Remembrances from Summer camps

Posted on July 30, 2023 by obligingworldviewer

The small-town New England rabbi Seth Adelson, who moved to Pittsburgh via Long Island, wrote:

If you ever went to a Jewish summer camp, you may have encountered a long list of Jewish catastrophes that have taken place on Tish’ah BeAv, the ninth day of the month of Av. {A Visit to the Jewish Quarter of Toledo, Spain}

And how we were not reminded that

“when we enter the month of Av, our joy was diminished”. {Taanit 29a}

During our summer camps, we were regularly reminded of dark days that had come over our community during that eleventh month of the civil year and the fifth month of the ecclesiastical year on the Hebrew calendar.

First, there is the death of high priest Aaron (1 Av), then we remember the invasion by King Nebuchadnezzar of Bēṯ hamMīqdāš the First Temple (7 Av) and the day (1 Av) that Civil war broke out in besieged Jerusalem; one group setting fire to the city’s food stores, which is said to have quickened starvation. But also on 7 Av (1492 CE) the day that Jews of Spain were expelled by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.

From others, we hear that the signing of the edict of the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 is a very common topic at the summer camps.

It sits alongside other such calamitous moments in Jewish history as the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem (586 BCE and 70 CE, respectively) and the fall of the fortress of Betar in the Bar Kochba Rebellion in 135 CE ^{[9 Av]}. {A Visit to the Jewish Quarter of Toledo, Spain}

In the year that Ferdinand II of Aragon sponsored the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in continuation of his policy of modernisation including a ban against all religions other than Roman Catholicism, he enforced religious uniformity and the expulsion of the Jews (1492).

Though we remembered that expulsion in summer, technically speaking, that is not historically accurate.

The final edict of Expulsion was signed in the spring of 1492, not the summer. And, of course, it is worth noting that Spain was neither the first nor the last country from which the Jews were expelled. {A Visit to the Jewish Quarter of Toledo, Spain}

That effort to strengthen the church, which would in turn support the crown, came already after the horrible actions against Christians who had other ideas than the Catholic Church. It was the papacy which had established a judicial procedure to combat what they called heresy. This had made life for real followers of Christ very difficult, and at first even more than that of the Jews. The medieval inquisition, established by Pope Sixtus IV at the petition of Ferdinand and Isabella, had played a considerable role in Christian Spain during the 13th century, but the struggle against the Moors had kept the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula busy and served to strengthen their faith. As such we came to learn it was not only Jews targeted, but other religious people than Catholics, had it at first worse.

But when toward the end of the 15th century the Reconquista was all but complete, the desire for religious unity by the Spaniards became more and more pronounced. After that for a long time, they did not have so much to fear, because they were of some economic importance, it became more difficult for Spanish Jews to feel safe anyway. Mobs of fanatical Christians started making life very difficult for Jews, who in turn thought they could escape problems by doing as if they had become Catholic. Those Jews who converted to the Christian faith to escape persecution but who continued to practice Judaism secretly were called Marrano.

By the mid-15th century the persons who had been baptized but continued to practice Judaism in secret—Marranos—formed a compact society. The Marranos began to grow rich and to rise to high positions in the state, the royal court, and the church hierarchy. They intermarried with the noblest families of the land. The hatred directed against them by the old Christians, ostensibly because they were suspected of being untrue to their converted faith, was in fact directed indiscriminately against all conversos, or Jewish converts. {Marrano – Encyc. Brit.}

Following the decline of the Iraqi Jewish community in the late first millennium, Spain could be counted as having the largest Jewish population in Europe, which was among the largest in Europe. But the Catholics wanted to end the Jews’s influence. For the Spaniards with their Inquisition, only the total expulsion of the Jews from Spain could end Jewish influence in national life. For the Catholic sovereigns, it was one of the pillars to come to the purity of faith.
Thus came about the final tragedy, the edict of expulsion of all the Jews from Spain on March 31, 1492. Portugal promulgated an edict of expulsion in 1497 and Navarre in 1498.

The majority of Jews living in Spain were not at all willing to be baptised into Catholicism and chose to flee the country rather than pretend to be converted Jews. for us, at the summer camps, this was special to commemorate, because those who went into exile, were the Jews who preferred to be faithful to God, and we were supposed to take an example from that.

Rabbi Seth Adelson visited Toledo, which was for many centuries the spiritual centre of Spain, for the Christians as well as the Jews, and writes about Spain its rich years and the darker days. He also reminds us of some special or important figures and writes:

In the 11th and 12th centuries, the Jews enjoyed a fruitful period of economic and intellectual development there. The ferment of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers and poets and scholars in that era led to a golden age for the Jews, spawning such brilliant contributors as Yehudah haLevi, Ramban (Nachmanides), Avraham ibn Ezra, Shemuel haNagid, Shelomoh Ibn Gevirol, and of course Rambam / Maimonides, the greatest figure of the Middle Ages. {A Visit to the Jewish Quarter of Toledo, Spain}

Adelson notes how under Christian rule from the late 11th century, Toledo had become a centre for translation between Arabic, Hebrew, and Castilian Spanish, and was therefore also the epicentre of cross-cultural intellectual development.

We learnt at summer camps about rich and spiritual Jewish communities across Europe and North Africa that were crowded out time and again. Each time, the Jews had to find another shelter. But what we had to be aware of is that they had no intention of giving in to renounce their faith.

That is one of those important lessons that did have to remain with us from those camps. The examples we were shown had to inspire us to stand firm in our own faith. And that is what it certainly did.
Thus we can say: