Читать книгу Winter Is Past - Ruth Morren Axtell - Страница 6

When a cousin of mine began investigating the possibilities of Jewish ancestry in our family’s Colombian/Venezuelan roots, I suddenly became interested in the Sephardic branch of Judaism. Soon I was fascinated with the story of the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews from Spain in 1492.

In Spain, under the Inquisition, thousands of Jews were forced to convert to Catholicism. However, many of them continued to practice their religion clandestinely. When they were expelled from Spain and eventually migrated to Holland, the Middle East, England and the New World, they were more accustomed, perhaps, than Ashkenazi and other non-Sephardic Jews, to leading a “double life” between outward Christianity and inner Judaism.

During the early nineteenth century, when Winter Is Past takes place, Jews living in England were gaining greater acceptance in mainstream Christian society, though the old prejudices were still thriving. I’ve used this background in telling the story of Methodist nurse Althea Breton and her employer, Simon Aguilar, a Jew by birth who has for political reasons become a member of the Church of England. When Althea meets Simon for the first time, she faces her own ugly prejudices against Jews. At first afraid and unsure of what to expect from this “foreign man,” Althea realizes that she has believed half-truths, not God’s true word regarding the Jewish people. Soon, through her faith and newly gained knowledge of Simon and his family, Althea comes to see that Jews, much like Christians, are people of faith, family and love. Sadly, it took somewhat longer for England to officially acknowledge this.

The most famous story of an English converso is Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881). He was a Sephardic Jew whose family migrated to England from Italy. Although his career in Parliament didn’t begin until about a decade after Simon’s, Disraeli, too, received baptism as an adolescent, attended a private school run by an independent minister and was elected to Parliament. Back then, only baptized members of Britain’s official state church could receive higher education, wed legally or hold public office. Luckily, in 1858, a law was passed making it legal for Jews to be admitted as members of Parliament, paving the way for Disraeli as England’s first and only Jewish prime minister.

For further reading on Sephardic Jewry, I highly recommend The Cross and the Pear Tree: A Sephardic Journey by Victor Perera.