the creation of the State of Israel and only one in its immediate aftermath, in 1949. Interestingly, in that last known Judeo-Spanish War Haggadah, there are no more traces of the self-humor, so typical of the previous War Haggadoth. The ethos of the group seem to have changed, and with it – it's self-image.

Following the 1492 expulsion from Spain, the Spanish (later in the text Sephardic)
Jews scattered all over the world, carrying with them (among other things) their
Iberian oral culture. Many of the expellees found a safe haven in the provinces of
the then ever-growing, new world’s superpower, the Ottoman Empire, which happily
embraced the influx of this eminently urban, highly professional, and skilled manpower
as an unexpected blessing from Heaven. Others expellees opted for the
immediate vicinity, migrating to northern Morocco (which will prove to be a better
choice than neighboring Catholic countries) or to Portugal (where they were forcefully
converted a few years later, this time even without the option of leaving the country
to remain in one’s faith). Both groups that were spared forced baptism to Catholicism,
namely the Ottoman and the North Moroccan Sephardim, have kept their distinctive
Judeo-Hispanic character until our own times. This has been, primarily, through the
preservation of their vernacular daily language and through the perpetuation of its rich
oral culture.
One of the oral genres that has remained dominant in Sephardic culture to
this very day is, certainly, the genre of refranes or proverbs. During their fivehundred-
year-long separation, both Sephardic groups, the Ottoman and the North-Moroccan Jews produced many new proverbs. Some of these were a Judeo-
Spanish translation or an adaptation of local (Balkan or Moroccan) sayings, while
others were produced by the ethnic group itself. Yet, the overwhelming majority of
proverbs in both traditions stem from their common Iberian roots, some of which
are shared with all speakers of different Iberian (especially Castilian) dialects, while
others were particular to the Jewish population of the peninsula (to this category
belong translations of non-biblical Hebrew and Aramaic proverbs deriving mostly
from Rabbinic literature).3 Some of the mentioned common Iberian elements have an
apparent Catholic origin, and the sole role of this study is to analyze the appearance
of these eminently Catholic proverbs among the Sephardim in the Muslim Morocco
and in the Muslim-dominated Ottoman Empire. As representative of the extensive
Ottoman refranero, one single tradition was chosen as a point of reference: the
Bosnian. Being the most northern autochthonous Sephardic tradition and also being
an eminently continental one (Bosnia of the time did not have ports and Bosnian
Jews did not live in them), Bosnian Sephardic common masses did not have much
contact with their Moroccan brethren or with their common country of origin. No less
important, during the first few centuries of Sephardic presence in Bosnia most of the
Jews were concentrated in Sarajevo, where they have developed strong relations with
the two biggest local communities: Muslims and Orthodox Serbs (whose liturgical
language is Church Slavonic and not Latin). Catholic Croat presence in Sarajevo was
not that numerous until the Austro-Hungarian occupation in 1878. Moreover, even
the Catholics who lived in Sarajevo and were acquainted with Bosnian Sephardim
were of Slavic stock and did not speak any Roman language (even if they prayed
in Latin, without understanding much of what they said). Therefore, any residual
Catholic elements in traditional Bosnian Judeo-Spanish refranero should be seen as
traces of pre-Expulsion traditions and not as a result of local influences. Consequently,
a comparison of these two Jewish ex-Iberian proverbial traditions might provide us
with a usable criterion for a more precise dating of the absorption of Catholic elements
in different Sephardic proverbial repertoires, helping us better define which of its elements could and should be seen as pertaining to some common, pre-exile Iberian
tradition and which should be viewed as a result of post-exilic linguistic and cultural
contacts of certain Sephardic communities (primarily the Moroccan one, due to
geographic proximity) with their old Iberian motherland.