SephardicJews, also known as Sephardi Jews or Sephardim, and rarely as Iberian Peninsular Jews, are a Jewish diaspora population associated with the Iberian Peninsula. The term, which is derived from the Hebrew Sepharad, can also refer to the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, who were also heavily influenced by Sephardic law and customs. Many Iberian Jewish exiled families also later sought refuge in those Jewish communities, resulting in ethnic and cultural integration with those communities over the span of many centuries.
Marranos is one of the terms used in relation to Spanish and Portuguese Jews who converted or were forced by the Spanish and Portuguese crowns to convert to Christianity during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but continued to practice Judaism in secrecy or were suspected of it, referred to as Crypto-Jews. "Crypto-Jew" is the term increasingly preferred in scholarly works, instead of Marrano.
Yosef Hayim was a leading Baghdadi hakham, authority on halakha, and Master Kabbalist. He is best known as author of the work on halakhaBen Ish Ḥai, a collection of the laws of everyday life interspersed with mystical insights and customs, addressed to the masses and arranged by the weekly Torah portion.
João Gonçalves Zarco was a Portuguese explorer who established settlements and recognition of the Madeira Islands, and was appointed first captain of Funchal by Henry the Navigator.
The Spanish Benveniste family is an old, noble, wealthy, and scholarly Jewish family of Narbonne, France and northern Spain established in the 11th century. The family was present in the 11th to the 15th centuries in Hachmei Provence, France, Barcelona, Aragon and Castile.
In Judaism, Nusach (Hebrew: נוסח, romanized: nusaḥ, Modern Hebrew pronunciation nusakh, plural refers to the exact text of a prayer service; sometimes the English word "rite" is used to refer to the same thing. Nusakh means "formulate" or "wording".
Gracia Mendes Nasi, also known as Doña Gracia or La Señora, was a Portuguese philanthropist, businesswoman, and one of the wealthiest Jewish women of Renaissance Europe. She married Francisco Mendes. She was the maternal aunt and business partner of João Micas, who became a prominent figure in the politics of the Ottoman Empire. She developed an escape network that saved hundreds of Conversos from the Inquisition.
The history of the Jews in Portugal reaches back over two thousand years and is directly related to Sephardi history, a Jewish ethnic division that represents communities that originated in the Iberian Peninsula. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Portuguese Jews emigrated to a number of European cities outside Portugal, where they established new Portuguese Jewish communities, including in Hamburg, Antwerp, and the Netherlands,<Swetschinski, Daniel M. Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization 2000</ref> which remained connected culturally and economically, in an international commercial network during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The community of Sephardic Jews in the Netherlands, particularly in Amsterdam, was of major importance in the seventeenth century. The Portuguese Jews in the Netherlands did not refer to themselves as "Sephardim", but rather as "Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation." The Portuguese-speaking community grew from conversos, Jews forced to convert to Catholicism in Spain and Portugal, who rejudaized under rabbinic authority, to create an openly self-identified Portuguese Jewish community. As a result of the expulsions from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1496, as well as the religious persecution by the Inquisition that followed, many Spanish and Portuguese Jews left the Iberian peninsula at the end of the 15th century and throughout the 16th century, in search of religious freedom. Some migrated to the newly independent Dutch provinces which allowed Jews to become residents. Many Jews who left for the Dutch provinces were crypto-Jews, but continued to practice Judaism in secret. Others had been sincere New Christians, who, despite their conversion, were targeted by Old Christians as suspect. Some of these sought to return to the religion of their ancestors. Ashkenazi Jews began migrating to the Netherlands in the mid seventeenth century, but Portuguese Jews viewed them with ambivalence.
Isaac Aboab da Fonseca was a rabbi, scholar, kabbalist, and religious writer. In 1656, he was one of several elders within the Portuguese-Jewish community in Amsterdam and for a time in Dutch Brazil before the Portuguese reconquest. He was one of the religious leaders who excommunicated philosopher Baruch Spinoza in 1656.
A Conspiracy of Paper is a historical-mystery novel by David Liss, set in London in the period leading up to the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720.
Richard Zimler is a best-selling author. His books, which have earned him a 1994 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Fiction and the 1998 Herodotus Award, have been published in many countries and translated into more than 20 languages.
Steve Hamilton is an American mystery writer who is known for the Alex McKnight series. Apart from his Alex McKnight books, Hamilton has written Night Work and The Lock Artist. His works have won the Edgar Award, Shamus Award and Barry Award.
The Hebron massacre was the killing of sixty-seven or sixty-nine Jews on 24 August 1929 in Hebron, then part of Mandatory Palestine, by Arabs incited to violence by rumors that Jews were planning to seize control of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The event also left scores seriously wounded or maimed. Jewish homes were pillaged and synagogues were ransacked. Some of the 435 Jews in Hebron who survived were hidden by local Arab families, although the extent of this phenomenon is debated. Soon after, all Hebron's Jews were evacuated by the British authorities. Many returned in 1931, but almost all were evacuated at the outbreak of the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine. The massacre formed part of the 1929 Palestine riots, in which a total of 133 Jews and 110 Arabs were killed, the majority of the latter by British police and military, and brought the centuries-old Jewish presence in Hebron to an end.
The Lisbon massacre started on Sunday, 19 April 1506 in Lisbon when a crowd of churchgoers attacked and killed several people in the congregation whom they suspected were Jews. The violence escalated into a city-wide, anti-semitic riot that killed as many as 4,000 "new Christians" (cristãos-novos), the name for Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity.
On 5 December 1496, King Manuel I of Portugal signed the decree of expulsion of Jews and Muslims to take effect by the end of October of the next year.
The Warsaw Anagrams is a 2009 novel by American-Portuguese author Richard Zimler. It has since come out in seven other languages: Portuguese, French, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, Italian and Spanish. It was a bestseller both in the UK and Italy. Set in the Warsaw ghetto subsequent to the Nazi occupation of Poland, the novel is both a noir thriller and exploration of the day-to-day heroism evidenced by the Jewish residents.
The Gospel According to Lazarus is a 2019 novel by Richard Zimler.
Portugal was officially neutral during World War II and the period of the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe. The country had been ruled by an authoritarian political regime led by António de Oliveira Salazar but had not been significantly influenced by racial antisemitism and was considered more sympathetic to the Allies than was neighbouring Francoist Spain.
