No tengo lugar
Y no tengo paisaje
Yo menos tengo patria
Naci en Alamo

I have no place
And I have no landscape
Still less do I have a homeland
I was born in Alamo

Like the history of the Gypsies, the song itself has become an archaeological enigma. It has crossed so many borders and been sung in so many languages that it is no longer easy to determine its roots or which precise Alamo, in either Spain or Portugal, the song is about. Even now, Naci en Alamo roams a pathless Odyssey around the Mediterranean, no less homeless than a Gypsy. The word “Gypsy” itself turns out to be a conundrum as well. Gypsies, who speak Romany, refer to themselves as Roma, not with the exonym Gypsy. (Roma is the plural for Rom, meaning “man”—no relation to Romania.) “Gypsy” in English, just like the word gyftos in Greek, may be derived from gipcya, with a possible derivation from egipcien, because Gypsies were mysteriously believed to come from Egypt—which also means from far away, from elsewhere, or just simply from goodness-knows-where. Etymological dictionaries also suggest that the word might derive from the Greek for untouchables, athinganoi, hence zingaro in Italian, tsigane and gitan in French, gitano in Spanish, ţigan in Romanian, cigano in Portuguese. The real origin of the word, like the real origin of the people, is lost in time. There is no origin.

Western Europe first encountered “Naci en Alamo” in Tony Gatlif’s 2000 film Vengo. A stark, frequently violent, elegiac portrait of the hardscrabble lives of Gypsies, Vengo is rife with crime, drink, blood feuds, and, as always, music, laughter, and dance. The film opens with a gathering of a seemingly privileged audience in Spain about to enter a large ruined church temporarily converted into a concert hall. The camera focuses on a flamenco guitarist and a violinist and on the rhythmic loud clapping of hands. Soon enough, the camera shifts to another part of the hall where a group of Arab performers have joined the Spanish duo: drummers, a flautist, a violinist, and a lutanist, and finally a Flamenco Sufi singer, the Egyptian Ahmad Al Tuni, begins to chant to the rhythmic clank of a metal object, possibly a large key, which he strikes against a thick drinking glass—not an atypical percussive feature in flamenco folksongs, especially in the cante jondo (deep song) style. The blending of Arab with Andalusian strains, underscored by flamenco, with its Gypsy roots, is not new to Spain and harks back to the long period of Convivencia when Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived together in relative harmony there in the early Middle Ages. Some claim that cante jondo predates the Moorish invasion in the 8th century and goes back to Byzantine liturgical music. Even if this were true, it takes no expert to recognize that the more stirring and heartrending the sustained wail of cante jondo the clearer its affiliation to traditional Arab music.

It is no accident that Tony Gatlif should want to open his film with this scene. Not only is Gatlif restoring the millenary contributions of so many ethnicities in the creation of Spanish music, but, as with almost everything he touches, he is forever prodding questions of displacement, exile, memory, and cultural miscegenation. Things are never one thing; they are always hybrid. People don’t come from one place; they come from at least two. Gatlif is not just a Gypsy; he is an Algerian of Gypsy descent now living in France—displaced, that is, to the third degree. His name is not even Tony Gatlif; it is Michel Dahmani. Like the song, he too is without place, without homeland, without borders.

But then even the title of “Naci en Alamo” begins to shadow over. Alamo (not the Alamo in Texas) is a very small town in Portugal. The Internet, where hunches run amok and facts are distorted no differently than among early historians, suggests that several scenes of the film were indeed shot on location in or near Alamo. Alamo—and one could see why it drew the attention of a Gypsy filmmaker making a film about Gypsies—sits right on the very border between Portugal and Spain. It lies in no one country.

To further confuse matters, there is more than one Alamo in Portugal, just as there are several Alamos in Spain. In fact, there is an Alamo close to the one on the border just across from the Alamo near Seville.

Things get more complicated yet. “Naci en Alamo” sounds like “Naci en el amor”: “I was born of love, of passion,” but it could just as easily mean “out of wedlock.” Once again, the Internet and Gatlif favor Alamo over el amor, but the partisans of each staunchly stick to their views. Adjudication is pointless where speculation prevails or where rumor has the last word.

Continue reading: Compulsive hybridization

A century and a half later, another converted Jew—Emmanuele Conegliano, known as Lorenzo da Ponte—reworked Tirso’s play as a libretto for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and the result was an utterly unique work of art. It is pointless to argue about whether Don Giovanni is the best opera ever written, because it is a genre unto itself—the musical tragi-comedy, or “drama giocoso,” as Da Ponte put it. Mozart’s combination of tragic and comic elements turns the world inside out. From the first bars of the orchestra to the final note, we are unsure whether we should laugh, cry, or feel fear. If you don’t leave the theater confused, you haven’t been listening.

Mozart’s anti-hero seduced 2,065 women, his servant Leporello recounts in the celebrated Catalogue Aria. As a literary archetype, Don Juan’s conquests are just as prolific. One scholar lists 1,720 published variants on the theme since Tirso de Molina printed The Trickster of Seville in 1630, in the middle of the Thirty Years War. For the two centuries between Tirso and Byron’s eponymous epic poem, Don Juan bestrode the literary imagination like no other personage in history.

In a post-Christian world that has lost interest in the problem of sin and salvation, Don Juan is passé. By 1821, when Juan appears in Byron’s eponymous masterwork, Juan was on his farewell tour. E.T.A. Hoffman’s and Kierkegaard’s fascination with the subject is a response to Mozart’s astonishing music, not to the literary theme. Baudelaire’s poem “Don Juan in Hell” and Shaw’s intermezzo of the same title make Juan into a defiant hero. Desultory efforts to recast Don Juan as a Freudian case history still crop up from time to time, but lack conviction and much of an audience.

Juan held the audience of the 17th and 18th centuries in thrall, because he personified the Christian world’s foreboding about its own vulnerability. Tirso’s trickster poses an impossible paradox for the Christian concept of salvation: The story is not about eros, but evil. Christian society is founded on the premise that it requires “only one precept,” as St. Augustine put it: “Love, and do as you will.” Once humankind accepts the utterly unselfish love of Jesus Christ, Christianity asserts, the elaborate body of Jewish law becomes redundant, for Christian love will elicit the right behavior spontaneously.

The trouble, Tirso demonstrates, is that society that depends on conscience has no defense against a sociopath who has none. Don Juan is a predator inside the Christian world with no natural enemies. Juan enjoys murdering the male relatives of his female victims almost as much he enjoys seducing the women. To the extent that we can speak of Juan’s descendants in today’s fiction, they are not so much lovers but serial killers.

Tirso’s theological mousetrap had more than hypothetical importance for the audience of 1630, a dozen years into the Thirty Years War that would ruin the Spanish Empire and kill not quite half of central Europe’s population. His world was infested with sociopaths in positions of power, including Spain’s King Philip IV, one of whose bastards would eventually stage a coup against the legitimate heir to the Spanish throne. Philip makes an appearance in The Trickster of Seville, lightly disguised as the 14th-century king Alfonso XI, who also peopled the Spanish royal line with bastards.

It may not be a coincidence that Alfonso’s bastard son, Henry of Trastámara, incited Jew-hatred to overthrow his more tolerant half-brother, the legitimate heir Pedro I of Castile. Henry led the massacre of 12,000 Spanish Jews in Toledo on May 7, 1335. The Jews fought alongside Pedro in a prolonged civil war and suffered horribly after Henry won and beheaded his brother with the words: “Where is that son-of-a-whore Jew?”

I first knew of Jorge through the world of the Spanish dissident students I’d met in my late teens in postwar Paris. I had been a restless Manhattan high-school kid during World War II, and my sense of the world was informed by the war, a war in which 40 million people died and, though we didn’t yet call it the Shoah, Jews were murdered through all of Europe. Hollywood movies segued into wartime glamour—female stars like Claudette Colbert seemed to dance around the world in high heels. Doris Day, domesticity, and avocado-colored refrigerators came later, in the 1950s. Mark, my older brother, had enlisted in the Air Corps; I was so scared when the family, including me, his only sibling, accompanied him to Camp Dix, N.J., where he was inducted. I was also well aware that my father, a private in World War I, had been mustard-gassed while a scout in the trenches at Saint-Mihiel and had to spend several years recovering in an American Army hospital in France. When he returned to New York, he became a successful lawyer, but after Mark joined the Air Corps, he had recurring nightmares about the trenches. I knew if a stray bullet had gone in the wrong direction in France I might never have been born. I would study maps of those earlier battlefields, wondering. My father had Austrian Jewish cousins who fought on the Austrian side—did he have his relatives in mind when he pointed out that he had killed young men just like himself?

Unfortunately I was the wrong age—still in high school—when the war ended. But wrong age or not, there would be only one postwar time in Europe, and I had to be part of it; college, which I grumpily attended for a few months when I was 17, could wait. When the State Department informed my parents that their underage daughter had applied for a passport and passage on the Jon Erickson, a reconverted troop ship, they were furious. After they calmed down, they persuaded me to wait a little longer with the promise that my mother would settle me in Paris in a more normal fashion.

They kept their word, and quite by chance on the ship going over, my mother met Norman Mailer’s mother, and Norman’s younger sister, Barbara, and I immediately became friends. It was spring 1948. Mrs. Mailer was bringing Norman a first copy of The Naked and the Dead, and my mother read it. When our ship docked in Cherbourg and our two families met, my mother, one of Norman’s first fans, firmly informed him: “You have written the great war novel.” Years later Norman would also add, laughing, “and she was also the only mother who asked me to take care of her daughter.”

Norman and his wife, Bea, had an apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens, where Barbara and I met Norman’s friends, including the Polish Jewish writer Jean Malaquais, who had fought with the Marxist POUM in Spain. Paris was cold—no heat, some rationing—yet its intellectual sizzle had the prominence politicians and talk shows have now. Camus and Sartre had furious fights over the existence of the Russian gulags; the huge French Communist Party, an accepted fixture of the French working class, still had the admiration of many intellectuals. (Véra Belmont’s 1985 film Rouge Baiser, or Red Kiss, depicts Jewish working-class Communists in Paris worshipping Stalin in the early 1950s and their bewilderment when one of their own returns from Russia. He yells at them that he was on his way to Israel—in reality he had been a mistreated Jew imprisoned in Siberia.)

The Spanish situation had other complexities. Ninety-five percent of the exiled Spanish workers were anarchists and Socialists, totally at odds with the Communists, and thus doubly marooned in a France that had no place for them. After the war Paris was chock-a-block with the displaced, particularly kids—Jews, Spaniards, Poles, French, a whole United Nations of adolescents. Sartre’s politics were undeniably askew. I felt his appeal to this younger generation (my generation) was predominantly emotional: The fatherless Sartre became father to the fatherless; his outdoor café table became their home, and existentialism their nationality.

Through Norman I met Paco Benet, a 21-year-old student at the Sorbonne from Madrid whose father had been shot in the Civil War. He was tall, with very blond hair, intense dark eyes, and very brainy. We quickly fell in love and stayed together five years. Spain then was a forgotten country, isolated behind Franco’s iron curtain. Paco felt he had to do something to raise morale; he didn’t want his generation to go down in history as having done nothing. Norman, on his way back to America for the reception of The Naked and the Dead, lent Paco his car, his sister Barbara, and me. We were to be the innocent-looking American decoys in a foray that only kids can dream up. The upshot of our petite unarmed Entebbe is that we rescued from the gulag near Madrid the son of the president of the Spanish government-in-exile, another student, and tried to persuade an anarchist worker to join us, but he was too afraid and later died in prison. We got through. And when the news traveled through the prisons (as these things do), there was apparently a great clanging of metal plates and cups. Back in France—Barbara had returned to New York—Paco and I hung out with the aging anarchists dying alone in Paris. And Paco started his small underground journal, Peninsula. It was smuggled across the Pyrenees into Spain to combat the ignorance bred by fascist and Communist propaganda. Paco and his friend José (Pepe) Martinez, with me helping, printed it on the cheap in Belleville. Paco’s brother Juan Benet (later to emerge as one of Spain’s greatest fiction writers) contributed his first short story to it. Peninsula’s motto was: “Neither Franco nor Stalin.”

So, why did Semprún and his friend the historian Fernando Claudin stay so long in the party, waiting until they were expelled in 1964? On a political level Semprún clearly wanted to carve out a new party, similar to Togliatti in Italy, destroying the Stalinist wing led by La Passionaria and Carrillo. Emotionally Semprún yearned for a permanent home: He was Spanish, yet his life consisted of almost permanent exile. To my mind his two best books are the extraordinarily moving The Long Voyage, about his deportation to Buchenwald, and What a Beautiful Sunday!, about a single day in Buchenwald, his life flashing this way and that, as scenes in a kaleidoscope. Another gem is his deeply meditative Literature or Life—in it he takes on the essential troubling questions of the 20th century.

The Autobiography of Federico Sanchez is about the period Semprún spent in Madrid, risking his life recruiting for the Communist Party—his successor was caught and executed. It’s hard to describe Madrid then. It had only a thin sliver of a middle class, which created an atmosphere intrinsically odd—you never knew when you would run into a bullfighter, a duke, a worker, or a poet, and Semprún came from one of Spain’s most distinguished aristocratic families. He was a Maura. His grandfather, the prime minister Antonio Maura, was a sort of Winston Churchill of Spain, and his father a leading politician in the Spanish Republic. When Carrillo and La Passionaria, the heads of the party, sarcastically called Semprún a bourgeois and a harebrained intellectual when he wanted the party to split from Moscow (in the style of euro-communism) they really were taking potshots at his social class. Semprún had spent his life in the party; it had to be excruciatingly difficult to be shunned by it.

Meanwhile, in the early 1960s, Pepe Martinez, from our Peninsula days, had created Ruedo Ibérico, the dissident publishing house and bookstore in Paris that had morphed into a fabled meeting place on the Left Bank for Spanish intellectuals. I met Juan Goytisolo there, and sometimes Claudin came around. I heard about Semprún, who was also loosely connected to Ruedo, from them, but didn’t meet him at that time.

Semprún waited 15 years before he dared look back at his time in Buchenwald. In his amazing first memoir, The Long Voyage, written when he was already taking leave of the Communist Party, with its aura of submerged clenched passion, he seems more comfortable describing his dazed, confused exit from Buchenwald after the Americans liberated it than reawakening nightmare memories about what happened to him and others, including the Jewish children he witnessed thrown directly into the crematorium. What Semprún does allow himself in his book are moments of sardonic anger. Upon his return to France he is denied his repatriation bonus. He is told by officials that he isn’t entitled to repatriation because he isn’t a French citizen. He thinks to himself he has left one foreign country, Germany, for another, France. Instead of the repatriation bonus due him the officials offer him cigarettes and order him to the back of the line. Someone yells, “Spanish Red!” And he reflects: So that is who I am—a Spanish Red!

Barbara Probst Solomon in Paris, 1948.
Courtesy of the author

But did Semprún immediately comprehend the complexity of his own story when he was liberated from Buchenwald? I doubt it. His life had been one of tremendous losses braided with star power and derring-do. His adored mother died while he was still a child: He lost her, her comfortable love, his country, and his language. When Madrid fell, the family moved to Paris; at 15 Jorge entered the Lycée Henri IV, where he became, at least temporarily, a French boy. He learned to write exclusively in French. At the Sorbonne he excelled in philosophy. One minute he was a 19-year-old immersed in Proust; the next he was a kid in the FTP-MOI, the immigrant wing of the French Communist Party made up largely of Spaniards and Jews, then a member of the Spanish and then the French Communist Parties, ending up as an inmate in Buchenwald.

His close friend there was Josef Frank, a Czech Jew. The two survived together life under the Nazis: torture, starvation, humiliation, and horrendous cold. Costa-Gavras’ film The Confession, with a screenplay by Semprún, was based on Arthur London’s book about the l952 Slánsky trial. But the film was more than a film for him; it reflects his moral turning point, at least from Stalinism. Josef Frank was one of the 11 Czech Jewish intellectuals paraded in the trial. They were gruesomely strangled to death after being made to grovel in a public, Soviet-style confession. Of the 14 Czechs on trial, only the 11 Jews were murdered.

Years later Semprún delivered his essay “Reflections on Jewish and European Culture” to the French Judaic Society in Paris, his focus being the tremendous loss for Europe of its Jews. Where once the vibrant Jewish culture with its multiple voices and talents had culturally enriched Europe, particularly Germany at the end of the 19th century, there was now silence. The piece had all the marvelous twists and turns of a person deeply enmeshed in philosophy. (I published it in translation in The Reading Room.) At the time we discussed over the phone the possibility of Semprún’s giving a reading here with other Spanish writers, but he was not well.

While we talked I was remembering a transatlantic conversation we had while I was covering the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie in Lyon and needed to know about the French Resistance there. Ordinarily I would have asked Pepe for details, but he had died an accidental death after his return to Madrid, and Ruedo was no more. So, I’d called Jorge in Paris. And as he talked I sensed in his pauses his excitement as he evoked those times. I was also remembering other transatlantic phone calls—the spring day in 1966 when Juan Benet called me from Madrid reluctantly telling me that Paco, who had been on a group anthropological dig exploring the habits of Bedouins, had been killed when his Jeep crashed in the desert.

And as I listened to Semprún’s reaching back into his special time, France under the Occupation, his soul and 20th-century tragedy braided as one, it occurred to me that so many American memoirs start with cruel and impossible beginnings but eventually end with the narrator’s triumph over circumstance. Jorge Semprún, to the contrary, starts with his memory of a Proustian lost paradise; his catharsis, his ending, is his vision of history.

Barbara Probst Solomon, an essayist, novelist, and journalist, became the first American and second woman to be awarded Spain’s top journalist award, the Francisco Cerecedo Prize, in 2008.

In the spring of 2007, I was fortunate enough to enroll in his final class at Columbia University and experience his teachings first hand. While the class was primarily made up of devotees—and make no mistake, he had many—as a philosophy major, this was the first and only history class I ended up taking. Even for me, a history novice, his clear thinking and beautifully wrought narratives brought life to the stories he told.

Praised primarily for his historical writings (most famously, Zakhor) and his teachings at Columbia, Yerushalmi hadn’t been known for his fiction. Until now. This week’s New Yorker features his posthumous debut, Gilgul (subscription required). The story within a story deals with themes familiar to Yerushalmi, touching on messianism and reincarnation (or gilgul).

In the story, Ravitch, himself a historian who has written a study on the Jewish tales of Sacher-Masoch, visits the sorceress Gerda at the behest of one of his friends. While at the time he has no interest, life’s events four years later, including the divorce from his wife and his father’s death, leave him overwhelmed with the need to visit her again. Gerda speaks in riddles of sorts, as all good sorceresses do, and tells him the story of a man who was “pathologically rest-less.” While he had no desire to travel, the man felt a strange compulsion that would constantly drive him away from wherever he was settled. Gerda explained to him that while he was born in Bucharest, his soul was the soul of Isaac Benveniste, a 15th century physician born in Spain and exiled during the great expulsion of 1492. He tried to reach Israel, but ended up dying in Rhodes. His restlessness is what inhabited him. Ravitch, captivated by the story, asks her if this is the source of his troubles as well. But all Gerda tells him is, “this story was meant for you, but is not about you.” Like Ravitch, we are left wondering about the meaning of such a tale and how this fits into our lives.

On the New Yorker website, Yeushalmi’s widow, Ophrah, discussed her husbands work with fiction editor Deborah Treisman:

Do you know whether this story—or, at least, the story within the story, the history of Isaac Benveniste, the fifteenth-century Spanish Jewish physician—was drawn from his historical research?

It calls on some basic themes that occupied him, such as exile, Israel, the Diaspora, and more. And the choice of a Sephardic name—Benveniste—hints at that; his major historical research was in Spain, and resulted in his book “From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso,” about a seventeenth-century Spanish Jew, who abandoned his post as court physician in order to live openly as a Jew in Italy.

Ophrah goes on to explain that Yerushalmi never expressed any desire to publish the story (“if Yosef hears of this somewhere…he will be astounded”), but a colleague convinced her of the merits of publishing posthumously. She also expressed the hope that the story would “bring him out of his ‘professor’ box and to a new audience.”

This Week in Fiction: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi [New Yorker]
Related: History and Memory

• Obama administration officials clamored to have their ideas heard over what the United States’s next step vis-à-vis the peace process should be. Their deadline is tonight, when Secretary of State Clinton is set to give a big speech expected to lay out the new strategy. [LAT]

• Columnist Jackson Diehl blames the failure of the latest round of talks on Palestinian President Abbas—who, he reports, has a history of declining good deals—and on the administration for failing to recognize this. [WP]

• Roger Cohen’s column is about an activist-y young American Jew who went to Israel, was spat on by haredim, and then joined J Street. [NYT]

• Hadassah will pay back $45 million of Madoff-related money as part of Bankruptcy Court proceedings. [eJewishPhilanthropy]

• A WikiLeaks cable revealed U.S. plans to try to get Spain an underwater treasure in exchange for a Camille Pissaro painting, now in Spain, that the Nazis confiscated from a Jewish family. The ploy failed. [ARTINFO]

• The U.S. and Israeli Reform and Conservative movements are furious at today’s vote on a bill that would give exclusive conversion authority to Israel’s Chief (Orthodox) Rabbinate. [Haaretz]

• Lebanon reinforced its troops in its south with 5,000 more. [WP]

• Meanwhile, Lebanese newspapers are reporting that the July 2006 conflict with Israel is “not over.” [Ynet]

• In a move that resembles 1979’s “morality police,” the Iranian regime is sending 1,000 clerics to Tehran schools to enforce against political dissent. Last month, the teaching of music was banned in Iranian schools. [NYT]

• Congratulations to España, which won the World Cup yesterday in its first-ever final game appearance. [ESPN]

Hmmm.

In Israel, they’re having no trouble hoping that Germany ends up, well, uber alles. “Israelis support Germany,” the AP reports,

for the same reason fans around the world do: They are one of the competition’s strongest teams, with beautiful footwork, aggressive strikers and a no-nonsense defense.

The passing of time and Germany’s consistent public contrition for the Holocaust has softened many Israelis. And Germany’s strong political support for Israel at a time when the country feels like the target of international hostility makes their soccer team more endearing.

Adds Howard Wolfson, who asks “Is It Okay To Root for Germany?” (and answers that it is), “I’m looking forward to putting history and politics aside for 90 minutes and enjoying a great match. Hopefully that will be ok.”

It will be. Until Sunday, when we’ll be rooting for the Righteous Oranje to put the beatdown on whoever wins today.

Some Israelis OK With Cheering for Germany [AP]
Is It Okay To Root for Germany? [The Goal Post]
Earlier: Going Dutch
Which Squad You Should Root For
Postcard from Berlin

Uruguay and The Netherlands play today at 2:30 E.S.T.; Spain and Germany, last week’s other two victors, play tomorrow. It should be obvious which is Tablet Magazine’s team now:

Hup, Holland, Hup!

Earlier: Which Squad You Should Root For

• Uruguay. Harbored Nazis after the war.

• Ghana. They (in soccer, a side are described with plural verbs) defeated Tablet Magazine’s official team, so by a certain logic they now claim that mantle. Plus, they have John Pantsil, who in the last World Cup waved an Israeli flag after scoring a goal, in honor of his then-team, Hapoel Tel Aviv.

• Argentina. Harbored Nazis.

• Paraguay. Harbored Nazis. Harbors Hamas.

• Netherlands. Compared to most other Western European countries (ahem, France?), they resented Nazi persecution and slaughter of their Jews. Plus, Anne Frank lived there!

• Germany. I mean.

• Spain.

• Brazil. You can’t root for Brazil: That’s like rooting for the Yankees or the Lakers! Plus, they harbored Nazis.

For now, Tablet Magazine is officially supporting the Netherlands, which is playing Brazil, and Ghana, which is playing Uruguay, both on Friday. We’ll revisit the matter after the quarter-finals. Happy watching!

Earlier: U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Forward emails from your elders to elders@tabletmag.com.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: _______
Date: Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 1:36 AM
Subject: Fw: If Israel Goes Down We All Go Down
To: ______, _______

Wouldn’t you and I love to see Jose Maria Aznar as our American President instead of the Marrano Moslem now actively destroying democracy, capitalism and Israel?

How much more destruction do we need before those who voted for Osama finally say “ich hub gemacht a toos” (I made a mistake voting for Obama?)

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
________________________________________
From: One Jerusalem
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2010 03:57:24 +0000
To:
Subject: If Israel Goes Down We All Go Down

If Israel Goes Down We All Go Down

In a powerful article in today’s Times of London, Jose Maria Aznar, the President of Spain from 1996-2004) provides a rousing and eloquent defense of the State of Israel. Aznar also uses this opportunity to announce the launch of his new organization “Friends of Israel” composed primarily on non-Jewish Europeans and Americans. President Aznar is to be applauded for standing up for Israel, standing up for what is right.

The article is below:

If Israel goes down, we all go down
Anger over Gaza is a distraction. We cannot forget that Israel is the West’s best ally in a turbulent region
By José María Aznar

For far too long now it has been unfashionable in Europe to speak up for Israel. In the wake of the recent incident on board a ship full of anti-Israeli activists in the Mediterranean, it is hard to think of a more unpopular cause to champion.

In an ideal world, the assault by Israeli commandos on the Mavi Marmara would not have ended up with nine dead and a score wounded. In an ideal world, the soldiers would have been peacefully welcomed on to the ship. In an ideal world, no state, let alone a recent ally of Israel such as Turkey, would have sponsored and organized a flotilla whose sole purpose was to create an impossible situation for Israel: making it choose between giving up its security policy and the naval blockade, or risking the wrath of the world.

In our dealings with Israel, we must blow away the red mists of anger that too often cloud our judgment. A reasonable and balanced approach should encapsulate the following realities: first, the state of Israel was created by a decision of the UN. Its legitimacy, therefore, should not be in question. Israel is a nation with deeply rooted democratic institutions. It is a dynamic and open society that has repeatedly excelled in culture, science and technology.

Second, owing to its roots, history, and values, Israel is a fully fledged Western nation. Indeed, it is a normal Western nation, but one confronted by abnormal circumstances.

Uniquely in the West, it is the only democracy whose very existence has been questioned since its inception. In the first instance, it was attacked by its neighbors using the conventional weapons of war. Then it faced terrorism culminating in wave after wave of suicide attacks. Now, at the behest of radical Islamists and their sympathizers, it faces a campaign of delegitimisation through international law and diplomacy.

Sixty-two years after its creation, Israel is still fighting for its very survival. Punished with missiles raining from north and south, threatened with destruction by an Iran aiming to acquire nuclear weapons and pressed upon by friend and foe, Israel, it seems, is never to have a moment’s peace.

For years, the focus of Western attention has understandably been on the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. But if Israel is in danger today and the whole region is slipping towards a worryingly problematic future, it is not due to the lack of understanding between the parties on how to solve this conflict. The parameters of any prospective peace agreement are clear, however difficult it may seem for the two sides to make the final push for a settlement.

The real threats to regional stability, however, are to be found in the rise of a radical Islamism which sees Israel’s destruction as the fulfillment of its religious destiny and, simultaneously in the case of Iran, as an expression of its ambitions for regional hegemony. Both phenomena are threats that affect not only Israel, but also the wider West and the world at large.

The core of the problem lies in the ambiguous and often erroneous manner in which too many Western countries are now reacting to this situation. It is easy to blame Israel for all the evils in the Middle East. Some even act and talk as if a new understanding with the Muslim world could be achieved if only we were prepared to sacrifice the Jewish state on the altar. This would be folly.

Israel is our first line of defense in a turbulent region that is constantly at risk of descending into chaos; a region vital to our energy security owing to our overdependence on Middle Eastern oil; a region that forms the front line in the fight against extremism. If Israel goes down, we all go down. To defend Israel’s right to exist in peace, within secure borders, requires a degree of moral and strategic clarity that too often seems to have disappeared in Europe. The United States shows worrying signs of heading in the same direction.

The West is going through a period of confusion over the shape of the world’s future. To a great extent, this confusion is caused by a kind of masochistic self-doubt over our own identity; by the rule of political correctness; by a multiculturalism that forces us to our knees before others; and by a secularism which, irony of ironies, blinds us even when we are confronted by jihadis promoting the most fanatical incarnation of their faith. To abandon Israel to its fate, at this moment of all moments, would merely serve to illustrate how far we have sunk and how inexorable our decline now appears.

This cannot be allowed to happen. Motivated by the need to rebuild our own Western values, expressing deep concern about the wave of aggression against Israel, and mindful that Israel’s strength is our strength and Israel’s weakness is our weakness, I have decided to promote a new Friends of Israel initiative with the help of some prominent people, including David Trimble, Andrew Roberts, John Bolton, Alejandro Toledo (the former President of Peru), Marcello Pera (philosopher and former President of the Italian Senate), Fiamma Nirenstein (the Italian author and politician), the financier Robert Agostinelli and the Catholic intellectual George Weigel.

It is not our intention to defend any specific policy or any particular Israeli government. The sponsors of this initiative are certain to disagree at times with decisions taken by Jerusalem. We are democrats, and we believe in diversity.
What binds us, however, is our unyielding support for Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself. For Western countries to side with those who question Israel’s legitimacy, for them to play games in international bodies with Israel’s vital security issues, for them to appease those who oppose Western values rather than robustly to stand up in defense of those values, is not only a grave moral mistake, but a strategic error of the first magnitude.
Israel is a fundamental part of the West. The West is what it is thanks to its Judeo-Christian roots. If the Jewish element of those roots is upturned and Israel is lost, then we are lost too. Whether we like it or not, our fate is inextricably intertwined.

José María Aznar was prime minister of Spain between 1996 and 2004.

In our home in Queens, New York, he would sit his five children down on the living room rug and tell us stories of the Prophet Muhammad. It was the way he told the stories that made us respect and accept Islam as a way of life—rubbing his ankles with his left hand, and swaying back and forth—pausing and then repeating the most important parts of the stories to make sure we had understood. Some people have a way of earning your respect through their eyes. They search your face to make you understand what they are trying to tell you before they actually say anything, and their attention makes you want to respect them. My father was one of those people.

My father was also an indulgent man who never denied his children anything. In middle school, he let his three daughters attend a three-day school trip in the wilderness; most Muslim fathers would never let their daughters spend a night outside of the family home. If the sleeves of a shirt were too short or our pants too tight, he’d softly ask a question: “Don’t you think the sleeves of that shirt are too short?” It was his way—telling you, without actually telling you—that made you ask for his forgiveness. My father made me appreciate Islam, and I began praying five times a day when I was 8 years old, and everything I did from that point on was for Islam and my father. In high school I was teased for not wanting to stay out late. In college I was teased for not drinking.

During my junior year of college I decided I wanted to study in Granada, Spain, for a year. My father had already agreed to let me live on campus during my first two years in college, so I thought maybe he’d trusted me enough to let me move to another country. When I approached him about my new ambition, he took a deep breath and rubbed his beard with the palm of his hand. He never liked to say no to his children. “Rania,” he said softly, “you know a woman should never travel on her own without a male representative.” He looked at me to make sure I understood what he was trying to tell me. I made sure to let him know I was disappointed. “I understand,” I answered him lowering my gaze to the floor. “You are my father, and I have to respect your decision.” As I got up to leave, my father called out, “but I trust you, and I know you won’t do anything to make me regret having let you go.”

In the car on the way to the airport, my father looked at me from the rear-view mirror. “Rania,” he said—I could see through the tint of his glasses that he was uncomfortable—“be careful of the Arab men you’ll meet in Europe.”

“Be careful of all men you meet,” my mother quickly added, turning back to look at me and then my father. “Be careful,” he whispered in my ear once more as he hugged me goodbye and patted my back roughly in that awkward way he had learned to express his affection.

* * *

There was something absolutely thrilling about being a 20-year-old Muslim girl on my own in a country where no one knew me. Granada was home to a large North African community, and despite being Egyptian, with my dark hair and deep-set black eyes, I have very Moroccan features. The Moroccan men who worked at the souvenir shops on Calle Elivra didn’t know what to make of me. They whispered “As salamu aleikum,” to me, waiting to see if I would return the traditional Islamic greeting. I returned it in a whisper with a nod of my head and an innocent smile.

They would wait to make sure I was there on my own, before they started a conversation, at which point I immediately understood why my father had warned me against the Arab men who had left their homes for a blurred dream of a life in Europe. Once they found out I was an Egyptian girl from New York who was studying in Granada for the year, they got straight to the point. Was I married? Did I live alone? Did I have any family in Spain? If I wasn’t married and was living alone without my family it meant I was fair game—a “loose” girl who could invite them over to her place for a good time They relaxed their shoulders and crossed their arms. The nerves that had made their voices quiver began to fade. “Why don’t we go out for a beer tonight,” they’d whisper. At that point, I’d step back and tell them sternly that I don’t drink. Their faces would whiten. They uncrossed their arms and began tugging on the bottom of their shirts, trying to flatten out the wrinkles like they were about to present themselves to my father to ask for my hand in marriage.

Now, only one question mattered to them: “Do you pray?” I had gone from being the loose girl with whom you could speak Arabic and fool around without having a guilty conscience to the pure and righteous girl you respect and marry. “Alhamdulilah, I pray five times a day,” I would answer as I stepped out of their stores. “Thank God,” they repeated. “It was really a pleasure, meeting you,” they called out after me. “The pleasure was mine,” I shouted back with my naive smile.

* * *

My experience in Spain prepared me somewhat for Dubai. My father had grown accustomed to me living abroad, but he was apprehensive about sending me to an Arab country to teach young males at a language school. I couldn’t blame him. I soon discovered that being an Muslim Arab girl on her own in an Arab country was much harder than being one in Europe. I was surprised to find that here I was getting what I call “studged”—stared at and judged—by the women more than by the men. Here I was, an Arab girl, with all her Arab features, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and Nike flip-flops, presenting a different answer to the regional equation that balances tradition and modernity. They glared at me with their black abeyas opened to reveal their leggings and glittery tops, flowing to the ground despite their 4-inch spiked heels. They walked like geishas through the mall, trying to hold their designer bags in place at the crest of their elbows, and their veils that were wrapped in a cone shape from falling too far back from the half-point mark of their heads. Their thick chestnut-dyed brown hair fell over their deep kohl-lined eyes just above their hot-pink lips, but I could still see them looking me up and down. I was plain, but somehow I was still a threat. Who did I think I was with my flip-flops and my leather-strapped watch?

In Spain I had worked at an International Expo, for the United Arab Emirates Pavilion, and when I got to Dubai, I reconnected with my male Emirati colleagues. We walked around Dubai—they in their traditional kanduras and me in my jeans. Other Emirati men looked at them with envy—probably because I looked Moroccan and the behavior of North African women in Dubai was quite notorious. The women looked at me disapprovingly. I pretended not to know, and asked my Emirati male friend why the women were looking at me like that. “They are thinking, ‘What does she have that I don’t?’ ” he said. “And what is that?” I asked with a smile. He sat back, and traced the handle of his coffee cup looking at the women passing by and then at me, “Charm.”

I came to Dubai to teach English to boys preparing for careers in the military. When I was first introduced to my class I walked into a room of 10 open-mouthed Emirati men in their early to late 20s. At 24, I was younger than most of my students. They sat frozen, afraid to say anything to each other in Arabic for fear that I might understand. “My name is Rania,” I began, and one student turned to whisper something to his friend sitting next to him, who stopped him from making a fool of himself by nudging him to keep quiet. I began by telling them that I was from New York, and they sat with their backs hunched watching my lips—afraid that they would miss a word that would reveal my true identity. One student finally gave up and relaxed his shoulders and asked, “Where are you really from?”

“I’m really from New York,” I answered.

“But your name is Arabic.”

“My parents are from Egypt,” I said reluctantly. There was a collective aha that rang through the class, as the students simultaneously dropped their pencils on their notebooks and sat back relaxed as if they’d just been given the answer to a riddle.

“Do you speak Arabic?” one student asked. I was curious to know what they’d say about me, so I told them that I didn’t. They turned to look at each other and smiled at one another as if I wasn’t standing right there in front of them and couldn’t understand the language of smiles.

As the weeks went on, I listened in on their pre-class conversations.

“She really is lovely.”

“She looks really nice in red.”

“I wish she’d wear the silk blue blouse she wore last week.”

“I wish she’d let her hair down and not tie it in a pony tail.”

One time, a student bought cake to the class to celebrate his fifth wedding anniversary. “Who else in here is married?” I asked. As the student proceeded to point out his married peers, one student stopped him and said through clenched teeth in Arabic, “No, don’t tell her I’m married.” I laughed, and the student’s face turned pale. “Why are you laughing?” he asked nervously. I looked at him and then the rest of the class, contemplating whether or not to let them in on my secret. I sat cross-legged on the edge of my desk. “You really are a funny bunch,” I said to them in Arabic.

The color drained from the top of their foreheads down to their chins, as if their heads were hourglasses being flipped over, and I could actually hear them swallow their embarrassment. Their mouths stayed open, and the back of their throats were getting dry. They looked at each other and then smiled nervously.

“Why didn’t you tell us you spoke Arabic?” asked Abdullah, the student who had wished I’d wear my blue blouse.

“Where’s the fun in that?” I asked with a smile. “Deciding what to wear in the morning has never been easier,” I added, and he tried to hide his embarrassment by covering his smile with his hand.

“Do you drink?” another student asked apprehensively. I was surprised by the question and didn’t see how it was related to the fact that I spoke Arabic.

“No,” I replied.

“Why?” asked another student, waiting excitedly for the answer.

“Because it’s haram,” I said seriously, and they all gave me their nods of approval. But they still seemed surprised to know that I knew drinking alcohol was forbidden in Islam. The same student who asked me if I drank came up to me later after class and crouched over my desk. He waited for the other students to leave. “Do you pray at home?” he asked. “Alhamdulilah,” I replied, thanking God. He smiled and gave me a thumbs up before heading out the door.

The students grew accustomed to me, and they enjoyed the experience of having a young Arab girl who understood them and with whom they could openly joke around. Many of these boys were married by the age of 20, and they’d been kept segregated from women until then. They seemed immature for their age. In a society where boys and girls “spoke” via Bluetooth in the malls, having a female friend—not a girlfriend—was a foreign concept to them. They appreciated the fact that they could be light-hearted with me, and that I could be good-humored with them without chastising them. Egyptians are known around the Arab world for making light of situations even if they aren’t funny, and they appreciated the fact that even though I was born and raised in the United States, I didn’t try to suppress my Egyptian half. They were learning that when they saw a girl in front of them who didn’t have her hair covered and who wasn’t in a black abeya, they didn’t have to think sexually by default and ask for Allah’s forgiveness.

* * *

The years I spent traveling on my own have made me realize that other Arabs find me both offensive and intriguing. They can’t seem to reconcile the idea of an American-born Egyptian-Muslim girl on her own in a foreign country without the eyes of her father on her all the time who also prays five times a day without anyone telling her to and who willingly chooses not to drink and stay out late in clubs. Here in Dubai, I’ve met many Arabs who are surprised that I don’t drink for religious reasons. “I used to be like you,” they’d tell me, as if they felt compelled to remind me they were once on the right path and that it would only be a matter of time before I found myself like them. To almost everyone I met, I wasn’t an Egyptian girl raised to be a Muslim—I was an American girl born to Egyptian parents, who made the effort to transmit their culture. I wanted to tell them that I owe the fact that I’ve been able to stay out of trouble abroad to my father, who taught me why I should be a Muslim and not why I had to be one.

Before leaving for Dubai, I traveled alone to Cairo to visit my father, who had retired to Egypt after a career at the United Nations. At passport control, I was met by a stern-looking officer with a white beard and a dark spot on his forehead, which many Muslim men develop over years of prostrating themselves during prayer. The spot on his forehead reminded me of my father. He flipped through my passport and saw all the European stamps from when I traveled during my time in Spain. “You’ve been all over,” he said seriously. “All alone?” he asked, showing his disapproval. We weren’t in Saudi Arabia and it wasn’t his business, so I didn’t let him bother me. “I guess you can call me Bint Batouta,” I joked with a smile, making reference to the 14th-century Moroccan geographer Ibn Batouta. His younger colleague laughed and turned to smile at me. “As staghfurallah,” I seek forgiveness from Allah, said the officer with the beard. I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. I couldn’t tell whether he was asking for Allah’s forgiveness on my behalf for having traveled without a male who was accountable for me, or because of an inappropriate thought he had when he looked at me. As he handed my passport back to me my pinky finger brushed lightly against his by accident. “As staghfurallah,” I whispered quickly looking down at the ground. I had beat him to it. He looked at me coldly. His young colleague could barely suppress his laugh.

I walked away smiling, and then I stopped and looked back at the officer. His face was still flushed as he examined the passport of a woman veiled from head to toe standing with her four children. I wished I could rewind and replay the whole scenario again, except this time instead of calling myself the daughter of Batouta, I would have responded with the phrase my father once taught me—in a country where they don’t know you, hike up your galibeya and run wild through it. I decided against it when I saw my father standing behind the glass of the arrivals sections, waving his hand enthusiastically, his black eyes staring at me and his own galibeya resting neatly at his ankles.

Rania Moaz is a writer living in Dubai.

• The French and Spanish foreign ministers are the most prominent supporters of an initiative that would see the European Union recognize a Palestinian state within 18 months. Israel is opposed. [Haaretz]

• One report states that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally approved Mossad’s killing of Hamas weapons man Mahmoud Mabhouh. (Much more on the Dubai murder mystery at 10am.) [Times of London]

• Despite an anti-blockade backlash throughout the Arab world, Egypt is moving ahead with plans to block off smuggling tunnels into Gaza. [WSJ]

• Alexander Haig, a secretary of state in the Reagan administration, died at 85, and was remembered as a friend and fond admirer of Israel. [JPost, Haaretz]

• In case you didn’t see it yesterday, you really must read about Yitta Schwartz, of Kiryas Joel, New York, who died in January at 93. A Holocaust survivor, Satmar Hasid, and mother of 16, she is estimated to have—from a 75-year-old daughter to a week-old great-great-grandson—over 2,000 living descendants. [NYT]

About halfway through Conviction, a melodrama about the Spanish Inquisition, a beautiful young crypto-Jewess sings a Halevi poem, “Shabbat, my love!”, to her lover, a priest:

Now ’tis dusk. With sudden light distilled
From one sweet face, the world is filled;
The turmoil of my heart is stilled—
For you have arrived, Shabbat, my love!

Check out the full text of the poem, and enjoy the rest of Andalusian History Month.

Conviction [NYT]

Related: Yehuda Halevi [Nextbook Press]
The Pilgrim [Tablet Magazine]
Life of a Poet [Tablet Magazine]

That was the role of Jews in Spanish art in a nutshell, it seemed: their own creations desecrated, destroyed, or lost, their image tied to sacrilege and evil. In Spain, where national narratives did not make room for Jewish and Muslim influences until lately, there has been little incentive to look deeper. But strangely enough, the origins of Spain’s greatest surviving legacy of Jewish art—illuminated Haggadoth—have not been properly addressed even by Jewish scholars, says Vivian Mann, who runs the master’s program in Jewish Art and Visual Culture at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

But that’s because no one knew where to look—or what to look for, says Mann. The answer, she says, is in the retablos, Haggadoth, ceramic Judaica, and other suggestive objects borrowed from major collections in the United States and abroad for “Uneasy Communion: Jews, Christians, and the Altarpieces of Medieval Spain,” a fascinating, provocative show opening this week at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York. “We should be considering Haggadoth not as an isolated phenomenon of Jewish art,” Mann says, “but in the context of Spanish art.”

The exhibition reflects a change in thinking about the role of Jews in Spain, specifically in the century between the countrywide pogroms of 1391, which decimated many communities, and the Expulsion, in 1492. It re-envisions Jews not as marginalized, passive victims, but as active protagonists in a cultural apparatus that was a great deal less segregated than was previously thought, working in studios composed of Christian, converso, and Jewish artists, who could turn out a Haggadah just as readily as they could a Catholic altarpiece.

Mann, who has logged plenty of time in Spain—she was chief curator of the groundbreaking 1992 exhibition “Convivencia” when she was curator of Judaica at the Jewish Museum—got the idea for the show in the Aragonese town of Ejea de los Caballeros. “I was staring at a painting of the presentation of Jesus,” she says. “I said, ‘What’s that on the altar?’ It was a tik, or Torah case.” The object, which had gone unrecognized by scholars of Spanish medieval art, could not have been painted without knowledge of Jewish religious practice. She soon identified more tiks, along with other examples of a material culture lost to history in Spain but preserved in the Sephardic diaspora, such as a dress reminiscent of Moroccan Jewish bridal wear and a type of half-moon circumcision knife known in Amsterdam and Prague. She found paintings inscribed with correct Hebrew. The excavation of the Jewish quarter of Lorca, a town in the southern Spanish province of Murcia, further bolstered her thesis; the synagogue unearthed there looked just like the one in the anonymous 15th-century Catalan tempera-and-gold Christ Among the Doctors, which is on loan to the show from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Jewish contribution to Christian altarpieces is half of the equation; the contribution of Catholic artisans to Jewish manuscripts is the other. Mann is not the first to suggest that Jews, Christians, and conversos worked together in inter-religious ateliers—Harvard art historian Millard Meiss proposed as much in the 1940s. But she is the first to do extensive comparative research in the two genres. She found that figures and colors in the late-13th-century Hispano-Moresque Haggadah from Castile, the earliest known Passover manuscript, resemble those in the late-13th-century Scenes from the Life of Christ, a retablo in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. Depictions of the Creation in the most lavish Passover manuscript of the era, the circa 1320 Golden Haggadah, echo those in another Met retablo, an anonymous 14th-century artist’s Scenes from the Life of Saint Andrew. “When I walked into the Cloisters storeroom, I almost fainted,” Mann says.

Images of Jews in Spanish medieval art serve several purposes. Clearly they are stand-ins for the contemporaries of Jesus, just as the synagogues in the paintings are stand-ins for the Temple. But many figures also appear to be faithful portraits of individuals, whose stereotypically ruddy features contrast with the idealized images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints, making the latter look all the more holy in comparison. The red, unkempt locks and long beards worn by Jews in the retablos were considered signs of evil, but also reflected contemporary reality, namely sumptuary laws passed in 1412, which mandated that Jews had to let their hair grow wild. In the exhibition catalogue, Mann suggests that one reason the laws were passed is that in fact the Catholic and Jewish populations looked so much alike.

In December I went to hear Mann speak on this subject at a conference, “The Jews of Spain: Past and Present,” sponsored by the American Sephardi Federation/Sephardic House. Representatives sent by city halls and tourist offices in towns across Spain, where Jewish cultural tourism has been growing steadily, were in the audience. In many cases, however, the historical evidence far surpasses the material traces of the Jewish presence. Indeed, last month, some towns along the Ruta de Sefarad discussed standardizing their offerings and ways to promote them: charming inns in former juderías, signage reflecting the Jewish presence of yore, knowledgeable tour guides, restaurants serving Jewish-style food. In Segovia, for example, you can dine at El Fogón Sephardí, in case you’d rather skip the city’s famous suckling pig, after you visit the “Centro Didáctico” in the judería. Also, according to a report in the local paper last month, the city government is working to market the Jewish cemetery as a “first-class” tourist attraction.

So far, Mann says, there are no travel plans for “Uneasy Communion.” But it would be an interesting project for a Spanish museum—or a Jewish one.

Robin Cembalest is the executive editor of ARTnews.

Forward emails from your elders to elders@tabletmag.com.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: [A relative]
To: [Distribution list]
Sent: Thu, Feb 11, 2010 6:26 am
Subject: RE: Fwd: Fw: A non Jew and active member of Spain’s left, speaks out

Pilar Rahola is a Spanish politician, journalist and activist and member of the far left. Her articles are published in Spain and throughout some of the most important newspapers in Latin America:

Why don’t we see demonstrations against Islamic dictatorships in London, Paris, Barcelona?

Or demonstrations against the Burmese dictatorship?

Why aren’t there demonstrations against the enslavement of millions of women who live without any legal protection?

Why aren’t there demonstrations against the use of children as human bombs where there is conflict with Islam?

Why has there been no leadership in support of the victims of Islamic dictatorship in Sudan?

Why is there never any outrage against the acts of terrorism committed against Israel?

Why is there no outcry by the European left against Islamic fanaticism?

Why don’t they defend Israel’s right to exist?

Why confuse support of the Palestinian cause with the defense of Palestinian terrorism?

And finally, the million dollar question: Why is the left in Europe and around the world obsessed with the two most solid democracies, the United States and Israel, and not with the worst dictatorships on the planet? The two most solid democracies, who have suffered the bloodiest attacks of terrorism, and the left doesn’t care.

And then, to the concept of freedom. In every pro Palestinian European forum I hear the left yelling with fervor: “We want freedom for the people!”

Not true. They are never concerned with freedom for the people of Syria or Yemen or Iran or Sudan, or other such nations. And they are never preoccupied when Hammas destroys freedom for the Palestinians. They are only concerned with using the concept of Palestinian freedom as a weapon against Israeli freedom. The resulting consequence of these ideological pathologies is the manipulation of the press.

The international press does major damage when reporting on the question of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. On this topic they don’t inform, they propagandize.

When reporting about Israel the majority of journalists forget the reporter’s code of ethics. And so, any Israeli act of self-defense becomes a massacre, and any confrontation, genocide. So many stupid things have been written about Israel, that there aren’t any accusations left to level against her.

At the same time, this press never discusses Syrian and Iranian interference in propagating violence against Israel; the indoctrination of children and the corruption of the Palestinians. And when reporting about victims, every Palestinian casualty is reported as tragedy and every Israeli victim is camouflaged, hidden or reported about with disdain.

And let me add on the topic of the Spanish left. Many are the examples that illustrate the anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli sentiments that define the Spanish left. For example, one of the leftist parties in Spain has just expelled one of its members for creating a pro-Israel website. I quote from the expulsion document: “Our friends are the people of Iran, Libya and Venezuela, oppressed by imperialism, and not a Nazi state like Israel.”

In another example, the socialist mayor of Campozuelos changed Shoah Day, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, with Palestinian Nabka Day, which mourns the establishment of the State of Israel, thus showing contempt for the six million European Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

Or in my native city of Barcelona, the city council decided to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel, by having a week of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Thus, they invited Leila Khaled, a noted terrorist from the 70’s and current leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist organization so described by the European Union, which promotes the use of bombs against Israel.

This politically correct way of thinking has even polluted the speeches of President Zapatero. His foreign policy falls within the lunatic left, and on issues of the Middle East he is unequivocally pro Arab. I can assure you that in private, Zapatero places on Israel the blame for the conflict in the Middle East, and the policies of foreign minister Moratinos reflect this. The fact that Zapatero chose to wear a kafiah in the midst of the Lebanon conflict is no coincidence; it’s a symbol.

Spain has suffered the worst terrorist attack in Europe and it is in the crosshairs of every Islamic terrorist organization. As I wrote before, they kill us will cell phones hooked to satellites connected to the Middle Ages. An yet the Spanish left is the most anti Israeli in the world.

And then it says it is anti Israeli because of solidarity. This is the madness I want to denounce in this conference.

Conclusion:

I am not Jewish. Ideologically I am left and by profession a journalist. Why am I not anti-Israeli like my colleagues? Because as a non-Jew I have the historical responsibility to fight against Jewish hatred and currently against the hatred for their historic homeland, Israel. To fight against anti-Semitism is not the duty of the Jews, it is the duty of the non-Jews.

As a journalist it is my duty to search for the truth beyond prejudice, lies and manipulations. The truth about Israel is not told. As a person from the left who loves progress, I am obligated to defend liberty, culture, civic education for children, coexistence and the laws that the Tablets of the Covenant made into universal principles.

Principles that Islamic fundamentalism systematically destroys. That is to say that as a non-Jew, journalist and lefty I have a triple moral duty with Israel, because if Israel is destroyed, liberty, modernity and culture will be destroyed too.

The struggle of Israel, even if the world doesn’t want to accept it, is the struggle of the world.

Torah Scroll, Kabbalistic Circle of Shem Tov Ben Abraham Ibn Gaon, Northern Spain [Sotheby’s]
Related: Treasure Trove [Tablet]

Here’s the problem. As this illuminating article in the latest Boston Review makes clear, President Hugo Chávez’s regime only holds such an enlightened attitude toward Venezuela’s roughly 12,000 Jews when it knows the world is watching. The Tiferet Israel attack came soon after Venezuela severed diplomatic ties with Israel in response to January’s Gaza incursion. According to the Review article, Chávez’s first instinct was to hypothesize that his regime’s opposition was responsible for the attack; only international pressure prompted an about-face and a series of arrests. Chávez has in the past claimed that Israel did “something similar to what Hitler did, possibly worse.” Jewish sites in Venezuela, including the Israeli Embassy, have previously been targets of vandalism.

Moreover, the article contends, such incidents and words are not aberrations, but rather are inextricably linked to Chávez’s populist appeal and the climate he deliberately cultivates: “Anti-Semitism is close to the intellectual heart of Chavismo,” it asserts. For example, the regime regularly utilizes anti-Semitism to discredit its opponents, as when a prominent anchor on a state television channel accused the owners of a Venezuela mall chain, the Cohens, of “financing all that is happening” in reference to the anti-Chávez student movement that gained momentum in late 2007. In other words, such pious displays as we saw yesterday are the exception to the rule. “In recent years,” notes the article, “the Jewish community in Venezuela has shrunk some 20 percent.”

Spanish, Venezuelan Foreign Ministers Visit Synagogue [JTA]
United By Hate [Boston Review]

Anyone who’s been to a Jewish wedding has witnessed the ritual of the groom stepping on a glass. And most of us have seen hamsahs, the hand-shaped amulets often displayed in people’s homes or worn as jewelry. But how many of us have had a chicken killed on our behalf to ward off bad luck?

Nextbook editor Hadara Graubart’s ancestors came from Spain, via Turkey, and like many Jews who have traversed the globe, they picked up a few traditions along the way. In her family, it’s a short leap from hanging a mezuzah on a doorway to flushing handfuls of salt down the toilet. For this podcast, Hadara spoke with her mother, Jean, about her family’s preoccupation with protective rituals.

Golijov explains the shofar in Krakow

What about Federico García Lorca inspired you to write an opera?

It was Lorca who said that the greatest tragedy in the history of Spain was the expulsion of the Muslims and the Jews. That made Spain from a great civilization into a petty and chauvinistic little provincial thing.

The image that I had when I started composing the opera was of a floating pomegranate, bleeding melodies of the three civilizations that were in Spain—Jewish, Muslim, Catholic. The Arabs were translating the Greeks, and Maimonides was in touch with Averroes, and all of that. People were having a dialogue. It’s not like it was all rosy, but there was creative tension.

As opposed to a more violent kind of tension today?

Violence and fear, mutual fear.

Also, Ainadamar was so beautiful in the Golden Era. It was a place people went to be in harmony with the world, and the same place, nine centuries later, becomes the witness of a horrible murder. Lorca was assassinated there. It’s about how things don’t necessarily get better.

The idea is that there are rhythms and melodies that come from the soil of Spain. What I did was mostly take them and bend them in a way, to express the history of that place—the pain, the war, and the beauty.

Do you see any of this as a lesson for today?

Wishful thinking. [Laughs] In the opera, Lorca, through one of the characters, says “You love freedom, but I am freedom.” And that to me is the main point. That people who love freedom feel entitled to kill others for that love, but those people who are freedom are actually killed. Like Lorca, just by being freedom, they scare the others. It would be beautiful to arrive at the place where we all are freedom, and do not just love freedom.

How did your grandparents end up in Argentina?

Argentina, believe it or not, was as good as America in terms of promise then. There is still a pretty sizable Jewish population there, but it’s much smaller than when I was growing up. In the 1960s, there were two Yiddish newspapers, a lot of theater in Yiddish. In most homes Yiddish was spoken. When I was younger—well, I forgot everything now, but I was fluent. But with the dictatorship and anti-Semitism, people emigrated, many to Israel. Many assimilated, and several hundred were killed.

You left for Israel. How old were you then?

Twenty-two. I had a very happy childhood in Argentina, but then it got much more difficult with all the violence and I got fed up. And musically, I was not growing. Plus there was always the desire to know Israel, to know Jerusalem.

By the time you got to Israel, you already knew a lot of Jewish music.

Yeah, but I didn’t know all the Sephardic music. It was just incredible to walk down the streets and hear—there are so many little synagogues. And people sing all the time, like the plumber would come to fix something and see the piano and start singing. He didn’t fix the problem, the leak got bigger. But I got a couple of songs out of him, so it was okay.

Do you come from a musical family?

My mom was a very good pianist. My dad was a doctor, an orthopedist. Because of my mother, I studied piano. I loved Bach and still love it, and Schubert and Mozart and Beethoven and all of that. But because we were in a relatively small town, there were no amazing performers coming. The orchestra in my town was pretty bad. My knowledge was mostly from playing scores or listening to records.
So when I was, like, 10, and my mom took me to see Astor Piazzolla, it was a shattering moment in my life because—here is a real, living person, not someone born 200 years ago in Vienna, who integrates all that I loved, from Bach to Bartok. Piazzolla sublimated the sound of the streets of Argentina into music. The way people talk—you know, people who talk to you from the side of their mouth just to show how macho they are? That’s the way the phrasing was. I could hear everything at the same time, Bach and the streets. And that’s something that I still remember with goose bumps.

Is that when you knew you wanted to write your own music?

Oh, that definitely did it. I was already writing little ditties by then.

Since your mother introduced you to music, that must have made her very happy.

Not really. She was scared. I could be anything I wanted, but not a musician. The whole prospect of a starving artist was not very exciting for her. Once it was inevitable and she couldn’t fight my decision anymore, she was incredibly supportive, and she totally believed in me. She always said, “Keep dreaming.” Many times I felt like giving up—when you slowly let go of your wildest dreams—and she was the one who always kept pushing me.

You write a lot for Dawn Upshaw, who is known as a champion of new music. How did you meet her?

She got my name from the Kronos Quartet. She called to ask for a song, seven years ago. Now, I’m a little used to big people calling, but at that moment only AT&T called me to remind me to pay the phone bill. She was given some money to commission a piece, and she decided that rather than call a well-known composer, she wanted somebody she didn’t know. In Dawn, I was able to find somebody with that affective power, that deep truth of expression, but also the possibility of whatever I want because she’s such a huge musician.

There are moments on Ayre when she doesn’t even sound like a soprano—sometimes she even sounds throaty.

Exactly. In Ayre, she’s like seven different voices. [Laughs] I told her: after this record, either they will change the definition of soprano or of Dawn Upshaw.

Does your recent success, especially now with Lincoln Center devoting a month to your music, feel a little strange?

When you are born in La Plata, Argentina, you never lose that wide-eyed feeling, which I think is actually a good thing. It means a lot, but it could also be a freak thing. Obviously I try to do my best all the time, but I don’t have that supreme confidence that I think Mozart or Strauss had.

Mozart was very poor when he died.

Yeah, but he had confidence. He knew he was Mozart. I still don’t know who I am. I think that what I do is truthful, but I also feel that I’m pretty minor. But I’m opening a door. I think I’m John the Baptist, except I never want to end up with my head on a platter. But I am kind of announcing a new era in music, an era in which boundaries will disappear. But I think a much greater composer than me will come soon.

Antonio Muñoz Molina

How do you explain your interest in the history of Jews in Spain?

A writer doesn’t write about just anything. He writes about things he has an affinity for. For some reason, I feel that affinity. Don’t ask why. Well, there is a historic reason. There was an extraordinary community that was unjustly expelled. And the disappearance of that community was a tragedy for culture and life and Spain. Because immediately after came the limpieza de sangre of strict Catholicism. Many like me are victims of this strict Catholicism. This rebellion against Catholic orthodoxy lets you feel close to those who have been excluded by the same orthodoxy.

You spent many years collecting the stories that appeared in Sepharad.

For a long time, I was interested almost obsessively in this kind of story: of Primo Levi, Jean Améry, this kind of writer. One story led to another. In Spain there was not a lot of information about this.

About the Holocaust? Both Levi and Améry recounted their experiences at Auschwitz.

About the great tragedies of the 20th century. Spain was very isolated politically, and the Civil War isolated it more. So this consciousness that you find in France or the United States—or, of course, in Germany—about these things is very vague here. Many of the books I read, I had to read them in French, English, or Italian, because they hadn’t been translated into Spanish. I discovered the diaries of Victor Klemperer when they were translated into English, and they had a great impact on me. Later, I started to write a story based on the story that a woman had told me in Copenhagen.

The woman in the book with the intriguing name, Camille Pedersen-Safra?

That’s not her real name, but I had it in my head a long time to write about her. It was very novelistic: the girl who returns to France with her mother after the war, they get locked in a hotel room, and it turns out to have been the Gestapo’s room. Why can’t they open that door? It’s almost like a story by Henry James. And when I was writing, I remembered another story I had heard in Tangiers many years before.

About the Sephardic man from Budapest who escaped with his son to Morocco after the Spanish consul in Hungary gave them citizenship papers.

Yes. And I thought, there was a clear relation between the two things. So I thought of the word Sepharad—that is the name of Spain.

Because these people were Sephardic?

And because they were people in exile, people who were lost in the world. I had also read a lot about the Spanish Jews. I thought that what they had in common, apart from ethnicity and religion, was the experience of loss and exile. And somehow, many stories I had read before came together. I didn’t really have to invent anything. I found the connection between Milena Jesenska, who knew Margarete Buber-Neumann, and Willi Münzenberg, who was married to Margarete Buber-Neumann’s sister. It seemed like the book was writing itself. All the documentation that I had been acquiring suddenly had meaning. I had been preparing to write a book without knowing it.

You talk about how Münzenberg, Buber-Neumann, and several other characters were respected Communists who fell from grace with the Party and suddenly found themselves in a terrifying limbo. How far can you push Sepharad as a metaphor?

It functions in a number of ways. It functions in a literal manner, because Sepharad is a concrete thing: The persecution and expulsion of the Jews from Spain is something historically concrete. And it functions as a metaphor of destruction, expulsion, or loss. As the place one wants to come back to.

The Sephardic longing for Sepharad is quite different from the nostalgia most Ashkenazis might feel for Eastern Europe.

Recently, I was in Paris to receive a literary prize from a center for Jewish studies at the Sorbonne, the Centre Alberto Benveniste. It was amazing how people there spoke an antique Spanish, and the tenderness with which they spoke of Spain. And these people have never lived in Spain. This is the paradox: Those who left preserved what those who remained lost. Spain has been very cruel to democrats, to progressives. So many of them, the best, had to go. Not only in the 15th century when the Jews left, but in the 19th century, in the 20th. I am a grandchild of the generation of García Lorca, of the great writers of the Civil War era. These artists are like the new Sephardim in the sense that they have been expelled from their country. And they have preserved the best of Spanish culture. The Spanish culture that remained after the war, during Franco’s dictatorship, was repulsive.

Aren’t you reducing the idea of Sepharad to a sophisticated culture of exile?

I’m saying that there is a metaphorical parallelism, not an identification. And a kind of historical continuity. I know perfectly that you can’t compare the culture of a person of the 15th century to one from the 20th. But I do know that when the Jews were expelled from Spain in the 15th century and later from Portugal, Spain lost a fundamental thing. This loss led it to obscurantism, to the loss of what is called diversity. In the 20th century, a similar thing happens.

How was the book received?

The reviewers thought it was well-written, a different kind of book, and so on. I didn’t find they established a real dialogue about the deeper meaning. The French reviewers have been much more accurate because they are far more familiar with those issues. In Spain, as elsewhere in Western Europe, there is often a strange kind of anti-Semitism, from many people apparently of the left. And I consider myself of the left. It’s not presented as anti-Semitism, but as opposition to the state of Israel. Often, people who have read my book say, “Why didn’t you write about the Palestinians?”

Aside from the question of Israel, how do you see the image of Jews in Spain today?

It is confused and vague. A neighbor of mine said to me, “What do you know about this? Are the Jews good or bad?” And I said, “There are good ones and bad ones.”

Well, they hardly know Jews in Spain.

Of course. Because there isn’t a real presence. There are only ghosts.

In Sepharad, you often ask direct questions: “What would it be like to arrive at a German or Polish station in a cattle car?”; “What would you do if you knew that at any moment they could come for you?” Are these directed at a Spanish audience that has never considered these questions?

No, they are directed at any reader. There are many examples in history and the present of people to whom this has happened. It happened in Yugoslavia in the nineties; it happened in Uganda; in Argentina in the seventies. In my book there is a story of a woman, granddaughter of a German Jew who lived in Uruguay and then Argentina. And she had to go into exile again. Here in Spain, there are Argentine Jews, children and grandchildren of immigrants of Jews who fled Germany or Austria in the thirties and in the seventies during the dictatorship, they had to go into exile again.

How faithful is the book to your sources? Is there really a house with Stars of David carved on the lintel in your hometown, Ubeda?

There are two types of stories: public and private. The public ones are totally faithful. I didn’t invent anything about Primo Levi or Willi Münzenberg. The house in my native town exists. But yes, I invented things about private people. I didn’t literally recount the story of the woman from Copenhagen or the man from Tangiers.

When I read that the Hungarian family had the key to their ancestral home in Toledo, I also wondered if you had invented that part. Many people make such claims, but they’re often apocryphal.

That’s what the man told me. But I never saw the key.