In Memory of the Crypto-Jewish victims, HY”D of the Auto da fé at Lisbon on 6 September 1705. The Archbishop of Cranganore’s viciously antisemitic sermon delivered that day was smuggled (to London’s Sephardic community), republished and rebutted by Carlos Vero (aka Hakham David Nieto)
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“Mohamad Jebara, ‘Reclaimer’ of the Quran”
By Armin Rosen, The Wall Street Journal
Imam Mohamed Jebara, American Sephardi Federation and Institut du Monde Arabe event celebrating the “Juifs d’Orient: Une histoire plurimillénaire” exhibit in Paris, Consulate General of France in New York, NYC, 20 October 2021
(Photo courtesy of Zak Siraj)
Starting in 2014, the American Sephardi Federation began identifying and collaborating with forces in the Muslim world committed to building bridges and counteracting Islamism. One of our friends, Mohamed Jabara, is finally starting to get noticed outside Muslim circles, where he is recognized as a religious and communal leader, exceptional and prolific scholar, and force for good.
A Lebanese-Canadian Imam, calligrapher, and author with scholarly lineage that connects him to the Prophet Muhammad, Jebara argues that the Quran is “‘a formidable life-giving force that can be misused for destruction.’” Counter to popular perception, however, “‘The Quran… is the solution to extremism and stagnation in the Muslim world today, not its cause.’”
Jebara makes his case by turning one of the core claims of the Islamists against them, namely, the idea that our time parallels the time of the Prophet Muhammad. While the Islamists often use that parallel to justify a contemporary total war on jahaliya, the alleged ignorance of God’s sovereignty common to all non-Islamist regimes, Jebara sees the Islamists themselves as the type of enemy the Quran originally aimed to overcome, “The core condition of the Muslim world today—willful stagnation—mirrors the same paralysis the Qur’an originally emerged to repair.” Jebara’s fundamental argument is that the Quran offers liberation from stagnation and closed-mindedness.
As for the relations with Israel, according to Jebara the Quran not only recognizes God’s continuing relationship with the Jewish people and accepts ancient Jewish history, it sees in Solomon’s Jerusalem “a lost monotheistic model of aesthetic and technical creativity.”
But the challenges to realizing Jebara’s vision are immense. The Muslim world is far from the Solomonic ideal, while his key to renewal, the Quran “has become frozen… To most Muslims it’s a talisman....”
Given the honor of blurbing the book, the ASF’s Executive Director Jason Guberman wrote: "Jebara rescues the Qur’an, one of the world’s most memorized yet misunderstood and maligned works, from the book burners and fanatics by elucidating the nuanced meanings of Islam’s fundamental text. A beautifully written, well-sourced, and essential read for understanding the power of ideas and intercultural exchange."
“After 21 Generations in the Land of Israel, Facing Hizbullah on the Northern Border”
By Ani Wilcenski and Isaac de Castro, Tablet Magazine
Yaniv Elhadif
(Screenshot courtesy of Tablet Magazine/Youtube)
One of the gravest effects of the Oct. 7th War that opened in Israel’s south is the internal displacement of 100,000 Israelis from the country’s north. Yaniv Elhadif grew up in the northern Israeli town of Metulla situated between the Lebanese and Syrian borders. Elhadif’s family has lived in the Land of Israel for 21 generations since fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, and his childhood included other wars, with weeks in bomb shelters and traumas aplenty, but this is different, “‘dangerous… I never felt the same before. Never.’” Shortly after Oct. 7th , and under attack from Hizbullah, Elhadif evacuated Metulla with his family. With Hezbollah’s forces in place along the border, the reality is difficult to digest:
It was a very very hard feeling. Very very hard, leaving everything behind, taking only the essentials and leaving Metulla, for who knows how long. It was the first time in my life, even during other wars in the past we always stayed… For us it’s shaking the earth beneath our feet. There’s no longer a stable place… I want to go back but I’m not gonna go back, taking the risk of having Hizbullah again on the fence. For me leaving, as now, away from home, it means that they won. It already means for me that they won the war.
Enabling Israelis like Elhadif to return to their northern homes requires pushing Hezbollah away from the border. Present and future Israeli governments will be judged, in large part, by their success or failure in achieving this goal.
“Sephardic Art and the First Modernist Sephardic Artists”
By Devin E. Naar, Ayin Press
Artist Harry Naar with sons Devin and Aaron, Naar Studio, Lawrenceville, NJ, circa 1992
(Photo courtesy of Devin Naar/Ayin Press)
Dr. Devin E. Naar, the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies and Associate Professor of History at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, inaugurated a new series of essays dedicated to exploring “[t]he contested place of the artist in Sephardic Jewish life” and “the largely invisible yet dynamic world of art created by Sephardic Jews.”
Naar opens the article together with his brother “sitting on the floor of our father’s studio at home, watching him paint.” Naar’s father, Harry Naar, was a visual artist who “resisted characterization as a Sephardic or Jewish artist,” but whose rich Sephardic Jewish home rendered the strict separation between art and Sephardic Judaism problematic for his son, Devin, who notes how
Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews played noteworthy roles in the arts. They spearheaded the design and production of Judaica in the Ottoman Empire, became antiquarians whose Judaica collections formed part of the foundation of the holdings of institutions like Jewish Museum in New York City, and were key figures in the modern art scenes that stretched from Paris to Tel Aviv, Sarajevo, New York, and beyond.
Naar identifies two obstacles in the way of Sephardic Jewish artists at the turn of the 20th c. First, the status of artists in Sephardic communities was far from secure. To illustrate the point, Naar refers to one of “the dozens of Ladino novels written in the Ottoman Empire, Ben Izak Sacerdote’s Refael i Miriam: Novela de la Vida de los Judios del Oriente, published in Istanbul in 1910.” Sacerdote’s tale “reflects the position of the artist as essentially the craziest and least practical profession imaginable in the Ottoman Jewish world of the time.”
An additional obstacle was the “entrenched perception” in Western Jewish communities “shaped by deeply Eurocentric and orientalist assumptions internalized by mainstream (i.e., Ashkenazi) Jewish society—that Jews from the Ottoman Empire were not “cultured” enough to produce their own art.”
In Naar’s telling, however, we can trace vibrant visual art in Sephardic Jewish communities back to “Illustrated Haggadot made on the printing press” as well as illustrated ketubot (wedding contracts) “unique to all Sephardic Jews, whether in Amsterdam, Livorno, or Ottoman lands” that “frequently included fauna, celestial objects, birds, and elaborate cityscapes of Istanbul or Jerusalem.”
The spread of global modernity then opened a door to figurative art through “The invention of picture postcards, including those colorized by hand, and their introduction into the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century.” As Naar concludes:
These developments set the stage for the emergence of the first Ottoman-born modernist Jewish artists… In parts 2 and 3 of this series, I’ll look at the life and times of five such artists: Jules Pascin, Raphael Avraham Shalem, Siona Tagger, Daniel Kabiljo, and Angel (Angelo) Castro.
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Upcoming Events or Opportunities
ASF Broome & Allen Fellow Richard Sassoon will be presenting a lecture at the Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy:
Babylonian Jews in Hashemite Iraq
“Let’s visit Baghdad of the 1920s, a city with a higher percentage of Jews that modern New York. We will meet local politicians like Menahem Saleh Daniel, economic leaders like Sasson Hezqel and the part each played in Iraqi national project. We will see the Iraqi juggernaut families like the Sassoons and Kadoories who fought for dominance as far away as China and will hear the convulsing debates over Zionism that eventually resulted in the Humiliations and Expulsions.”
11 September @ 7PM
LESJC on Zoom
Sign-up Now!
Tickets: General Admission $15
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Iraqi Jewish playwright and former ASF Board Member Anwar Suliman’s play, Café Munich, is returning to NYC as part of the Dream Up Festival:
Café Munich
A gritty, cerebral drama about the far flung consequences of WWII in 1992 Germany
31 August - 15 September
Theater for the New City
First Avenue at East 10th Street, New York, NY 10003
Sign-up Now!
Tickets: General Admission $18