Ephraimite Forum-57
Date: 2/May/08 27th Nissan 5768
Contents:
1. History: German Jewish Rabbis were forced to become Assimiliationists
2. Captive Jews:
Was Miguel de Cervantes (author of "Don Quiote") a 'Converso' ?
3. Captive Jews:
Another  Case of  a Jewish Child Forcibly  Adopted

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1. History: German Jewish Rabbis were forced to become Assimiliationists
Brit-Am Comment:
The mother of Yair Davidiy was born in England but her father came from Denmark and her mother from Alsace which is in France but German in culture.
At all events they evidently belonged to the  "German Jews" and members of their family were murdered in the Holocaust.
They were also quite liberal in outlook. This something that German Jews are noted for. The German Jews were highly assimilationist and sometimes considered themselves much more German than Jewish. Reform Judaism started there as did several other similar schools of thought.
The extract below shows us that the assimilationist tendencies of German Jews were not entirely a natural development of German Jewry.  These attitudes were forced upon them by German society and governmental policies.

From: "Schrover, M.L.J.C."

The German Rabbinate Abroad: emigration and exile in the 19th and 20th centuries Oct. 18-20, 2009

Akademie fur Politische Bildung in Tutzing near Munich, Germany

In the 1830s, in wake of the Haskalah, a religious reform movement  emerged within German Jewry that was to pave the way for Judaism to  embrace modernity. In this context a new type of rabbi developed, one  with a distinct modern identity. This new identity reflected changes  within the Jewish world brought about by the so-called emancipation  of the Jews and the Haskalah. It was due to the engagement of  Southern German states in the professional training of the rabbis and  new legislation that required a the emerging rabbinate to attend a  secular university that connected it with the currents of the non- Jewish intellectual sphere.
As a result, this new Jewish elite had to  define itself intellectually and socially as representatives of a  "modern Judaism".

The role of the German rabbi thus began to change. He became a  leadership figure within civil society, and his influence and image  were widely visible outside his community, even conveying the  community's identity. Given the influence of the Christian  environment, the rabbi's professional identity was increasingly  shaped by his duties as pastor and preacher. His extensive secular  knowledge, usually obtained while earning a Ph.D., became a central  feature. His status was closely related to the complete re- organization of rabbinical training between 1854 and 1873. This shift  created new academic centers of Jewish learning that reflected the  zeitgeist and were instrumental in shaping a new generation of the  German rabbinate: the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, and in  Berlin the Hochschule f r die Wissenschaft des Judentums and the  Orthodox Rabbinical Seminary. These schools institutionalized and  professionalized a modern rabbinate that embraced the "spirit of  critical reason."

With this systematic modernization of the German rabbinate, German  rabbis soon became a significant emigrant group. As early as the 19th  century they officiated in Denmark, Sweden, England, the USA, Italy,  Russia, Galicia, and other regions. With their academic background  and new thinking, they often became deeply involved in reshaping  Jewish life in their new homelands, thereby restructuring Judaism and  establishing a lasting intellectual and social relationship with  German Jewry. This relationship often served as a link for the second  large wave of emigration of German rabbis that occurred after 1933.  Especially outside Europe, these refugees from Nazism did not arrive  as strangers, but were often supported by individuals, congregations  or seminaries with strong German-Jewish background connections abroad.
Tobias Grill
University of Munich

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2. Captive Jews: Was Miguel de Cervantes (author of "Don Quiote") a 'Converso' ?
by: Linda Jimenez Glassman
http://www.ejpress.org/article/26561
Extract:

Cervantes also speaks of book burnings.
 "What books were burned by the Inquisition??, asks Haim. "Those with references to Judaism."
 
In addition, in Chapter IX, and speaking in the first person, the author tells of walking through the Alcan, the old Jewish and Arab section of Toledo, where he bought some old papers from a street vendor.
 
Thinking that they were in Arabic, he looked for a translator and was told that they were written in "a better and older" language, a clear reference to Hebrew, says Haim.
 
However, the most important evidence cited by Haim is perhaps the almost literal translation of an entire page of the Talmud.
 
 This occurs when Sancho Panza, as Governor of the Island of Barataria, passes judgment in the case of a dispute between two men over the payment of a debt. The town's people are so impressed with Sancho's wisdom that they hail him as "a new Solomon."

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3. Captive Jews:  Another  Case of  a Jewish Child Forcibly  Adopted
"Argentinian Jewish poet Juan Gelman receives Spanish highest literary prize"
http://www.ejpress.org/article/26496
Extract:

In 1976, during the Argentinian dictatorship, Gelman's son Marcelo and daughter-in-law Maria Claudia were kidnapped and killed. They became two of the countless "desaparecidos", the people who vanished without a trace during the military regime.
 Gelman spent years tracking down a granddaughter born of that marriage and reared in adoption in neighboring Uruguay.
 It is one of Argentina's most famous cases of babies being born to political dissidents, taken from their mothers and given up for adoption.
 Gelman met his granddaughter Macarena for the first time in 2000. When she learned the poet was her grandfather, she changed her last name to Gelman.

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