A small town in Spain is finally embracing its Jewish history — but is any of that history true?
In Hervás, a rural hamlet of 4,000, an invented Jewish heritage has become a point of pride and a marketing tool
Spanish Inquisition
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Culture Not just Chabad headquarters: The secret Jewish history of secret Jewish tunnels
Jewish groups through history have used tunnels for warfare, resource transportation and more
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Culture The most prominent Jew in Latin America wore a crucifix at a recent campaign event. Is that kosher?
People are divided about Claudia Sheinbaum, the Jewish woman aiming to become Mexico's next president, donning a rosary
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Opinion The Inquisition decimated Sephardic Jewry. We still haven’t internalized its lessons
On a recent warm night in Madrid, a young woman shared that she had travelled over 3,000 miles, leaving her husband and two young children in Montreal, to claim Spanish citizenship. Over glasses of the local Alhambra brew, she told me that her grandparents spoke Ladino, and that whenever someone would mention Spain around her…
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Yiddish World The Yiddish professor and female Orthodox rabbi sharing Yiddish children’s literature with the world
Read this article in Yiddish A jack of many trades is sometimes a master of them all Speaking with Miriam Udel, the Yiddish professor at Emory University in Atlanta who is reacquainting the world with Yiddish children’s literature, you quickly notice something remarkable. In one moment she sounds like a literary scholar and in the…
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Fast Forward Latin American Jews Whose Ancestors Fled Inquisition Will Get First Rabbi
For the first time, “long-lost” Jewish communities in three Central American nations will have their own full-time rabbi. The Bnei Anousim — whose ancestors were forced to convert to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition — will be led in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala by Rabbi Elisha Salas of Shavei Israel, an organization that contacts…
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Fast Forward Conservative Magazine Defends Spanish Inquisition, Calls It ‘Ahead Of Its Time’
The prominent conservative magazine National Review published an op-ed defending the Spanish Inquisition, lamenting that most opinions of it were formed by Elizabethan propaganda. Ed Condon, a writer and practicing canon lawyer, argued that northern European kingdoms worked to “paint the Spanish Empire as constitutionally evil; not just a political, religious, and military rival but…
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News The Spanish Inquisition Was ‘Moderate’ Solution. So Says This Conservative Columnist.
(JTA) — Here’s something no one expected: A reputable conservative magazine has published a column defending … The Spanish Inquisition. To be clear, this is not Monty Python. This is a column in the National Review. Here’s the headline: “The Spanish Inquisition Was a Moderate Court by the Standard of Its Time.” Moderate? We’ll run down…
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