Fish and chips? Spain's Jews are the origin

 

[Illustration: Leonardo Berbesi]

"The history of the dish begins with the persecution of the Jews in the Iberian Peninsula, during the 16th century.

Many of them ended up in England, taking the fried fish with them. It was a Sephardic dish that they used to eat on Fridays.

The secret was the use of oil, which sealed the flavours, made the flour crispy and the fish very tasty.

To those islanders accustomed to lard, frying in oil seemed revolutionary…’ Later we read: ‘…A Jewish fishmonger who emigrated from Eastern Europe, named Joseph Malin, was the first to come up with the idea, in 1860, of putting fried fish and potatoes together in his store in [London's] East End…"

Found at BoT but original source is here.

Claude Lanzmann: "Life at its widest"

[This article was first published under the title "Summer at its widest" in Catalonia Today, July 2022.]

15 summers ago (my first full one here) the CCCB, or Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona showed French-Jewish filmaker Claude Lanzmann’s “extraordinary diptych of the Holocaust.”

Coming after the critically acclaimed, monumental 9 and a half hour documentary, Holocaust [or “Shoah”] of 1985, the Barcelona screening was titled “Variations of what is real.” It was part of their Xcèntric program for 2006-7.

Led by the academic Jorge Seca, the films were subtitled in Castilian Spanish by a group of translators from the UAB, Autonomous University in Barcelona.

In the first offering, Un vivant qui passe (1997), Lanzmann tells the story of Maurice Rossel, the only representative of the Red Cross to visit the Terezin death camp and wrote a report stating that he had seen “no atrocities.”

In 1944 Rossel reported that it was in fact a “model ghetto” and noticed “nothing terribly wrong”. He also freely and repeatedly expressed his view that Jews had “a passivity that I couldn’t stomach.” 

In the longer follow-up reel, “Sobibor” (2001) Lanzmann examined another episode of the Holocaust: the attempted escape of 600 Jews (also including some Red Army prisoners of war) from a Polish extermination camp.

He did this “through the story of Yehuda Lerner [one of only 60 survivors] who was seventeen years old, when in a meticulous plan of rebellion he ordered a Nazi officer to smash his head with an axe.”

The film “ends with the triumph of the Jews’ murder of their Nazi guards and their succesful flight from Sobibor, but he does not follow the survivors [return] where some were killed.”

Lanzmann himself (who died 4 years ago this July) was often simply called a director.

In truth, he was a film producer in the widest sense of the word.

According to journalist Julia Pascal he was even “the movie-maker-as-spy, the Jew who pretended to be pro-Nazi in order to film the guilty.

In one long sequence, he posed as a Nazi sympathiser and secretly filmed an SS officer who confided his past.” In fact, after their subterfuge was discovered he and a female accomplice were badly beaten and it could have been much worse before they got away. 

Lanzmann created from his will, as a stranger to brevity, stapling it well below accuracy or exhaustive detail.

The memoir he wrote, titled The Patagonian Hare, was no exception. If you’re like me and an hour on the beach (or maximum two) is only doable with a good book and you want something different from the standard lighter or narrower reading, then this book is the polar opposite.

It’s a kind of stretched agony in many places. His battle with what becomes his life’s purpose, the telling of the most stomach-churning truths, is clear.

What shines too from the lines of his memory in top gear is his determination to never be resigned to a great silence, to never taste the poison of passivity. 

His is a reverence for life itself. Seemingly never belittled by doubt, he has made much of the crucial importance of Nazi victims being treated so that in contemporay times “they haven’t died alone.”

My hope for everyone reading this in a season of pure heat is that you find time to relax and enjoy all that you can, living with the spirit of a Lanzmann.

"Voices fallen from the sky" -- Manu Valentín's history of the Jewish exile in Barcelona, 1881-1954 "

"Voces caídas del cielo [tries] to fill a notable [non-fiction] vaccuum...of the collective memory of a community of Jewish exiles who struggled to establish themselves in the city of Barcelona with hardly any support. 

Based on a vast body of documentation, a lot of it unpublished,...sources that dealt with the crisis of the Jewish exiles in different moments, and interviews with the refugees and their descendents, the historian Manu Valentín manages to rescue the protagonists’ memory and raises their personal experiences to the level of historical events." (Publishers summary.)"

Read more from source at Literary Rambles here.

'Ours is not a bloodline, but a textline'

[Photo: EVDOKIM PEREVALSKY.]

 "I just found out only a few weeks before coming to Girona, that through the Horowitz branch of my family, I am Gironan, through my forebear Rabbi Isaiah Halevi Horowitz. This made me shudder a little bit, but I still don’t believe in God. I don’t think it’s a coincidence; I think it has to do with the secular movement of Jewish continuity."

Israeli writer and historian Fania Oz-Salzberger who was interviewed by Catalonia Today editor Marcela Topor here.

"Marine Le Pen Denies French Guilt for Rounding Up Jews"

Photo: Sylvain Lefevre/Getty Images

  "A casual remark about France’s wartime anti-Jewish actions by Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, threatened on Monday to derail her yearslong effort aimed at “un-demonizing” her party just as she is emerging as a strong contender in this month’s presidential election.

The remark was made on Sunday during an interview in which she referred to the most notorious roundup of Jews in France during World War II, when nearly 13,000 were arrested in Paris by the French police on July 16 and 17, 1942, in what is known as the “Vel d’Hiv roundup.”

“France wasn’t responsible for the Vel d’Hiv,” she said. “If there was responsibility, it is with those who were in power at the time, it is not with France. France has been mistreated, in people’s minds, for years.”

Ms. Le Pen’s words created a small eruption in an already heated campaign, drawing strong criticism by politicians right, left and center and by Jewish groups, who all saw it as an echo of her party’s anti-Semitic roots."

Read more from source here.

"The (re)construction of the Catalan Jewish community"

 "This coming year the Catalan Jewish community will celebrate its Centenary in our country. 

This anniversary refers to the creation, in the years 1917-1918, of a specific organisational structure (community) that served as a social, educational, cultural and religious meeting point of the Catalan Jewish population. 

Numerically, it represents a very small percentage of the Catalonian population, but deserves further consideration. To this end, we must cross many centuries, to ancient times, when the great Diaspora of the Roman times found Jewish populations settling across Mediterranean lands. Not only did medieval Jews assimilate Catalan language and culture, they also played a key role."

Read more from source at Mozaika here.

"Hungarian anti-Semitic leader moves to Israel after discovering he is a Jew"

[Photo: Reuters]

"A leader of a Hungarian far-right party is planning to move to Israel after discovering his Jewish heritage. 

Csanad Szegedi, 34, former leader of the Jobbik party who have been previously accused of Neo-Nazism, is preparing to make aliya and move to Israel four years after leaving the nationalist party when he discovered his Jewish roots and that his grandmother was a Holocaust survivor.

Szegedi who was known for his extremist positions and anti-Semitic statements, helped found the Hungarian Guard, who wore black uniforms reminiscent of the notorious pro-Nazi Arrow Cross party that ruled Hungary briefly in the Second World War and rounded-up hundreds of thousands of Jews to be sent to the gas chambers.

In 2012, he described how "shocked" he was at the news of his grandmother and his Jewish heritage, adding: "First of all because I realised the Holocaust really happened."

Quickly, Szegedi rejected his far-right past and embraced Judaism, including taking a Hebrew name Dovid, regularly attending synagogue, eating kosher food and getting circumcised, and is now planning on moving to Israel with his family."

Read more from source here.

"In Andalusia, on the Trail of Inherited Memories"

"ARCOS DE LA FRONTERA, Spain — I still wonder how I ended up living in a former medieval bordello on the brink of a sandstone cliff on the southern frontier of Spain.

It was 2008, the start of the Andalusian region’s economic meltdown, La Crisis, and anxiety spread like the Black Plague. But from the roof of my apartment in this ancient white pueblo, I plunged back in time.

The other world worried about bills, real estate values, tourism, lost jobs, the immediate future. In contrast, I retreated into my quest, hoping to take new stock of my identity by reclaiming ancestral memories, history and DNA clues that I believe had been faithfully passed down for generations of my family, the Carvajals.

They had left Spain centuries ago, during the Inquisition. That much I knew. We were raised as Catholics in Costa Rica and California, but late in life I finally started collecting the nagging clues of a very clandestine identity: that we were descendants of secret Sephardic Jews — Christian converts known as conversos, or Anusim (Hebrew for the forced ones) or even Marranos, which in Spanish means swine.

I didn’t know if my family had a connection to the white pueblo. But by living in its labyrinth of narrow cobblestone streets, I hoped to understand the fears that shaped the secret lives of my own family.

History is a part of daily life in the old quarter, where Inquisition trials were staged and neighbors spied on neighbors, dutifully reporting heretics — Christian converts who were secretly practicing Judaism. The former Jewish quarter, where white houses plunge down a steep, silvery lane, is still standing, though unmarked by any street sign. I wanted to understand why my family guarded secret identities for generations with such inexplicable fear and caution. When my aunt died a few years ago, she left instructions barring a priest from presiding over her funeral; my grandmother did the same."

Read more from source here.

Ladino - "On what a dying language leaves behind"

"My grandmother’s mother tongue was Ladino—old Spanish, the language of the Sephardic Jews. 

Like Yiddish, it’s a kind of pidgin language, a collage of words drawn from multiple sources, among them: Medieval Spanish, Galician-Portuguese, Mozarabic, Greek, Bulgarian, French, Serbo-Croatian. 

And like Yiddish, it’s a vulnerable language. Once the trade language of the Adriatic Sea and the Middle East, and renowned for its rich literature especially in Salonika, it’s now under serious threat of extinction. UNESCO has called it “seriously endangered.” 

I’ve never heard it spoken in person, though one can listen online at the Ladino preservation council’s website. When I do, I feel like I should understand the voice that sounds like my grandmother’s, with its purring R’s, but I don’t. Not a single word.
 
I’m not sure how much Ladino my grandmother remembered when she died in the American Midwest at 103. As a girl, she’d studied in Egypt at French schools. Later, she studied law in France, married a Frenchman. French was the only language I ever heard her speak, besides a richly accented English. French was my mother’s first language. My brother and I never considered taking Spanish in school. We took French, naturellement. And explained our interest, if asked, by saying our mother was French.
 
In researching my collection of linked stories, Heirlooms, which is based on family stories, I came across old letters written in what I came to understand was Ladino. I knew from reading other old family letters that much about the writer could be revealed in their word choice or turn of phrase. I stared at the undecipherable swoops of cursive, wondering what the letters conveyed. 

My mother could glean a few words, because Ladino, like French, is a Romance language. My mother’s cousin who grew up in Israel couldn’t help us, as he’d heard Ladino only when the grown ups didn’t want the children to know what they were talking about. 

Read more from Rachel Hall's article in Guernica magazine here.

"Spain at last welcomes back the Sephardim"

"Following new legislation, the first descendants of expelled Jews get Spanish nationality..."

Read from from source at El Pais in English here.

Leader of Podemos, Pablo Iglesias, visits Jerusalem's Wailing Wall

The trip was made [last weekend] by a group made up of Spanish political parties, Izquierda Plural (with six Euro deputies) and Podemos (with five).

They visited Ramala after Israel had denied the delegation entry to Gaza two days earlier.

The delegation held meetings with Palestinian leaders, among them the Prime Minister of the United Nation Transitional Government, Rami Hamdala, and with the top Palestinian diplomat, Raid al Malki.

The group also met with Israeli pacifists and left-wing groups such as Rabbis for Democracy, and they visited the old city of Jerusalem.

More from original source here.

"I don't think,...therefore I am" - My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

"Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars."

This is "probably a true statement" according to one in four people across the entire planet, a recent global survey has found.

It would be easy to dismiss these kinds of stereotyped opinions as the ill-informed ignorance of a small minority, except that nearby events of the last few months show that discrimination and prejudice of many kinds are seemingly much deeper and more widespread than we might like to think.

At a Brussels Jewish museum in May a lone gunman shot dead three people, including two Israeli citizens on holiday. Only hours later, two Jews were attacked and beaten in Paris as they left a suburban synagogue.

In fact, following from another public slaying of three Jewish children and a Rabbi in Paris in 2012, more than 1,400 Jews left France to live in Israel in the first three months of this year, now making it probable that 2014 will see the biggest exodus of French Jews to Israel since that country was established in 1948.

The results from France's municipal elections in May seem to prove that getting out of the "land of liberty, fraternity and equality" is a prudent decision for those minorities without that promised equality.

The far right National Front party there has just received it's best ever voter support in municipal elections and actually won the European Parliament elections with 25% of the vote.

Further East the situation is also disturbing.

In the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, Jews leaving their local synagogue were handed leaflets from the new pro-Russian military that ordered them to pay a fee and register their property. They were threatened that failure to comply would lead to their assets being confiscated or even deportation.

One resident of the city said that she had never experienced anti-Semitism until she saw the leaflet but it reminded her of when the Nazis occupied the area in 1941. In that part of the world and across wider Europe we know that there has been a long and terrible history of violent "pogroms" against Jewish people.

But it is not just religious bigotry that is increasingly finding it's way into the light.

If you have a dislike of homosexuality then you can be comforted by having entire national governments that share your intolerance. Apart from Russia's new anti-gay "propaganda" laws, in the continent south from here homosexuality has become a criminal offence in Burundi, South Sudan, Uganda and Nigeria.

Even Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott has come up with more than 200 million dollars in new funds in a bid to push his anti-gay attitudes into schools through so-called "emotional and spiritual support" chaplains.

Meanwhile, another survey has discovered that a staggering 43% of Americans would not vote for any presidential candidate who declared them self to be an atheist.

Just as surprising was that 40% would also not cast their vote in favour of a president of who happened to be a Muslim.

Equally, the possibility of a lesbian or gay president of the "free world" would almost certainly be blocked by the 30% of Americans who openly admitted that they would not support their commander in chief being of that sexual orientation.

But where do these attitudes come from?

I think that purely and simply they can be a result of collectively identifying ourselves as different from others. If we are X and they are Y, then oh, that is a relief because now I know who I am.

As George Orwell wrote, this is "the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects," and something that I believe is done instinctively by extremists and others who don't have what is needed to create their own beliefs.

At it's core, this mindset of segregation and separation tips 17th century philosopher René Descartes celebrated phrase "I think, therefore I am" on it's head.

Video: The 500 year-old voice

 

When French songwriter/musician Luc Arbogast sings it is as if you are listening to a voice from Europe's Middle Ages.

This video is of "Sefardic Song."

 

"Jewish community to file complaint after anti-Semitic tweets posted from Spain"

"The Jewish community in...Catalonia has taken action over anti-Semitic messages posted on social networking sites after Israeli basketball team Maccabi Tel Aviv beat Real Madrid to win the Euroleague title on Sunday.

After the game in Tel Aviv was over, nearly 18,000 offensive messages appeared on Twitter, according to Jewish associations, which have announced they are planning to file a complaint with the state attorney on Tuesday. According to sources from the Jewish community, the complaint will include tweets from five users of the micro-blogging site – along with their full names – which, the complainants will argue, constitute incitement of hatred against Jews."

Read more from El Pais [in English] here.

"New project honors thousands of Jews who braved Catalan Pyrenees to escape Holocaust"

"The Lleida Provincial Council is promoting a project entitled ‘Persecuted and Saved’ that aims to identify and mark the principal paths through the Catalan Pyrenees taken by 80,000 fugitives, 20,000 of whom were Jewish, in order to escape the Nazi horror during the Holocaust. 

They will also show the prisons and concentration camps set up to hold those who were caught. The project has already received a good deal of interest from Israel, with Alon Bar, Ambassador of Israel to Spain, visiting the key sites.

Furthermore, Walter Wasercier, CEO of Israel’s principal airline, EL-AL, and Joan Reñé, President of Lleida’s Provincial Council, have met in order to discuss setting up weekly chartered flights between Israel and Lleida-Alguaire Airport.

 

Reñé claims that the project is an opportunity to “recover the historical memory and publicize the little-known events that occurred here during the Holocaust.”  Bar summarized the importance of the project with a Hebrew saying, “to save a soul is to save an entire world”. 

He also expressed thanks to the Catalan people, many of whom risked their lives to help save Jews and other refugees who were fleeing from Nazi barbarism.

A chance for Jewish people to find their ‘roots’

Bar believes that many Jewish people may find their roots while exploring the sites that their relatives used to escape tyranny and certain death. Over 20,000 Jewish refugees are believed to have passed through the Pyrenees, often taking the harshest and most difficult routes in order to avoid capture by Nazi soldiers patrolling the area.

Better Catalan understanding

Reñé also believes the project is a good chance for Catalans to better understand and appreciate the history of the area and the role that their parents and grandparents played by helping the starving and freezing survivors that made it over the mountains."

Source: Vilaweb here.

"Anti-Semitism and the Catalan left"

The entrance to the Auschwitz Birkenau death camp

Matthew Tree (author of the remarkable novel SNUG) writing in Catalan for nuvol.com with his usual clear sight and bravery...

"Before World War II , anti-Semitism - a toxic hybrid

of anti-Judaism and Christian European pseudo-

scientific racism - was fashionable throughout

Europe, especially among young people. From 1945,

when everyone realized that some 5.8 million people

had been executed, starved, beaten, gassed or - in

the case of many babies- impaled on bayonets or

smashed against walls, simply for having non-Gentile

surnames, anti-Semitism began to lose popularity.

According to Labour MP Denis MacShane ('The New

Anti-Semitism', 2008) during the 60s and 70s certain

European intellectuals helped to make anti-Semitism

a socially acceptable prejudice once again thanks to

the concept (also a hybrid) of “anti-Zionism”, which

denies the right of Israel to exist as a state (on the

grounds that it is fascist and colonialist) while hinting

that all Israelis (or all Jews, even) manipulate

international opinion (especially U.S. opinion) in favor

of the said state of Israel by means of powerful

lobbies. 

In other words, rather than make specific

criticisms of certain undeniable crimes committed by

the Israeli state, anti-Zionists treat this country as if it

were the only beneficiary of a powerful and diabolical

conspiracy, against which everything from boycotts

to physical elimination is therefore justifiable.

In Catalonia this discourse has enjoyed huge success,

partly because it is often accompanied by an equally

huge ignorance of history: just look at the

incredulous face of almost any Catalan 'anti-Zionist' if

you tell him, for example, that in 1947, the

Palestinian Arabs were offered their own state, twice

as large as the current Occupied Territories; or that

the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were occupied

from 1948 up to Six Day War [in 1967] by Egypt and

Jordan respectively (though these states did not treat

the Palestinians any better than the Israelis have

done). 

And perhaps our anti-Zionist may not know –

accustomed as he is to qualifying the Israelis as Nazis

–that an important part of the Palestinian national

movement had genuinely Hitlerian roots, having been

founded by Yasser Arafat 's mentor, Haj Amin el-

Husseini, a personal friend of Himmler and the

architect of a plan to exterminate all the Jews of

North Africa and the Middle East with an

einsatzkommando led by Walter Rauff, the inventor

of the gas trucks used in Chelmno.

What is more, after centuries of relative tolerance

by Muslims towards Jews, European anti-Semitism,

imported directly from the Third Reich by el-Husseini,

has thoroughly infected the doctrines of radical

Islamist organizations such as Hezbollah or Allah

Hamas, both funded by Iran, a country that denies

the Holocaust, and has repeated again and again

hat Israel should be wiped off the face of the planet.

Yet when these same countries and organizations do

things that are somewhat worse than anything Israel

has done (such as now sending military support to

the current Syrian regime, which is responsible for

more deaths of Arab civilians in the last three years

than in Israel in it's entire history) the Catalan anti-

Zionists don't mutter so much as a word of protest.

In a nutshell, anti-Semitism has taken on many

different guises over the years, and the Catalan

variety - a generic anti-Zionism, often poorly informed

and pseudo-progressive (because it implicitly supports

regimes that are homophobic, sexist and, of course,

anti-Semitic) - is yet another variation on an old

European theme. Having said which, that does

not deny anybody the right to crticise a cruel and

unjustifiable occupation on the part of the state of

Israel. But of course, that's so obvious it doesn't need

to be stressed. Or maybe it does."

Claude Lanzmann and "The Last of the Unjust" in Seville

Lanzmann, left, with Benjamin Murmelstein in 1975, in a still from The Last of the Unjust

French producer-director Claude Lanzmann, author of the singularly penetrating memoir “The Patagonian Hare” visited Seville this week.

As the creator of Shoah, the 9-hour documentary (which was the result of over ten years of research and filming testimonies of survivors from the Nazi's extermination of Jews across Europe) Lanzmann was honoured yesterday at the Andalucian city's film festival.

His new movie is titled “The Last of the Unjust.” It is about Benjamin Murmelstein, the Jewish Council president in Theresienstadt ghetto, the concentration camp in the city of Terezín (in the modern-day Czech Republic.) who collaborated with the Nazis, a man who Lanzmann said he actually “grew to love.”

“The Last of the Unjust” will be released in Spain on January 10.

"“Beatle Jew” in the Czech Republic

The short documentary "Beatle Jew", produced by [Barcelona-based] Mozaika, written by Daniel Wagensberg and directed by Federico Szarfer, has been selected in the “Short Joy” section of the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival in the Czech Republic.

The film is "a journey in search of personal identity [that# reveals a history stretching from Spain all the way to the Czech village of Batelov, whose “Wild West” heroes have found eternal rest at the local Jewish cemetery. Grandfather Moritz, whose picture inspired the film, lives on in the memory of old “Sheriff” Mirabelski – a mediator of remarkable historical moments."

"Who Killed Walter Benjamin?" - Screening of documentary in Barcelona

This new film by David Mauas will be shown in Barcelona on Monday the 16^th of September. (Details: here.)

 
"In September 1940, after seven years of exile, Walter Benjamin crosses the Pyrenees in a desperate attempt to escape the Nazis.

According to the official version, Walter Benjamin did make it across the French-Spanish border successfully. But when he arrived in the Catalan town of Portbou, a sudden change in legislation impeded his entry into Spain and he was obliged to spend the night at a local hotel under the close vigilance of three guards, whose orders were to deport him the following morning.

In utter despair, Benjamin took his own life, swallowing an overdose of morphine. The local doctor, however, declared it a natural death and Benjamin was given a Catholic burial in the municipal cemetery, under a wrong name.

Did the doctor conceal some hidden cause of Benjamin´s death? Was there really a change of legislation? Was Walter Benjamin aware that Portbou was a pro-Franco town virtually occupied by the Nazis?

Who killed Walter Benjamin… reaches for answers among the suspicious circumstances of his death. Giving at the same time, a portrait of a frontier town anchored between two fronts, constant witness of evasion, persecution and false hopes..."

Muñoz Molina interviewed in English

Photo: Jesús de Miguel

A fascinating English-language interview recorded recently with the great Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina. He talks fluently about a range of subjects including the Franco years, the creative process and particularly his masterpiece Sepharad.