Aug 12 - En route to the ruins of Itil (or Atil), near where the driver I hired and I waited in vain for the car-ferry to cross this branch of the Volga, near Astrakhan
I learned that the ruins of a medieval city thought to be the legendary Itil (or Atil), capital of the Khazar Khaganate, had recently been discovered and excavated in the steppe not far SW of Astrakhan. So I hired a local guy to drive me to the site (handy to modern day 'Samosdelka'), along a route at the rougher end of the dirt-road spectrum. But we waited a little too long for the flat-boat/car-ferry to cross from the other side of this branch of the Volga (while the operator waited for customers from that end), so we gave up and drove back. (That day Itil/Atil joined that list of sights that I was so close to near the end of a trip but just missed for various reasons, with Long Wat in Sarawak, Potosi, Afqa in Lebanon, etc., & the best example, Gondogoro La with K2 in Pakistan. But from the photos I've seen, the site's on the cerebral end of the spectrum as a sight, with little to see [or so far, the dig is ongoing. thecompletepilgrim.com/ruins-atil/ ]. Then too, Samosdelka, the town, might be exotic).
- I didn't know what to expect, but Itil was one of the largest cities in the world at its height (@750 - 969 A.D.), & the capitol of a trading empire and a regional superpower. It's also famous for the conversion of the Khagan and the nobility to Judaism in what's thought to be a political move in part (to help maintain independence from Christian neighbours to the west and northwest and Muslims to the south and east), and for being so multi-confessional, multicultural, and wealthy (!). Excavators have found (amongst other things) turquoise-glazed ceramics from Persia, stone cauldrons from Uzbekistan, amber beads from the Baltic, a dragon-adorned belt-end from China, a copper crucifix, and coins from all over. But it's also quite possible that the site of Itil is submerged under the Caspian or the Volga, and that this is simply the largest Khazarian site found to date.
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/3072167/...
- Much gold in the form of jewelery and coins has been found at the site as well, one of the reasons why archaeologist prof. D. V. Vassilyev is so confident that it was Itil. "For more than 300 yrs., from @ the middle of the 7th cent. the Khazars commanded a vast empire stretching from the north steppes to the Caucasus and Crimea. It stood on the Silk Road, benefiting from extensive trade between east and west, and served as a buffer between Christian lands and the expanding Arab Caliphate to the east and south. It was the final outpost before the steppe, the last orderly state before the danger and lawlessness of the nomad hordes roaming to the east. One road took travelers from Spain and France through Prague and Krakow to Kiev and then Sarkel and on to Itil. It was, by all accounts, a remarkably tolerant society: The judicial system provided for the practices and customs of Jews, Muslims, Christians and pagans in ways that presaged the later millet system of the Ottomans. But in the 10th century, it came to an abrupt end, replaced by a burgeoning Kiev principality and later, the Russian Empire. The causes for the collapse are still unknown. Khazaria had powerful neighbors and its own internal divisions may have weakened the state and the army. @ 965 the ruler of Kievan Rus, Sviotaslav, conquered and destroyed the city of Itil. A visitor wrote soon after that not a raisin or grape were left in the land. Itil had been leveled to the ground."
www.politico.eu/article/on-the-trail-of-europes-last-lost...
- According to Jewish tradition, one Isaak Sangari (700s C.E.) converted the Khazar Khagan to Judaism. His name appears first in Nahmanides’ commentary on the book Kuzari by the great Jewish poet and philosopher Jehuda ha-Levi. The story of the conversion of the Khazar khans in @ the 8th cent. to Judaism was considered legendary until Arabic sources were published in the 1820s providing indisputable proof of the conversion. eajc.org/page34/news23519.html
- A longstanding theory has it that the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe, the Ashkenazim, descend from these legendary Khazars. But if the Khaganate is in the Ashkenazic ancestral mix, DNA studies and the linguistic analysis of Yiddish indicate that it could only be in small measure, if at all. www.livescience.com/40247-ashkenazi-jews-have-european-ge... This shouldn't be surprising as I've read that @ 10% of the population of the Roman empire was Jewish, until the adoption of Christianity as the state religion with the Edict of Thessalonika in 380. "By the time of the destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 A.D., as many as 6 million Jews were living in the Roman Empire, but outside Israel, primarily in Italy and Southern Europe. In contrast, only about 500,000 lived in Judea." (livescience.com) Judaism was perceived to be a sophisticated religion and had many converts in the Hellenistic and Roman periods up until 66 A.D. and the beginning of the first Jewish-Roman war. "Under Julius Caesar, Judaism was officially recognized as a legal religion, a policy followed by the first Roman emperor, Augustus. ... In Rome, Jewish communities enjoyed privileges and thrived economically, becoming a significant part of the Empire's population (perhaps as much as 10 %)." (Wikipedia) [Update: The numbers and percentages might be controversial. I'll review a detailed, recently revised and expanded Wikipedia entry re the origins and history of the Ashkenazim and revise or add to this accordingly sometime. But from a quick glean, it seems that the 6 million number and the 10% estimate might be speculative and off-base. There's evidence from an ambitious British study conducted in 2013 that Ashkenazic matrilineal DNA is almost entirely European, primarily Italian, whereas the Y-chromosome male lineage is 50 to 80% Levantine, although this has been challenged too. If true, I wonder {and I haven't read this anywhere} if the origins of the Ashkenazim in ancient Roman Italy are similar in a way to those of the Metis in Manitoba.: Significant numbers of Jewish men from the Levant relocated to Italy to trade and work, many of whom met local women and settled down far from home. In the case of ancient Rome, many certainly would, in the most vibrant and fascinating city anywhere at that time, and in a lovely neck of the woods too. And 50-80% is a lot on the male line, which contradicts the idea of a large population of converts.]
- (Note: Much of what follows in the next 2 paragraphs is only of interest to close relatives, or to those on my Mom's Dad's side.) I find the history of the diaspora fascinating, moreso than that in the Old Testament, or in the New. It's unusual and mysterious, and I tend to like anything mysterious, one reason I often travel in countries I know less about. How did the practice of Judaism come to spread out all over the world and how did its adherents persist, cope and thrive in the face of so much adversity? There's much to learn from their experience. I also have a bit of a personal interest in the diaspora as I have a great x 3 grandmother, Bessina or Besina Hirsch (Mom's Dad's Mom's Mom's Mom), who I have reason to believe was Jewish, or that her father was, Benjamin Hirsch from Bristol. (I don't know the name of Bessina's mother nor where she hailed from.) My grand-dad and my Mom and relatives on that side of my tree had never heard this so I could be wrong, but Hirsch is a Jewish as well as a German surname, there was a small Jewish community in Bristol in the 1st 1/2 of the 19th cent., and it certainly seems that my great great grandmother Eliza, matriarch to a score of kids who worked as children or as young teens in the textile mills in Manchester, concocted a glamorous, fanciful family and personal history for her mother Bessina (or Besina) and for everyone's entertainment, and which she would do if she was covering something up, or Bessina herself might have done and Eliza might've merely repeated what she'd been told. This family 'history' involves: German tea plantation owners in Ceylon (Bessina's parents); a Colonel in the British army (Benjamin Hirsch allegedly, but which isn't true, I checked the military records at Kew in London in Dec. '99); the amorous pursuit of Bessina by "a young Rajah, son of the dethroned king of Kandi" (Sure. Prince Rajadhi Rajasinghe, the son of Sri Vikrama Rajasinha who ceded his kingdom to the meddlesome Brits with the 'Kandyan Convention' on March 2, 1815, ending what's claimed to be the longest royal dynasty in the history of this planet, dating from 543 B.C., > 2,350 years. That prince was exiled in 1815 with his father and family to Vellore fort in Tamil Nadu. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmb2RVY6fQ0 ); Bessina and her sisters witnessing the removal of much gold from the palace of the king of Kandi to a hiding place in the jungle by hundreds of natives who were never seen again and as such were presumed slain; Bessina's loss of both her parents at sea on their return voyage to England (the father died in a fall from ship's rigging "while viewing with the captain" and the mother promptly "died of a broken heart"); Bessina's loss of her large inheritance when she eloped to marry an older man for love (great x 3 granddad George Shaw, a Protestant immigrant to England from Ireland); Eliza's own psychic abilities and her frequent possession by the spirit of her mother's royal Sinhalese lover (Prince Rajadhi Rajasinghe, presumedly) at seances where she'd draw 'Indian' designs on paper in a trance (I showed one I was given by a cousin, who has a stack of them, to a friend in the '90s, and he asked "Was she in grade 4??"); etc. (Seances and the occult were all the rage with those Victorians, and I'm sure there was a thriving market in sheets of foolscap and coloured pencils with which seance participants would create so much art while possessed by any one of a host of exotic and glamorous foreign ghosts with names that were fun to try to pronounce. It's also just possible that Eliza had a good sense of humour.) Of course if her mother &/or her grandfather was Jewish, she'd be inclined to hide that fact for her own and her family's sake in light of the prevailing anti-semitism, and as life was difficult enough with eking out a living, if you could call it that, in Blake's 'dark satanic mills' in the 1860s, 70, and 80s. www.flickr.com/photos/97924400@N00/2568543121/in/datepost... youtu.be/yG_0lJiIsNo?si=USXvw-EbJkF5JjPN Or her concoctions might have been the result of a deep and profound insecurity; she might have been a pathological liar (which I've read tend to be sociopathic); or her childhood might have been too sad and dark to face up to, as life for any working-class kid in the mills in Salford (an extension today of d/t Manchester) could easily have been in the 1840s and 50s. But then it doesn't seem she was an emotional basket case. And again, she might have been reporting what she had been told by her own mother, which doesn't seem unlikely as she was one of 7 sisters.
- There's one other clue in documents received only 3 or 4 yr.s ago from a cousin that my great great grandmother Eliza made that whole history up. The following follows from the point in one account when Benjamin Hirsch and his wife both die at sea.: "The 3 daughters' money was put under the control of an executor who was an American and adopted the eldest daughter whose money founded a Hirsch colony in America. Nothing seems to be known of the 2nd daughter. The youngest daughter (Bessina) was adopted by a Col. Smith of London. She became engaged to the son of Co. [sic] Smith, but being in love with a Mr. Shaw of Ireland, a man twice her own age, married him." And they both ran off together to settle and live in the slums of Salford, some of the worst slums anywhere in the 1840s, made infamous by Engels. Sure. But the point to address here is the claim that her aunt's money was used to found a Hirsch colony in America. Baron Moritz de Hirsch, one of the wealthiest men in the world in the 1880s, "was moved by the relentless poverty and persecution of Russian Jews" and so "provided emergency funds for Russian Jewish refugees making their way through Europe and sponsored projects to help these refugees become self-sufficient farmers and craftsmen in their new countries" including Argentina, the American west, and the Canadian 'North-west' (latter day Saskatchewan). The disconnect however is that it wasn't until 1891 that Baron de Hirsch would donate "$4 million to establish a fund in New York City that would lead to the creation of JAIAS (the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society). Over the next three decades, JAIAS would loan more than $7 million (of which $6 million was repaid) to some 10,000 Jews for the purchase of farms, equipment, and seed." thebaronhirschcommunity.org/ It was these settlements founded with the assistance of the JAIAS which became known as 'Hirsch colonies'. If the 'eldest daughter' did found a Hirsch colony in America, or if her money was used to found one, she would have been in her 70s at the time or older, and for Eliza to have known about this would mean that she would have maintained some contact, at least indirectly, with her wealthy aunt throughout the decades and into her mid-to-late 40s or 50s. Why would my great grandmother and her siblings have to work in the textile mills as children (!), or at least from their early teens, to help to support their family if they had a great aunt who was so wealthy that she or her money could found or at least help to found a Hirsch colony? The account doesn't indicate this aunt's first name or anything else about her, whether she married, where she was living (London? the home of the alleged Col. Smith), nor how Eliza would've known anything about where or how she was in the 1890s. It seems most likely to me that Eliza heard the name or the term 'Hirsch colony' somewhere and simply wove it into her fanciful account. Nothing else fits. She might well not have known that a 'Hirsch colony' is Jewish. I know she was uneducated. (I was told that one of her daughters, my great great aunt Florrie, a sweet old spinster, was illiterate. My uncle said that he persuaded Florrie to go with him to a movie theatre once in Toronto when he was a boy to see the 1st movie she'd ever seen. That would've been in @ 1940!). If Eliza had known that Hirsch colonies were Jewish it wouldn't mean that her stories about her aunt, etc. are any more likely to be true, but it would be more likely that Bessina &/or her father Benjamin was Jewish as this would show that Eliza had a certain pride in her mother's heritage, enough to include a revealing detail in her tall story. (And who doesn't want to be proud of their heritage? Elvis Presley found subtle ways to express pride in his great great grandmother's Jewish heritage, incl. placing a star of David on his mother's tombstone. [Not so subtle really.] It might be more than coincidental that Eliza had such a penchant for mysticism in light of the popular Victorian association /b/ Judaism and spirituality and ancient arcane knowledge. I write about Gustav Meyrink, the Austrian author of 'The Golem', here.: www.flickr.com/photos/97924400@N00/2221453873/in/photolis... A judeophile and a mystic himself, he was drawn to Judaism at least in part by his belief that practicing Jews had access to ancient spiritual knowledge, an access he might have coveted. In light of this association, Eliza's claim to mystic and psychic abilities might be consistent with a belief that her mother was Jewish or that she descended from Jews.) So that becomes a question; I don't doubt that Eliza fibbed when she said that her aunt's $ was used to found a Hirsch colony, but would she have known what a Hirsch colony was? Although she was uneducated, I think there's a good chance she would have. Another question: if she did learn what a Hirsch colony was, would she have assumed or guessed that her mother &/or her grandfather was of Jewish descent and that Hirsch is an exclusively or primarily Jewish name b/c Baron de Hirsch was Jewish? (It's not. It's a common surname for both Ashkenazic Jews and for Christian and secular Germans of non-Jewish descent.) How well did she know her mother or her grandfather? Eliza was one of 8 kids, with 6 sisters and 1 brother, for what that might be worth. Another hand-written version says less and is a bit contradictory (one of the 2 accounts might've been written by my granddad's 1st cousin Cyril's mother, Lil, or by his first cousin Betty [Bessina]).: "3 daughters' money was put under control of an executor but youngest [Bessina] eloped with Mr. Shaw of Ireland. The executor adopted the eldest and an American adopted the second daughter. Mr. Shaw and youngest daughter had 7 daughters and 1 son. The son went to Canada in the vicinity of Fort Garry (Winnipeg)."
- For real evidence I come back to the name Hirsch itself and that Benjamin was said to be from Bristol. It's of interest that one 'Isaac Collish or Zvi Hirsch Kalisch' was a Minister to the small Bristol Hebrew Congregation from 1765-85, the first in a list provided here.: www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/Community/bri1/Ministers.htm "The earliest known Rabbi was Isaac Collish [aka Zevi Hirsch Kalisch] who lived at Avon st. from 1765 to 1767, Temple st. from 1768 to 1769 and Counterslip from 1770 to 1785 in Temple Parish near the first synagogue. ... His surname seems to be an [anglicization] of Kalisch, derived from the Polish town Kalisz, but which is unlikely to indicate his place of origin." (J. Samuel, 'Jews in Bristol: the history ...') Kalisch had served as "the secretary and valet to the famous 'Rabbi Dr.' de Falk, the Baal-Shem of London" and as "the Hazzan at Bristol." (Barnett, 'The Western Synagogue through Two Centuries') His son-in-law Myer Solomon (@ 1760-1840) founded the St. Alban's Shul, aka the Western or Westminster Synagogue, London, consecrated on Sept. 7, 1826. "As Mohel he visited a number of towns including Bristol to perform circumcisions in the early 19th cent. He was also an amateur Chazzan, a qualified Shochet, a preacher, a Sopher who wrote two Scrolls of the Law, a composer of Hebrew hymns, a Freemason, philanthropist and a minor businessman. He had a bric-a-brac shop at 119, Pall Mall, where his Succah was open to all his congregation. His English funeral oration for George IV in 1830 was famous." Could this 'Isaac [or Zevi or Zvi] Hirsch Kalisch', who lived in Bristol from the 1760s to the 1780s, have been Benjamin's cousin, or an uncle? Cecil Roth writes in 'The Rise of Provincial Jewry' (1950) that "there was already an organized [Jewish] community [in Bristol by 1754]. The name of the Hazan was R. Hirsch, whose office was mentioned when he was admitted to membership of the Great Synagogue in 1762/3. He had been the personal attendant to the 'Baal Shem' of London, and was the progenitor of the Collins (Kalisch) family." I've read that by the 1840s when Eliza was born, the population of Bristol's Jewish community was only @ 300. (Now I'd like to learn more about the provenance of the 18th cent. Jews of Bristol. [For an update on this point, see below.])
- But if Eliza's mother &/or her grandfather was Jewish, how her mother or grandfather left or were separated from the Jewish community in Bristol or her mother's relatives is in question (although she claimed her mother eloped) as, again, that community was only @ 300-strong in the 1840s when Eliza was born in Salford, and I reasonably assume that small communities whose members face discrimination for their membership in that community, will be tight-knit and co-dependent (in a good way). I also note that Salford is far from Bristol, @ 225 km.s north, the length of Wales from north to south for what that's worth. (Btw, Bristol is very much an outlier on my Mom's tree. The 2nd-southernmost location where she had roots on any branch of her tree is Cheshire, bordering Lancashire in the north. My Dad's roots in England however [of those I've identified] are primarily in the south, Devonshire in chief.) But I could be over-thinking things on this point. Attractive young women are seduced by eloquent, older men everywhere, every day (and those Irish can be mellifluous www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYeNU4UqOxc ), and might become pregnant out of wedlock, thus greatly disappointing and often scandalizing their community, however small, and which they'll leave if their new bf will marry and support them. (Bessina Hirsch married George Shaw in the 1830s). Doesn't that sound like a likely scenario, or at least not unlikely, all things considered (particularly if Bessina was related to such a community leader as a rabbi or a chazzan)?
- It's also quite possible that Benjamin Hirsch was a 'Palatine German', a descendant of Protestant German refugees (the claim for German heritage was made for his wife, a "tea plantation heiress"; again Benjamin was alleged to be "a Col. stationed in Ceylon", but wasn't). "Protestant refugees emigrated to Great Britain [in the 16th cent.] to flee the instability caused by the religious wars following the Reformation. By the end of the 17th cent., a significant German community had developed, consisting primarily of businessmen from Hamburg; sugar bakers and other economic migrants." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans_in_the_United_Kingdom And @ 13,000 or more German refugees from the middle Rhine region arrived in the London area in 1709, including a minority from the Palatinate, by whose name the entire group became known ('the Palatines'). (Invading French troops during the current 'War of the Spanish succession' imposed continuous military requisitions, causing great hardship, and the winter of 1708 was particularly cold.) @ 2,800 were sent in 10 ships to New York, and @ 1,200 of those who sailed to Ireland remained there, but thousands more remained in England. I haven't read that there were Palatines or their descendants in Bristol, but I haven't read that there weren't. Here's one I found online who was a Hirsch and who sailed to Virginia. www.wikitree.com/wiki/Hirsch-722 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Palatines#:~:text=The%20term.... According to the 1861 census, taken @ 15 yr.s after Eliza was born, there were 28,644 people in England for whom Germany was their country of origin. In 1850, the Jewish population in England was @ 30-40,000, again with @ 300 in Bristol. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1462169X.2004.1051201...
- It's also possible that the name 'Benjamin Hirsch from Bristol' is another of Eliza's concoctions, although I don't think it could be that simple. Her father George Shaw attended her wedding and her working-class English husband would have learned his mother-in-law's correct surname from his father-in-law I should think if not from his wife (if Bessina wasn't @ for the wedding). Would her Dad have been in on the concoction of a fake surname for his wife? And it's claimed that Eliza had 6 sisters. If so, surely her husband and children would have had some connection and contact with some of them. She must have been constrained at least some as to how much she could make up. Maybe the tall-tale-telling was done by Bessina, and it's a coincidence that Eliza became such an avid medium and occultist (which is consistent with making stuff up generally, at least IMHO). I could speculate 'til the cows come home.
- Btw, I have evidence that my Dad's Mom's Mom might have fudged or covered up that her paternal grandmother was of Irish Catholic heritage, and that her mother's parents were first cousins (although I'm much more certain of the latter item of information than the former. Great x 5 grand-dad's will is in the records which pretty much proves that one of his daughters [great grandma x 4] married the future father of the wife [her daughter, great grandma x 3] of her brother's son [great grand-dad x 3]. As to the Irish-Catholic roots of the one great x 3 grandmother [Dad's Mom's Mom's Dad's Mom] I'm going by some interesting circumstantial evidence.) These things mattered much more to folks back then. But it's much easier to fudge or concoct the story of a grandparent than that of a parent, unless the parent's already done much of the fudging.
- Leaving my family tree (finally), I can say that I'd find the diaspora no less interesting with or w/o a connection, but it might be less mysterious if we consider the relative popularity of and the extent of conversion to Judaism in southern Europe before 66 A.D. We all tend to see things through the lens of the familiar, and project, which I think might have happened twice in the narrative of Jewish history with the paradigm of the exile and removal of the Jewish people (to Babylon or Assyria). There's some debate as to whether the earlier biblical books, incl. Exodus (traditionally ascribed to Moses himself), were (initially) written in or @ the time of Josiah in the late 7th cent. after 630 BC or in the 500s BC. If Exodus was written in the 500s, it was a product of the Babylonian exile, possibly with final revisions in the 4th cent. Persian post-exilic period. The authors were working with an ancient tradition and folk memory of a period when Israelites and Judaeans were ruled by Egyptians but then gained their freedom, and they and their sources imagined that this involved a physical relocation to, and then an escape from, Egypt, just as the Jews had been taken by force to and were liberated and returned from Babylon. The same logic applies if the book had been written in the late 7th cent. as @ 100 yr.s earlier Sargon II and the Assyrians goose-stepped into Israel in the 720s and carried 27,000 Israelites off into captivity and the population of Jerusalem swelled 10-fold with the arrival of brutalized refugees. But Egypt had annexed and occupied the lands of Israel and Judah in the New Kingdom, and so there wasn't a free Israel to escape to in the late 2nd mill. BC. Liberation from the Egyptian yoke involved Egypt's retreat from Israel and the end of the Egyptian occupation. What if the Babylonian (or Assyrian?) lens has been applied to some degree to the extent of the diaspora? (The question could become to what degree.) If the Ashkenazim descend in part from more indigenous types in Italy and southern Europe who converted at a time before 66 A.D. when Jews would proselytize, to a religion which, in contrast to paganism, was more challenging, required self-sacrifice, literacy and learning, chastity outside of marriage, adherence to strict rules, etc., all of which can have an undeniable appeal to people in times of trials and trouble, than the early spread of Judaism in those days could be compared to the later spread of Christianity or of Islam, as a communication of ideas, culture and a way of life as much as, or moreso than, a movement of people and their descendants. (Remember that this period of conversions to Judaism was before the emergence of Christianity and long before that of Islam). Again, this fits with the current estimate that in @ 70 AD there were 12 x as many Jews living outside Israel (primarily in Italy and southern Europe) than in Israel itself. [Update: As stated above, I'll review the latest from Wikipedia, etc. on this point sometime and revise and add to this accordingly, but it appears that the proportion of the Jewish population within the Roman empire and beyond the Levant might be much less than this estimate.]
- If anyone finds anything in this description, including the last paragraph, to be unduly opinionated or irksome, than I hope they'll write a comment and let me know how or why. I like to try to unravel history and figure out how things came about, but I could read this again and realize that I'm off-base or somehow insensitive. But please don't blame me if I come off as irreverent, although I hope not disrespectful, when writing about religion. Only the religious revere religion, and I'm not. My Dad was, very much so, and I know he would have been disgruntled and I would've felt a bit guilty if he'd read the description to this: www.flickr.com/photos/97924400@N00/3555960524/ or this: www.flickr.com/photos/97924400@N00/6974230484/in/photolis... or this: www.flickr.com/photos/97924400@N00/8472834932/in/photolis... or the last 2 comments to this: www.flickr.com/photos/97924400@N00/7092254243/in/photolis... or this: www.flickr.com/photos/97924400@N00/4287843201/in/photostr... which is why I never sent him the link to this stream.
- If I'd had an extra few days, I would have traveled further west to see the Buddhist monasteries at Elista in Kalmykia that I'd just learned about, the westernmost penetration of Buddhism in Eurasia, another surprise.
- This photo and write-up has been translated into German and mysteriously posted on a 'psychic source coupons' site I just found when doing a little genealogy googling (because genealogy = the internet these days). ?? Strange. psychicsourcecoupons.com/de/aug-12-en-route-to-the-ruins-...
- Update re the history of the 18th cent. Jews of Bristol, from www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/Community/bri1/Articles/History.pdf : "In 1656, an Order in Council re-admitted the Jews into England [they'd been expelled in 1290, 366 yr.s earlier, by 'Edward the Hammer'], and it is most probable that many newcomers entered through the port of Bristol. Nothing is known of the state of the congregation in the late 17th and early 18th cent.s. In fact, the only evidence of the community's existence before 1754 is a single reference in an advertisement which mentions the Jews' burying ground behind a house in St. Philip's. Bristol's last manifestation of organized antisemitism occurred in 1754, when the 'Merchant Venturers' [?] sent a protest to Parliament against a proposed bill to allow the naturalization of the Jews. By 1786 the earliest recorded post exile synagogue in Bristol opened in the ancient Weaver's Hall. ... A contemporary description in Matthew's Guide of 1791 describes the place as beautifully furnished. The menorah, which still exists, was selected for special mention. The development of the fashionable suburbs of Clifton and Hotwells encouraged the growth of the congregation during the Regency period, when the leading lights of Bristol Jewry were the Jessel family and the Jacobs, the latter being the makers of the famous Bristol [Blue] glass. [ jewishmuseum.org.uk/50-objects/jm-700/ ] In 1828 the congregation [which was "notorious for its fissiparous tendencies" [Roth]) seems to have split and a 2nd place of worship was opened at the Counterslip. ..."
- I came across a website devoted to the history of English or Bristol's Jewry earlier this year in which a generalization was made in one line as to the provenance of Bristol's 18th cent. Jews; that they hailed from Bavaria or Poland or Bohemia, I forget which. (I'm getting old.) I should've copied and pasted that line into this, but I thought I'd find it again easily enough. Nope. I'll look again sometime, but I found the above info. while looking.
Aug 12 - En route to the ruins of Itil (or Atil), near where the driver I hired and I waited in vain for the car-ferry to cross this branch of the Volga, near Astrakhan
I learned that the ruins of a medieval city thought to be the legendary Itil (or Atil), capital of the Khazar Khaganate, had recently been discovered and excavated in the steppe not far SW of Astrakhan. So I hired a local guy to drive me to the site (handy to modern day 'Samosdelka'), along a route at the rougher end of the dirt-road spectrum. But we waited a little too long for the flat-boat/car-ferry to cross from the other side of this branch of the Volga (while the operator waited for customers from that end), so we gave up and drove back. (That day Itil/Atil joined that list of sights that I was so close to near the end of a trip but just missed for various reasons, with Long Wat in Sarawak, Potosi, Afqa in Lebanon, etc., & the best example, Gondogoro La with K2 in Pakistan. But from the photos I've seen, the site's on the cerebral end of the spectrum as a sight, with little to see [or so far, the dig is ongoing. thecompletepilgrim.com/ruins-atil/ ]. Then too, Samosdelka, the town, might be exotic).
- I didn't know what to expect, but Itil was one of the largest cities in the world at its height (@750 - 969 A.D.), & the capitol of a trading empire and a regional superpower. It's also famous for the conversion of the Khagan and the nobility to Judaism in what's thought to be a political move in part (to help maintain independence from Christian neighbours to the west and northwest and Muslims to the south and east), and for being so multi-confessional, multicultural, and wealthy (!). Excavators have found (amongst other things) turquoise-glazed ceramics from Persia, stone cauldrons from Uzbekistan, amber beads from the Baltic, a dragon-adorned belt-end from China, a copper crucifix, and coins from all over. But it's also quite possible that the site of Itil is submerged under the Caspian or the Volga, and that this is simply the largest Khazarian site found to date.
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/3072167/...
- Much gold in the form of jewelery and coins has been found at the site as well, one of the reasons why archaeologist prof. D. V. Vassilyev is so confident that it was Itil. "For more than 300 yrs., from @ the middle of the 7th cent. the Khazars commanded a vast empire stretching from the north steppes to the Caucasus and Crimea. It stood on the Silk Road, benefiting from extensive trade between east and west, and served as a buffer between Christian lands and the expanding Arab Caliphate to the east and south. It was the final outpost before the steppe, the last orderly state before the danger and lawlessness of the nomad hordes roaming to the east. One road took travelers from Spain and France through Prague and Krakow to Kiev and then Sarkel and on to Itil. It was, by all accounts, a remarkably tolerant society: The judicial system provided for the practices and customs of Jews, Muslims, Christians and pagans in ways that presaged the later millet system of the Ottomans. But in the 10th century, it came to an abrupt end, replaced by a burgeoning Kiev principality and later, the Russian Empire. The causes for the collapse are still unknown. Khazaria had powerful neighbors and its own internal divisions may have weakened the state and the army. @ 965 the ruler of Kievan Rus, Sviotaslav, conquered and destroyed the city of Itil. A visitor wrote soon after that not a raisin or grape were left in the land. Itil had been leveled to the ground."
www.politico.eu/article/on-the-trail-of-europes-last-lost...
- According to Jewish tradition, one Isaak Sangari (700s C.E.) converted the Khazar Khagan to Judaism. His name appears first in Nahmanides’ commentary on the book Kuzari by the great Jewish poet and philosopher Jehuda ha-Levi. The story of the conversion of the Khazar khans in @ the 8th cent. to Judaism was considered legendary until Arabic sources were published in the 1820s providing indisputable proof of the conversion. eajc.org/page34/news23519.html
- A longstanding theory has it that the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe, the Ashkenazim, descend from these legendary Khazars. But if the Khaganate is in the Ashkenazic ancestral mix, DNA studies and the linguistic analysis of Yiddish indicate that it could only be in small measure, if at all. www.livescience.com/40247-ashkenazi-jews-have-european-ge... This shouldn't be surprising as I've read that @ 10% of the population of the Roman empire was Jewish, until the adoption of Christianity as the state religion with the Edict of Thessalonika in 380. "By the time of the destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 A.D., as many as 6 million Jews were living in the Roman Empire, but outside Israel, primarily in Italy and Southern Europe. In contrast, only about 500,000 lived in Judea." (livescience.com) Judaism was perceived to be a sophisticated religion and had many converts in the Hellenistic and Roman periods up until 66 A.D. and the beginning of the first Jewish-Roman war. "Under Julius Caesar, Judaism was officially recognized as a legal religion, a policy followed by the first Roman emperor, Augustus. ... In Rome, Jewish communities enjoyed privileges and thrived economically, becoming a significant part of the Empire's population (perhaps as much as 10 %)." (Wikipedia) [Update: The numbers and percentages might be controversial. I'll review a detailed, recently revised and expanded Wikipedia entry re the origins and history of the Ashkenazim and revise or add to this accordingly sometime. But from a quick glean, it seems that the 6 million number and the 10% estimate might be speculative and off-base. There's evidence from an ambitious British study conducted in 2013 that Ashkenazic matrilineal DNA is almost entirely European, primarily Italian, whereas the Y-chromosome male lineage is 50 to 80% Levantine, although this has been challenged too. If true, I wonder {and I haven't read this anywhere} if the origins of the Ashkenazim in ancient Roman Italy are similar in a way to those of the Metis in Manitoba.: Significant numbers of Jewish men from the Levant relocated to Italy to trade and work, many of whom met local women and settled down far from home. In the case of ancient Rome, many certainly would, in the most vibrant and fascinating city anywhere at that time, and in a lovely neck of the woods too. And 50-80% is a lot on the male line, which contradicts the idea of a large population of converts.]
- (Note: Much of what follows in the next 2 paragraphs is only of interest to close relatives, or to those on my Mom's Dad's side.) I find the history of the diaspora fascinating, moreso than that in the Old Testament, or in the New. It's unusual and mysterious, and I tend to like anything mysterious, one reason I often travel in countries I know less about. How did the practice of Judaism come to spread out all over the world and how did its adherents persist, cope and thrive in the face of so much adversity? There's much to learn from their experience. I also have a bit of a personal interest in the diaspora as I have a great x 3 grandmother, Bessina or Besina Hirsch (Mom's Dad's Mom's Mom's Mom), who I have reason to believe was Jewish, or that her father was, Benjamin Hirsch from Bristol. (I don't know the name of Bessina's mother nor where she hailed from.) My grand-dad and my Mom and relatives on that side of my tree had never heard this so I could be wrong, but Hirsch is a Jewish as well as a German surname, there was a small Jewish community in Bristol in the 1st 1/2 of the 19th cent., and it certainly seems that my great great grandmother Eliza, matriarch to a score of kids who worked as children or as young teens in the textile mills in Manchester, concocted a glamorous, fanciful family and personal history for her mother Bessina (or Besina) and for everyone's entertainment, and which she would do if she was covering something up, or Bessina herself might have done and Eliza might've merely repeated what she'd been told. This family 'history' involves: German tea plantation owners in Ceylon (Bessina's parents); a Colonel in the British army (Benjamin Hirsch allegedly, but which isn't true, I checked the military records at Kew in London in Dec. '99); the amorous pursuit of Bessina by "a young Rajah, son of the dethroned king of Kandi" (Sure. Prince Rajadhi Rajasinghe, the son of Sri Vikrama Rajasinha who ceded his kingdom to the meddlesome Brits with the 'Kandyan Convention' on March 2, 1815, ending what's claimed to be the longest royal dynasty in the history of this planet, dating from 543 B.C., > 2,350 years. That prince was exiled in 1815 with his father and family to Vellore fort in Tamil Nadu. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bmb2RVY6fQ0 ); Bessina and her sisters witnessing the removal of much gold from the palace of the king of Kandi to a hiding place in the jungle by hundreds of natives who were never seen again and as such were presumed slain; Bessina's loss of both her parents at sea on their return voyage to England (the father died in a fall from ship's rigging "while viewing with the captain" and the mother promptly "died of a broken heart"); Bessina's loss of her large inheritance when she eloped to marry an older man for love (great x 3 granddad George Shaw, a Protestant immigrant to England from Ireland); Eliza's own psychic abilities and her frequent possession by the spirit of her mother's royal Sinhalese lover (Prince Rajadhi Rajasinghe, presumedly) at seances where she'd draw 'Indian' designs on paper in a trance (I showed one I was given by a cousin, who has a stack of them, to a friend in the '90s, and he asked "Was she in grade 4??"); etc. (Seances and the occult were all the rage with those Victorians, and I'm sure there was a thriving market in sheets of foolscap and coloured pencils with which seance participants would create so much art while possessed by any one of a host of exotic and glamorous foreign ghosts with names that were fun to try to pronounce. It's also just possible that Eliza had a good sense of humour.) Of course if her mother &/or her grandfather was Jewish, she'd be inclined to hide that fact for her own and her family's sake in light of the prevailing anti-semitism, and as life was difficult enough with eking out a living, if you could call it that, in Blake's 'dark satanic mills' in the 1860s, 70, and 80s. www.flickr.com/photos/97924400@N00/2568543121/in/datepost... youtu.be/yG_0lJiIsNo?si=USXvw-EbJkF5JjPN Or her concoctions might have been the result of a deep and profound insecurity; she might have been a pathological liar (which I've read tend to be sociopathic); or her childhood might have been too sad and dark to face up to, as life for any working-class kid in the mills in Salford (an extension today of d/t Manchester) could easily have been in the 1840s and 50s. But then it doesn't seem she was an emotional basket case. And again, she might have been reporting what she had been told by her own mother, which doesn't seem unlikely as she was one of 7 sisters.
- There's one other clue in documents received only 3 or 4 yr.s ago from a cousin that my great great grandmother Eliza made that whole history up. The following follows from the point in one account when Benjamin Hirsch and his wife both die at sea.: "The 3 daughters' money was put under the control of an executor who was an American and adopted the eldest daughter whose money founded a Hirsch colony in America. Nothing seems to be known of the 2nd daughter. The youngest daughter (Bessina) was adopted by a Col. Smith of London. She became engaged to the son of Co. [sic] Smith, but being in love with a Mr. Shaw of Ireland, a man twice her own age, married him." And they both ran off together to settle and live in the slums of Salford, some of the worst slums anywhere in the 1840s, made infamous by Engels. Sure. But the point to address here is the claim that her aunt's money was used to found a Hirsch colony in America. Baron Moritz de Hirsch, one of the wealthiest men in the world in the 1880s, "was moved by the relentless poverty and persecution of Russian Jews" and so "provided emergency funds for Russian Jewish refugees making their way through Europe and sponsored projects to help these refugees become self-sufficient farmers and craftsmen in their new countries" including Argentina, the American west, and the Canadian 'North-west' (latter day Saskatchewan). The disconnect however is that it wasn't until 1891 that Baron de Hirsch would donate "$4 million to establish a fund in New York City that would lead to the creation of JAIAS (the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society). Over the next three decades, JAIAS would loan more than $7 million (of which $6 million was repaid) to some 10,000 Jews for the purchase of farms, equipment, and seed." thebaronhirschcommunity.org/ It was these settlements founded with the assistance of the JAIAS which became known as 'Hirsch colonies'. If the 'eldest daughter' did found a Hirsch colony in America, or if her money was used to found one, she would have been in her 70s at the time or older, and for Eliza to have known about this would mean that she would have maintained some contact, at least indirectly, with her wealthy aunt throughout the decades and into her mid-to-late 40s or 50s. Why would my great grandmother and her siblings have to work in the textile mills as children (!), or at least from their early teens, to help to support their family if they had a great aunt who was so wealthy that she or her money could found or at least help to found a Hirsch colony? The account doesn't indicate this aunt's first name or anything else about her, whether she married, where she was living (London? the home of the alleged Col. Smith), nor how Eliza would've known anything about where or how she was in the 1890s. It seems most likely to me that Eliza heard the name or the term 'Hirsch colony' somewhere and simply wove it into her fanciful account. Nothing else fits. She might well not have known that a 'Hirsch colony' is Jewish. I know she was uneducated. (I was told that one of her daughters, my great great aunt Florrie, a sweet old spinster, was illiterate. My uncle said that he persuaded Florrie to go with him to a movie theatre once in Toronto when he was a boy to see the 1st movie she'd ever seen. That would've been in @ 1940!). If Eliza had known that Hirsch colonies were Jewish it wouldn't mean that her stories about her aunt, etc. are any more likely to be true, but it would be more likely that Bessina &/or her father Benjamin was Jewish as this would show that Eliza had a certain pride in her mother's heritage, enough to include a revealing detail in her tall story. (And who doesn't want to be proud of their heritage? Elvis Presley found subtle ways to express pride in his great great grandmother's Jewish heritage, incl. placing a star of David on his mother's tombstone. [Not so subtle really.] It might be more than coincidental that Eliza had such a penchant for mysticism in light of the popular Victorian association /b/ Judaism and spirituality and ancient arcane knowledge. I write about Gustav Meyrink, the Austrian author of 'The Golem', here.: www.flickr.com/photos/97924400@N00/2221453873/in/photolis... A judeophile and a mystic himself, he was drawn to Judaism at least in part by his belief that practicing Jews had access to ancient spiritual knowledge, an access he might have coveted. In light of this association, Eliza's claim to mystic and psychic abilities might be consistent with a belief that her mother was Jewish or that she descended from Jews.) So that becomes a question; I don't doubt that Eliza fibbed when she said that her aunt's $ was used to found a Hirsch colony, but would she have known what a Hirsch colony was? Although she was uneducated, I think there's a good chance she would have. Another question: if she did learn what a Hirsch colony was, would she have assumed or guessed that her mother &/or her grandfather was of Jewish descent and that Hirsch is an exclusively or primarily Jewish name b/c Baron de Hirsch was Jewish? (It's not. It's a common surname for both Ashkenazic Jews and for Christian and secular Germans of non-Jewish descent.) How well did she know her mother or her grandfather? Eliza was one of 8 kids, with 6 sisters and 1 brother, for what that might be worth. Another hand-written version says less and is a bit contradictory (one of the 2 accounts might've been written by my granddad's 1st cousin Cyril's mother, Lil, or by his first cousin Betty [Bessina]).: "3 daughters' money was put under control of an executor but youngest [Bessina] eloped with Mr. Shaw of Ireland. The executor adopted the eldest and an American adopted the second daughter. Mr. Shaw and youngest daughter had 7 daughters and 1 son. The son went to Canada in the vicinity of Fort Garry (Winnipeg)."
- For real evidence I come back to the name Hirsch itself and that Benjamin was said to be from Bristol. It's of interest that one 'Isaac Collish or Zvi Hirsch Kalisch' was a Minister to the small Bristol Hebrew Congregation from 1765-85, the first in a list provided here.: www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/Community/bri1/Ministers.htm "The earliest known Rabbi was Isaac Collish [aka Zevi Hirsch Kalisch] who lived at Avon st. from 1765 to 1767, Temple st. from 1768 to 1769 and Counterslip from 1770 to 1785 in Temple Parish near the first synagogue. ... His surname seems to be an [anglicization] of Kalisch, derived from the Polish town Kalisz, but which is unlikely to indicate his place of origin." (J. Samuel, 'Jews in Bristol: the history ...') Kalisch had served as "the secretary and valet to the famous 'Rabbi Dr.' de Falk, the Baal-Shem of London" and as "the Hazzan at Bristol." (Barnett, 'The Western Synagogue through Two Centuries') His son-in-law Myer Solomon (@ 1760-1840) founded the St. Alban's Shul, aka the Western or Westminster Synagogue, London, consecrated on Sept. 7, 1826. "As Mohel he visited a number of towns including Bristol to perform circumcisions in the early 19th cent. He was also an amateur Chazzan, a qualified Shochet, a preacher, a Sopher who wrote two Scrolls of the Law, a composer of Hebrew hymns, a Freemason, philanthropist and a minor businessman. He had a bric-a-brac shop at 119, Pall Mall, where his Succah was open to all his congregation. His English funeral oration for George IV in 1830 was famous." Could this 'Isaac [or Zevi or Zvi] Hirsch Kalisch', who lived in Bristol from the 1760s to the 1780s, have been Benjamin's cousin, or an uncle? Cecil Roth writes in 'The Rise of Provincial Jewry' (1950) that "there was already an organized [Jewish] community [in Bristol by 1754]. The name of the Hazan was R. Hirsch, whose office was mentioned when he was admitted to membership of the Great Synagogue in 1762/3. He had been the personal attendant to the 'Baal Shem' of London, and was the progenitor of the Collins (Kalisch) family." I've read that by the 1840s when Eliza was born, the population of Bristol's Jewish community was only @ 300. (Now I'd like to learn more about the provenance of the 18th cent. Jews of Bristol. [For an update on this point, see below.])
- But if Eliza's mother &/or her grandfather was Jewish, how her mother or grandfather left or were separated from the Jewish community in Bristol or her mother's relatives is in question (although she claimed her mother eloped) as, again, that community was only @ 300-strong in the 1840s when Eliza was born in Salford, and I reasonably assume that small communities whose members face discrimination for their membership in that community, will be tight-knit and co-dependent (in a good way). I also note that Salford is far from Bristol, @ 225 km.s north, the length of Wales from north to south for what that's worth. (Btw, Bristol is very much an outlier on my Mom's tree. The 2nd-southernmost location where she had roots on any branch of her tree is Cheshire, bordering Lancashire in the north. My Dad's roots in England however [of those I've identified] are primarily in the south, Devonshire in chief.) But I could be over-thinking things on this point. Attractive young women are seduced by eloquent, older men everywhere, every day (and those Irish can be mellifluous www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYeNU4UqOxc ), and might become pregnant out of wedlock, thus greatly disappointing and often scandalizing their community, however small, and which they'll leave if their new bf will marry and support them. (Bessina Hirsch married George Shaw in the 1830s). Doesn't that sound like a likely scenario, or at least not unlikely, all things considered (particularly if Bessina was related to such a community leader as a rabbi or a chazzan)?
- It's also quite possible that Benjamin Hirsch was a 'Palatine German', a descendant of Protestant German refugees (the claim for German heritage was made for his wife, a "tea plantation heiress"; again Benjamin was alleged to be "a Col. stationed in Ceylon", but wasn't). "Protestant refugees emigrated to Great Britain [in the 16th cent.] to flee the instability caused by the religious wars following the Reformation. By the end of the 17th cent., a significant German community had developed, consisting primarily of businessmen from Hamburg; sugar bakers and other economic migrants." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans_in_the_United_Kingdom And @ 13,000 or more German refugees from the middle Rhine region arrived in the London area in 1709, including a minority from the Palatinate, by whose name the entire group became known ('the Palatines'). (Invading French troops during the current 'War of the Spanish succession' imposed continuous military requisitions, causing great hardship, and the winter of 1708 was particularly cold.) @ 2,800 were sent in 10 ships to New York, and @ 1,200 of those who sailed to Ireland remained there, but thousands more remained in England. I haven't read that there were Palatines or their descendants in Bristol, but I haven't read that there weren't. Here's one I found online who was a Hirsch and who sailed to Virginia. www.wikitree.com/wiki/Hirsch-722 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Palatines#:~:text=The%20term.... According to the 1861 census, taken @ 15 yr.s after Eliza was born, there were 28,644 people in England for whom Germany was their country of origin. In 1850, the Jewish population in England was @ 30-40,000, again with @ 300 in Bristol. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1462169X.2004.1051201...
- It's also possible that the name 'Benjamin Hirsch from Bristol' is another of Eliza's concoctions, although I don't think it could be that simple. Her father George Shaw attended her wedding and her working-class English husband would have learned his mother-in-law's correct surname from his father-in-law I should think if not from his wife (if Bessina wasn't @ for the wedding). Would her Dad have been in on the concoction of a fake surname for his wife? And it's claimed that Eliza had 6 sisters. If so, surely her husband and children would have had some connection and contact with some of them. She must have been constrained at least some as to how much she could make up. Maybe the tall-tale-telling was done by Bessina, and it's a coincidence that Eliza became such an avid medium and occultist (which is consistent with making stuff up generally, at least IMHO). I could speculate 'til the cows come home.
- Btw, I have evidence that my Dad's Mom's Mom might have fudged or covered up that her paternal grandmother was of Irish Catholic heritage, and that her mother's parents were first cousins (although I'm much more certain of the latter item of information than the former. Great x 5 grand-dad's will is in the records which pretty much proves that one of his daughters [great grandma x 4] married the future father of the wife [her daughter, great grandma x 3] of her brother's son [great grand-dad x 3]. As to the Irish-Catholic roots of the one great x 3 grandmother [Dad's Mom's Mom's Dad's Mom] I'm going by some interesting circumstantial evidence.) These things mattered much more to folks back then. But it's much easier to fudge or concoct the story of a grandparent than that of a parent, unless the parent's already done much of the fudging.
- Leaving my family tree (finally), I can say that I'd find the diaspora no less interesting with or w/o a connection, but it might be less mysterious if we consider the relative popularity of and the extent of conversion to Judaism in southern Europe before 66 A.D. We all tend to see things through the lens of the familiar, and project, which I think might have happened twice in the narrative of Jewish history with the paradigm of the exile and removal of the Jewish people (to Babylon or Assyria). There's some debate as to whether the earlier biblical books, incl. Exodus (traditionally ascribed to Moses himself), were (initially) written in or @ the time of Josiah in the late 7th cent. after 630 BC or in the 500s BC. If Exodus was written in the 500s, it was a product of the Babylonian exile, possibly with final revisions in the 4th cent. Persian post-exilic period. The authors were working with an ancient tradition and folk memory of a period when Israelites and Judaeans were ruled by Egyptians but then gained their freedom, and they and their sources imagined that this involved a physical relocation to, and then an escape from, Egypt, just as the Jews had been taken by force to and were liberated and returned from Babylon. The same logic applies if the book had been written in the late 7th cent. as @ 100 yr.s earlier Sargon II and the Assyrians goose-stepped into Israel in the 720s and carried 27,000 Israelites off into captivity and the population of Jerusalem swelled 10-fold with the arrival of brutalized refugees. But Egypt had annexed and occupied the lands of Israel and Judah in the New Kingdom, and so there wasn't a free Israel to escape to in the late 2nd mill. BC. Liberation from the Egyptian yoke involved Egypt's retreat from Israel and the end of the Egyptian occupation. What if the Babylonian (or Assyrian?) lens has been applied to some degree to the extent of the diaspora? (The question could become to what degree.) If the Ashkenazim descend in part from more indigenous types in Italy and southern Europe who converted at a time before 66 A.D. when Jews would proselytize, to a religion which, in contrast to paganism, was more challenging, required self-sacrifice, literacy and learning, chastity outside of marriage, adherence to strict rules, etc., all of which can have an undeniable appeal to people in times of trials and trouble, than the early spread of Judaism in those days could be compared to the later spread of Christianity or of Islam, as a communication of ideas, culture and a way of life as much as, or moreso than, a movement of people and their descendants. (Remember that this period of conversions to Judaism was before the emergence of Christianity and long before that of Islam). Again, this fits with the current estimate that in @ 70 AD there were 12 x as many Jews living outside Israel (primarily in Italy and southern Europe) than in Israel itself. [Update: As stated above, I'll review the latest from Wikipedia, etc. on this point sometime and revise and add to this accordingly, but it appears that the proportion of the Jewish population within the Roman empire and beyond the Levant might be much less than this estimate.]
- If anyone finds anything in this description, including the last paragraph, to be unduly opinionated or irksome, than I hope they'll write a comment and let me know how or why. I like to try to unravel history and figure out how things came about, but I could read this again and realize that I'm off-base or somehow insensitive. But please don't blame me if I come off as irreverent, although I hope not disrespectful, when writing about religion. Only the religious revere religion, and I'm not. My Dad was, very much so, and I know he would have been disgruntled and I would've felt a bit guilty if he'd read the description to this: www.flickr.com/photos/97924400@N00/3555960524/ or this: www.flickr.com/photos/97924400@N00/6974230484/in/photolis... or this: www.flickr.com/photos/97924400@N00/8472834932/in/photolis... or the last 2 comments to this: www.flickr.com/photos/97924400@N00/7092254243/in/photolis... or this: www.flickr.com/photos/97924400@N00/4287843201/in/photostr... which is why I never sent him the link to this stream.
- If I'd had an extra few days, I would have traveled further west to see the Buddhist monasteries at Elista in Kalmykia that I'd just learned about, the westernmost penetration of Buddhism in Eurasia, another surprise.
- This photo and write-up has been translated into German and mysteriously posted on a 'psychic source coupons' site I just found when doing a little genealogy googling (because genealogy = the internet these days). ?? Strange. psychicsourcecoupons.com/de/aug-12-en-route-to-the-ruins-...
- Update re the history of the 18th cent. Jews of Bristol, from www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/Community/bri1/Articles/History.pdf : "In 1656, an Order in Council re-admitted the Jews into England [they'd been expelled in 1290, 366 yr.s earlier, by 'Edward the Hammer'], and it is most probable that many newcomers entered through the port of Bristol. Nothing is known of the state of the congregation in the late 17th and early 18th cent.s. In fact, the only evidence of the community's existence before 1754 is a single reference in an advertisement which mentions the Jews' burying ground behind a house in St. Philip's. Bristol's last manifestation of organized antisemitism occurred in 1754, when the 'Merchant Venturers' [?] sent a protest to Parliament against a proposed bill to allow the naturalization of the Jews. By 1786 the earliest recorded post exile synagogue in Bristol opened in the ancient Weaver's Hall. ... A contemporary description in Matthew's Guide of 1791 describes the place as beautifully furnished. The menorah, which still exists, was selected for special mention. The development of the fashionable suburbs of Clifton and Hotwells encouraged the growth of the congregation during the Regency period, when the leading lights of Bristol Jewry were the Jessel family and the Jacobs, the latter being the makers of the famous Bristol [Blue] glass. [ jewishmuseum.org.uk/50-objects/jm-700/ ] In 1828 the congregation [which was "notorious for its fissiparous tendencies" [Roth]) seems to have split and a 2nd place of worship was opened at the Counterslip. ..."
- I came across a website devoted to the history of English or Bristol's Jewry earlier this year in which a generalization was made in one line as to the provenance of Bristol's 18th cent. Jews; that they hailed from Bavaria or Poland or Bohemia, I forget which. (I'm getting old.) I should've copied and pasted that line into this, but I thought I'd find it again easily enough. Nope. I'll look again sometime, but I found the above info. while looking.