Sephardic Jews???

Hi Everyone ... this is so totally off topic of MLU but I'm sure that because so many French roots soldiers were WW2 Canadian soldiers, then this sorta-kinda fits in here?

I received a couple of interesting emails from a stranger today regards a geneology search I'm doing and this guy mentioned that my French roots (Vezina's and varied other spellings) come from "Sephardic Jews" ... of which some studies he's done, even DNA tests, makes him say that probably most, if not all, French Canadian's hail from Sephardic Jews.

I have NEVER heard of "Sephardic Jews" before ... have you?


La Heim (spelling?)

Karmen

[Crewman]

Originally posted by Vets Dottir
I have NEVER heard of "Sephardic Jews" before ... have you?

I have heard but I have heard about various less typical things... such my hobbies...

I knew one Sephardic Jew. He was a student in Poland and he was as black as the blackest Africans.

Moreover I think that majority of the people interested in history and politics have heard about the Sephardic Jews when several years ago Israel organized great action and airlift between Israel and North Africa to rescue and evacuate the Sephardic Jews from that region.

Best regards

C.

Originally posted by Crewman
I have heard but I have heard about various less typical things... such my hobbies...

I knew one Sephardic Jew. He was a student in Poland and he was as black as the blackest Africans.

Moreover I think that majority of the people interested in history and politics have heard about the Sephardic Jews when several years ago Israel organized great action and airlift between Israel and North Africa to rescue and evacuate the Sephardic Jews from that region.

Best regards

C.

Thanks a lot Crewman

I did a little searching and found some amazing sites that I got lost in about Jewish History and of course the Holocaust. Harsh history...

but a tidbit I picked up somewhere on was that apparently "Sephardic Jews" relates back to Portugal and Spain ... I believe the 1700's. I have to research a little more to clarify and/or verify all of this. Maybe I'll discover that it's MY family that has the Holy Grail too?

If this is all true then I shall have to insist on circumcision and bar mittzvahs all round for the family ... males only of course.

At any rate, this has all been interesting ...

Ma

The link below is one of the sites that I got lost in following links today ... many of the photos are not for the weak-stomached.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org

Karmen

Here is another link talking about Sephardic Jews:

http://www.jewfaq.org/ashkseph.htm

Karmen

[Jon Skagfeld]

Originally posted by Vets Dottir
Hi Everyone ... this is so totally off topic of MLU but I'm sure that because so many French roots soldiers were WW2 Canadian soldiers, then this sorta-kinda fits in here?

I received a couple of interesting emails from a stranger today regards a geneology search I'm doing and this guy mentioned that my French roots (Vezina's and varied other spellings) come from "Sephardic Jews" ... of which some studies he's done, even DNA tests, makes him say that probably most, if not all, French Canadian's hail from Sephardic Jews.

I have NEVER heard of "Sephardic Jews" before ... have you?


La Heim (spelling?)

Karmen

IIRC, the Sephardic and Askenazie (sp?) are two pretty well differing sects of Jewry. I believe that the Askenazie are the ones who ally themselves with the Temple on the Mount and share their dogma with the Christians, Muslims and Greek Orthodox.

Edit, edit, edit...I should have read the other link; disregard what is written above.

BTW, it's "L'Chaim".

Originally posted by Jon Skagfeld

Edit, edit, edit...I should have read the other link; disregard what is written above.

BTW, it's "L'Chaim".

Hello Master Skagfeld, and thank you for your reply ... of which I'll disregard ... except for the L'Chaim part

Karmen

I guess I'm a true Heinz 57! Lessee now, what am I:

English
Cree (Saulteaux) / mayhaps Ojibway
French
Scottish (Orkneys)
Icelandic
Irish too (said Mom)
JEWISH of Spain or Portugal now too?

No wonder I keep getting called different things!

Karmen aka everything else

If my memory serves me right there is a Sephardic community in New York State. They were in the news a couple of years ago when they tried to have their town declared a religeous community and therefore not subject to State Taxes. I forget the details of the case but the interesting part of the story is that the entire town is made up of Sephardic Jews.
Sephardic Jews are heavily involved in the diamond trade often becoming easy targets for robbers as they carry thousands of dollars in gems on their person, they are easily identifiable from their mode of dress.

[Tony Smith]

Originally posted by Vets Dottir
I guess I'm a true Heinz 57! Lessee now, what am I:

English
Cree (Saulteaux) / mayhaps Ojibway
French
Scottish (Orkneys)
Icelandic
Irish too (said Mom)
JEWISH of Spain or Portugal now too?

No wonder I keep getting called different things!

Karmen aka everything else

Well, you're certainly not SHORT OF ancestors, just lots of short ancestors!

[John McGillivray]

I guess I'm a true Heinz 57! Lessee now, what am I:

You're pure Canadian!

Originally posted by John McGillivray
You're pure Canadian!

That's what I figured ... PURE CANADIAN ... SPLENDIDLY BLENDED!

[Bob Potter]

Without the benefit of reference (I am on the faculty room computer not in my home library) and with the benefit of the rusty memory, I think the term, "Sephardic Jews," may redate the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of Spain that occurred between about 1100 and 1492. When the Christians finally took Granada, they issued a decree requiring all non-Christians (Moslems and Jews) to either leave, convert, or die. Most left, becoming members of established Jewish communities around Europe. Up a few posts, someone makes reference to Portugal. I thin (emphasis: THINK) that the Azkenazi (again, me too on spelling) were from Portugal.

If my memory works on this when I get home, I'll check into this further.

Bob Potter

Originally posted by Bob Potter
Without the benefit of reference (I am on the faculty room computer not in my home library) and with the benefit of the rusty memory, I think the term, "Sephardic Jews," may redate the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of Spain that occurred between about 1100 and 1492. When the Christians finally took Granada, they issued a decree requiring all non-Christians (Moslems and Jews) to either leave, convert, or die. Most left, becoming members of established Jewish communities around Europe. Up a few posts, someone makes reference to Portugal. I thin (emphasis: THINK) that the Azkenazi (again, me too on spelling) were from Portugal.

If my memory works on this when I get home, I'll check into this further.

Bob Potter

I think that I read that the AZKENAZI (NAZI????? then I'm glad I'm from the Sephardic Jews ) were NOT from Portugal ... I'll have to read through those links again and we can try and get clearer.

L'Chaim and Yah Voll (spelling?) Bob ...

Karmen

Here is the page I read about the differences between the two ... Karmen

Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews

Level: Basic

The pages in this site are written from the Ashkenazic Jewish perspective. Ashkenazic Jews are the Jews of France, Germany, and Eastern Europe. Sephardic Jews are the Jews of Spain, Portugal, North Africa and the Middle East. Sephardic Jews are often subdivided into Sephardim (from Spain and Portugal) and Mizrachim (from the Northern Africa and the Middle East), though there is much overlap between those groups. Until the 1400s, the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa and the Middle East were all controlled by Muslims, who generally allowed Jews to move freely throughout the region. When the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, many of them were absorbed into existing Mizrachi communities in Northern Africa and the Middle East.

The word "Ashkenazic" is derived from the Hebrew word for Germany. The word "Sephardic" is derived from the Hebrew word for Spain. The word "Mizrachi" is derived from the Hebrew word for Eastern.

Most American Jews today are Ashkenazic, descended from Jews who emigrated from Germany and Eastern Europe from the mid 1800s to the early 1900s, although most of the early Jewish settlers of this country were Sephardic. The first Jewish congregation in North America, Shearith Israel, founded in what is now New York in 1684, was Sephardic and is still active. The first Jewish congregation in the city of Philadelphia, Congregation Mikveh Israel, founded in 1740, was also a Sephardic one, and is also still active.

In Israel, a little more than half of all Jews are Mizrachim, descended from Jews who have been in the land since ancient times or who were forced out of Arab countries after Israel was founded. Most of the rest are Ashkenazic, descended from Jews who came to the Holy Land (then controlled by the Ottoman Turks) instead of the United States in the late 1800s, or from Holocaust survivors, or from other immigrants who came at various times. About 1% of the Israeli population are the black Ethiopian Jews who fled during the brutal Ethiopian famine in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The beliefs of Sephardic Judaism are basically in accord with those of Orthodox Judaism, though Sephardic interpretations of halakhah (Jewish Law) are somewhat different than Ashkenazic ones. The best-known of these differences relates to the holiday of Pesach (Passover): Sephardic Jews may eat rice, corn, peanuts and beans during this holiday, while Ashkenazic Jews avoid them. Although some individual Sephardic Jews are less observant than others, and some individuals do not agree with all of the beliefs of traditional Judaism, there is no formal, organized differentiation into movements as there is in Ashkenazic Judaism.

Historically, Sephardic Jews have been more integrated into the local non-Jewish culture than Ashkenazic Jews. In the Christian lands where Ashkenazic Judaism flourished, the tension between Christians and Jews was great, and Jews tended to be isolated from their non-Jewish neighbors, either voluntarily or involuntarily. In the Islamic lands where Sephardic Judaism developed, there was less segregation and oppression. Sephardic Jewish thought and culture was strongly influenced by Arabic and Greek philosophy and science.

Sephardic Jews have a different pronunciation of a few Hebrew vowels and one Hebrew consonant, though most Ashkenazim are adopting Sephardic pronunciation now because it is the pronunciation used in Israel. See Hebrew Alphabet. Sephardic prayer services are somewhat different from Ashkenazic ones, and they use different melodies in their services. Sephardic Jews also have different holiday customs and different traditional foods.

The Yiddish language, which many people think of as the international language of Judaism, is really the language of Ashkenazic Jews. Sephardic Jews have their own international language: Ladino, which was based on Spanish and Hebrew in the same way that Yiddish was based on German and Hebrew.

For more information on Sephardic Jewry, see BSZNet. (this site has moved; I will update the link when I find it again!)

There are some Jews who do not fit into this Ashkenazic/Sephardic distinction. Yemenite Jews, Ethiopian Jews (also known as Beta Israel and sometimes called Falashas), and Oriental Jews also have some distinct customs and traditions. These groups, however, are relatively small and virtually unknown in America. For more information on Ethiopian Jewry, see the Index of Ethiopian Jewry Pages (this site has moved; I will update the link when I find it again!). For more information on Oriental Jewry, see Jewish Asia.

© Copyright 5756-5764 (1995-2004), Tracey R Rich

[Alex Blair (RIP)]

Originally posted by Bob Potter
Without the benefit of reference (I am on the faculty room computer not in my home library) and with the benefit of the rusty memory, I think the term, "Sephardic Jews," may redate the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of Spain that occurred between about 1100 and 1492. When the Christians finally took Granada, they issued a decree requiring all non-Christians (Moslems and Jews) to either leave, convert, or die. Most left, becoming members of established Jewish communities around Europe. Up a few posts, someone makes reference to Portugal. I thin (emphasis: THINK) that the Azkenazi (again, me too on spelling) were from Portugal.

If my memory works on this when I get home, I'll check into this further.

Bob Potter

Sephardic Jews

Where does the name originate from?

A location named "Sepharad" is mentioned in the Tanakh (Bible) in the book of Obadiah, where the prophet refers to the Jerusalemite exiles in Sepharad. There is no scholarly concensus as to the geographical location to which this passage originally referred. Some scholars have suggested locations in Mesopotamia, Sardis in Asia Minor, or Sparta in Greece. From late Roman times, some Jews assumed that Sepharad referred to Spain. In any case, this was but one instance of the transference of biblical terms such as Sepharad, Tzarefat and Ashkenaz from their original Middle-Eastern referents to European locales. By the Middle Ages, Sepharad was the normal term used by Jews to refer to Spain.


Judaism in Spain

According to Sephardic tradition, the first Jews to arrive in Spain were the exiles from Jerusalem to whom Obadiah referred, who came in the sixth pre-Christian century. Many scholars assume Jews settled in Spain in Roman times, but we have little information about Jewish life in Spain until the time of the Visigothic Spanish kingdom, which outlawed Judaism at the end of the seventh century after the kings had become Catholics. Spain was conquered by the Muslims in 711. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, Spanish Judaism flourished under the Muslims, producing poets, scholars, and courtiers of the first order. After the Christian Reconquista gained Toledo in 1085, when the Almoravids came to rule the Islamic side of the frontier, Jewish cultural achievements in Muslim Spain began to decline, disappearing under the Almohades in the mid-twelfth century. But Christian Spain meanwhile developed its remarkable convivencia in which Jews (and Muslims) were involved in cultural, intellectual, financial and even political life all over Christian Spain. By the mid-thirteenth century, the Christians controlled all of the Peninsula except for a small area from Granada to the Mediterranean. In many of the independent Spanish kingdoms, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries still saw striking religious, cultural and literary achievements among the Jews, but Jews also faced increasing religious pressures and occasionally were forced to participate in religious "disputations" with Christians.

Violent anti-Jewish riots broke out in several cities in 1391, causeing many to flee, and leaving thousands of Spanish Jews dead. The fifteenth century was marked by continuing hardships and religious pressure, leading many Jews to convert or to leave Spain. In January, 1492, the Muslims were driven out of their last stronghold, Granada, completing the Reconquista.

In March, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella decreed the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Many Jews converted or left the Iberian peninsula; other Jews went to Portugal, where Judaism could still be practiced freely. But Portugal expelled its Jews in 1497, and the tiny kingdom of Navarre followed suit in 1498.

Judaism could be practiced openly nowhere in the Peninsula. The exact number of Jews who left Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century is debated by scholars, but may be estimated at several hundred thousand, significant enough to enable Sephardim to establish their own congregations in such places as Morocco, Italy, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, the Land of Israel, and elsewhere.



http://www.sephardicstudies.org/intro.html

Hey Alex,

Thanks a lot for this ... it's interesting stuff.

Karmen

[DaveCox]

Just like the best of us - pure mongrel !! LMAO

(hey - just noticed we now have an emoticon for genealogists =
)

[Bob Potter]

You lot are amazing, truly. I pop in here from time to time and seem to confirm my status as village idiot. You can even spell better than my fat fingers can. There is a lot of good info up there, nicely sorted out and carefully explained.

Bob Potter

[cmperry4]

Good stuff above on Sephardim/Ashkenazim - but to come back to Karmen's original point - it would totally freak out the "pure wool" nationalists in La Belle Province if it were proven they were descendants of Jews.

Originally posted by DaveCox
Just like the best of us - pure mongrel !! LMAO

(hey - just noticed we now have an emoticon for genealogists =
)

More like geneology = !

Here are the variations on my FRENCH surname (SEPHARDIC JEWISH?) relatives in different Canadian documents, many of whom were Canadian WW2 Vets (to keep this in context of MLU ) Many documents referring to the same person, each one had a different spelling variation in each different document! Argh ... cross-check cross-check cross-check

Viznaugh
Visnaugh
Vezina
Visnaw
Vesigneault
Visigneault
Visneauve
Visneau
Visneaux
Visina
Visna
Vizna
ARGH

(I just know I'm forgetting some of the spellings I've come across ... and Smith seems so simple except there are so many)

Hmmmm, my Quebec French relations may be upset to know their roots may root back a little farther than pure France and that perhaps their lovely dark and tan-able complexions come from and perhaps they also speak Spanish and Portuguese in their sleep when they have nightmares about bar mitzfahs and other ... rituals ... but their loved ones are too kind to tell them??? Mais oui?

Ma

[Mark W. Tonner]

Originally posted by Vets Dottir
More like geneology =

LOOKY LOOKY, MA IN HER USUAL MODE: ..... etc, etc, etc....

...."a mushy-softy Grandpa", my A*S I am.......

Originally posted by Mark W. Tonner
LOOKY LOOKY, MA IN HER USUAL MODE: ..... etc, etc, etc....

...."a mushy-softy Grandpa", my A*S I am.......

Pickin' on me again? I knew I'd get a reaction from you with this last post ... which is me thinking about 12 different topics at the same time in one wee bittie mind and typing the scatteredness, as usual

THINK PINK nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah

Ma

[cmperry4]

I guess Karmen would rather not get into that whole thing about the Icelanders originally coming from Persia while she sorts out those Sephardic Quebecois.

Mazel Tov

Originally posted by cmperry4
I guess Karmen would rather not get into that whole thing about the Icelanders originally coming from Persia while she sorts out those Sephardic Quebecois.

Mazel Tov

Hmmmm, Persia you say? :idea: THAT just MIGHT explain why part of me has ALWAYS loved Persian carpets!

[cmperry4]

I have a superb Persian carpet, but it can give you a nasty burn


As for the Persian Icelanders - I checked my sources - it's a bit roundabout, how they got there from here and back there again - here are some links:

http://web.missouri.edu/~tm104/who_w...varangians.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varengians

Originally posted by cmperry4
I have a superb Persian carpet, but it can give you a nasty burn

Pardon me? Whatever do you use your carpet for?

As for the Persian Icelanders - I checked my sources - it's a bit roundabout, how they got there from here and back there again - here are some links:

http://web.missouri.edu/~tm104/who_w...varangians.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varengians

I'll check out those links tomorrow ... and thanks

I've always figured that none of us are pure anything ... Adam and Eve had many globe travelling descendents ... funny how every generation tends to rebel against the traditions of their parents generations and start new ... nations and "original" nationalities :

:idea: Hey, do you think that the Cree/Ojibway part of me could get part of my land back that was ripped off if I show my original birth registration that lists my Mom's nationality as a SCOTCH HALFBREED? Rent here is a killer ... and maybe your Persian carpet belonged to my Persian ancestors and you should just give it back to me as a family heirloom!

Now goodnight

[Tony Smith]

Originally posted by Vets Dottir

... and Smith seems so simple except there are so many!

Ma

The Smith clan motto: "Quality AND Quantity"!

[Mark W. Tonner]

Originally posted by Tony Smith
The Smith clan motto: "Quality AND Quantity"!

Tony... : ...Are you saying that MA is a distant relation of the SMITH clan..... ....... you'd better check the roots on that family tree ..... must be a colony of Pixies infecting it......

Little Miss Yappy from down-under......


Good Morning Karmen......

Originally posted by Tony Smith
The Smith clan motto: "Quality AND Quantity"!

Well, the QUANTITY part certainly fits So many Smith's!

I think Adam and Eve's last name must have been SMITH!


Hey, Tim Tam Tony, are you my brother?