February 10 In Jewish History

1258: Mongols overran Baghdad, burning it to the ground and killing 10,000 citizens. This marked the beginning of the Il-khan (Mongol) Dynasty in Persia. The Dynasty lasted until 1335. With the conquest of Baghdad by the grandson of Genghis Khan, the Mongol dynasty replaced the Abbasids. The Mongols were for the most part tolerant of Judaism. An Arab writer reported that on the eve of the Mongolian invasion there were 36,000 Jews living in the city and that they supported 16 Synagogues. Most of the city was destroyed during the siege. It is during this period that Judeo-Persian literature flourished specifically the poetry of Shahin whose most famous work was Sefer Sharh Shain al Hatorah.

1660: Saul Levi Morteira passed away. Born in 1596, he was a Dutch rabbi of Portuguese descent. In a Spanish poem Daniel Levi de Barrios speaks of him as being a native of Germany (“de Alemania natural”). When in 1616 Morteira escorted the body of the physician Elijah Montalto from France to Amsterdam, the Sephardic congregation Bet Ya’a?ob elected him ?akam in succession to Moses ben Aroyo. Morteira was the founder of the congregational school Keter Torah. He taught Talmud and Jewish philosophy to the older students. He had also to preach three times a month.. Among his most distinguished pupils were Baruch Spinoza and Moses Zacuto. Morteira and Isaac da Fonseca Aboab (Manasseh ben Israel was at that time in England) were the members of the bet din which pronounced the decree of excommunication (“?erem”) against Spinoza. Some of Morteira’s pupils published Gibeat Shaul a collection of fifty sermons on the Pentateuch, selected from 500 derashot written by Morteira.

1755: French author and political philosopher Charles Louis De Secondat Montesquieu, simply known as Montesquieu passed away. A product of the Age of Reason, the optimistic Montesquieu’s most famous work is De l’esprit des lois which is known in English as The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748. Montesquieu did not just believe in religious toleration. He believed that the state had a responsibility to see to it that religious groups leave each other in peace. In the Spirit of Laws he writes, “’I cannot help remarking by the way how this nation (the Jews) has been sported with from one age to another: at one time their effects were confiscated when they were will to become Christians; and at another, if they refused to become Christians they were ordered to be burn.’” He described the Jews as a “’a mother that brought forth two daughters who have stabbed herewith a thousand wounds.’” As befitted his optimistic views, Montesquieu believed “’the Jews are at present safe; superstition will return no more, and they will no longer be exterminated on conscientious principles.’” Unfortunately, History would prove him wrong.

1779: Jews were granted right of residence in Stuttgart, Germany(As bad as all the bad things that happened to the Jewish people were, one often considers some of the good things also bad – Anon). The Jewish experience in the Germanic states was a mixed bag. Emancipation and anti-Semitism co-existed in an uneasy alliance that produced great culture but ended in the ashes of the Shoah.

1795: Birthdate of Dutch born French painter Ary Scheffer. Scheffer was not Jewish but one of his famous paintings “Ruth & Naomi” is based on the Book of Ruth.

1824: Simon Bolivar named dictator by the Congress of Peru. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Jews of Curacao became involved with Simon Bolivar and his fight for the independence of Venezuela and Colombia from their Spanish colonizers. Two Jewish men from Curacao distinguished themselves in Simon Bolivar’s army, while another supplied moral and material support to Bolivar, as well as refuge for him and his family

1853: Birthdate of Victor Mordechai Goldschmidt, German mineralogist. Goldschmidt made important studies of crystallography. His books The Index of Crystal Forms and The Atlas of Crystal Forms are considered classics of mineralogy.

1874: Baron Mayer Amschelm de Rothschild, late Member of Parliament for Hythe was laid to rest this morning at the Jewish Cemetery at Willesden. According to an article in the Pall Mall Gazette, “the funeral cortege consisted of a hearse drawn by four horses followed by thirty mourning coaches and a large number of private carriages.”

1890: Birthdate of Boris Pasternak, the Russian Nobel Prize-winning novelist and poet, author of Dr. Zhivago.

1896: Herzl reads Auto-Emancipation by Leon Pinsker. Leon Pinsker was a Russian born physician who became a Zionist years before Herzl had his “vision of a Jewish state. ’Auto-Emancipation was a pamphlet Pinsker published in 1882 “in which he urged the Jewish people to strive for independence and national consciousness.”

1897: Freedom of religion granted in Madagascar. This “liberal sounding statement” was actually the product of French imperialism. France conquered the island in 1895 and the Chamber of Deputies voted to annex it in 1896. The extension of Freedom of Religion, including securing the rights of French Jews who might settle there, was part of the law of unintended consequences. Madagascar would enter into Jewish history as the site where the Nazis offered, before World War II to deposit the Jews. This was the so-called Madagascar Plan.

1898: Birthdate of French journalist and author, Joseph Kessel

19??: Birthdate of Elaine Kaufman, founder of the restaurant of the same name, Elaine’s not Kaufman

1901: Birthdate of actress and teacher of thespians, Stella Adler. Adler was part of a major theatrical family. She began her career on the Yiddish stage before making the transition to Broadway. Her fame as an actress was exceeded only by her fame as an inspiration for aspiring actors and actresses at the Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting in New York City. She passed away in 1992 at the age of 91.

1903: Herzl writes to Lord Rothschild, reports about the commission and asks for a meeting in Paris.

1903: Birthdate of Russian born composer, Matvey Isaakovich Blatner.

1911(12th of Shevat, 5671): Madame Fakima Modiano, a prominent philanthropist from Salonica, passed away.

1911: At the request of the Hahambashi, the Turkish Minister of War directs his officers in every Army Corps to provide money for Jewish soldiers to buy Matzah and kosher food during the 8 days of Passover.

1914: The completion of the first English translation of the Bible from the original Hebrew by a body of Jewish scholars representing all shades and schools of Jewish thought and learning was celebrated at a dinner in the great hall of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America tonight. Jacob H. Schiff gave the main address praising the work of the translators.

1914: Birthdate of one of the world’s greatest harmonica players, Baltimore born Lawrence “Larry” Cecil Adler.

1918: Abdul Hamid II Ottoman Sultan passed away. Sultan Abdul-Hamid II’s is famous for his refusal to allow Dr. Theodore Herzl, the founder of Political Zionism, to settle Palestine with Jewish colonists. Herzl offered to buy up and then turn over the Ottoman Debt to the Sultan’s government in return for an Imperial Charter for the Colonization of Palestine by the Jewish people. Herzl probably thought that he was offering the Sultan a bargain, knowing that the Sultan’s dearest wish was to rescue the empire from the indebtedness it had fallen into as a result of easy European loans. While some saw this as a form of anti-Jewish bias others contend that Abdul Hamid’s response was based on internal nationality problems that were already troubling the empire. Hamid had enough problems with indigenous groups without bringing a new nationality problem to his tottering empire.

1923: Texas Tech University was founded as Texas Technological College in Lubbock, Texas. Today, Texas Tech boasts a small, but vibrant Hillel about which you can find out more by seeing http://www.orgs.ttu.edu/hilleljewishsociety/.

1927: Birthdate of Austrian born British novelist, story-writer and memoirist Jakov Lind author of Landscape in Concrete and Ergo.

1928: The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported today that the District Court of Jaffa ruled that “compulsory Sabbath observance is in contradiction with Article XV of the Palestine Mandate that states: “The mandatory shall see that complete freedom of conscience and the free exercise of all forms of worship, subject only to the maintenance of public order and morals are assured to all. No discrimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants of Palestine on the ground of race, religion or language. No person shall be excluded from Palestine on the sole ground of his religious belief.” The District Court was overruling a decision by a Tel Aviv magistrate who had fined a Jewish shopkeeper named Altschuler for violating the city’s ordinance regarding the observance of the Jewish Sabbath.

1929: Birthdate of Jerry Goldsmith the prolific composer who wrote hundreds of film scores and television theme songs, including music for the films Patton and Basic Instinct and television’s The Twilight Zone. He passed away at the age of 75 in 2004.

1936: With the unification of the police and the SS, the Gestapo became the supreme police agency of Nazi Germany. Gestapo Law was enacted in Prussia, giving them exclusive right to make arrests, and entitled to investigate all activities considered hostile to the state. The same law gave the Gestapo complete independence from the courts.

1938: The Palestine Post reported from London that the Colonial Secretary, Mr. Ormsby Gore, made a clear reaffirmation of the British desire to proceed with the partition, as recommended by the Peel Report and the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations. Gore repeated that partition was the best means to establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine.

1938: The Palestine Post reported that a British Army sergeant was killed by an Arab terrorist near Tulkarm.

1938: The Palestine Post reported that he final allocation of 31 seats at the Jerusalem Community Council was: Labor 10, Revisionists four, Hapoel Hamizrahi and Sephardim three each, and the rest were divided between nine smaller parties. The total number of votes cast was 9,368.

1944 (16th of Shevat, 5704): Dr. George Bernhard, exiled editor and political economics of pre-Nazi Germany who had been living in the United States since February, 1941 passed away today at the age of 68 from the effects of pneumonia. A native of Berlin, Bernhard was part of a Jewish family that had lived in Germany for centuries. Bernhard’s enjoyed a successful business career before devoting his time to government service and the publishing industry. “Dr. Bernhard’s Pariser Tageblatt was considered the world’s first anti-Nazi daily” and “was read all over the world by German speaking Nazis” before the Nazis took control of it in 1936. Bernhard stayed one step ahead of the Nazis, publishing in Paris until it fell in 1940 and then moving on to Marseilles before had to leave Vichy France in 1941. Dr. Bernhard who had been a deputy member of the Agency for Palestine as a representative of the German Jews and was a member of the executive committee of the Jewish World Congress was a member of the staff of the Institute of Jewish Affairs from the time he arrived in the United States until his demise.

1944(16th of Shevat, 5704): Yiddish author Israel Joshua Singer brother of two other Yiddish writers, Esther Kreitman and Isaac Bashevis Singer, passed away.

1944: The first ship to break the British blockade of Palestine arrives in Eretz Israel. Worldwide publicity of “illegal” immigration of Jews to Israel was an important factor in England’s ultimate decision to give up the mandate. Most of you know the story the “Exodus” which Leon Uris used as basis for novel of that name that later was a big screen Hollywood event. The story was based on an actual event that took place in 1947. However, it was only one a series of blockade runners seeking to bring Jews from Europe to Palestine despite the White Paper banning immigration and the military might of the British Royal Navy.

1944: Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt was honored today for her work in helping to rehabilitate 40,000 refugee children in Israel. More than 1,000 persons attended the meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel where she received the first citation and cash award given for humanitarian work with children by Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, in memory of the late Henrietta Szold, founder of the organization.

1948: The Central Committee of the Communist Party indicted Dimitri Shostakovich and other leading Soviet composers as “formalists,” enemies of the people. This bogus charge and all that flowed from it caused one critic to describe 1948 as “the worst year of Dmitri Shostakovich’s life;” a year in which the Stalinist government would fire him from two teaching positions, ban his works and take away his livelihood. Shostakovich, who was not Jewish, responded to all of this travail by setting eleven texts from “Jewish Folk Poetry” — a collection of Yiddish folk poems published the year before in Russian translation — for soprano, alto, tenor and piano. This musical work would gain fame as “From Jewish Folk Poetry.” Shostakovich’s orchestration of the cycle would not be heard in public until 1955, two years after Stalin’s death. [Ed. Note: Shostakovich was not Jewish and I do not now why he chose this way of thumbing his nose at Stalin at a time when the Soviet dictator’s anti-Semitism was reaching a new crescendo]

1949: Arthur Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman” opened at Broadway’s Morosco Theater. How Jewish was Arthur Miller? He was Jewish enough that when Marilyn Monroe married him she converted to Judaism.

1950: Birthdate of Mark Spitz, Olympic Games swimming gold medalist

1950(23rd of Shevat, 5710): French anthropologist and sociologist Marcel Mauss passed away. Mauss was the nephew and intellectual heir of Émile Durkheim. His most famous work is The Gift.

1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that a strong explosion shook the Soviet Legation building in Tel Aviv, injuring three members of the staff. Israel expressed “horror and detestation” at this cowardly act. The owner of a Soviet bookshop in Jerusalem was threatened. This violence came as a wave of anti-Semitism swept across the Soviet Union.

1953: The Jerusalem Post reported that The Haifa Technion opened a faculty of agricultural engineering.

1966(20th of Shevat, 5726): Billy Rose composer and band leader passed away. Born William Samuel Rosenberg in New York City, he began his career as a lyricist. Two of his most famous efforts were “Me and My Shadow” and “It’s Only a Paper Moon.”

1977: In the Bronx Yehonathan Netanyou Lane was named in honor of the Bronx-born Israeli soldier who died freeing hostages in Entebbe Raid in 1976. Netanyou was the only Israeli soldier to die in the daring rescue mission. His brother would build a political career based on the fame garnered from being Jonathan’s surviving brother

1978: The Jerusalem Post reported that Prime Minister Menachem Begin rejected the US position that the Jewish settlements in the administered areas are illegal and an obstacle to peace. He said that Israel offered Palestinians a local autonomy which was “more than anything they had been offered by the Arab states which ruled them in the past ¬ Jordan and Egypt.”

1990: The New York Times reported that based on a poll created by Steven M. Cohen, a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York, and by the study’s sponsor, the Israel-Diaspora Institute, a Tel Aviv-based public policy center that deals with relations between Jews in Israel and elsewhere officials of American Jewish organizations, although highly distrustful of the Palestine Liberation Organization, say that Israel should talk to the P.L.O., a national survey has found. In a group of 780 officials in major Jewish community, religious and philanthropic agencies who responded to a questionnaire, 74 percent approved of private discussions between Israeli officials and those P.L.O. officials who are considered ”moderates.” Almost as many, 73 percent, approved of talks with the P.L.O. on the condition that the Palestinian group recognize Israel and renounce terrorism, while talks ”with no preconditions” were endorsed by a plurality of 46 percent, with 42 percent opposed. More than three-quarters of those who responded opposed annexation of the West Bank, expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and increased deportations of Palestinians from there. Three out of four favored ”territorial compromise in the West Bank and Gaza in return for credible guarantees of peace.”

1991: An American official said today that Air Force F-15’s had destroyed a Scud surface-to-surface missile launcher in western Iraq, but it was not the one that lobbed another projectile into Tel Aviv, Israel, wounding 26 people.

1991: During Desert Storm, the Israeli Army allowed some West Bank and Gaza Palestinians to return to their jobs in Israel today for the first time in three weeks.

1995: Eli Rosenbaum has been named director of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), Jo Ann Harris, Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division, announced today. OSI is the unit of the Criminal Division that identifies and takes legal action against those who participated in persecutory activities of the Nazi regime during World War II. “

2001: Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues” was presented to a crowd of 18,000 men and women at Madison Square Garden.

2001(17th of Shevat, 5761): Abraham “Abe” Beame, first Jewish Mayor of New York City passed away.

2002: The New York Times featured reviews of books by Jewish authors and/or of special interest to Jewish readers including the recently published paperback edition of James Atlas’ Bellow: A Biography, the encyclopedic portrait of the writer Saul Bellow in which the author beat all the bushes to trace his personal life and achievements, drawing on more than a decade’s worth of research.

2003(8th of Adar I, 5763): Ron Ziegler, Press Secretary for Richard Nixon during the Watergate Scandal passed away.

2005 (1st of Adar I, 5765): Playwright Arthur Miller passed away.

2006: Sheloshim ends for Judy Rosenstein (nee Levin) of blessed memory.

2007: “Musical Genius” Chen Halevi performs together with five musicians from the Tel Aviv Soloists Ensemble in a Classical-Romantic-Modern program featuring works by Mozart, Dvorak and Paul Ben-Haim at the Israel Conservatory in Tel Aviv.

2008: The Sunday New York Times featured a review of Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again by Jewish author David Frum.

2008: The Sunday New York Times featured a pre-Valentine’s Day interview with Ben Karlin, Wisconsin alum and former member of Hillel based on his book Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me

2008: The Jerusalem Post that “anger boiled over in Sderot on as residents took to the streets, demanding that the government take stronger steps against the rocket fire from Gaza following a Kassam strike that shattered one local family’s Shabbat. Two brothers from Sderot, aged eight and 19, were seriously wounded and two other members of their family were also hospitalized when a rocket fired from northern Gaza – one of almost four dozen launched this weekend – struck two meters from where the boys were standing. Islamic Jihad’s military wing, the Quds Brigades, claimed responsibility for the attack.

2008: At the Tucson Jewish Film Festival in Tucson, AZ a showing of “Samuel Bak:
Painter of Questions,” a documentary that explores Bak’s work and life through the lens of his childhood experiences.

2008: The 12th New York Sephardic Jewish Festival continues with showings of “Sallah Shabati,” “Souvenirs,” “Operation Mural: Casablanca 1960,” “The Jews of Lebanon” (le Petite Histoire des Juifs de Liban) and “My Love (Aviva Ahuvati).”

2009: Adelphi University Cultural Events Lecture Series presents a presentation a lecture entitled “Israel and the United Nations” by Ambassador Danny Carmon, Deputy Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations followed by a Q & A session.

2009: In Little Rock, Arkansas, the Chabad-Lubavitch Center for Jewish Life, under the dynamic leadership of Rabbi Pinchas Ciment, presents a lecture on the power of prayer by Dr. Lisa Aiken, entitled, “Dear G-d, is anyone listening?”

2009: Israelis go to the polls in the only free, democratic elections (in the western sense of that that term) held in that part of the world. Kadima captures 28 seats and Likud captures 27 seats in the inconclusive race to control the 120 seat Israeli Parliament.

2010: Maggie Anton, author of the outstanding trilogy about Rashi’s Daughters, is scheduled to speak at Milken JCC in West Hills, CA.

2010: The 14th New York Sephardic Jewish Film Festival is scheduled to present the New York Premiere of “Azi Ayima” (Come Mother), “a story of transition, cultural crisis, social survival and also lots of faith, optimism, joy and dignity, told for the first time by Moroccan women of the first generation to immigrate to Israel.”