Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Putting the Oy Back Into Ahoy

They did not sing "Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Manischewitz," nor do they ever seem to appear in any of the Disney films about pirates in the Caribbean. The website piratesinfo.com carries not a single reference to them.

And while September 19 has for a number of years now been designated International Talk Like a Pirate Day (there are even Internet courses available in pirate lingo), none of its initiators seems to have had Ladino (the language spoken by Jewish refugees expelled by the Spanish and Portuguese after the Reconquista) in mind. Shwashbuckling buccaneers who took time to put on tefillin each morning? Better get used to the idea. Long overlooked, the history of Jewish piracy has been garnering increasing interest, with several serious books and articles telling its epic tales.

Many Jewish pirates came from families of refugees who had been expelled by Spain and Portugal. They took to piracy as part of a strategy of revenge on the Iberian powers (though lining their pockets with Spanish doubloons was no doubt also a motive). Many of these pirates mixed traditional Jewish lifestyles with their exploits on the high seas.

* * * * *

Jewish refugees from Portugal first settled in Jamaica in 1511, probably originally as sugar growers, and some took up piracy. The British, led by Admiral William Penn (the father of the William Penn who established Philadelphia), took over the island from the Spanish in
1655, reportedly with assistance from local Jews and Marranos
(crypto-Jews), all of whom were allowed to remain.

By 1720, as many as 20 percent of the residents of Kingston were Jews. Over time, Ashkenazi Jews arrived and their synagogues operated alongside the Sephardic ones (the congregations all merged in the 20th century). Jewish tombstones dating back to 1672 have been found there, with Portuguese, Hebrew and English inscriptions.

Some Jews went into local Jamaican politics, and there were so many in the Jamaican parliament in the 19th century that it became the only parliament on earth that did not hold deliberations on Saturday. The Jewish community of Jamaica today numbers a couple hundred and calls itself the United Congregation of Israelites in Jamaica (UCIJA). The active synagogue there is built in Sephardic style and is one of the few left in the world with a sand floor. Naturally, its official website includes a page on the pirate ancestors of Jewish residents
(ucija.org/pirates.htm).

According to an article earlier this year in the Israeli weekly Bakihilot, municipal workers in Kingston recently uncovered a long forgotten pirate graveyard. Among the tombstones are those with Jewish stars and Hebrew inscriptions, together with pirate symbols such as the skull and crossbones.

Similar Jewish pirate graves have been found near Bridgetown in the Barbados and in the old Jewish graveyard in Curacao. Jamaican-born Jewish historian Ed Kritzler claims that Jewish pirates once operated there, raiding the Spanish Main wearing tallis shawls. He's just published a book titled Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean and conducts private tours of the "Jewish pirate coves" of Jamaica.

Kritzler's book includes the saga of one Moses Cohen Henriques, who participated in one of history's largest sea heists against Spain. In
1628, Henriques sailed together with Dutch Admiral Piet Hein, of the Dutch West India Company, who hated Spain after having been held as a slave for four years on a Spanish galleon. They raided Spanish ships off Matanzas Bay in Cuba, commandeering large amounts of gold and silver.

Henriques set up his own pirate "Treasure Island" on a deserted island off the Brazilian coast on which Jews could openly practice their religion. (He also served as adviser to Henry Morgan, perhaps the most famous pirate of all time; Errol Flynn played Morgan in the movie "Captain Blood.") After the recapture of Brazil by Portugal in 1654, some of these Jews would sail off to set up a brand new Jewish community in a place called New Amsterdam, now known as New York.

In many cases Jewish pirates collaborated with Holland, a friendly and welcoming state for Jews. One such pirate was Rabbi Samuel Pallache, a leader of the Moroccan Jewish community in Fez. Born in The Hague, he was son of a leading rabbi from Cordoba who ended up in Morocco. From there he was sent to Holland as envoy of the Moroccan sultan, who was seeking allies against Spain. He became a personal friend of Dutch Crown Prince Maurice, who commissioned him as a privateer, and served for years as a pirate under a Netherlands flag and with Dutch letters of marque. Rabbi Pallache recruited Marranos for his crews.

In other cases Jewish pirates worked for the Ottomans. A Jewish pirate named Sinan, known to his Spanish prey as "The Great Jew," was born in what is now Turkey and operated out of Algiers. He first served as second in command to the famous pirate Barbarossa. (No connection to the fictional Barbarossa of the Disney films.) Their pirate flag carried a six-pointed star called the Seal of Solomon by the Ottomans.

Sinan led the force that defeated a Genoan navy hired by Spain to rid the Barbary Coast of corsairs. He then conquered Tripoli in Libya, and was eventually appointed supreme Ottoman naval commander. He is buried in a Jewish cemetery in Albania.

A Jewish pirate named Yaakov Koriel commanded three pirate ships in the Caribbean. He later repented and ended up in Safed as one of the Kabbalah students of the Ari (Rabbi Isaac Luria) and is buried near the Ari's grave.

A pirate named David Abrabanel, evidently from the same family as the famous Spanish rabbinic dynasty (which included Rabbi Isaac Abrabanel), joined British privateers after his family was butchered off the South American coast. He used the nom de guerre "Captain Davis" and commanded his own pirate vessel named The Jerusalem. According to at least one report, he was the person who discovered what is now called Easter Island.

Several Jewish corsairs operated against Spanish ships off the coast of Chile. There are reports that their galleys were kosher and they abstained from raids on the Sabbath. A maritime museum in Chile today holds letters of communication among these pirates composed in Hebrew.

One pirate leader was named Subatol Deul. On a trip up the coast he stumbled across a ship under the command of the pirate Henry Drake, son of Sir Francis Drake. They decided to create an alliance of anti- Spanish pirates, the "Black Flag Fraternity."

Deul and Drake reportedly buried treasure on an island near Coquimbo in 1645. A chapter in the book Piracy & Plunder: A Murderous Business, by Milton Meltzer, is devoted to Deul's swashbuckling career.

There also were Jewish corsairs based in Curacao next to Venezuela. The local Curacao rabbi once berated his community's pirates when they thoughtlessly attacked a ship owned by a fellow Jew. At least it wasn't done on the Sabbath.

The history of Jewish pirates goes far back: Josephus mentions Jewish pirates operating in the seas off the Land of Israel in Roman times. There is a drawing of a pirate ship inside Jason's Tomb in Jerusalem. The Hasmonean Hyrcanus accused Aristobulus, his brother, of "acts of piracy at sea." In its last days, the Seleucid empire (the one fought by the Maccabees) was plagued by Jewish and Arab pirates.

Pirates operated from coves along the Levantine coast for centuries, and my own city of Haifa was once known as The Little Malta because of its notorious pirates. (The local pirates these days seem to specialize mainly in computer software.)

The fact that some Jews seemed to have taken so easily to the pirate lifestyle may have been due in part to other skills developed by Jews over the centuries. Cartography, for example, was considered a Jewish specialty in the 15th and 16th centuries, and Christopher Columbus is believed to have consulted the work of a Jewish cartographer, one Abraham Cresque of Mallorca, who produced the Catalan Atlas in 1375. Portuguese Jewish cartographers and scientists contributed to Vasco Da Gama's voyage of discovery to the Cape of Good Hope in 1497. Jews also worked on ships as navigators.

* * * * *

Perhaps the most important Jewish pirate of all was the Caribbean pirate Jean Lafitte, a familiar name to many American schoolchildren. He and his men, pirates trained in cannon fire, came to the aid of General
(later President) Andrew Jackson and played a critical role in winning the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812. A Jean Lafitte National Historic Park stands today on the outskirts of the city.

What is still largely unknown is that Lafitte was a Jew, born either in Western France or in what is now Haiti. A while back my friend Edward Bernard Glick, a retired professor of political science living in Oregon, published an article in the Jerusalem Post (July 14, 2006) on Lafitte's Jewish origins and it stirred up a storm of interest. Parts of Rabbi I. Harold Sharfman's book Jews on the Frontier also discuss Lafitte's life.

According to Glick, "[Lafitte] was a Sephardi Jew, as was his first wife, who was born in the Danish Virgin Islands. In his prime, Lafitte ran not just one pirate sloop but a whole fleet of them simultaneously. He even bought a blacksmith shop in New Orleans, which he used as a front for fencing pirate loot. And he was one of the few buccaneers who didn't die in battle, in prison or on the gallows."

Glick claims the British tried to recruit Lafitte to guide them through the swamps to ambush the Americans, but Lafitte instead showed General "Old Hickory" Jackson Britain's battle plans to attack New Orleans. The rest is history.

Years before the Battle of New Orleans, Louisiana Governor William C. C. Claiborne placed a reward of $500 on Lafitte's head. Lafitte retaliated by putting a $5,000 bounty on the head of the governor. Neither collected.

Lafitte later commanded his own "kingdom" named Campeche on the island of Galveston, Texas, then nominally under Spanish rule. Some of Lafitte's trading activities were conducted by Jao de la Porta, a Portuguese Jew from Spanish Texas. Among their clients was Jim Bowie, made famous at the Alamo and also for the special knife.

* * * * *

Mention of Jewish pirates can pop up in some unexpected places. Just before Rosh Hashanah this year, the liberal Huffington Post website carried a post by humorist Andy Borowitz "reporting" that the group of Somali pirates who had just hijacked a ship full of Ukrainians in the Gulf of Aden was calling a halt to the piracy in honor of the Jewish High Holidays.

Wrote Borowitz: " 'To all of our Jewish friends, we say a hearty Shana Tova,' said pirate spokesman Sugule, moments before the pirates hoisted a Star of David flag over the captured ship. Sugule took pains to indicate that while the pirates were taking a Rosh Hashanah break from their usual plundering and pillaging schedule, they were doing so only out of respect for Jewish pirates and not because they are Jewish themselves. 'None of us Somali pirates are Jewish,' he said. 'Except for Abe in accounting, who's half.' "

And there are others who are getting into the spirit of things. The Bangitout.com Jewish humor website listed a set of halachic challenges for Jewish pirates, including the following:

If you have a hook instead of a hand, on which arm do you put tefillin? Does your treasure map show how far the eruv extends? How long do you wait, after capturing a plundered ship, to put up a mezuzah in the captain's cabin? Should you cover your eye patch with your hand when you say the Shema? Can you wear a leather boot over your peg leg on Yom Kippur? Are you able to carry on the plank on Shabbos? If your parrot is on your shoulder, is that carrying?

Personally, I think the biggest challenge to Jewish pirates occurs at Purim. After walking around all year decked out like that, what could they possibly dress up as? Accountants?

In a way, the legacy of Jewish pirates is alive and well in Israel today. One of the most outstanding examples of the Jewish state's derring-do was when it stole five gunboats out of the port of Cherbourg in France - ships that had already been paid for by Israel but that France, as punishment for Israel's Six-Day War victory, was refusing to deliver.

Israeli agents operating through a front corporation seized the ships on December 25, 1969 and sailed them to Haifa. The details of that piracy are engagingly told in The Boats of Cherbourg (1997) by Abraham Rabinovich.

So let's swab the decks, count our doubloons and grant the Jewish pirates their proper place in history. In other words, it's time to put the oy back into "ahoy."


Steven Plaut, a professor at Haifa University, is a frequent contributor to The Jewish Press. His book "The Scout" is available at Amazon.com. He can be contacted at steveneplaut@yahoo.com.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Jewish Country Hits

Jewish Country Hits


* For You I Should Be Singing?
* Honkey Tonk Nights On The Golden Heighlo
* I Was One Of The Chosen People "Til She Chose Somebody Else
* Stand By Your Merch
* I'm Crying In The Manischewitz
* The Shikoas Gonna Hit The Fan!
* Four Thousand Years Of Sufferin' And I Had To Go And Marry You
* All Right, All Ready Enough With The Infidelity
* Eighteen Wheels And A Dozen Latkes
* You've Been Talkin' Hebrew In Your Sleep Since The Rabbi's Come To Town
* You Picked A Fine Time To Leave Me Schiemiell
* Yippee Ko Yi Oy!
* Momma's Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys When They Could Have Easily Taken Over The Family Business That My Very Own Grandfather Broke His Neck To Start And My Own Father Sweated And Toiled Over For Years Which Apparently Doesn't Mean Anything To You Now That You're Turning Your Back On Such A Gift You Ungrateful Schmuck

Friday, October 10, 2008

The centuries-long controversy over Yom Kippur's Kol Nidre.By Michael Weiss

Of all the Jewish prayers, Kol Nidre is one of the most recognizable— and certainly the most controversial. Neil Diamond intoned it in order to penetrate the stone heart of his cantor father at the end of the remake of The Jazz Singer, and Al Jolson sang it, mercifully out of blackface, in the 1927 original. Max Bruch used the haunting music that accompanies the prayer to furnish the full title, and half the theme, of his celebrated adagio in 1881. Beethoven, too, borrowed the theme for the sixth movement of his String Quartet Op. 131, which had been commissioned by the heads of Viennese Jewry seeking to honor the founding of a new synagogue. Even Perry Como and Johnny Mathis recorded their own renditions in the late '50s.
For observant Jews, Kol Nidre represents the liturgical kickoff for Yom Kippur (opening services are named for the prayer, which means "All vows"), a repetitive and crescendoing piece of Aramaic recited before sunset on the Day of Atonement. For anti-Semites, it's evidence that Jews are duplicitous and two-faced. The trouble has to do with a misconstrued doctrine of pre-emption. The full text of the prayer reads:

All vows, obligations, oaths, and anathemas, whether called konam, konas, or by any other name, which we may vow, or swear, or pledge, or whereby we may be bound, from this Day of Atonement until the next (whose happy coming we await), we do repent. May they be deemed absolved, forgiven, annulled, and void, and made of no effect; they shall not bind us nor have power over us. The vows shall not be reckoned vows; the obligations shall not be obligatory; nor the oaths be oaths.
As stand-alone statement, divorced of its context and Talmudic source material, it does seem to suggest that there's no such thing as a promise or oral contract affirmed in Judaism. But, of course, context is everything, and the prayer refers only to personal vows—those made by man in relation to his own conscience or to God, not interpersonal ones made by man to his fellow man. Contrary to claims made by perplexed exegetes such as David Duke, Kol Nidre was not invented as a sinister tribal clause to cheat gentiles or one another with impunity.
Judaism goes to great lengths to legislate social behavior, both within and without the community. As Rabbi Gil Student describes it in his primer on the arcana of vow annulment, the Talmud "dedicates one sixth of itself to detailing the Jewish court system which adjudicates based on the sworn testimony of witnesses." Why expend so much ink on the rules and procedures for dealing with betrayal and injustice if a yearly invocation affords an easy get-out-of-jail- free card? The Talmud says that if a person wishes to free himself from a vow made to a second party, he has to plead his case before a religious court in the presence of that person, who must then consent to the vow's nullification. It doesn't matter if the petitioner is beholden to an adult, a child, or a gentile; the same standard applies.
The arduous and prohibitive process by which one can be freed from a personal vow eventually led to the adoption of Kol Nidre in the first place. The only passage in the Pentateuch pertaining to personal vows is Numbers 30:3, which states: "If a man takes a vow to G-d or swears an oath to establish a prohibition upon himself, he shall not desecrate his word; according to whatever comes from his mouth he shall do." In ancient Israel, gaining absolution for these kinds of pledges meant presenting oneself to a scholar, an expert, or a board of three select laymen. One could plead forgetfulness, unintentional violation, or stupidity. A common excuse was that one had entered into a vow without fully understanding its consequences. Typically, an annulment would be granted if the lapsed pledge-maker could prove through interrogation he had erred in good faith. However, the ritual was eventually exercised to the point of exhaustion—imagine going to court every
time you broke a New Year's resolution. Kol Nidre was introduced in the 10th century, and transcribed in the Seder Rav Amram Gaon, the first comprehensive Jewish prayer book, as a convenient umbrella policy.
The original version encompassed the preceding year, "from the last Day of Atonement until this one." Then, in the 12th century, Meir ben Samuel, the son-in-law of the revered French rabbi Rashi, altered the wording to reflect the year to come, arguing that pre-emptive annulment was more in keeping with the letter and spirit of the Nedarim, the Talmudic treatise on vows. Ben Samuel also added to the prayer the phrase "we do repent [of them all]," which aligned it more closely with purpose of atonement. His version has been taken up by the bulk of the Ashkenazim, while the Sephardim continue to prefer the older, retroactive one.
From its inception, Kol Nidre never attained universal sanction or appeal. Five of the heads of the Babylonian rabbinical academies rejected it outright, claiming that it undermined both the sanctity of personal vows as well as the necessary custom for canceling them. Nevertheless, the prayer gained traction in the other lands of the diaspora. It came in handy on the Iberian Peninsula during the Inquisition when Marranos—Spanish Jews who pretended to convert to Christianity to escape persecution—were forced to make bogus professions of faith in public and needed the winking dispensation of God to do so.
Jewish authorities have often sought to clarify Kol Nidre's intention, while occasionally advocating for its abolition on the grounds that it is theologically worthless. One popular objection to it has been that ignorant Jews would misinterpret the prayer as a license for deceit and treachery—just as anti-Semites have. The prayer was cited as justification for the Oath More Judaico, a humiliating and sadistic legal vow Jews were for centuries forced to swear before testifying in European courts. It wasn't until the middle of the 19th century that most of the Continent began revising or removing it in earnest. (Romania's remained on the books until 1902.) Perhaps in response to this history of vulgar misinterpretation, Jews themselves have had a hard time deciding what to do with the prayer. A rabbinical conference in Brunswick in 1844 ruled unanimously that Kol Nidre was superfluous and should be eliminated from the entire religious tradition. This
decision led numerous congregations in Western Europe and many more Reform congregations in the United States to do just that, or to replace the words of the prayer with a Hebrew psalm while retaining its elegaic melody. Orthodox and Conservative congregations still recite the words.
Whichever way one sides in this antique dispute, it's obvious that the line separating conviction and rhetoric in human discourse has always been blurry. "Lord, if you let the harvest come, I'll marry my neighbor's lazy-eyed daughter" was no more feasible or enforceable in the Dark Ages than "If Bush wins, I'm moving to Canada" was in 2000. Modern parlance has a host of throat-clearing clauses to cancel whatever sentiment follows, often in the same sentence, from "Don't hold me to this" to "Dude, I'm not saying, I'm just saying." And it's hard to imagine how the long, proud history of recreational Yiddish cursing would have progressed had Judaism not afforded this wiggle room with respect to anathemas ("May all the teeth fall out of your head except one, and may that one turn brown and rot.")
There's even an esoteric or Straussian reading of Kol Nidre. According to the Kabbalah, the prayer is actually intended as a two-way pact with the Almighty, absolving him of any vows he might make in the coming year that could affect his mortal creation. A man-made allowance for God to rescind promises of plague, pestilence, and Jobian misery suggests not just wishful thinking but a lack of trust in the wisdom and surety of his judgments. Heresy and agnosticism run not far behind. I'm not saying, I'm just saying.Michael Weiss is a writer living in New York. His personal blog is Snarksmith.

Article URL: http://www.slate. com/id/2201628/
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost. Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Why My Grandpa Was No Hitter on Yom Kippur

Why My Grandpa Was No Hitter on Yom Kippur
Opinion
By Melanie Greenberg
Thu. Oct 02, 2008

ONE FOR THE TRIBE: Baseball legend Hank Greenberg sat out a game on the Day of Atonement.


Yom Kippur is rather inconveniently timed. Just ask any Jewish baseball player. It invariably falls during either the pennant race or the post-season, which poses a dilemma for players with teams that are championship contenders.

In 1934, my grandfather, Hank Greenberg, was the first big leaguer to sit out a game on the Day of Atonement. He was a man for whom baseball was practically a religion, so his was not an easy decision — particularly because the Tigers were in a close race for the American League pennant, and he was a fierce competitor.

The deliberation began with Rosh Hashanah. Much to the consternation of many fans, my grandfather initially announced that it was his intention to sit out the Jewish New Year. But a leading Detroit rabbi, presumably a baseball fan, cleared him to play, citing an obscure passage from the Talmud. As it happened, my grandfather provided the two home runs that allowed the Tigers their 2-1 victory against the Red Sox. The Detroit Free Press applauded his effort by publishing a front-page headline the following day, reading, “Happy New Year, Hank” — in Hebrew.

With only days left until Yom Kippur, he would soon be faced with another predicament. Despite the fact that he was not particularly observant, he ultimately decided to sit. He realized that his choice was bigger than his personal relationship to his religion. It was about doing the right thing by acting as a representative for the Jewish people. For American Jews, who were still only acknowledged as second-class citizens, his was a meaningful decision. While he would not be met by the roar of the stadium crowd, he was greeted with thunderous applause and a standing ovation when he walked into synagogue.

The Tigers lost that outing, in large part due to his absence. One might say, however, that he won a victory for his people by making the statement that their heritage was something in which they could take pride.

In 1965, Sandy Koufax, the next of the great Jewish ballplayers, also observed Yom Kippur, sitting out the first game of the World Series. Like my grandfather, Koufax was admired for his decision, though it would have dire consequences for the Dodgers that day. Don Drysdale, who pitched in his place, had an abysmal outing, giving up seven runs in 2 2/3 innings. As Dodgers manager Walter Alston approached the mound to pull him from the game, Drysdale gave him a sheepish look, saying famously, “Hey, skip, I bet you wish I was Jewish today, too.”

In recent years, Gabe Kapler has been one of the most vocally Jewish athletes in baseball. He has a tattoo of the Star of David on one leg and the words “Never Again,” a reference to the Holocaust, on the other. Given his devotion to his heritage, one would think that the decision to sit out Yom Kippur would be a no-brainer for him. Yet, in both 2001 and 2004, when faced with this choice, he decided to play.

Kevin Youkilis, like Kapler a player for the 2004 Red Sox, did not take the field that day. Unlike my grandfather and Sandy Koufax, however, he did not go to shul but, rather, suited up and sat in the dugout — perhaps a reflection of his ambivalence. He wanted to honor his religious tradition, but it seemed his heart was in the game. That same year, Shawn Green, who had sat out Yom Kippur in 2001, was scheduled to play not one but two games over the holiday. In the end, he went with a compromise, playing one and sitting the other. Green said that, while he was not religious, he felt it was important to at least acknowledge his faith.

When asked about their respective decisions, players have responded that it is a personal choice — that every individual has to do what is right for him. That is not entirely true.

Heavy though the burden may be, I believe that Jewish players share the same obligation as my grandfather — to serve as representatives for their people. Admittedly, he lived in different times. Jewish athletes, however, still have the ability to affect their communities.

If Kevin Youkilis and Shawn Green had wanted to send a message, they might have been more effective if they had made stronger commitments to their positions. Moreover, since Gabe Kapler cares so deeply about the Holocaust, he could have acknowledged the people who lived through it by exercising a right that they were denied — the right to be Jewish, to observe Yom Kippur.

Ultimately, the decision to sit on Yom Kippur is not necessarily about religion but rather heritage, tradition and pride. If there are any Jewish players left standing come this Yom Kippur, I hope they bear that in mind, remembering that, as Jewish ballplayers, their decisions are bigger than simply personal ones.

Melanie Greenberg is a freelance writer living in New York. She is finishing her first novel.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Tashlich humor

On the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, there is a ceremony called
Tashlich. Jews traditionally go to the ocean or a stream or river to
pray and throw bread crumbs into the water.

Symbolically, the fish devour their sins. Occasionally, people ask
what kind of bread crumbs should be thrown. Here are suggestions for
breads which may be most appropriate for specific sins and misbehaviors.

For ordinary sins.....................White Bread
For complex sins......................Multigrain
For twisted sins......................Pretzels
For sins of indecision................Waffles
For sins of chutzpah..................Fresh Bread
For committing auto theft.............Caraway
For timidity/cowardice................Milk Toast
For ill-temperedness..................Sourdough
For silliness, eccentricity...........Nut Bread
For war-mongering.....................Kaiser Rolls
For jingoism, chauvinism..............Yankee Doodles
For excessive irony...................Rye Bread
For erotic sins.......................French Bread
For particularly dark sins............Pumpernickel
For dressing immodestly...............Tarts
For causing injury to others..........Tortes
For being holier than thou............Bagels
For abrasiveness......................Grits
For dropping in without notice........Popovers
For overeating........................Stuffing
For pride and egotism.................Puff Pastry
For trashing the environment..........Dumplings
For telling bad jokes/puns............Corn Bread