H A P P Y   H A N U K K A H !

The True Meaning of Hanukkah

By HILARY LEILA KRIEGER

WHEN my brother was in kindergarten, where he was the only Jewish student, a parent organizing enrichment activities asked my mother to tell the class the story of Hanukkah. My mother obligingly brought in a picture book and began to read about foreign conquerors who were not letting Jews in ancient Israel worship freely, even defiling their temple, until a scrappy group led by the Maccabee family overthrew one of the most powerful armies in the world and won their liberty.

The woman was horrified.

The Hanukkah story, she interrupted, was not about war. It was about the miracle of an oil lamp that burned for eight days without replenishing. She urged my mother to close the book. My mother refused.

The woman wasn’t alone. Many Americans, Jews as well as Christians, think that the legend of the long-lasting oil is the root of Hanukkah’s commemoration. And perhaps that mistake is no surprise, given that for many the holiday has morphed into “Christmas for Jews,” echoing the message of peace on earth accompanied by gift giving. In doing so, the holiday’s own message of Jewish survival and faith has been diluted.

Hanukkah is one of the most widely celebrated Jewish holidays in America. But unlike Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and Passover (or even the lesser-known Sukkot and Shavuot), all of which are explicitly mentioned in the Torah, Hanukkah gets only a brief, sketchy reference in the Talmud, the voluminous collection of Jewish oral law and tradition written down hundreds of years after the Maccabees’ revolt.

There for the first time the miracle of the oil is recorded: the ancient temple in Jerusalem held an eternal flame, but after the desecration by the foreign invaders — including the sacrificing of pigs, a non-kosher animal, on the altar — only one day’s worth of purified oil remained. Yet the faithful went ahead and lighted it.

The oil burned in the rededicated temple for eight days, long enough for a new supply to arrive. Hence the practice of lighting candles for eight nights to observe Hanukkah, which means dedication in Hebrew. (Perhaps just as significantly, the reference to oil also gave rise to a holiday tradition of eating foods like potato pancakes and doughnuts  that had been cooked in it.)

Though Hanukkah is a minor Jewish holiday, 19th-century activists in America promoted it to encourage their coreligionists to take pride in their heritage. During the 20th century it was embraced more broadly by Jews who wanted to fit in with other Americans celebrating the holiday season — and to make their kids feel better about not getting anything from Santa.

It helped, of course, that Hanukkah falls near Christmas on the calendar and traditionally involved candles and small monetary gifts. Over time, children began receiving grander presents, and Hanukkah-themed season’s greeting cards proliferated. Some families even started to purchase “Hanukkah bushes,” small trees often decked out with Stars of David and miniature Maccabees.

By the 1980s, when I was a child, menorahs had been placed next to mangers in the public square and Hanukkah songs had been incorporated into winter holiday concerts. Despite this recognition, I still felt excluded enough to brag to classmates that my holiday was better than Christmas, since it had eight days of gift giving, instead of one.

While elevating Hanukkah does a lot of good for children’s morale, ignoring or sanitizing its historical basis does a great disservice to the Jewish past and present.

The original miracle of Hanukkah was that a committed band of people led a successful uprising against a much larger force, paving the way for Jewish independence and perhaps keeping Judaism itself from disappearing. It’s an amazing story, resonant with America’s own founding, that offers powerful lessons about standing up for one’s convictions and challenging those in power.

Many believe the rabbis in the Talmud recounted the miracle of the light alongside the military victory because they did not want to glorify war. That in itself is an important teaching, as are the holiday’s related messages of renewal, hope and turning away from darkness.

But it’s a story with dark chapters as well, including the Maccabean leaders’ religious zealotry, forced conversions and deadly attacks on their neighbors. These transgressions need to be grappled with. And that is precisely what the most important Jewish holidays do: Jews on Passover spill out wine from their glasses to acknowledge Egyptian suffering caused by the 10 plagues, and congregations at Rosh Hashana read and struggle with God’s order to Abraham to bind his son Isaac as a sacrifice.

If we’re going to magnify Hanukkah, we should do so because it offers the deeper meaning and opportunity for introspection that the major Jewish holidays provide.

Hilary Leila Krieger is the Washington bureau chief for The Jerusalem Post. 

FROM THE JERUSALEM POST

Of Marranos and musicians

CORINNA DA FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
11/02/2006 10:30

Did Jewish 'Ministers of Pastime' shape the music of the Tudor Court?

What's in a name? Shakespeare may have found little of value, but for historians investigating the music of Tudor England, a handful of names unlocked a secret history at the very root of art music in England. Roger Prior, a retired lecturer in English Literature at Belfast University, investigated the names of the instrumentalists imported from Italy in the late 1530s by Henry VIII and found that one by one they revealed their bearers to be Jewish. Some of these Jews - among them the Bassanos, Comys and Lupos - were to found musical dynasties that definitively shaped the English style and dominated the King's music. This weekend, the English viol consort Fretwork presents a concert dedicated to the music of these Jewish musicians in New York before taking the program on a tour through the United States. Fretwork, one of the premier early music ensembles in Britain, had long been performing music by one of the descendants of the first generation of Italian immigrants without suspecting his identity. "We had been playing Thomas Lupo without knowing where he came from, or what his antecedents were," says Richard Boothby, a founding member. How these Jewish musicians came to England had always been well documented: in preparation for his fourth marriage, Henry VIII instructed his ambassadors to seek out the best "musicians and other ministers of pastime" throughout Europe and bring them to his court. An English resident in Venice identified four brothers thought to be among the best musicians in the city and recruited them for the king - against the express wishes of the Venetian government, which refused to grant the Bassano brothers permits to leave the city. The Bassanos, all wind players, were soon followed by a group of six string players, also from Venice. With first names like Alberto, Vincenzo and Antonio, and family names denominating towns in northern Italy - Bassano, Vicenza and Milan - there was nothing about them identifying them as Jews. But according to Prior, the musicians had one set of names they used in official business, and another set of names which were revealed only in private or at rare documented moments, such as the witnessing of wills. In these, "John Anthony" became "Anthonius Moyses," "Peregrine Symonds" became "Simon de Maion" and "Antony Maria" signed as Cuson or Cossin, both variants of the name Gershon. Another musician, Ambrose of Milan, appeared in one record as "deolmaleyex," which Prior convincingly interprets as an English scribe's awkward attempt to transliterate the name "de Almaliach." Beyond the Jewish character of these names, the discovery of these "secret" names was significant for the evidence they provided of a Spanish, and in some cases Portuguese, origin of the musicians. De Almaliach, or Elmaleh, was a well-known Jewish family from pre-expulsion Spain. Two other string players in the King's consort, George and Innocent de Combe, could be traced back to Coimbra in Portugal. Of course the very fact that the Italian musicians had been active in Venice outside the Ghetto - as the Senate's attempt to keep them in the city suggests - is evidence that they were Marranos who had settled in Venice, living outwardly as Christians. Their official names, including several Johns and Baptists, confirm this. But the uncovering of the crypto-Jewish identity of the musicians, together with their Iberian roots, allowed Prior to shed light on an episode in Anglo-Jewish history which had long been a riddle. "Toward the end of 1541, Henry VIII received information that some Portuguese nationals living inLondon were 'secret Jews,'" recounts Prior. "Normally, so far as one can tell, he would have taken little notice of such an accusation. All his other actions suggest that, if anything, he tended to favor Jews rather than persecute them. But the circumstances were exceptional. He was anxious at this time to ally himself more closely with the Emperor Charles V, and the prosecution of crypto-Jews was one way of showing himself a true Catholic and a friend of Spain. Around Christmas time of 1541, these 'certain persons' were imprisoned and their property confiscated." The imperial envoy in London, Eustace Chapuy, reported the arrests to the chief minister in Spain. However, due to pressure from the Emperor's sister, and of the King and Queen of Portugal, Chapuys was forced to retract his accusations and ask Henry VIII to free them again. When they were released, in March 1543, Chapuys wrote in a bitter letter to Madrid: "Most likely, however well they may sing, they will not be able to fly away from their cages without leaving some of their feathers behind." Chapuys seemed to be calling the prisoners songbirds, a metaphor for musicians. "But," explains Prior, "this interpretation had always come up against the difficulty that no Portuguese or Jewish musicians were known of in Tudor England, and the remark has never been explained. It is now no longer a problem, for we know that there were musicians in England who were both Portuguese and Jewish." In addition, court records showed that the other Jewish musicians left England abruptly at the time of their colleagues' arrest, and returned only the next summer when the affair had blown over. The Jewish musicians stayed at the Tudor court, shaping the nature of English music. The appointment of the original six string players from Venice, incidentally, marks the first use of the word "violin" in English, although the terms viol, violin and violon would continue to be used interchangeably to describe the different-sized string instruments of the court band. Its function was essentially as a dance band, according to Boothby, and the rediscovery of some of the earlier viol music in Fretwork's new program brought to the surface the original Italian dance rhythms. "It was a discovery to play some of these more obscure composers. It's very clear, functional dance music," says Boothby of the Pavanes, Courantes, Allemandes and other dances the Jewish musicians brought over to England. "By the end of the sixteenth century, it becomes much more intricate and arty, more sophisticated, but not as danceable as the music of the original generation. "The Lupo family established themselves as stalwarts of the royal music establishment and stayed there for a century," says Boothby. "They developed what came to be called the English style." In addition, they developed reputations as excellent instrument makers, with the Ashkenazic families specializing in wind instruments, and the Sephardic families in the making of string instruments. The Bassanos turned out wind instruments that, according to contemporary records, were "so beautiful and good they are suited for dignitaries and potentates." And it was the daughter of one of these, Emilia Bassano, who may have left the greatest mark of all on English culture as Shakespeare's Dark Lady. The inspiration behind his centralsonnets, the poet immortalized her beauty, wit and cruelty - but not her name. After all, what's in a name?

DONA GRACIA

(From the Jerusalem Post)

Dona Gracia recognized as Zionist hero in Beit Hanassi

By GREER FAY CASHMAN

Once the wealthiest woman in the world, Dona Gracia planned to establish an autonomous Jewish community in Tiberias. She was more than 300 years ahead of Theodor Herzl in conceiving a movement whereby Jews would once again take possession of their spiritual homeland, and way ahead of Baron Rothschild in purchasing property in the Land of Israel, but only now is Dona Gracia, once the wealthiest woman in the world, being accorded her rightful place in Jewish history and the history of Israel. Various novels have been written about her, with a blending of fact and fiction, but she has entered Israeli consciousness only in recent years. A true heroine of Jewish history, she was largely ignored according to Dr. Tzvi Schaick of Tiberias, because history was by and large written by men who were unwilling to credit women with power and achievement. The one place in Israel where her memory has long been revered is in Tiberias, where there is a Dona Gracia Museum of which Schaick is the director and curator. The museum, known as Casa Dona Gracia is part of the Dona Gracia hotel which is owned by the Amsalem family, veteran residents of Tiberias with known roots in Morocco and Turkey that in all probability stretch back to Spain and Portugal. The museum conducts weekend seminars about the life and times of Dona Gracia whose story fired Cohen's imagination to the extent that she pushed for the Education Ministry to include the study of Dona Gracia in school curricula. Tzvi Tzameret, the Chairman of the Education Ministry's Pedagogic Secretariat, agreed that it was high time for Dona Gracia to come out of the mothballs of the distant past. The upshot is that Israeli high school students as well as soldiers in the IDF will now learn of her plans to establish an autonomous Jewish community in Tiberias, which from the second to the tenth centuries was the largest Jewish city in the Galilee, and a great seat of Jewish learning. The 500th anniversary of Dona Gracia's birth was celebrated on Sunday at Beit Hanassi in the presence of President Shimon Peres, Israel's fifth President Yitzhak Navon, who heads the National Authority for Ladino, is a former Education Minister and is descended on both sides from long lines of Sephardi rabbis, Education Minister Gideon Saar, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch among a host of dignitaries. Former MK Geula Cohen, once a Lechi fighter who was arrested by the British, and an Israel Prize laureate, was credited several times over with initiating the Dona Gracia festivities - so much so that Peres said he was tempted to call her Dona Geula. The remark was greeted with cheers and sustained applause. Peres observed that it was easier to reach the peak of Mount Everest than the heights attained by Dona Gracia, whose influence was felt all over Europe and whose enormous wealth also influenced the Sultan of Turkey. Filled with awe and admiration at the extent of Dona Gracia's political and economic clout in what was then a man's world, Peres underscored that even though women have come a long way since then, there are still societies in which women are discriminated against, repressed and humiliated. "It is an outrage that even today millions of women are subjected to a life of slavery". Under the circumstances, it was hardly surprising that the story of Dona Gracia was buried for centuries and almost forgotten. "She was larger than life" said Peres, his voice ringing with astonishment as he recounted her travels, her rescue of Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition, and the manner in which she provided safe havens for conversos like herself. The amazing thing he said was that she was able to achieve so much in so short a life span. She was only 49 at the time of her death. Education Minister Gideon Saar described Dona Gracia as "a woman before her time" preceding Herzl in her vision of a Jewish homeland and becoming a Zionist before the term was ever coined. Chief Education Officer of the Israel Defense Forces, Brigadier General Eli Shermeister commented that if Dona Gracia were alive today, she would be able to teach a valuable lesson in global economy and in leadership. "Her economic success was unprecedented, as was her political influence," he said. "She was a woman among men long before women were given the right to vote." Even if her name is not widely known, said Shermeister, "the values she espoused are part of our heritage. I salute her in the name of the IDF." http://www.jpost. com/Israel/ Article.aspx? id=192615