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The Destruction, and Return, of the Jews of Majorca

Aug. 26 2015

Monday marked the anniversary of a 1391 pogrom on the Spanish-ruled island of Majorca in which some 300 Jews were killed and many others forcibly baptized. In recent times, many of their descendants returned to Judaism:

Jewish habitation on Majorca ebbed and flowed with the whims of the island’s rulers, who were caught up in the intrigues of the Spanish crown, but among the Jews were influential merchants, money-lenders, and slave-traffickers, whose value to the ruling class of Spain often led to their protection.

The massacre on Majorca was matched by persecutions on the Spanish mainland, and would resume with further violence in 1413 and 1435. Ultimately, Jews were either driven from Majorca or into life as “New Christians” and secret Jews. In 2011, Francesc Antich, the regional president of the Balearic Islands, issued an official condemnation and apology for the killings—the first of its kind in Spain—and Rabbi Nissim Karelitz, head of the rabbinical court in Bnei Brak, recognized the Chuetas, descendants of these persecuted Jews (who number close to 15,000), as Jewish.

Read more at Jewish Currents

More about: History & Ideas, Jewish history, Sephardim, Spain, Spanish Expulsion

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic