Lamed-E

A Quarterly Journal of Politics and Culture

Selected and Edited by Ivan Ninic
________________________________________________________________________
Autumn 2012

Number 16
but knew it could not attack Israel by itself. Syria
remained content reaching informal understandings
with Israel. Meanwhile, relatively weak and isolated
Jordan depended on Israel for its national security.
Lebanon alone was unstable. Israel periodically intervened there, not very successfully, but not at very
high cost.
The most important of Israel's neighbors, Egypt, is
now moving on an uncertain course. This weekend,
new Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi removed
five key leaders of the military and the Supreme
Council of the Armed Forces and revoked
constitutional amendments introduced by the military.
There are two theories on what has happened. In the
first, Morsi -- who until his election was a senior
leader of the country's mainstream Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood -- is actually much
more powerful than the military and is acting
decisively to transform the Egyptian political system.
In the second, this is all part of an agreement between
the military and the Muslim Brotherhood that gives
Morsi the appearance of greater power while actually
leaving power with the military.
On the whole, I tend to think that the second is the
case. Still, it is not clear how this will evolve: The
appearance of power can turn into the reality of
power. Despite any sub rosa agreements between the
military and Morsi, how these might play out in a year
or two as the public increasingly perceives Morsi as
being in charge -- limiting the military's options and
cementing Morsi's power -- is unknown. In the same
sense, Morsi has been supportive of security measures
taken by the military against militant Islamists, as was
seen in the past week's operations in the Sinai
Peninsula.
The Sinai remains a buffer zone against major
military forces, but not against the paramilitaries
linked to radical Islamists who have increased their
activities in the peninsula since the fall of former
President Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. Last
week, they attacked an Egyptian military post on the
Gaza border, killing 16 Egyptian soldiers. This
followed several attacks against Israeli border
crossings. Morsi condemned the attack and ordered a

The Israeli Crisis

By George Friedman
Crises are normally short, sharp and intense affairs.
Israel's predicament has developed on a different time
frame, is more diffuse than most crises and has not
reached a decisive and intense moment. But it is still a
crisis. It is not a crisis solely about Iran, although the
Israeli government focuses on that issue. Rather, it is
over Israel's strategic reality since 1978, when it
signed the Camp David accords with Egypt.
Perhaps the deepest aspect of the crisis is that Israel
has no internal consensus on whether it is in fact a
crisis, or if so, what the crisis is about. The Israeli
government speaks of an existential threat from
Iranian nuclear weapons. I would argue that the
existential threat is broader and deeper, part of it very
new, and part of it embedded in the founding of Israel.
Israel now finds itself in a long-term crisis in which
it is struggling to develop a strategy and foreign
policy to deal with a new reality. This is causing
substantial internal stress, since the domestic consensus on Israeli policy is fragmenting at the same
time that the strategic reality is shifting. Though this
happens periodically to nations, Israel sees itself in a
weak position in the long run due to its size and
population, despite its current military superiority.
More precisely, it sees the evolution of events over
time potentially undermining that military reality, and
it therefore feels pressured to act to preserve it. How
to preserve its superiority in the context of the
emerging strategic reality is the core of the Israeli
crisis.

Egypt
Since 1978, Israel's strategic reality had been that it
faced no threat of a full peripheral war. After Camp
David, the buffer of the Sinai Peninsula separated
Egypt and Israel, and Egypt had a government that did
not want that arrangement to break. Israel still faced a
formally hostile Syria. Syria had invaded Lebanon in
1976 to crush the Palestine Liberation Organization
based there and reconsolidate its hold over Lebanon,
1

heavily dependent on Iran. Neither outcome appealed

to Israel, and neither outcome was in Israel's control.
Just as dangerous to Israel would be the
Lebanonization of Syria. Syria and Lebanon are
linked in many ways, though Lebanon's political order
was completely different and Syria could serve as a
stabilizing force for it. There is now a reasonable
probability that Syria will become like Lebanon,
namely, a highly fragmented country divided along
religious and ethnic lines at war with itself. Israel's
best outcome would be for the West to succeed in
preserving Syria's secular military regime without al
Assad. But it is unclear how long a Western-backed
regime resting on the structure of al Assad's Syria
would survive. Even the best outcome has its own
danger. And while Lebanon itself has been reasonably
stable in recent years, when Syria catches a cold,
Lebanon gets pneumonia. Israel thus faces the
prospect of declining security to its north.

large-scale military crackdown in the Sinai. Two

problems could arise from this.
First, the Egyptians' ability to defeat the militant
Islamists depends on redefining the Camp David
accords, at least informally, to allow Egypt to deploy
substantial forces there (though even this might not
suffice). These additional military forces might not
threaten Israel immediately, but setting a precedent for
a greater Egyptian military presence in the Sinai
Peninsula could eventually lead to a threat.
This would be particularly true if Morsi and the
Muslim Brotherhood impose their will on the
Egyptian military. If we take Morsi at face value as a
moderate, the question becomes who will succeed
him. The Muslim Brotherhood is clearly ascendant,
and the possibility that a secular democracy would
emerge from the Egyptian uprising is unlikely. It is
also clear that the Muslim Brotherhood is a movement
with many competing factions. And it is clear from
the elections that the Muslim Brotherhood represents
the most popular movement in Egypt and that no one
can predict how it will evolve or which factions will
dominate and what new tendencies will arise. Egypt in
the coming years will not resemble Egypt of the past
generation, and that means that the Israeli calculus for
what will happen on its southern front will need to
take Hamas in Gaza into account and perhaps an
Islamist Egypt prepared to ally with Hamas.

The U.S. Role and Israel's Strategic

Lockdown
It is important to take into account the American
role in this, because ultimately Israel's national
security -- particularly if its strategic environment
deteriorates -- rests on the United States. For the
United States, the current situation is a strategic
triumph. Iran had been extending its power westward,
through Iraq and into Syria. This represented a new
force in the region that directly challenged American
interests. Where Israel originally had an interest in
seeing al Assad survive, the United States did not.
Washington's primary interest lay in blocking Iran and
keeping it from posing a threat to the Arabian
Peninsula. The United States saw Syria, particularly
after the uprising, as an Iranian puppet. While the
United States was delighted to see Iran face a reversal
in Syria, Israel was much more ambivalent about that
outcome.
The Israelis are always opposed to the rising
regional force. When that was Egyptian leader Gamal
Abdel Nasser, they focused on Nasser. When it was al
Qaeda and its sympathizers, they focused on al Qaeda.
When it was Iran, they focused on Tehran. But simple
opposition to a regional tendency is no longer a
sufficient basis for Israeli strategy. As in Syria, Israel
must potentially oppose all tendencies, where the
United States can back one. That leaves Israeli policy
incoherent. Lacking the power to impose a reality on
Syria, the best Israel can do is play the balance of
power. When its choice is between a pro-Iranian
power and a Sunni Islamist power, it can no longer
play the balance of power. Since it lacks the power to
impose a reality, it winds up in a strategic lockdown.
Israel's ability to influence events on its borders was
never great, but events taking place in bordering

Syria and Lebanon

A similar situation exists in Syria. The secular and
militarist regime of the al Assad family is in serious
trouble. As mentioned, the Israelis had a working
relationship with the Syrians going back to the Syrian
invasion of Lebanon against the Palestine Liberation
Organization in 1976. It was not a warm relationship,
but it was predictable, particularly in the 1990s: Israel
allowed Syria a free hand in Lebanon in exchange for
Damascus limiting Hezbollah's actions.
Lebanon was not exactly stable, but its instability
hewed to a predictable framework. That understanding broke down when the United States seized an
opportunity to force Syria to retreat from Lebanon in
2006 following the 2005 assassination of Lebanese
Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri. The United States
used the Cedar Revolution that rose up in defiance of
Damascus to retaliate against Syria for allowing al
Qaeda to send jihadists into Iraq from Syria.
This didn't spark the current unrest in Syria, which
appears to involve a loose coalition of Sunnis
including elements of the Muslim Brotherhood and
other Islamists. Though Israel far preferred Syrian
President Bashar al Assad to them, al Assad himself
was shifting his behavior. The more pressure he came
under, the more he became dependent on Iran. Israel
began facing the unpleasant prospect of a Sunni
Islamist government emerging or a government
2

the Iranian nuclear program. Of all their options in the

region, a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities
apparently plays to their strengths. Two things make
such a move attractive. The first is that eliminating
Iran's nuclear capability is desirable for Israel. The
nuclear threat is so devastating that no matter how
realistic the threat is, removing it is desirable.
Second, it would allow Israel to demonstrate the
relevance of its power in the region. It has been a
while since Israel has had a significant, large-scale
military victory. The 1980s invasion of Lebanon didn't
end well; the 2006 war was a stalemate; and while
Israel may have achieved its military goals in the 2008
invasion of Gaza, that conflict was a political setback.
Israel is still taken seriously in the regional
psychology, but the sense of inevitability Israel
enjoyed after 1967 is tattered. A victory on the order
of destroying Iranian weapons would reinforce Israel's
relevance.
It is, of course, not clear that the Israelis intend to
launch such an attack. And it is not clear that such an
attack would succeed. It is also not clear that the
Iranian counter at the Strait of Hormuz wouldn't leave
Israel in a difficult political situation, and above all it
is not clear that Egyptian and Syrian factions would
even be impressed by the attacks enough to change
their behavior.
Israel also has a domestic problem, a crisis of
confidence. Many military and intelligence leaders
oppose an attack on Iran. Part of their opposition is
rooted in calculation. Part of it is rooted in a series of
less-than-successful military operations that have
shaken their confidence in the military option. They
are afraid both of failure and of the irrelevance of the
attack on the strategic issues confronting Israel.
Political inertia can be seen among Israeli
policymakers. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
tried to form a coalition with the centrist Kadima
Party, but that fell apart over the parochial Israeli
issue of whether Orthodox Jews should be drafted.
Rather than rising to the level of a strategic dialogue,
the secularist constituency of Kadima confronted the
religious constituencies of the Likud coalition and
failed to create a government able to devise a platform
for decisive action.
This is Israel's crisis. It is not a sudden, lifethreatening problem but instead is the product of
unraveling regional strategies, a lack of confidence
earned through failure and a political system
incapable of unity on any particular course. Israel, a
small country that always has used military force as
its ultimate weapon, now faces a situation where the
only possible use of military force -- against Iran -- is
not only risky, it is not clearly linked to any of the
main issues Israel faces other than the nuclear issue.
The French Third Republic was marked by a
similar sense of self-regard overlaying a deep anxiety.

countries are now completely beyond its control.

While Israeli policy has historically focused on the
main threat, using the balance of power to stabilize the
situation and ultimately on the decisive use of military
force, it is no longer possible to identify the main
threat. There are threats in all of its neighbors,
including Jordan (where the kingdom's branch of the
Muslim Brotherhood is growing in influence while the
Hashemite monarchy is reviving relations with
Hamas). This means using the balance of power
within these countries to create secure frontiers is no
longer an option. It is not clear there is a faction for
Israel to support or a balance that can be achieved.
Finally, the problem is political rather than military.
The ability to impose a political solution is not
available.
Against the backdrop, any serious negotiations with
the Palestinians are impossible. First, the Palestinians
are divided. Second, they are watching carefully what
happens in Egypt and Syria since this might provide
new political opportunities. Finally, depending on
what happens in neighboring countries, any agreement
Israel might reach with the Palestinians could turn into
a nightmare.
The occupation therefore continues, with the
Palestinians holding the initiative. Unrest begins when
they want it to begin and takes the form they want it to
have within the limits of their resources. The Israelis
are in a responsive mode. They can't eradicate the
Palestinian threat. Extensive combat in Gaza, for
example, has both political consequences and military
limits. Occupying Gaza is easy; pacifying Gaza is not.

Israel's Military and Domestic Political

Challenges
The crisis the Israelis face is that their levers of
power, the open and covert relationships they had, and
their military force are not up to the task of effectively
shaping their immediate environment. They have lost
the strategic initiative, and the type of power they
possess will not prove decisive in dealing with their
strategic issues. They no longer are operating at the
extremes of power, but in a complex sphere not
amenable to military solutions.
Israel's strong suit is conventional military force. It
can't fully understand or control the forces at work on
its borders, but it can understand the Iranian nuclear
threat. This leads it to focus on the sort of
conventional conflict they excel at, or at least used to
excel at. The 2006 war with Hezbollah was quite
conventional, but Israel was not prepared for an
infantry war. The Israelis instead chose to deal with
Lebanon via an air campaign, but that failed to
achieve their political ends.
The Israelis want to redefine the game to something
they can win, which is why their attention is drawn to
3

attacks from the Islamist regime and its terrorist

allies. But those who assert that Netanyahu is just
bluffing forget that Israeli anxiety is rooted as
much in its lack of confidence in Washington as
it is in knowledge of Irans genocidal ambitions.
With even the Americans now finally willing
to agree in the form of a new National
Intelligence Estimate that Iran is building a bomb,
the feeling in Jerusalem is that they cannot sit
back, wait and hope for the best as their allies
seem to be telling them. The latest round of
threats from Tehran as they prepare to celebrate
al Quds (Jerusalem) Day started with a comment
from an Iranian general that there is no other
way but to stand firm and resist until Israel is
destroyed. That was followed by a prediction in
a speech by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the
countrys Supreme Leader, that Israel would
disappear.
But Israels problem isnt so much their
certainty that if Iran is allowed to keep on refining uranium that they will have a bomb before
long. It is their utter lack of faith in the Obama
administrations willingness to do something
about the problem.
Netanyahus domestic critics are not off base
when they chide his government for painting the
Iranian threat as being primarily a problem for
Israel rather than the region or the West. It is also
obviously true that if Israel acted on its own, the
impact of such a strike would not be nearly as
devastating or conclusive as one led by the
United States armed forces. But who can blame
Netanyahu and Barak for having come to the
conclusion that President Obama will continue
pretending that his policy of ineffective diplomacy and loosely enforced sanctions can deal
with the situation until it really is too late.
It could be that fear of an Israeli strike in the
middle of a presidential election will prompt
Obama to improve upon his current feckless
stand. But in the absence of any sign of such a
switch and with the prospect that a re-elected
Obama will find the flexibility to abandon his
promise to stop Iran, Netanyahu may have no
choice but to contemplate a unilateral strike.
Rather than worrying about Israel bluffing, the
administration needs to recognize that if they
wish to avert a war this fall, the president must
start acting like he means what he says about
stopping Iran.

This led to political paralysis and Paris' inability to

understand the precise nature of the threat and to
shape their response to it. Rather than deal with the
issues at hand in the 1930s, they relied on past glories
to guide them. That didn't turn out very well.
"The Israeli Crisis is republished with permission of
Stratfor."
___________________________________________

Is Bibi Bluffing on Iran

Strike?
By Jonathan S. Tobin
In Israel this week, people are lining up for gas
masks, a new Homeland Defense has been set to
work to deal with the task of readying the country
for the possibility of attacks from Iran, Lebanon
and Gaza, and pundits are working overtime
trying to figure out whether the nations political
leadership is serious about launching a strike on
Irans nuclear facilities sometime this fall.
Michael Oren, Israels ambassador to the
United States, is doing his best to convince
Americans that the saber-rattling coming out
Jerusalem is not a bluff aimed at forcing the West
to toughen sanctions on Iran or start making their
own credible threats about using force. In
interviews with journalists and an op-ed in the
Wall Street Journal last week, Oren has made a
powerful case about the existential threat that a
nuclear Iran presents to Israel, but Washington
may be listening more closely to those figures
inside the Jewish state who are claiming that
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense
Minister Ehud Barak are begging to be talked out
of an attack.
As the New York Times reported yesterday, Uzi
Dayan, a former general who was asked to serve
as Homeland Defense Minister, says his conversations with both Netanyahu and Barak led him to
believe that the window of diplomacy with Iran
that the Obama administration keeps talking
about is still open. There are good reasons to
believe the Israeli government would like nothing
better than to have the war talk do what an earlier
wave of speculation about a strike accomplished
when Washington belatedly adopted a tougher
sanctions policy. Jerusalem understands that even
a successful strike on Iran will exact a terrible
price in casualties and damage from counter-

Commentary
4

clock to Syria, Oren said, that clock is

ticking.
The U.S. and European allies share Israels
assessment that Iran is moving closer to being
able to make nuclear weapons, while Iran says its
program is for civilian power and medical use.
U.S. Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman
of the Joint Chiefs Staff, said at a Pentagon news
conference yesterday that an Israeli strike on Iran
could delay but not destroy Irans nuclear
capabilities, based on his review of Israels
military arsenal.
Such assessments arent relevant, Oren said.
That, on the basis of our previous experience, is
not an argument against a strike, Oren said. In
the past, we have operated on the assumption that
we can only gain a delay.

Israel Would Strik Iran

to Gain a Few Years,
Oren Says
By Tony Capaccio and Nicole Gaouette
Israel would be willing to strike Irans nuclear
facilities, even if doing so only delayed its ability
to produce nuclear weapons for a few years,
Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren
said.
One, two, three, four years are a long time in
the Middle East -- look whats happened in the
last year in terms of political change, Oren said
today at a Bloomberg Government breakfast in
Washington. In our neighborhood, those are the
rules of the game.
Israeli leaders have stressed this month that
time is running out for a diplomatic solution to
the nuclear program that Israel regards as an
existential threat.
Diplomacy hasnt succeeded, Oren, 57, said
today. Weve come to a very critical juncture
where important decisions do have to be made.
While Israeli leaders repeatedly have said they
may strike Irans facilities, the words are now
being accompanied by civil- defense measures,
including a new system that uses text messages to
alert the public to missile attacks, wider distribution of gas masks and the appointment of a
new Home Front Defense minister.
Iran may present the most dangerous in an
array of threats Israel faces, Oren said, describing
them as unprecedented in the countrys 64 years.
The Arab Spring has roiled neighbors Egypt and
Syria, the Sinai Peninsula is becoming a magnet
for militant groups and terrorist attacks on Israeli
citizens and property are rising around the world,
Oren said.

Progressing Apace
When Israel struck at an Iraq reactor in 1981,
the military assumption was we would gain a
delay of between one and two years on that
program, Oren said. To this day, Iraq does not
have a nuclear weapon.
While no country has a greater stake in
resolving this diplomatically than Israel, Oren
said, Iranians show no signs of flexibility in
negotiations with the U.S. and other countries
over its program.
Instead, Irans nuclear program is progressing
apace, Oren said, both in the growth of
stockpiles of enriched uranium and in efforts to
protect operations in underground facilities that
take the program beyond the reach of bunker
buster bombs. The Iranian enrichment
operations are monitored by the International
Atomic Energy Agency to prevent diversion to
bomb use.
An Iranian nuclear weapon is an existential
threat to Israel, Oren said. We dont just say it.
They say it as well. They confirm it.

Plots, Threats

Syrian Peril

The threat has been personal, the ambassador

said today. A thwarted 2011 Iranian plot to kill
Saudi Arabias ambassador to Washington also
included plans to kill Oren and others by bombing the Israeli embassy, he said.
Israeli intelligence suggests that, for now,
Irans Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameni
doesnt think the threat of military action is
credible, Oren said. Given that, he said Israel

Syrias stockpiles of chemical weapons are a

grave concern to Israel amid the uprising against
President Bashar al-Assad, Oren said. The
situation in Syria is highly fluid, highly
flammable, he said, so much so that Israel may
have to deal with its northern neighbor before any
confrontation with Iran. If you had to assign a

wants to see truly crippling sanctions and a

credible military threat against Iran.
Israels Haaretz newspaper reported Aug. 10
that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is
considering a strike before the U.S. presidential
election. Oren said the Nov. 6 election isnt a
consideration in Israeli decision-making.
The issue is not the American elections, he
said in an interview today with Bloomberg
Television. The issue is the degree to which the
Iranian program has reached a critical point
where they can begin to put together nuclear
weapons.

Melville in Jerusalem
The Moby-Dick author sought spiritual
connection on an 1857 Holy Land trip.
He found dust and rocks instead.

By David Sugarman

U.S. Relationship
At the Bloomberg Government session, Oren
said that fundamentally Israels relationship
with the United States hasnt changed under the
Obama administration.
Every administration brings a certain emphasis, but there is also the continuing traditions and
themes -- and that is a very close strategic
alliance, he said. Additionally, Oren said his
nation is rapidly becoming a vital American
commercial interest, something that was unthinkable 40, 50 years ago.

Collage Tablet Magazine, original photo Museum

of Photographic Arts, white whale Rockwell Kent.
Herman Melville, the popular writer of
adventure stories, all but lost his readership with
the publication of Moby-Dick; or The Whale.
Mr. Melville has survived his reputation, one
critic wrote in 1851 of the imposing novel, with
its diatribes, tangents, and verbosity. If he had
been contented with writing one or two books, he
might have been famous, but his vanity has
destroyed all his chances for immortality, or even
of a good name with his own generation. While
some reviewers recognized the greatness of
Moby-Dick, it failed to achieve the success
Melville had hoped for, selling only a scant 3,100
copies during his lifetime. Though I wrote the
Gospels in this century, he lamented to his
friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, I shall die in the
gutter.
Melville never fully recovered from the
disappointing response to Moby-Dick. In 1857,
upon the suggestion of his wife, Melville set off
to Europe and the Middle East in the hopes of
finding some clarity, inspiration, and cheer. It
was on this trip that Melville visited Jerusalem, a
place that did not live up to the authors high
expectations. The journal Melville kept on his
journey, along with Clarel: A Poem and
Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, the epic the trip

Bloomberg News
________________________________________

Idit Ben Or
Jerusalem International Book Fair
Kikar Safra 9
P.O.Box 775
Jerusalem 91007
Tel: +972 2 629 64 15
Fax: +972 2 624 06 63
jerfair@jerusalem.muni.il

journal, he notes such weather as one might

have in paradise, of stars shining with
brilliancy, and gloriously clear evenings. This
attitude, though dotted with days of despair,
generally continued through Constantinople,
Alexandria, Cairo, and Rome.
And then Melville arrived in Jerusalem. His
first description of the city: Unless knew it,
could not have recognized itlooked exactly like
arid rocks. Melville had expected a place that
felt closer to God than New York City or
Massachusetts, a place of high sentiment and
spirituality. Instead, he got dust and flies, and
entry after entry indicates his chagrin: How it
affects one to be cheated in Jerusalem, he wrote
early on in his weeklong stay in the city. Later he
wondered whether the desolation of the land [is]
the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity?
Hapless are the favorites of heaven. And later
still: The color of the whole city is grey & looks
at you like a cold grey eye in a cold old man.
Indeed, Melvilles ruminations on Jerusalem
are sometimes so bleak as to be comical:
Stones of Judea. We read a good deal about
stones in Scriptures. Monuments & stumps of the
memorials are set up of stones; men are stoned to
death; the figurative seed falls in stony places;
and no wonder that stones should so largely
figure in the Bible. Judea is one accumulation of
stonesstony mountains & stony plains; stony
torrents & stony roads; stony walls & stony
fields, stony houses & stony tombs; stony eyes &
stony hearts. Before you and behind you are
stones. Stones to the right & stones to the left.
Melvilles journal portrays a hodgepodge of
peculiar characters that run about the citys
streets, including pilgrims wearing serious
expressions, old Arab men plowing in their
shirttails, and Christian missionaries from the
United States or England proselytizing in the
streets. The most oft-repeated descriptors
Melville affixes to these figures are strange and
sad. The whole thing is half melancholy, half
farcical, he writes of the city and its inhabitants,
like all the rest of the world.
To be fair, Jerusalem wasnt much to speak of
in the 1850s. The city was part of the Ottoman
Empire, and its fate was intertwined with that of
the dying sultanate. Contemporary accounts of
Jerusalem describe little infrastructure, terrible
corruption, a lack of hospitals, and an absence of
social amenities and order. Assault and theft were

helped shape, illustrate what a strange and

mystifying place Jerusalem was for the 19thcentury traveler. But Melvilles descriptions and
reflections, his spiritual longing and ultimate
disenchantment, also hint at the development of a
remarkable relationshipthat between the
American tourist and the Holy Land.
When Melville wrote Moby-Dick, he was
living in Pittsfield, Mass., a small New England
town that is currently celebrating the life and
work of the author with its summer-long Call Me
Melville festival. But Pittsfield, in the wake of
Moby-Dicks poor reception, was not a happy
place for Melville. His farm was losing money,
and his career seemed to be in shambles. He
followed Moby-Dick with Pierre (1852), another
financial and critical disappointment, and then
several stories for Harpers New Monthly
Magazine and Putnams Monthly Magazine,
among them Bartleby the Scrivener (1853) and
Benito Cereno (1855). Each short story hints at
the authors anger, despair, and exhaustion.
Another novel, Israel Potter, published in 1855,
did little to change his reputation or
circumstances, and those closest to Melville grew
increasingly worried; the writer seemed fatigued,
unhappy, and even, some suggested, suicidal.
Given Melvilles anguished state, his wife,
Elizabeth Shaw, proposedand his father-in-law,
Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of the Massachusetts
Supreme Judicial Court, agreed to financea trip
overseas. Melville had previously gone abroad to
London in 1849, shortly before the completion of
Moby-Dick, and had enjoyed the trip immensely.
But that had been a different time in the authors
life; he was a successful novelist writing a book
he believed would be immediately celebrated as
one of the greatest works of the 19th century. Six
years and many disappointments later, Melville
had good reason to be down.
Nonetheless, on Oct. 11, 1856, Melville
boarded the Glasgow, a steamer bound for
England. As Howard C. Horsford recounts in his
historical note to the Northwestern-Newberry
edition of Melvilles journals (for which Horsford
served as editor), Melville visited Hawthorne in
Liverpool, and Hawthorne said afterward that
Melville seemed a little paler, and perhaps a
little sadder than hed been before. But as
Melville journeyed on, the trip appeared to revive
his spirits. As he sails the Mediterranean in midwinter, Melvilles exuberance is clear. In his
7

While there are plenty of interesting characters

in the poem, including a pious old Ethiopian Jew
Melville calls the Black Jew, and a young
American Jewess (named Ruth) whom Clarel
falls in love with, the theology students
experience of Jerusalem can be seen as Melvilles
negative impression rendered in verse.
The bulk of the Americans that Melville and
Clarel encounter fall into one of three categories:
American tourists, like Melville and Clarel
themselves; American Jews who live in
Jerusalem out of devotion to the city as the
Jewish homeland; and Christian missionaries
from the United States who have come dutifully
to pave the way for Christ. As a typology, this
catalog, though by no means exhaustive,
resonates today, and Melvilles insights can feel
surprisingly contemporary. Melville and Clarel
are not only in Jerusalem to see the sites, but also
to connect to something largerto feel closer to
the divine. Similarly, many Americans visit Israel
not solely to tour the Old City or German Colony
but also in search of an authentic religious
connection. This desire to have a meaningful
religious encounter in Jerusalem is an essential
aspect of the contemporary American Jewish
experienceone that is seen as a Jewish
birthright. But, alas, Jerusalem can be a place
like any other, a pile of arid rocks.
So, when Clarel swats at flies while trying to
feel Gods grace, or when he sees the tourist traps
that line the road to every holy site in the city, his
ruminations ring true: Little here moves hearts
of some pedlars versed in wonted tricks,/
Venders of charm or crucifix Is this Cairos
bazaar/ and concourse? Clarel is in part a
beautiful reflection on the tensions of being an
American in Israel and an even deeper consideration of the spirit in gulf of dizzying fable
lost, or of feeling like a metaphysical tourist.

daily occurrences in and around the Old City,

which, at the time of Melvilles visit, was all that
existed of Jerusalemdevelopment outside the
Old City walls would not occur in earnest until
the 1860s, when overcrowding made expansion
beyond the Old City necessary. Melvilles
description of a backwater pile of rocks full of
dusty religious types is not that much of a
metaphorical overreach.
But Melvilles view of the place was certainly
clouded by his financial and artistic troubles, as
well as the religious tensions he felt as a Christian
traveling in 19th-century Jerusalem. While
Melville was not a traditionally religious or
observant man, theological questions dominate
the authors work. The philosophically inclined
child of a Christian father and pious Calvinist
mother, Melville held a complex theology, best
described as something like devout agnosticism.
He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his
unbelief, Hawthorne wrote of Melville in his
journal. He is too honest and courageous not to
try to do one or the other. If he were a religious
man, he would be one of the most truly religious
and reverential. This devotion to uncertainty
but affiliation with pious Christianityaffected
Melvilles view of Jerusalem in a number of
ways: He felt uninspired by the city and
disappointed to find himself feeling this way.
Additionally, he was saddened to see the sites
associated with Christian history in such poor
condition. He wrote that the mind can not but be
sadly & suggestively affected with the
indifference of Nature & Man to all that makes
the spot sacred to the Christian. The barren city,
in combination with his bleak mood, left Melville
feeling disenchanted; his outlook was markedly
more optimistic upon departing for Rome.
Melville never returned to Jerusalem, but he
did revisit the journals and notes from his trip,
most notably in the 1876 publishing of Clarel: A
Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. The
longest American poemlonger, in fact, than the
Aeniad, Iliad, or Paradise LostMelvilles epic
tells the story of Clarel, a spiritually anxious
theology student who arrives in the Holy Land in
hopes of connecting to the divine. What he finds
instead is a Jerusalem full of bizarre pilgrims and
thieves. He makes some friends and travels with
them to Mar Saba and Bethlehem, only to have
his philosophical bewilderment and uncertainty
deepen as the trip goes on.

Tablet

Passed over as a writer of serious fiction, at

least temporarilyby 1978, the omission would
be rectified by the Nobel Prize for Literaturehe
assumed the role of a comic, cushioning his barbs
with disarming levity in heavily accented
English.

I. B. Singers Last
Laugh
By David G. Roskies
Like millions of his fellow immigrants to
America, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991)
started over. In the beginning, he was a deadly
serious Polish-Yiddish writer with world-literary
ambitions. By the end, he was known to some as
a world-literary figure indeedbut to many
others as a species of American-Jewish comedian. He played the latter part to perfection. Here,
for instance, is an excerpt from his acceptance
speech upon receiving the 1970 National Book
Award for his childrens book A Day of Pleasure:
Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw:

Why I Write for Children

Isaac Bashevis Singer

There are five hundred reasons why I began to

write for children, but to save time I will mention
only some of them:

How Singer became a comic writer and a

deliberately comic figure is a story in three
phases. Each is well-documented, but lost along
the way is Singers relation to Yiddish literature
and to that literatures career in America. Only as
an American-Yiddish writer could he have had
the last laughas indeed he did.
By the time Singer arrived in New York harbor
in 1935, the Persona school of American
Yiddish poetry had entered its second phase.
These youngsters, as they were called, had
shaken free of their collective Jewish identity
during the peak of the Eastern European mass
immigration
(1905-1910).
Against
the
anonymous backdrop of New York City, they
were bent on achieving individuation, refracting
their varied lives into a rich gallery of assumed
personae: Mani Leyb as poet-cobbler, Zishe
Landau as dandy, H. Leivick as martyr, Celia
Dropkin as circus lady, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern as
rascal.
Theirs was a radically new aesthetics. Blocking
out the cries of the traffic and the competing
claims of the street, they were the first Yiddish
poets anywhere to focus on their inner state of
being, on the search for a reinvented self. Some
adopted an extravagant poetic mask. Zishe
Landaus personaa Europeanized dandy living

- Children read books, not reviews. They dont

give a hoot about the critics.
- Children dont read to find their identity.
- They dont read to free themselves of guilt, to
quench their thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of
alienation.
- When a book is boring, they yawn openly,
without any shame or fear of authority.
- They dont expect their beloved writer to
redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know
that is not in his power. Only the adults have such
childish illusions.
By 1970, this sort of thingmockery disguised
as foolishnesshad become Singers calling
card. I am but a lowly storyteller (he was saying),
who now prefers to write for children because
children, unlike grownups, are devoid of
pretense, sophistication, guile, existential angst,
and, worst of all, false hopes for the betterment of
humanity. In the name of these nave readers,
Singer accepted the National Book Award not for
any of his major works like The Slave, The
Magician of Lublin, or In My Fathers Court, or
for any his volumes of short stories, but for a
modest volume written expressly for youngsters.
9

protective wall become mootperhaps because,

thanks to translation and growing fame, his
American publishers and readers were eager to
consume anything that carried the I. B. Singer
imprimatur. Bashevis, Warshawski, and Segal
having become irrelevant, Singer proceeded to
invent a persona, an authorial double.
In 1960, with Alone, set in Miami Beach,
Bashevis began to publish Yiddish stories
narrated in the first person by someone with a
biography very similar to that of I. B. Singer. A
perennial bachelor very successful with the
ladies, this alter ego appears in melodramatic
plots that combine fantasy with hilarity. In
Alone, the hero gets his signals crossed by
otherworldly forces and ends up with a
hunchbacked Cuban for a lover. In Brother
Beetle, he finds himself naked and shivering on
the roof of his lovers apartment building.
Eventually, this fictional persona would assume
the stable identity of Aaron Greidinger, the
narrator-protagonist of such middlebrow novels
as Shosha and Scum and of fantastical tales like
The Cafeteria. If Zishe Landaus dandy
conjured up prosaic reality, and Mani Leybs
cobbler-poet a realm of higher beauty, Basheviss
exhibitionist was a comic grotesque. When he
grew weary of clowning, Bashevis-Warshawski
wrote stories for children.
Having abandoned one set of identities,
Yiddish-American writers gained another of their
own invention. But more difficult than finding a
surrogate identity was finding a surrogate
language. As early as 1935, when Singer arrived,
Yiddish itself, in his judgment, had become an
obsolescent tongue, spoken by an ever-dwindling
and ever-aging segment of American Jewry.
Moreover, the Yiddish still being spoken was a
creole, he maintained, unfit for serious
consumption: a language so impoverished that its
Hebraic componentthat which made Yiddish
the language of Yiddishkaytand its Slavic
componentthat which gave it its regional,
provincial flavorhad all but vanished in a
Germanized and Anglicized mishmash. In
Problems of Yiddish Prose in America, a
sobering analysis published in Svive, a little
magazine founded by the poet Kadia Molodowski
in 1943, Singer proclaimed his belief that Yiddish
no longer had a vital role to play in the life of
American Jewry.

a life of sensual self-indulgence was a persona

designed to celebrate the it-ness of the everyday; Mani-Leybs personaa devoted craftsman,
marked by a streak of asceticismevoked a more
purified state of being.
Nothing quite like this was happening in
Poland, let alone in the Soviet Union. There were,
however, a number of quick-change artists there.
One was Yitzhak Manger, a serious poet who,
changing his name to Itzik when he arrived in
Warsaw from Romania in 1928, transformed
himself into the last of the Yiddish folk
troubadours. Another was the young Singer, who,
adopting the name Bashevis (after his mother
Bathsheba) in order to avoid being confused with
his older brother, the novelist I. J. Singer,
became, along with Manger, the youngest writer
admitted into the newly-founded Yiddish PEN
Club. But it was impossible to earn a living from
highbrow fiction and literary translation, and so
Bashevis did what others did: anonymously, he
published shund, or pulp fiction, in the popular
press, occasionally also signing his name to
humorous sketches.
In Poland, Bashevis was a jack-of-all-literarytrades. In America the thirty-three-year-old
immigrant split himself into three separate
identities: Isaac Bashevis the highbrow writer,
Isaac Warshavski a middlebrow writer, and D.
Segal, a tabloid journalist. Bashevis was the
name he used not only for his novels and short
stories but also for a series of Yiddish manifestos:
Problems of Yiddish Prose in America (MarchApril 1943), Concerning Yiddish Prose in
Poland (August 1943), and the recently discovered Realism as a Method and Worldview
(February 1944). Warshavski was the name he
used for his literary criticism, and for works of
fiction that he considered borderline: In My
Fathers Court, called a literary experiment,
and all the stories for children, including A Day of
Pleasure. D. Segal was a well-kept secretfor
good reason. These were articles cribbed mostly
from the Daily News and rewritten in the
colloquial Potato Yiddish of the daily Forverts.
It was the New World equivalent of shund.
Pen names, even three of them together, do not
a persona make. With the help of Warshawski
and Segal, Bashevis could protect the realm of his
serious, his real, writing. Only after living in
America for a full quarter-century, sometime
around 1960, did the need for maintaining such a
10

there was a new audienceone that no longer

spoke or even understood Yiddish, but loved
nothing better than a Yiddish-inflected performance in translation. Everything Yiddish
sounded wickedly funny when featured in
Playboy, or even in Partisan Review, where Saul
Bellows translation of Gimpel had appeared in
1953.
The last stage was the easiest: to cover his
tracks, to run circles around his interviewers, to
play the ingnue and make it seem as if little
Isaac Singer of Krochmalna Street in Warsaw
was born to be a simple storyteller and gossipmonger. That, after all, is what such born-again
storytellers as Sholem Aleichem and Itzik
Manger had done before him. And how much
easier it was for I. B. Singer to pull it off. By the
time he commanded center stage, few even knew
to look for hidden tracks or were aware of the
other costumes hidden in the closet.
Finally, I. B. Singer commanded the stage
because in America there was room for only one
Yiddish comedian at a time. Glatstein could never
play the role even if he had wanted to, for the
simple reason that he spoke an unaccented
American English and was a bona-fide New York
Jew. All other contenders made a graceful exit to
the grave: Mani Leyb, Zishe Landau, H. Leivick,
Celia Dropkin, Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Aaron
Glantz-Leyeles, Aaron Zeitlin, Kadia Molodowskithe lot.
Above all, though, I. B. Singer had the last
laugh because he alone knew how to keep his
audience laughing.

But then, in the next two issues of Svive, at the

height of the Holocaust, Bashevis unveiled a new
species of comic writing the likes of which
Yiddish literature had never seen: early
installments in a projected series of stories that he
called Dos gedenkbukh fun yeytser-hore, The
Devils Diary. The series, which would
eventually include such brilliant tales as The
Unseen, Zeidlus the Pope, and The
Destruction of Kreshev, was written in a satiric,
super-idiomatic style steeped in Jewish learning.
But the voice was the voice of the Devil, master
ventriloquist and seducer. No form of Jewish
consciousness, male or female, sophisticated or
simple-minded, was foreign to this character, and
no one had the slightest hope of escaping his net.
Basheviss ambitious (but unrealized) plan was to
fashion not a Yiddish Comdie humaine la
Balzac, and certainly not a Yiddish Divina
Commedia la Dante, but a true Comdie
diabolique.
Singer was by no means a lone figure on the
stage of genius during the terrible years of 19431945years four, five, and six of the war. In
particular, Yiddish was also being rediscovered
as a superidiomatic folk vernacular by his most
formidable rival: the poet, critic, and novelist
Jacob Glatstein. As Bashevis was parading the
Devils repertoire of Yiddish styles, Glatstein
reimagined himself as the great Rabbi Nahman of
Bratslav (1772-1810). In the dramatic monologue
The Bratslaver to his Scribe, Reb Nahman, weary
of intellectual endeavor, sets out with his
companion Reb Nosn in search of simplicity,
direct experience, and melody. Having found a
perfect counterpart in the weighty and witty voice
of an early Hasidic master and Yiddish
storyteller, Glatstein would return to his
Bratslaver persona over the course of the next
twenty years.
The Devils Diary, too, was written as a kind of
monologue. Thanks to the labors of the late
scholar Khone Shmeruk, we now know that
between 1945, the year he published the original
Yiddish version of his masterpiece story Gimpel
the Fool, and 1975, Bashevis perfected the lost
art of the Yiddish monologue as spoken by men
and women, Hasidim and thieves, animals and
demons. Not all the monologues were comic and
none of the monologists was as polyphonic a
speaker as Gimpel. But each monologue was a
command performance. And by the later decades

David G. Roskies teaches Yiddish literature at

the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. His Holocaust Literature: A History and Guide, co-authored with
Naomi Diamant, will be published in January by
Brandeis University Press. This essay is adapted
from a talk originally delivered at the Hebrew
University in June.

11

After his release from the Nuremberg prison, in

December 1945, Horthy was supported by John
Montgomery, Pope Pius XII and others. He could
also count on admirers such as Joseph Stalin to
plead for mercy on his behalf.
I would not have been aware of any of this if it
weren't for the work of Aleksandar Veljic. In
recent months the BBC has picked up on his
work, Serbian news media and agencies are
getting involved, and respected members of
various Holocaust Societies in Israel and
elsewhere are highlighting the importance of this
book.
One thing is for sure, Veljic's work is
important and explosive enough to stir up interest
in atrocities that have been buried for too long.
It's not just that the victims' blood cries out, it's
that Horthy's reputation has been laundered, that
his memoirs have been published in several
languages, and that statues of Horthy are on
display in his honor, and that schoolchildren in
Hungary and elsewhere are reading stories about
his role as a heroic leader, with no idea that in
other ways he was a very evil man.
The facts, for example, that he was the first
anti-Semitic European Leader, and that he had
close ties to Hitler, who admired him during
Hitler's own ascent to power, need to be surfaced,
examined, and judged. Not to mention his record
of endorsing genocidal atrocities.
This book is destined to cause a re-examination
of those facts.
Congratulations to Aleksandar Veljic for his
diligence and fortitude, in the face of opposition,
with no resources and very, very little official
support, on having created a work of original
history that is destined to be cited in every
subsequent work on this and related subjects, of
which we can be sure there will be many.

Aleksandar Veljic:

Genocide Revealed
New Light on the Massacre of
Serbs and Jews under Hungarian
Occupation
By Wade Fransson
Aleksandar Veljic has spent seven years doing
primary research on events that were covered up
70 years ago. The list of accomplices is long and
is not limited to Europeans. In the wake of WWII
Miklos Horthy was given an unprecedented getout-of-jail free card, as stated by the Wikipedia
article on Horthy "But American trial officials
declined to present charges against Horthy, a
kindness that may have been the result of the
influence in Washington of Horthy's admirer, the
former ambassador John Montgomery." In other
words, if we recall the geopolitical context Horthy's strong anti-communist record was
enough for the U.S. and others to turn a blind eye
to his overt support of racist facists like Hitler,
and the genocidal activities he endorsed and
supported in regions under his control.

www.amazon.com

While under arrest, he made appearances at

trials in which he helped convict others, but
during which he was never required to testify.
12

From the History

Of the Jews in Dubrovnik

'An Independent Administrative Authority' (Srara

Bifney Atsma). Due to its very favourable geographic
position, the independent dwarf State of Ragusa
served for centuries as a link and/or barrier between
Empires, Christian Venice and the Moslem Ottoman
Empire, which often quarrelled and could very easily
have swallowed it. However, the independence of
Ragusa served both parties well and its administration
derived benefits not only in peace, but also during
wars. Because of the unsafe conditions of the
Mediterranean, Ragusa attracted merchants from the
Levant, from Italy and from Western Europe, who
took advantage of its neutrality. There are traces of
this also in Hebrew sources:

(From Hebrew sources)

By Jennie Lebel

He informed me plainly; do not send me goods on a

French ship, because it is at war with England, do not
send it any other way than by a Ragusan ship, for
Ragusa is at peace with all Kingdoms 1

Precisely because of this entrepot position, medical

services, mediation and translation were professions
in great demand. Jewish physicians are known mainly
by one of them, Amatus the Portuguese (Lusitanus),
who stayed very rarely in Ragusa, but traveled
extensively between Ancona and Salonica where he
died. About some others we learn not exactly in the
medical context, such as Moshe, son of Marcilius,
who will be mentioned a little later.2
The Jews, who mostly knew foreign languages and
had good business connections with partners in
various countries and provinces, were an important
link in the chain of the general entrepot turnover of
goods. Usually honest, respected, responsible and
trustworthy people were chosen, very often rabbis and
community leaders, who served as 'consuls' and
'factors' in he economic process, and almost the whole
exchange of goods was conducted through them.
The Jewish 'consuls' were not diplomatic personnel
in the modern sense, but mediators, representatives
and defenders of the interests of individuals or of
entire Jewish communities. The consuls held no
formal power, but their influence was very strongly
felt. They could assist, elevate, support and accelerate
trade, but if they considered some act of a merchant to
be harmful and contrary to the interests of the
community they could foil his transaction; and if he
was defiant and opposed the accepted written and
unwritten regulations, they might even boycott him
and exclude him from their ranks.
The migration of Jews to Ragusa, first from Italy,
and in greater masses at the end of the 15th century
due to the expulsion from Spain and Portugal, was not
seen with pleasure by Ragusan businessmen. They felt
at once that the Jews were rivals against whom they
fought not always with honest means, but often with
very brutal and unjust acts. The rivalry was mostly

Map of Dubrovnik with points of Jewish interest

inset
The most important sources for the history of Jews
in Ragusa (the current name Dubrovnik was officially
adopted in 1909, when the city was under AustroHungarian rule) are preserved in the Historical
Archive of this town, which has been extensively used
through the decades. I think that the first to 'discover'
the archive was Prof. Jorjo Tadi, but it has also been
used by other historians and chroniclers, such as the
Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Sarajevo Dr. Moritz Levi,
Dr. Kalmi Baruch, Dr. Bogumil Hrabak and others.
There is probably still much material in this archive
that must be further studied.
It is our intention to show the 'other side of the
coin', to present mostly Hebrew, but also other sources
from that time. This means mainly the so-called
responsa, i.e. the abundant authentic rabbinical
literature of questions and answers. A difficulty lies in
the fact that this literature is accessible only to those
who are not only fluent in Hebrew and the so-called
square script, but also the so-called RASHI or cursive
script (this could be compared with German written in
Latin and Gothic letters). Every child in Israel can
understand the language in which these responsa are
written, for it has not changed over the centuries and
even millennia, except of course for modern
expressions which have been added by reformers like
Eliezer Ben-Jehuda (1858-1922), credited with the
revival of Hebrew as a modern tongue spoken by a
renascent Jewish nation.
Ragusa / Dubrovnik - the 'Pearl of the Adriatic' takes up a large space in Hebrew sources. It is called
13

exceed in weight that of the bales usually made here by the

Florentine merchants. And the said Ivan is obliged to load
and depart from Ragusa on the same morning with the
whole load, and to take the said Shemuel and his women
and bales directly to Skopje on the horses mentioned,
namely Shemuel and the other people who will ride with
him, and the said women and bales, with Shemuel's entire
goods, promising to keep them good and faithful company
and that he shall on the whole trip behave to them
humanely, as a good and faithful coachman, and that in
everything permitted, honest and customary he shall be
obedient and devoted to the said Shemuel, and shall well
protect all his belongings and bales. According to the
contract, if some horse disappears on the way, the said

kept 'on low heat' but sometimes it burst into flames

that were difficult to extinguish and upset the little
Jewish community very much.
From 1501 a fairly interesting document has been
preserved not only about the promissory note trade,
but also about the manner of travel at that time, in
particular when Jews travelled with the observance of
holidays and an effort not to desecrate the Holy
Sabbath. For that reason Jewish merchants, when
travelling in caravans, had to leave the protected
group of their non-Jewish colleagues, and often fell
victim to robbers because of their devotion to faith
and tradition.3
In 1501 the Jew Shemuel Richoma (Samuel
Richoma Hebreus) arrived in Ragusa (Dubrovnik).
Maybe Richoma was not his surname, but a nickname
from the Italian ricco uomo (rich man). He came from
Italy and intended to go on to Skopje, to his aunt
Donna Danora, who was engaged in trade inside and
outside Turkey. Donna Danora died in that year and
Shemuel, as her heir, demanded from one of Danora's
debtors in Ragusa to pay him a promissory note, but
the debtor demanded that Shemuel bring proof of his
right to inheritance.
At the beginning of 1502 Shemuel Richoma
decided to move to Skopje and to settle there. On
April 14, 1502 he agreed with two seamen from
Koloep that they should carry for him six bales of
various domestic goods of a value of 300 Ducats on
their ship from Ortona. On May 9 the goods arrived in
Ragusa. On the same day Shemuel Richoma signed a
contract with the hired coachman Ivan Mirosali that
the latter transport his family and goods on his horses
from Ragusa to Skopje.
This unique contract, in Italian, is preserved in the
Dubrovnik archive and was published for the first
time in 1937, and we publish it here because it is
characteristic of the circumstances prevailing at the
time. Among other things, in this contract the
observance of the Sabbath is expressed as noted
earlier.

Contract of Shemuel Richoma for the Move to

Skopje from 1502 (From the book by Jorjo Tadi
The Jews in Dubrovnik, p. 47
Ivan is obliged, at his account, at once to procure as many
other horses as, when and as often as they shall be lacking
and missing, so that the said Ivan is due to bring to Skopje
the said Shemuel with his escort and bales without any
defect or injury. If it should be necessary to take more
horses, he cannot ask for more payment from said Shemuel
than for 46 horses. In case the said Ivan does not provide
the necessary horses on the trip, in place of those that go
missing, the said Shemuel is allowed to provide them on
account of the said Ivan. And Shemuel promises the said
Ivan for his supplies and payment for this whole trip to
Skopje, to pay 150 aspra for each horse, during the trip as
much as needed, and the rest in Skopje immediately after
all is unloaded. The said Shemuel equally promises to pay
to the above mentioned Ivan, as petty merchant, for usual
and customary gifts three aspra daily, with the remark,

Shemuel Richoma, Jew, who now has here in Ragusa

several bales of textiles and other things, and women,
which have to be taken to Skopje, takes on voluntarily and
contracts this transport with Ivan Mirosali from
Maleevac, petty merchant and coachman, who is present
and agrees, and has agreed with him in this way, namely:
Since the aforementioned Ivan has promised to come to
Ragusa on the 21st of this month with 46 good and fitting
horses, namely five with saddles, for people who will ride,
and the remaining 41 with packsaddles for the bales that
are to be loaded. And on the following day, the 22nd of this
month, he will take and load the bales and women of the
mentioned Shemuel, loading two women on each horse,
and equally two bales per horse, only if the bales will not
14

since Jews according to their custom honor the Sabbath,

that on each Sabbath the said Ivan must stop with the horses
at the place which he reaches on Friday afternoon, and for
this day of rest the said Ivan will have from the said
Shemuel a gratuity of two aspra for each horse, on
condition that on the whole trip, except for the Sabbath, the
said Ivan is obliged to stop and rest with the whole caravan
for one day for the needs and at the will of the said
Shemuel, without any payment, for this is according to the
contract.

process. It is also significant that somebody had

destroyed three pages of the record of the court
inquiry against the physician Moshe, cut with a sharp
knife at the binding itself.
Two very well known Dubrovnik rabbis have left
an authentic picture of their time in their writings.
Rabbi Shelomo Ohev (according to Tadi: Salumun
Oef) as a consul of the Levantine Jews (according to
documents of the Dubrovnik archive), together with
four colleagues on January 25, 1577 defended the
interests of some Levantine Jews.6

The Trial of 1502

One of the big affairs happened in the night
between August 5 and 6, 1502, when in Ploe, on the
way that led to Turkey through the village of Brgat, an
old Christian woman was murdered who lived there
with her ten year old grandson. On the following day
ten Jews were arrested, suspected of having
committed that crime.Without concrete proof,
testimonies were collected from some persons who
claimed to have seen Jews on that night near the house
of the old woman. In line with the police regulations
of that time, the accused were tortured according to
the notorious method: their hands were bound behind
their back, they were lifted up by pulling a rope and
then suddenly lowered to the ground. There were
other methods; during that time two confessed that
they had been accomplices in the murder - with the
aim to take blood from the old woman and extract her
heart for Jewish rituals. In order to avoid further
torture, the prisoners confessed that they had in fact
committed this murder and pointed to a few more
Jews as accomplices who were at once arrested.
Among them was the highly respected physician,
Moshe son of Marcilius from Bari, who had for seven
years conducted a medical practice to the general
satisfaction of all the inhabitants, and for some time
was also the official physician of Bari.. Some eminent
Turks in nighbouring Bosnia were among his
patients.4
Not all those arrested broke down during
interrogation but the confession of one was enough to
seal the fate of the others. Ten Jews accused of ritual
murder were sentenced to death. Four were publicly
burnt at the stake in the central square in Ploe in
front of St. Anton's church, together with the corpse of
the physician Moshe who had been strangled in prison
the day before. They did this out of fear that the
Turks would ask for him and free him. Two of the
accused died in the interrogating torture and they were
thrown into the sea outside Lokrum. Three were lucky
only to be expelled from the town.
We found no trace of this event in Hebrew sources,
nor in the Dubrovnik archive. Among the records of
three state councils and of the government meetings,
always full of detail, there is not one word about this

In the fifteen-sixties a Jew named Shneur

Benvenisti was arrested in Ragusa and sentenced to
death by hanging. There are no details left why he got
such a severe penalty, but before the execution
Benvenisti was called to court by the authorities and
ordered to write a last will; they dictated to him what
to write, certainly not out of his free will, and without
any Jews as witness, only in the presence of the court
clerk and the investigator - torturer. The problem was
whether this last will was valid and the question was
sent to the well-known Rabbi Shemuel de Medina in
Salonica, who decided against the legality of this and
similar documents. However de Medina did not stop
there, but expressed himself very sternly in his
reasoning on the administration of justice in Ragusa,
where there was no law, and right did not rule but
banditism, that there was nothing stable there, not
even the ruler, but every month a new one was
appointed He mentions that Jews had settled there
only recently, that they were very few in numberand
were not permanent inhabitants of the town.7
That same Rabbi De Medina discussed several
questions sent in connection with commercial
transactions between Venice and Ancona and towns in
Albania and Macedonia. Sometimes only some
insignificant detail is mentioned, and sometimes there
are names, such as Shemuel Ergas (with Tadi 16
times) - Hoshen Mishpat, question 377. The minutes
were written in Ragusa on Wednesday, 13th of Shvat
5336 (1576), and were signed by the witnesses
Yitzhak Binjamil and Jehuda ben Altabib.8
There is testimony from 1597 from which it can be
seen that on Thursday, Adar beth 25, 5357 in the court
at Monastir (Bitola, Macedonia), in front of three
judges David Trevis gave his evidence under oath
about nine Jews who drowned in the Adriatic, sailing
from Ragusa to their homes in Monastir. David Trevis
stated that he was at that time in the temple in Ragusa,
and that the haham, the respected Rabbi Shelomo
Ohev, his name be blessed, ordered the hazan (cantor)
to say the 'kadish' ,a prayer for those persons who had
suffered the shipwreck and drowned in the sea, in the
'infinite water'. However the chazzan did not know the
15

shame; they asked her why she had done it and cursed
her to her face, and she kept silent. Among others a
certain non-Jew arrived and suggested that perhaps
the Jews had talked the woman into killing the girl in
order to use her blood for the festival. These words
were fixed in her mind 'like a snake's venom' and
aroused a hope that she could save herself.

name of those drowned, so Rabbi Ohev asked Trevis

to give the names to the hazan. Trevis knew those
people because they were his fellow townspeople with
whom he had arrived in Ragusa, but - fortunately for
him - he decided not to return with the group, and so
he could give their names. Rabbi Ohev later sent a
letter to Monastir with details of their death, so that
their wives, hitherto considered deserted wives
(agunot) cold be declared widows and could remarry.9

The Process of Yitzhak Yeshurun in

1622
Rabbi Shelomo Ohev wrote the book 'Shemen
haTov' (The Good Oil) that was bound together with
the book 'Zekan Aharon' by his son-in-law, Rabbi
Aharon ben David Hacohen-Lunelli, printed in Venice
by David ben Aharon Hacohen-Lunelli who was
Rabbi Ohev's grandson and the son of Rabbi Aharon
Hacohen-Lunelli. The book contains a special
appendix under the title 'Maasse Yeshurun' (The
Yeshurun Case) as well as poems dedicated to
Yeshurun. On pages 147a, 147b and 148a Rabbi
Aharon describes the sufferings of the Jew Yitzhak
Yeshurun, who had been accused and sentenced for a
'ritual murder' he had not committed.
On Saturday, the first day of the Succoth festival in
5383 (September 16, 1622) the news spread in town: a
girl, daughter of Giulio Longo, a local merchant who
lived in the suburbs, had disappeared. A search was
organized, but she was not found. Towards evening a
false rumour spread that she had been found. Among
the people who assembled on the spot there was a
Jew, whom a Christian from Ragusa addressed and
told him that it was lucky that the matter had ended in
this way, for otherwise, had the girl not been found,
the Jews would have been suspected and brought to
court under the accusation that they had killed her for
the festival rituals. The Jew only made fun of this.
A day passed. Night had fallen and it was
established that the rumours had been false and the
girl had not been found. At night her father went
outside the town with the guards to look for her, all
over the surroundings, in the gardens and on the roads
outside the ramparts where the girl used to walk. They
went from house to house until they came to the house
of (Maria Matkova), 'a mean and wicked non-Jew'.
They conducted a search there and found the corpse of
the murdered girl under her bed, wrapped in her torn
dresses.
The woman was arrested at once and chained, and
the girl's father tried to kill her, but the guards did not
permit him to do so. It was decided to keep her under
house arrest until dawn, for the town gates were
closed until then.
Many friends and neighbours and men came with
their wives to see her in her house and to hear her

'Maasse Yeshurun' (The Yeshurun Case)

The next day, when she arrived at court, this
damned woman saw that there was no hope for her
and remembered what that man had suggested, that
this was a Jewish custom for their festivals, and so she
told the judges: "I did this because a Jew forced me to
do it. This woman actually knew only one Jew
named Yitzhak Yeshurun with whom she had pawned
some clothing for 50 dinar, worth one real (the dinar
was a small silver coin, of different size at different
times, but with the same appearance; on one side the
image of Christ, and on he other that of Saint Blaise
(the patron saint of the city of Dubrovnik, where he is
known as Sveti Vlaho). She declared that this Jew
had ordered her to kill the girl. The court immediately
ordered the closing of the gate of the Jewish
courtyard, called ghetto (Giuderia), and to bring
YitzhakYeshurun to court to confront that damned
woman. When they brought him in and he heard what
she claimed, a great fear came over him because of
this false accusation and he said that had never done it
and that her accusation was false, but the judges sent
them to two separate jails.
16

silent. Yeshurun complained, wept and screamed that

he was innocent, but they did not believe him. With
enormous strength and with the help of God he
withstood the torture this time too. The judges were
amazed that such endurance was hidden in him and
understood that this was 'not from this world', so they
did not want to rely on their opinion alone, but turned
to a council of 12 counsellors called Minor Consiglio
(The small council). The counsellors conferred and
decided to torture him for the third time with more
severe tortures than before.
On the twentieth day after his arrest, his torturers
invented a much more severe method of torture in
order to extract a confession from him. They not only
left him suspended by his hands bound behind his
back, but tied each of his feet separately and stretched
each foot to one side, shook him and left him
suspended after they put a beam between his legs so
that he could not put them together; this aggravated
his position of being suspended by his hands, and the
beam was very heavy. The pain was more than
excruciating. They raised and lowered him every now
and then for a whole hour. He only called God and
moaned and wept 'like an ostrich in the desert '.
Yeshurun's torturers heckled him: "Jewish dog!"
and demanded that he confess to have ordered the
woman to kill the girl, and when he again answered
that he was completely innocent and that his torturers
would have to render an accounting to the heavenly
court if he died, they laughed at him.
After one hour they took him down from the rope
and marvelled how a person could endure such torture
and not confess. They then decided to torture the
woman by binding her hands behind her back, but she
continued to claim that Yeshurun had talked her into
the murder.
Fifty days after his arrest (November 5, 1622) they
again suspended him with his hands bound behind
and brought a goat and bound it with its head down
next to Yeshurun. The goat wiggled in all direction
and hit Yeshurun with its horns until it died.
At once they brought a still bigger goat and
suspended it like the fist one. It also tried to escape,
hitting Yeshurun with its horns so terribly that even a
stone or iron would have broken into pieces. He
intended to confess to the crime he had not
committed. He told himself that it was better to die at
once than after severe torture. But miraculously, this
time when they attached the goat to him, it was as if
he had got some unusual strength and resistance and
he almost did not feel pain.
Instead of believing Yeshurun's innocence, who
explained to them that he had endured all tortures
because to him, as to the Biblical Daniel (who was
thrown into a lion's den and by his righteousness
saved his own life and that of his compatriots) the
Almighty had given strength and stood beside him,

'Maasse Yeshurun' (The Yeshurun Case)

Towards evening they brought the Jew before the
judges and hatched a conspiracy to induce him to
confess. At the investigation the Jew was afraid when
he saw that they prepared a trap for him that could
lead to a death sentence; he made a mistake and said
that he had never before seen her, did not know her
and did not understand her language. However,
witnesses were found who confirmed that Yeshurun
knew this woman and that they had sometimes seen
him speaking to her. Yitzhak Yeshurun was arrested
on the spot.
On the third day after his arrest the torture began.
They bound his hands behind his back and suspended
him by them. He was thus suspended for a whole hour
and during that time they raised him by a rope to more
than 20 ells (1 ell = 45 cm) and released the rope so
that he fell suddenly and parts of his body fell apart.
So in that hour they did three times what in their
language was called 'tratti' (jerks). They did all this in
order to force him to confess that he ordered that
woman to commit the crime, but he, by the grace of
God, endured the torture with courage. Then they took
him, tortured, beaten up and crushed, and returned
him to jail. They conferred and decided to continue
the torture and to apply another kind of torture.
On the seventh day after the arrest the torture was
continued. Before they suspended him by his hands
bound behind his back, they shaved his head because
they claimed he was a magician and had therefore
endured the torture the first time and had remained
17

Yeshurun did not fear death although he was five

times submitted to severe tortures, which human
strength cannot by its nature endure - except with the
help of God.
When they saw that Yeshurun did not confess to the
crime even at the price of death through torture, they
tried to provoke a quarrel among the Jews and to find
some reason to arrest another one of them and to
torture him too, so that at least he would confess to
something that he had not done.
The Jewish community in Ragusa was in panic:

the authorities came to the conclusion that an ordinary

person could not endure such tortures without dying,
and even walk as if he were healthy. They concluded
that Yeshurun was a sorcerer and with the help of his
magic did not feel the tortures. That woman,
sentenced to death, constantly claimed that Yeshurun
had induced her to commit the crime.

We were afraid day and night, and always when they

took Yitzhak to be tortured, our hearts were terrified
that, God forbid, he should be induced to confess,
disaster would not befall him alone, but we would all,
God help us, drink the glass of grief. We always found
out when they took him to be tortured and at once all
gathered in the temple in front of God's scrolls and
prayed for his mercy.

What they feared happened. At the end of October

1622 Rabbi Aharon ben David Hacohen was arrested
at the house his parents "on the basis of a letter that
had reached me from abroad from a haham, and they
took this letter that was written in the Holy Language
and ordered the letter to be translated and they found
some dubious passages in it." They took him below
the gallows and questioned him again, expecting to
obtain at least some confession, but he trusted God
and took an oath to do good deeds if he remained
alive. Even though finally nothing was found that
would justify keeping Rabbi Aharon in jail, two more
Jews were arrested, Joseph Abuav and David
Lanciano and thrown into a pit, because a non-Jew
testified that he had seen them in conversation with
Yitzhak Yeshurun on the day that the girl was killed.
Guards patrolled day and night around the Giuderia,
the Jewish ghetto, so that no Jews could leave and
escape. Rabbi Aharon wrote about this:

Gershon Apfel: Yitzhak Yeshurun was arrested.

On the third day after his arrest the torture began
The torturers again gathered for a consultation with
the Great council (Consiglio Maggiore dei Pregati)
where it was decided to get the better of him if his
magic power was in his hair, his clothing or any part
of his body. They ordered him to be shaved over the
whole of his body, from head to foot. They did not
leave one hair. They cut the nails on his hands and
feet with scissors, removed all his clothes and gave
him others. They took him from that jail to another
one. They made him drink herbal preparations that
made him vomit and caused strong diarrhoea, to
empty him from above and from below, and if he
would die, he would die. And not this only, but from
time to time their priests arrived, cursed him and
burned incense in order, as they thought, to thrash out
the magic charm and the devils from him, and they
did not know that God Almighty was with him. And
the little food they gave him - it was all unclean and
unworthy and forbidden by his religion, but they did
not allow Jews to bring him food and drink, fearing
that it was bewitched. And the Lord saw all his
disgrace. And after all the tortures they added another
one, for the fifth time.
On the first day of the festival of Hanukkah he was
again tortured. In he course of an hour and a half they
applied 'tratti' (Tratti di cordo - Jerks of the rope) and
the rulers and all the citizens could not believe that

They allowed no representative or defender among

the non-Jews to defend us as was the custom, although
we shouted and sent letters on this and that. We beg
you to listen to us, to visit us and to mention our claims,
and know that we are truly sincere
We shouted to them and got no answer, and we could
trust nobody except our father in heaven, to whom we
prayed, fasted and wept

On November 29, 1622, Rabbi David HacohenLunelli, father of Rabbi Aharon, the author of the
book Zekan Aharon was also arrested. He was
accused of having tried to send a letter to a friend of
his, an official, in which he asked him to try to halt the
blockade and curfew which was in force day and
night. They were forbidden to converse with any
living soul for fear that they would escape and to
allow the Jews to leave their ghetto in order to engage
18

would put in his mouth, this non-Jew would slowly pour

water from the outside. He had to do so because the
walls were so thick that a human hand could not reach
the inner face of the wall. This man was paid by the
Jewish community, and every one took the obligation,
according to their respective resources, to ensure that
Yitzchak would get meals twice a day, in the morning
and in the evening...

in their trades, for they had no guilt. The guards had

allegedly seen that old Rabbi David handed the letter
to the son of that official so that he would take it to his
father. Rabbi David was accused of wanting to give
the official's son money in order to bribe him, and this
was the reason why they arrested him during the
Hanukkah Festival and sent him to torture.
Old Rabbi David remained in jail for fifteen days
and the Jews could not help him since all were
detained in the ghetto. All they could do was to pray
day and night during those fifteen days, and also
during Hanukkah, asking the Almighty that the old
rabbi should not be tortured like Yeshurun who was as
innocent as Rabbi David.
In the meantime in the prison of Ragusa they did
not know what to do with Yitzhak Yeshurun. Some
demanded that he be beheaded, while others said: no
blood shall be spilled without sufficient witnesses and
proof, but throw him into a deep pit, bury him live.
And indeed he was sentenced to twenty years and it
was ordered that no Jew should approach him, in the
hope that they would find additional excuses and
reasons to punish the other Jews.
In the meantime they ordered that no Jew should
enter town without a special permit from the
authorities, and even then all would vouch for each
other in order to make their life difficult and to hatch
plots against them
They threw Yitzhak Yeshurun into a pit at the
bottom of a cave and closed the entrance with a big
stone wall and bulwark and they did not leave him
more than one opening of about 28 cm by 28 cm so
that they could pass food through it. The pit was very
narrow, less than one meter wide.
The original text continues:

Gershon Apfel: Yeshurun in the bottom of a cave

closed with a big stone
Tadi wrote on page 130 that "the heart of some
Christian was moved by compassion, and he fed him
beef and vegetables" - while from the above text it
can be seen that this Christian was hired and paid by
the Jewish community. In addition, in the original text
it says nowhere that he fed him beef (!!!) but only
vegetables, which Yitzhak ate as cattle grazes
vegetables in the field.
Poor Yitzhak Yeshurun could not help himself, the
pit filled with excrement and urine and stench and his
body collapsed, it was covered with festering wounds
and he was at the limit of life. In this condition, as if
by miracle from the Lord, there came unexpected
help. A tomcat squeezed through the narrow opening,
lay on his hands and warmed Yitzhak and licked his
wounds so that they were cured without medicine.
Within a month he started to feel his hands and his
body again.
In that year, as Rabbi Aharon wrote, voices were
heard in Christian circles against such cruel measures
as were applied to the Jew Yeshurun. These voices
started not because they were against those tortures,
but because they were overcome by fear and panic
because disease started to spread in their town and
there were many fatalities. It was already heard that
this was God's punishment for their behaviour towards
Yeshurun, the innocently condemned Jew. After
almost three years from Yeshurun's 'burial' in the pit,
his application for a pardon was delivered.. It is not

And they left him there and all his bones burst
and all his organs atrophied His hands and arms
atrophied from the strong binding and suspension and
other tortures. His joints dislocated and he lost all
feeling and felt his body as a dead tissue so that he could
not even lift his hands to his mouth. And although we
spoke about him to those competent to let him go until
he recovered a little, for he could not lift his hands to his
mouth and could not relieve himself and that he would
die, and that would be as if they had killed him with
their own hands, nobody listened to us and nobody
wanted to hear us, for it was their intention that he
should die
But the Lord did not allow this and may His name be
blessed Although they had thrown him there,
miraculously, although he did not feel his hands and his
organs had atrophied, we tried as much as we could with
God's help and we hired a non-Jew to bring him food
and water. He did that as follows: He would take a
wooden beam with a little cavity at one end, where he
would put some food and drive it through the hole.
Yitzchak would lick the food like a bull grazes grass in
the field. Through a wooden tube, which Yitzchak
19

written who delivered this petition in Yeshurun's

name, but it contained the following:

possible sorts of goods for import and export and

transit of goods, both from local Jewish merchants
and those who passed through the town, from Turkey
and to Turkey, but in a way that the merchants did not
feel it. And the Jewish merchants of Ragusa acted
thus until one day a local merchant refused to pay tax
on goods from Western Europe and was excluded
from the community. This man went at once to the
authorities and told them all he had against the
community, especially in relation to the gabela. The
authorities immediately punished the community as a
whole and prohibited the collection of gabela, except
if someone decided of his own free will to pay it.

Already for three years I am buried in this solitary

and dark prison full of humidity and water from all
sides, my body is more and more ruined without a bed,
festering wounds spread over my entire body so that I
have almost lost my sight and in addition, worst of all
is the hunger of which I shall die, because the few
remaining Jews in Ragusa are unable to help me

The person who wrote the petition for him knew

exactly that the number of Jews in Ragusa had sharply
fallen in those years. On December 13, 1622 there
were 47 adults who were forced to vouch for Rabbi
David Hacohen-Lunelli, Joseph Abuav and David
Lancin, so that these three could be freed from jail and
those three vouched for all inhabitants of the ghetto
that none of them would leave without a special
permit. In the first months of 1624, petitions were
delivered and approved for the departure from Ragusa
of five families: Uziel, Hacohen, Pernik and two
Lanciano families. 11
The Jews of Ragusa, all as one man, did not rest
regarding Yeshurun. They continually asked the
authorities to remove the man from the pit, to suspend
his further serving of the sentence and grant him
amnesty:

Finally, after two years and eight months in the pit

of horror, the Martyr of Ragusa Yitzhak Yeshurun
was freed from a false blood accusation, on
condition that he leave his town forever immediately
after his liberation:
And they opened the pit at once and destroyed it. And
all we Jews came there to thank the Lord for all the
good deeds he did to his people and especially because
nobody thought that Yeshurun would leave the pit alive.
What astonished us was his physical condition. He was
healthy and a sign of the torture could be seen only on
the small finger of his left hand. And we all rejoiced in
his liberation and we all came to visit him and see him,
and we all were amazed and knew that something like
that could only have happened with God's help

We tried with all our strength, again and again. For a

year and a half, we knocked every day on the doors of
the rulers - from the age of 18 to the oldest ones -and
asked them to agree, all three legislative bodies and
three quarters.11

After his liberation from the pit Yitzhak Yeshurun

left Ragusa for Jerusalem where he died at an
unknown date. Kaznai writes on page 14: "Jesurun
part infatti subito per recarsi a Gerusalemme, dove
anche fin la vita" - but does not indicate the source of
this information.
Along with the ransom of Yeshurun the Jews of
Ragusa achieved another success: the authorities
allowed them to leave the ghetto freely, and they
compared this to the exodus from Egypt.

It can be read between the lines and it was also

spelled out that the Jews of Ragusa paid bribes to all
those people. It was stressed that 'the matter was not
easy, and that 'the water reached to their souls' while
they bribed those people and paid according to their
demands.
In another source, in the responsa of Rabbi Daniel
Ishtrusa 'Magen Giborim', Salonica 1754, question 25,
we found a reflection of the effort to procure the
money for the purchase of Yitzhak Yeshurun:

It is very strange that Jorjo Tadi praises the

attitude of the citizens of Dubrovnik, who had not
exterminated the Jews from their midst or mounted a
pogrom against the Jewish community, as had
happened in those times in similar cases in the West,
where Yeshurun would surely have been killed, and
the majority of Jews would have remained without
their homes, shops, property, and some also without
their lives. Tadi concludes that "looking from this
aspect at the proceedings against Yeshurun shows the
inhabitants of Dubrovnik of that time in a rather
good light

In this small town on the seashore, where there were

few inhabitants, sons of Israel, there occurred a bad and
bitter event, when a Jew was arrested and accused of
ritual murder and anger fell upon the whole community.
They passed through evil and misfortune. And they
spent a lot of money to the extent that they had to pawn
valuables from the Temple in order to save a Jewish
soul and for other expenses. And the Lord helped them
and they went out from darkness to light.

Although they thought to have paid all their debts,

suddenly bills started arriving for the interest. Then
they decided to introduce the gabela, a kind of
internal tax in Jewish communities, a tax on all
20

Notes

from documents from camera della Sommaria, Registri

'Partium', vol. 41, fol. 85.

1 Nachmuli, Hoshen mishpat, question 18.

2 About Jewish physicians in Ragusa see: Tadi, pp. 243271.
3 This contract with Mirosali, in Italian, is preserved in
the Dubrovnik Archive (Diversa Notariae LXXXI, 111)
and published for the first time by Tadi, pp. 47-49.

5 On the alleged ritual murder in 1502. See in detail: Tadi,

pp. 108-118.
6 De Medina, Hoshen Mishpat, question 18 - concerning
the surname Ohev, writes that a certain Joseph Ohev,
merchant from Ancona, testified in Venice on the 12th
Nissan 5329 (1569), but soon afterwards we learn that this
Joseph Ohev was murdered in Ancona and that his widow
lost all their property and fled to the Ottoman Empire Idem, question 380.
7 De Medina, Hoshen Mishpat, question 350.
8 De Medina, Hoshen Mishpat, question 63.
9 Sasson, question 4.
10 See Tadi about the families Abuav (Abuaf/Aboaf),
Lanciano, Pernik, Uziel.
11 Tadi, p. 131, says that the sentence was approved by
the votes of three quarters of the members of the Great
Council, of which all noblemen from the age of 20 were
members.

Much has been written about the proceedings against

Yitzhak Yeshurun and only lately, working on the Hebrew
sources, it crossed my mind to check the credibility of the
translation that is always quoted and to compare it to the
original
And as L. Munster found some disceepancies in the
identity of the physician Moshe from Barletta (see above),
so also in Kaznai's translation several very significant
errors appear which greatly change the sense of the text.
Prof. Jorjo Tadic, who published a book about Jews in
Dubrovnik, writes (pp. 119-134) that the whole chapter
about Yeshurun from the book 'Zekan Aharon' (Aharons
beard) by David ben Aharon Hacohen Lunelli published in
Hebrew in Venice in 1657 was translated into Italian, and
the Dubrovnik historiographer Fra Serafin Crijevi
(Cerva) wrote the same thing in his book Sacra Metropolis
Ragusina, vol. I, pp. 291-301.

Bibliography
(h) = Hebrew
(s/c) = Serbo-Croat

In Tadi, p. 130, we read that "Isaak was thrown into a

deep prison, with a door walled-in with stone and lime.
Only one opening, three hand breadths wide, was left to
let outer air in. The whole room was not longer than
twenty hand breadths..."

De Medina (h) Shemuel de Medina, Responsa, Salonica

1594.
Yaari (h)Abraham Yaari, Travel Literature of Jews
whoImmigrated to Eretz Israel, Tel-Aviv 1946.
Magen (h)Daniel Ishtrusa, Magen Giborim, Salonica 1754.
Mayim(h) Eliahu ben Chaim, Mayim Amukim,
Constantinople 1610.
Mishpatim (h) Shemuel ben Yitzhak Gaon, Mishpatim
Yesharim, Salobniva 1732.
Nachmuli (h)Shemuel Nachmuli, Ashdot HaPisga, Salonica
1790
Ohev (h)Shelomo Ohev, 'Shemen HaTov', Venice 1657
Sasson (h)
Aharon ben Joseph Sasson, Torat Emet, Venice 1626.
Tadi (s/c) Jorjo Tadi, The Jews in Dubrovnik until the
middle of the 17th century, Sarajevo 1937.

According to Tadi, the size of the 'room' (not the pit)

was about 20 spans (pedalj) breadths, meaning 20 x 22,5
cm, i.e. very comfortable 4,5 meters.
'Tefah' or 'tofah' was an old measure of length, and one
'tefah' equals 9,3 cm.
The "three tefahim wide opening", i.e. 3 x 9.3 cm,
which means 28 cm.
On the same page Tadi writes that "the heart of a
Christian was moved by pity. He fed him with beef and
cabbage which he attached to a long stick and put it through
the ventilation hole, where the mouth of the prisoner would
await the food."

Jennie Lebel (1927-2009), Israeli historian born

in Serbia. From the History Of the Jews in
Dubrovnik is a chapter from Not to be
Forgotten (Da se ne zaboravi) translated by Paul
Munch

From the above-quoted examples we come to an obvious

conclusion: Much of historic literature, even of the most
distinguished textbooks, encyclopaedias and lexicons, has
been written with no knowledge of Hebrew texts, which
resulted in a chain of assumptions, transmitted from one
author to the other. The source text has most often not been
checked, and sometimes not even referred to.
4 On the physician Moshe (Moses), son of Marcilius, see:
Tadi, pp. 246-247. Ladislav Munster,
Collection of
the Jewish Historical Museum (JIM) , Belgrade, 1/1971, p.
99,
corrects Tadi and writes that Moshe (Moyses)
Maralio (not Marcillio) was from Barletta, not from Bari;
Moyses Maralio, fisico ebreo de Barlecta. He presents this

Jennie Lebel
21

The Best Holocaust

Novel Ever

they ran for shelter in a nearby shack. They

closed the door and noticed that their pet kitten
had run in after them and was shaking off the
raindrops. Thunder struck.

Franz Werfels classic The Forty Days of

Musa Dagh, about the Armenian
Genocide, gets a new translation

My muscles went into spasms in the

voluptuous experience of digging into soft life,
he wrote later that year, and my ears yearned for
the sharp outcry of a victim. With treacherous
tenderness I finally picked up the kittens almost
weightless body and obscured its eyes with my
thumbs. And I pushed ever deeper until I felt
warm liquid run down my fingers and, with
unprecedented pleasure, uttered small cries
through my clenched teeth. Then I heard
myself, whipped into rage by thunder and
lightning, cry out fearfully, Dear God, protect
me from the Devil, God help us.

By Liel Leibovitz

More, perhaps, than any other writer in recent

memory, God and the Devil seemed to have
jointly guided Franz Werfels life. The former
gave him a keen eye and a tremendous sense of
style, driving his dear friend Kafka, Pragues
other famous native Franz, to state that when he
read Werfels first collection of poems, I was
going off my head with enthusiasm. The latter
cursed him with a sulfurous personality that led
him to betray friends, abandon ideologies,
denounce his Judaism, reject his family, marry
the blatantly anti-Semitic Alma Mahler, seek to
sidle up to the Nazis, and, only when the
jackboots came too close, flee to Hollywood and
write silly screenplays until his early death. But
all of Werfels sad apostasy is dwarfed by his
singular achievement, The Forty Days of Musa
Dagh, a novel about the Armenian holocaust that
Werfel wrote in 1933 and that is available now in
a new English-language translation from the
publishing house of David R. Godine. In nearly
1,000 pages, it tells an adventure story of
Armenian partisans fending off the Turks, but it
also delivers a stunning breadth of Armenian
folklore, history, language, customs, and politics.
The Nazis, freshly in power in Berlin, were quick
to grasp that the book wasnt only a work of
historical fiction about one genocide but also a
clear allegory about the impending murder of the
Jews, which would soon cause Werfel to flee
Europe for America.

Author Franz Werfel, 1920.

(Imagno/Getty Images)
Summers in the Salzkammergut were the
happiest times of the novelist Franz Werfels
young life. In Prague, he and his family were a
minority twice overJews in a Christian town,
Germans amid the Czechs. He remembered the
days of rioting led by the Glovemakers Union
that the local authorities struggled for almost a
week to put down; Franzs father, Rudolf, was the
biggest glovemaker in town. It was all the proof
Werfel, then 7 years old, needed that he didnt
belong.
Things were different in the Salzkammergut
forest, filled with the scent of tree resin and thin
Alpine air, droves of cousins and idle days to fill
with inventions. Franz wrote plays with biblical
themes and titles like Classical Philistines that
were secretly meant to insult his teachers and
rivals at the gymnasium by casting them as
historys goons and boobs. When his ink ran dry,
he convinced his sisters to play cowboys and
Indians, saving for himself the role of the helpless
victim tied to the stake. And then, one afternoon,
when he was 15 years old, it rained.
It was dusk, and Franz and his sister Hanna
were playing outside. When the drizzle turned
into a downpour, and lightning streaked the skies,

Read in chronological order, Franz Werfels

work leads through all the dreams and nightmares
22

that Europe had withstood in the first half of the

20th century. It begins with a collection of
hymns, grandiosely titled The Friend of the
World and containing lines like this one, in his
poem To the Reader: My only wish is to be
related to you, O fellow human being! The
author of these lines was 21, a rotund cafdweller who often entertained the crowds at his
favorite haunt, the Arco, by standing up and
belting out arias by his beloved Verdi.

Alma Mahler changed all that. The famous

composers widow had a brief and stormy affair
with the painter Oskar Kokoschka before
marrying the celebrated Walter Gropius, the
architect who would eventually found the
Bauhaus school. Werfel was introduced to
Mahler, 11 years his senior, by a mutual friend.
The very first time he met her, he serenaded her
with his arias and recited his best poems as her
husband sat by her side. Nor did he care that the
object of his infatuation was openly and vocally
anti-Semitic. Shortly after he had first met her,
Werfel began sending Alma Mahler impassioned
letters, calling her my giver of life and keeper
of my flame.

Young Werfel believed in the world and saw it

as sunny and filled with possibilities. The world,
for the most part, did not feel the same way about
Werfel. His father insisted that literature was no
way for a respectable gentleman to make a living
and dispatched him to Hamburg to work at a
friends import-export business. Werfel pretended
to be mentally challenged, spent his days at the
office doodling and laughing loudly, and was
soon dismissed. He sent his manuscript to the
publisher Axel Juncker, who found it juvenile and
overly bombastic and summarily rejected it; it
took a firm letter from Werfels famous friend
Max Brod to get Juncker to change his mind.

The letters worked. Despite his weight, his

thinning hair, his bulging eyes, despite being
young and loud and Jewishor maybe because
of all these thingsMahler fell deeply in love
with Werfel. Early on in their acquaintance, she
wrote in her diary that had she been two decades
younger, she would have abandoned everything
and followed her Franzl around. He was, she
wrote, the beloved of the gods.

At work on new pieces when World War I

broke out, Werfel enlisted and served mainly as a
telephone operator. Moving around the AustroHungarian empire with his unit, he did his best,
whenever the occasion permitted, to abandon his
barracks and rent a small apartment where he
could write without interruption. Eventually, his
admirers arranged for him to be transferred to the
propaganda ministry, where he would spend the
rest of the war giving patriotic speeches across
the empire. Werfel, however, couldnt help it;
before too long, he joined Martin Bubers secret
pacifist society, re-imagined Euripides The
Trojan Women as a contemporary antiwar play,
and infused his speeches with his socialist
sympathies. Comrades! he cried out at one such
public talk in Switzerland, that which today calls
itself art is just an iridescent blob of fat floating
on top of the capitalist broth. Catching word of
Werfels performances, his commanders were
displeased; he was reprimanded but never
seriously punished. And when the war ended and
the empire crumbled and Vienna was awash with
the eddies of revolutionary politics, Werfel
played along, happy to cast his lot with the
radicals.

Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine.

Tablet
_________________________________________

International Belgrade
Book Fair 2012

Anelka Bogdanov, PR
International Belgrade Book Fair
Telefon: +381 (0)11 26 55 934
Fax: +381 (0)11 26 55 934
Mob: +381 (0)63 365 194
e-mail: knjigepress@sajam.rs
23

3,000 Year-Old Jewelry

Content

Discovered In Megiddo Dig

George Friedman: The Israeli Crisis

Jonathan S. Tobin: Is Bibi Bluffing on
Iran Strike?
Tony Capaccio and Nicole Gaouette:
Israel Would Strik Iran to Gain a Few
Years, Oren Says
David Sugarman: Melville in Jerusalem
David G. Roskies: I. B. Singers Last
Laugh
Wade Fransson: Genocide Revealed
Jennie Lebel: From the History Of the
Jews in Dubrovnik
Liel Leibovitz: The Best Holocaust Novel
Ever

Image Caption: Ancient Ruins At Megiddo, Israel.

Credit: Photos.com

Archaeologists in Israel have discovered a

trove of 3,000-year-old jewelry, including a ring
and earrings, hidden in a ceramic jug near the
ancient city of Megiddo, writes Daniela Berretta
for the Associated Press (AP).
The unearthed jug was discovered at the site
two years ago but was left in a laboratory while
molecular analysis of its contents was performed.
While cleaning, pieces of a gold ring, earrings
and beads, dating to around 1100 B.C., poured
out.
The find offers a rare glimpse into ancient
Canaanite high society, says Israel Finkelstein of
Tel Aviv University, who co-directed the dig.
The fact the jewelry was found inside the jug
suggested the owner hid them there. Finkelstein
said the jewelry likely belonged to a Canaanite
family. We can guess that it was a rich family,
probably belonging to the ruling elite, he said.

Selected and Edited by Ivan L Ninic

Shlomo Hamelech 6/21
42268 Netanya, Israel
Phone: +972 9 882 6114
e-mail: ninic@netvision.net.il

Tel Aviv University declared the find as,

among the most valuable ever found from the
Biblical period, adding one piece in particular, a
gold earring decorated with molded ibexes, or
wild goats, is without parallel. Aren Maeir, an
archaeologist at Bar Ilan University, said because
the raw materials used arent from the area, the
find tells us about international relations and
about technical traditions used at the time.
Megiddo was an important trade center in ancient
times.

Lamed E logo is designed by

Simonida Perica Uth

Source: Red Orbit Staff & Wire Reports

24