Sarah Bernhardt’s presence in Montréal Québec

During the summer 2021 and under the direction of Geneviève De Viveiros, Amanda Lee produced a large portion of this study based on Sarah Bernhardt’s performances in Canada as they occurred between 1800 and 1918 and were studied by John Hare and Ramon Hathron, who included in their records her repertoire and the dates of her performances as well as critical opinions from various print sources. When Montréal constructed its francophone theater and its artistic infrastructure it quickly caught up with anglophone venues. Catholic institutions became increasingly adverse to Bernhardt deemed unworthy to represent the desired link to the French Catholic cultural bridge with the former motherland, in a context that revealed itself anti-women as well as anti-Semitic for this respected actress of Jewish ancestry, yet so famous for her French elocution. Bernhardt’s sulphureous reputation festered when she was reported as accusing people from Québec to be Iroquois or under religious guidance, setting her friend Louis Fréchette apart from the benighted crowd. Conversely, contrary to the increasingly negative reception of Bernhardt’s performances in the early 1900s, and the association of Jewish immigrants with Anglophone communities, Yiddish theatre saw a massive and fragmented growth between 1905-1910. By 1913, there were a total of three permanent professional Yiddish theatre troupes in the city.

DNA and historical evidence indicate many colonial French Canadians were of Sephardic Jewish ancestry

The Spanish Inquisition in 1492 resulted in the deaths of thousands of Spanish Jews and the exile of around 150,000. The Huguenots and Acadians who settled in Colonial French Canada are assumed to be of Christian faith and ancestry. To support this hypothesis, the researcher uses a novel combination of methods drawn from historical records and artifacts, genealogies and DNA testing. In recent years, this combination of methods has led to the discovery that several of the Plymouth Colony settlers, Central Appalachian Colonial settlers, and Roanoke Colony settlers were of Sephardic Jewish origin. Thus, using the new methodology of ancestral DNA tracing, the researcher document that the majority of Huguenot and Acadian colonists in French Canada were of Sephardic Jewish ancestry. They are most likely descended from Sephardic Jews who fled to France from the Iberian Peninsula in the late 1300s and early 1500s. The researcher additionally propose that some members of both groups continued to practice Judaism in the new world, thus becoming secret Jews or crypto-Jews. The researcher also finds evidence of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry in both groups.

Once We Were Slaves

An obsessive genealogist and descendant of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother’s maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses’s ancestors, Once We Were Slaves overturns the reclusive heiress’s assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor, Christian, and enslaved in Barbados. Tracing the siblings’ extraordinary journey throughout the Atlantic World, Leibman examines artifacts they left behind in Barbados, Suriname, London, Philadelphia, and, finally, New York to show how Sarah and Isaac were able to transform themselves and their lives, becoming free, wealthy, Jewish, and—at times—white. While their affluence made them unusual, their story mirrors that of the largely forgotten population of people with mixed African and Jewish ancestry that constituted as much as 10 percent of the Jewish communities in which the siblings lived, and sheds new light on the fluidity of race—as well as on the role of religion in racial shift—in the first half of the nineteenth century.

From the Inquisition Pyre to Insertion into the Church: The Familial and Social Trajectory of Hernando Ortiz, a Jewish Convert in the Spanish Empire in the 16th Century

This is a study of the trajectory of a Jewish converso who had a brilliant career at the University of Mexico in the 16th century: he received degrees from the faculties of arts, theology and law and was a professor for more than 28 years. He gained prestige and earned the respect of his fellow citizens, participated in monarchical politics and was an active member of his society, becoming the elected bishop of Guatemala. However, when he tried to become a judge of the Inquisition, a thorough investigation revealed his Jewish ancestry back in the Iberian Peninsula, causing his career to come to a halt. Further inquiry revealed that his grandmother had been burned by the Inquisition and accused of being a Judaizer around 1481; his nephews and nieces managed, in 1625, to obtain a letter from the Inquisition vouching for the “cleanliness of blood” of the family. Furthermore, the nephews founded an entailed estate in Oaxaca and forbade the heir of the entail to marry into the Jewish community. The university was a factor that facilitated their integration, but the Inquisition reminded them of its limits. The nephews denied their ancestors and became part of the society of New Spain. We have here a well-documented case that represents the possible existence of many others.

Challenging the Fundamental Premise of White Supremacy: DNA Documents the Jewish Origins of the New England Colony

The English Puritans of New England are a foundational element in the current racist ideology of White Supremacy. Depicted in history books as stalwart British Protestants who braved bitter winters and Native predations to establish a “City on the Hill”—a beacon to the world of freedom and liberty—the Puritans became ideals in the American consciousness. But what if this is a misrepresentation, created largely in the mid and late 1800s to serve as a political barrier against Catholic, East European, Jewish, and Asian immigrants who threatened the “American way of life”? The present research uses genealogical DNA data collected from descendants of the New England settlers to demonstrate that these original “Yankees” were of Jewish ancestry. The WASP origination of New England is shown to be a false narrative.

A Comparative Analysis of Berith and the Sacrament of Baptism and How They Contributed to the Inquisition

In 1391 Spanish Jews were forcibly converted to Catholic Christianity, and Portuguese Jews suffered the same fate in 1497. Jewish law rendered involuntary converts as anusim and voluntary converts as meshumadim. Christians without Jewish ancestry called them by various names, New Christians, alboraique, xuetas, and marranos, to name a few. In the fifteenth century, Catholic clerical authorities debated whether the New Christians were indeed Christians, albeit coerced. Canonic law rendered the sacrament of baptism as irrevocable. As such, any belief or practice not in accordance with Catholic doctrine was tantamount to heresy. Consequently, the Inquisition sought to rid the Church of the “Judaizing heresy.” On the one hand, the Sinaitic covenant (berith) considered anusim as Jews, even though there were Christians. This paper analyzes Jewish law and canonic law on respective religious identities. It includes an examination of rabbinic texts and rabbinic responsa, and an examination of the sacrament of Christian baptism. Both religious traditions fought for the souls of the anusim, characterizing what Victor Turner calls liminality and communitas.

Who Is an African Jew?

A new book explores how a community in southern Africa has turned to genetic testing to advance a claim to Jewish ancestry. The reviewer puts the episode in the broader context of diverse Jewish groups across the continent for whom religion is a matter of practice, not just identity.

BORROWINGS AS AN ASPECT OF LINGUACULTURAL TRANSFER IN THE CONTACT LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

The article explores borrowings in terms of linguacultural transfer in the ethnic (Russian) fiction written in the English language, the material being works of Helen Litman, an American writer of Russian-Jewish ancestry. The research significance is related to communicative value of the original culture both for interpretation of the author’s style and purport as well as for developing the theory of Russian English in terms of the World Englishes paradigm. Since the primary message of H. Liman’s writings is the difficulty of integrating into a new reality, reference to the past is embodied in numerous cases of lexical and conceptual borrowings. The author explores such types of loans as exoticisms describing Russian prototypical historical, and everyday life concepts which are absent in American culture; Russian transcribed words including exclamations, slang words, incorporated in the texts; zoonyms as a particular case of conceptual borrowings, and phraseological calques. Numerous examples are conditioned by the absence of Russian culture-specific concepts in American linguacultural continuum. Traces of transferring cultural identity in bilingual writers’ fiction, which are found in this article, make it possible to infer the author’s purport as well as broaden the research field of contact fiction.

The Transnational Roots of Key Figures from the Early Years of the Gate Theatre, Dublin

In Gate Theatre studies, the venue’s original artistic directors, Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Liammóir, are commonly described as ‘Englishmen’. This chapter breaks new ground by exploring the Irish roots of Edwards and mac Liammóir, and the rumours that mac Liammóir had Spanish and Jewish ancestry. ‘The Boys’ were not the only figures associated with the early Gate to have transnational backgrounds. Coralie Carmichael, the theatre’s biggest female star in its early years, was of mixed Moroccan and Scottish ancestry, and Nancy Beckh, who worked as an actor, costume designer and milliner at the Gate between 1932 and 1956, was a Dubliner of half-German descent. Using critical theories around new interculturalism, the chapter suggests that the mixed backgrounds of these artists helped them to create intercultural performances. It further demonstrates that these performances cannot be simply dismissed as those of people condescendingly engaging in cultural imperialism or shallow cosmopolitanism.