Kosher taco truck highlights crypto-Jewish history
An El Paso artist hopes to highlight the history of crypto-Jews in the Southwest through a kosher taco truck.
About six years ago, artist Peter Svarzbein started photographing crypto-Jews, Hispanic or Latinos of Jewish descent who had to keep their faith a secret after the Spanish inquisition, and their descendents.
Svarzbein wants to show the stories of those families through his taco truck, which was serving the fusion food at Congregation B’nai Zion and Hope and Anchor over the weekend.
On Monday, the truck was at the Foodville food truck spot in Downtown El Paso, on the corner of Mills and Mesa. Along with serving up tacos, the stories of crypto-Jews are projected on walls….
Just learned about this amazing Texan history art-and-food project about the Crypto-Jews. Sounds delicious and (crap) educational.
WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT…
This is the best.
Seriously. Should be in the OED, under “Best, the.”
These are some of the best stories people don’t know. Conversos have been hiding in plain sight for centuries.
It looks like you need a special dedicated bimuelo pan to make these Turkish Jewish treats, but maybe those with a more adventurous kitchen spirit can try these for Pesaj anyway :) they sound delicious: they’re like a type of matzah ball, but you boil them in honey-sugar syrup, and then serve them doused in sweet cream. Apparently they’re traditionally eaten for Pesaj breakfast every day 🤤
Fascinating that some places have them as a Pesaj treat. In Mexican culture, there are two kinds of Bimuelos - one that are like an “elephant ear” pastry, and one that is a round pan-fried sweet donut kind of a thing. The latter are eaten by Jewish and Crypto-Jewish families in December (aka Chanukkah time).
FYI if you don’t have a bimuelo pan, you can also use an abelskiver pan…or theoretically a takoyaki cooking plate but I haven’t personally tried that version.
The ‘elephant ear’ pastry you’re referring to are more commonly called palmeritas. Tbh I’ve never heard them be called buñuelo/bimuelo in Iberoamerica.
Bimuelos are what sefardim call what are more commonly known as buñuelos and it’s a common treat among xtians for Xmas, especially in Latin America. It is not a specifically crypto Jewish or converso thing. It’s a xtian thing. Please note it’s a food of morisco origin, so in many Muslim cultures it is also traditionally eaten for Ramadan.
The ebelskiver pan might work. If you click on the link above, you will see the author actually discovered several bimuelo pans precisely in Denmark where they were being used for that, bc nobody there knew what they were for. I don’t think a takoyaki pan will work though, since these are meant to be honestly quite hefty in size
No, palmeritas are different - they’re thicker and flakier and have the distinctive heart shape. I don’t know about the rest of Latin America, but in many parts of Mexico, what are called bimuelos or bunelos (depending on family) are not the spherical-ish donut-hole-looking things, but rather are about the size of a plate, are flat, are fried, and are covered in cinnamon and sugar and sometimes honey depending on where you’re from. That’s the Christian version. There is another dessert that, depending on your family, is called either a bimuelo or bunelo, that is spherical donut-hole-looking thing. Those are eaten by a lot of families who are now Christian but have Crypto-Jewish ancestry. They know that they only eat their version of the treat but are unaware of its origin.
Trust me on this, a simple Google search will confirm it’s origins which I already explained to you above, and you will find plenty of recipes like the above by xtians all referencing xtian holidays.
Idk about the other one, which Google informs me is a Mexican specialty, but please stop spreading the falsehood that bimuelos/buñuelos are a uniquely Jewish thing/indicator of crypto-jewishness, because it is precisely that misinformation, along with the infamous 'crypto Sephardic surnames to get Spanish nationality!’ lists floating all over the internet that make a lot of goyim believe they can just claim Jewishness with zero work, effort and education on their part. You know à la 23nme ~genome match. Thanks.
When Mitana Alexander bid goodbye to Kolkata’s Jewish Girls School in 1975, she was its last Jewish student. The bulk of the others were Muslims.
But it was not the steady influx of Muslim girls in the preceding two decades that moved Alexander’s parents to take her out of the school, she says.
They were worried because she was last remaining occupant of a Jews-only dormitory, as most Jewish girls they had known had migrated to Israel, America or Europe “with their folks.”
“They (school authorities) had to retain a matron just for me,” recalls Alexander, now aged 50. “I would be alone in the dormitory at night and my parents started panicking. Muslims had nothing to do with my leaving.”
Distinctly Kolkata
The swelling ranks of Muslim girls in the Jewish school offer a glimpse into the deep ties between Kolkata’s Muslim and once-thriving Jewish community.
More than 1,200 of the nearly 1,400 students are Muslims, as is the school’s vice principal and half the faculty.
The change began in the 1950s, when there were not enough Jewish families needing an institution set up specifically to instil Jewish values.
As Jewish enrollment petered out, the authorities decided to admit children of other faiths. The biggest response came from the Muslims of nearby areas.
Today, there is very little “Jewish” about the school, save for perhaps its name, the Star of David on the school gates, the school uniform and notebooks, and portraits of Jewish patrons on the walls.
[…]
The first Jew to arrive in Kolkata, on August 4, 1798, was Shalom Ha-Cohen. A native of Aleppo, Syria, Shalom was initially the court jeweler to a Muslim prince in northern India.
Shalom’s prosperity attracted other Jews from West Asia. According to community records, the population of Jews “of Arabic disposition” expanded to 600 by the 1830s. That number stood at around 4,000 when India gained independence from British rule in 1947.
However, soon after the community started emigrating en mass, beginning the end of a 200-year association with the city.
“A combination of national and global events in the ‘40s and ‘50s led to a very rapid dissolution of the community,” says Silliman, whose two daughters settled in the US.
With India’s independence, British settlers began returning to England, Israel came into being in May 1948, and the fledgling Indian government’s Socialist policies were perceived as not being conducive to business.
Today, the number of Jews in Kolkata stands at 22, the middle-aged Alexander being probably the youngest.
And it is left to the likes of the Jewish Girls School Vice-Principal Abeda Razeq to keep those ties alive.
Her father’s best friend at college was a Jew, whose family runs the 115-year-old confectionary store Nahoum’s, and their friendship, which continued beyond college, first exposed Razeq to Jewish culture.
The two families exchanged gift hampers during their respective festivals and Razeq learnt of the similarities and differences between kosher and halal cuisine.
She even helped out at Nahoum’s at Easter and Christmas: a Muslim girl at a Jewish bakery wrapping cakes during Christian festivals in a predominantly Hindu city.
The Nahoum family has shrunk to just one member now, who spends much of his time abroad, and the workers – many of them Muslims – run the show.
Razeq did her dissertation on Kolkata’s unique Jewish-Muslim relationship, and wishes she had the time to complete her doctorate on it.
Of all literary genres, commentary is the least appealing to the modern temperament, with its penchant for self-expression and speed-reading. And yet commentary is the key to understanding the unique achievement of Judaism in creating a canon without closure. The authority of a sacred text never reduced Jews to fundamentalists because it never denied them the freedom to interpret. That right kept the text open, supple, and responsive.
Posting pictures and videos can embarrass others in a variety of ways. The most obvious are images of someone else from an embarrassing incident. Whether someone was drunk or otherwise incapacitated, or was young and particularly foolish, you need to know the line between playful teasing and embarrassing. You are allowed to have fun with your friends and family by posting funny pictures online. But you may not embarrass anyone else. The Gemara (Bava Metzi’a 58b) compares embarrassing another to murdering him.
Hurtful pictures go one step farther. Posting a picture that hurts someone’s feelings or damages someone’s reputation is a form of attack. Hurting someone’s feelings is biblically prohibited as ona’as devarim (Bava Metzi’a, ibid.). You may think that this only applies to a verbal insult or attack–after all, “devarim” means words. However, the Torah (Lev. 25:17) merely says “lo sonu” and does not differentiate between methods of delivering this harm.
Similarly, lashon ha-ra is not limited to words. The Chafetz Chaim (1:1:8 n. 13) quotes Onkelos (Lev. 19:16), who translates “Do not be a talebearer” as “lo seichol kurtzin.” Rashi (ad loc.) explains that this refers to the way gossippers motion with their eyes. Even indirect gossip, even mere motioning without any words, qualifies as forbidden lashon ha-ra. As it says in Mishlei (Prov. 6:12-13), “A base person… winks with his eyes, scrapes with his feet, points with his fingers.” Lashon ha-ra does not have to be actual words.
To put it plainly, Jewish law allows for abortion. For the first 40 days of gestation, a fetus is considered “mere fluid” (Talmud Yevamot 69b), and the fetus is regarded as part of the mother for the duration of the pregnancy. It is not considered to have the status of personhood until birth; the Mishnah (Ohalot 7:6) teaches that if the mother’s life is in danger from the pregnancy, even in labor, the fetus may be sacrificed to save her life, unless the baby’s head has already emerged. Only then, according to Rashi (Talmud Sanhedrin 72b), is the fetus or baby considered to be a nefesh, a soul. Elsewhere, the Mishnah (Arachin 1:4) teaches that “If a [pregnant] woman is about to be executed, they do not wait for her until she gives birth. But if she had already sat on the birthstool, they wait for her until she gives birth.” Birth, not gestation, is the critical marker, here.
This body of literature, needless to say, comes in stark and striking contrast to arguments that life—and personhood—begins at conception.
Interestingly, many Christian communities derive their prooftexts against permitting abortion from the Hebrew Bible, like verses about God forming humans in the womb (Psalm 139:13, Jeremiah 1:5, Isaiah 44:24)—texts which don’t even register in the Jewish legal conversation on this topic. To put it simply, we don’t derive matters of Jewish law from Psalms. - Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
I’d like to point out too, since that thing about executing a pregnant woman sounds pretty brutal, that Jewish law places EXTREME limitations on the death penalty. The burden of proof is much higher than in many cases— you’d need 23 judges and two witnesses who could demonstrate that the defendant was explicitly warned that what they were doing was a capital offense, and proceeded anyway. If the verdict was too fast or was unanimous, it’d be taken as a sign of bias and they’d automatically acquit. The rabbis said that a court that executes more than one person in a generation would be considered a gang of murderers. Rabbis Akiva and Tarfon boasted that they if they had been on the court, being brilliant legal scholars, they could have found a way to acquit anyone.
tl;dr Judaism is really and truly pro-life in the sense of actually valuing life
^^^^^
That last one is really telling by Rabbi Ruttenberg.
People really reach for our P O E M S and LITURGICAL MUSIC to decide matters of life and death? So not what the Ketuvim are for.
The differences between a’s, o’s, p’s and f’s according to Magnus Krinski’s Der yidish-lerer, di ershte oyflage loyt der nayer ortografye, Warsaw 1936.
“Bebl bebl bob,” a cover of a children’s book
(apparently, about a bean)
by Ber Sarin (Moyshe Levin). Illustration by the author. The cover was reproduced in Józef Sandel’s “Umgekumene yidishe kinstler in poyln” (b. II).
A goat, a fragment of a woodcut illustrating Sholem Aleichem’s
Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son
carved in the 1930s by Rivke Berger.
Rivke
Berger (born c. 1895, died c. 1942) was a Lublin based artist and a
teacher in a secular Jewish school. Her works (woodcuts and linocuts)
are known only as copies printed in pre-war Yiddish and Polish press.
She perished in the Holocaust.
If you will happen to be in Lublin (Poland) around February and March
this year make sure to visit an upcoming exhibition of woodcuts and
linocuts “The Sketchbook of Rivke Berger”. The exhibition, organized by
The Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Center, will be probably the first solo
exhibition of the artist.
To put it plainly, Jewish law allows for abortion. For the first 40 days of gestation, a fetus is considered “mere fluid” (Talmud Yevamot 69b), and the fetus is regarded as part of the mother for the duration of the pregnancy. It is not considered to have the status of personhood until birth; the Mishnah (Ohalot 7:6) teaches that if the mother’s life is in danger from the pregnancy, even in labor, the fetus may be sacrificed to save her life, unless the baby’s head has already emerged. Only then, according to Rashi (Talmud Sanhedrin 72b), is the fetus or baby considered to be a nefesh, a soul. Elsewhere, the Mishnah (Arachin 1:4) teaches that “If a [pregnant] woman is about to be executed, they do not wait for her until she gives birth. But if she had already sat on the birthstool, they wait for her until she gives birth.” Birth, not gestation, is the critical marker, here.
This body of literature, needless to say, comes in stark and striking contrast to arguments that life—and personhood—begins at conception.
Interestingly, many Christian communities derive their prooftexts against permitting abortion from the Hebrew Bible, like verses about God forming humans in the womb (Psalm 139:13, Jeremiah 1:5, Isaiah 44:24)—texts which don’t even register in the Jewish legal conversation on this topic. To put it simply, we don’t derive matters of Jewish law from Psalms. - Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg
Surprisingly enough, the basic idea of monotheism in the Bible is not that there is only one God. After all, the Hebrew Bible refers to many heavenly creatures, calling them “gods” (Gen. 6.2, Psalms 29.1, 82.6, 86.8, 89.7, Job 1.6), “angels” (Num. 20.16, 2 Sam. 24.16, 1 Kings 13.18, Zech. 1.11–12, Psalm 78.49, Job 33.23), and “the council of holy ones” (Psalm 89.6, 8). It is God’s uniqueness rather than God’s oneness that is the essential content of monotheism. What distinguishes the Bible from every other religious text known from the ancient Near East or the ancient Mediterranean world is not that the Bible denies that gods like Marduk and Baal and Zeus exist (it doesn’t) but that it insists that the God of Israel is qualitatively different from all other deities—and infinitely more powerful. Monotheism, then, is the belief that one supreme being exists, whose will is sovereign over all other beings, whether heavenly or earthly.
The other gods of the ancient world were in crucial respects similar to human beings, and even to animals. They were born to a mother and a father; they could be sexually active; they often had children of their own; and they could even die (as did deities like Ouranos and Kronos in Greek mythology, Tammuz and Tiamat in Mesopotamian myth, and Baal and Yamm in Canaanite). But the Bible proclaims the God of Israel, the creator of the world, to be different from all other gods (and from humans and animals) in precisely these respects. This God:
was never born
never has sex
never gives birth
and never dies.
As the great Israel scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann put it (in The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, trans. and abridged by Moshe Greenberg [1960], 121), “The biblical religious idea … is of a supernal God, above every cosmic law, fate, and compulsion; unborn, unbegetting, knowing no desire, independent of matter and its forces … an unfettered divine will transcending all being.” - Benjamin D Sommer
