Until 2009, right-wing Portuguese politician Jose Ribeiro e Castro didn’t have much interest in the expulsion of his country’s Jewish community in the 16th century. That changed once Ribeiro e Castro opened a Facebook account. Online, the 60-year-old lawmaker and journalist connected to several Sephardic Jews, descendants of a once robust Jewish community numbering in…
Portuguese researchers have catalogued hundreds of secret markings that Jews left on structures in the northern Portuguese municipality of Seia in the 16th century, after their forced conversion to Christianity. The team’s three members – Alberto Martinho, Jose Levy Domingos and Luiza Metzker Lyra – say they found 500 markings in Seia, including coded Hebrew…
The parliament of Portugal is scheduled to vote on whether to naturalize descendants of 16th century Jews who fled the country because of religious persecution. The motion will be brought to a first reading on Thursday by Portugal’s Socialist Party and is expected to pass since it also is supported by the ruling Social Democratic…
A town in northern Spain is preparing to hold its first Passover seder since the areas Jews were forced to flee during the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. The festive dinner will take place in the old center of the town of Ribadavia on March 25 and is being organized by the municipality’s tourism department in…
Am I a Jew?: Lost Tribes, Lapsed Jews, and One Man’s Search For Himself By Theodore Ross Hudson Street Press, 280 pages, $25.95 There are hooks, and then there is the first sentence of Theodore Ross’s new book, “Am I a Jew?” which grabs you by the lapels and makes you instantly uncomfortable and intensely…
‘We descend from Jews, I am sure of it,” said Joan Punyet Miró, the youngest grandson of the eponymous painter. We were sitting in his offices in the heart of Palma de Mallorca, blocks from the imposing sandstone cathedral within which his grandfather once sought refuge and around the corner from the glorious and airy…
God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World By Cullen Murphy Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pages, $27 There is something preposterous about Cullen Murphy’s journey through the history of the Inquisition. He analyzes it as if it were the root of all institutional evil in the modern world. Really. For years the…
In Spain, the amount of garbage on a bar floor attests to the quality of the establishment’s fare. Local tradition dictates that an accumulation of dirty napkins and food scraps shows that patrons are having too good a time to be bothered with such mundane matters as cleaning up. Legs of ham are sliced in…
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