June 27


"Tilting at Wind-Farms" - a new concept for a new age
1605

This tale should have been told in my novel "A Journey In Time", which attempts to record the entire (known-discoverable) history of this date; but the book was long written by then, and this particular event had never once appeared in any of the almanacs or other sources that I had consulted. Until now.

I found it in Alberto Manguel's absolutely splendid "The Library At Night", in which he undertakes his own somewhat quixotic journey, not so much into the texts as into the business of collecting them, especially in libraries. On page 182 he records the following:

“In Valladolid, readers of Don Quixote can stroll through the house occupied by Miguel de Cervantes from 1602 to 1605, the year in which the first part of the novel was published, and experience a voyeuristic thrill. The house has melodramatic associations: on the night of 27 June 1605, a certain Gaspar de Ezpeleta was walking home when, just outside this house, he was assaulted by a masked man and mortally wounded. Ezpeleta managed to cry out, bringing to his assistance a neighbour who in turn summoned Cervantes, and the two carried the dying man to the address of a well-known lady. The mayor of Valladolid, suspecting Cervantes (or one of his relatives) of being responsible for the attack, ordered that the writer and his family be imprisoned. They were released a few days later, after proving their innocence, but historians have long debated the question of Cervantes’ involvement in the murder.”

I read this story in Toronto, at the end of 2007. It was, as I have noted above, the first I had ever heard of the incident, or the allegation. My own murder story about Cervantes ("The Knight’s Story" in "The Captive Bride", page 15), which chose Cervantes entirely randomly to illustrate a literary conceit, was written in Bristol, in 1992:
The Knight's Story

Because of Don Miguel and his childlike imagination - his tilting at the windmills of literature - all the world today believes that the Quixote was, yes a comic figure, but essentially a gentle, honest, good, well-meaning man, whose failing virtue was simply that he dreamed beyond his stature and aspired to heights of human chivalry that he could not possibly hope to scale. Supreme faults! Laudatory vices! Immaculate failures! Who more noble than the Quixote - unless perhaps Don Miguel himself, for imagining him?
But it was, truly, imagination. I, Don Pedro de la Santa Milanerva, I alone know the truth, I alone knew the real Quixote - the one who raped the twelve year old Dulcinea Castillano and robbed the house of Don Sancho Panza - a bad, a wicked, a truly evil man, no fool either, but a cruel schemer, who drank, and whored, and stole, stole even from the very poorest and from the whores that he himself had bought.
I knew him, and once I might have killed him and been thanked for it, when I came upon him in the barn of my own villa, forcing his will at knife-point on a serving-girl. But I did not kill him. The young Miguel and the by-then middle-aged Quixote were both guests in my house, and I knew the Quixote, but I knew the young Miguel much better, a mere boy still, but with an imagination of extraordinary fecundity, one that bent towards goodness quite as keenly as the Quixote’s bent towards licentiousness. I let the Quixote live, allowed him a further month in my house to seduce the young Miguel’s imagination with half-truths and concocted tales, or tales from which he had stripped the vilest details like a highway corpse.
Would the world really have thanked me for killing him? No, it would have been better to kill the serving-girl, to stop her doing what eventually she did - inform the magistrate of what the Quixote had done to her. So he was condemned to die, and his body ascended into the ephemeral fire, and his soul descended into the eternal one; but by then it no longer mattered. Already my young protégé was practicing his craft, already his imagination had begun to reinvent, already his pen had begun to weave its magical fables; already the authentic Don Quixote was being supplanted by the mythical one. No, I was right not to interfere when I came upon him in that act of sin. Much more than that - for in that moment of not killing an evil man, did I not, myself, give birth to a truly saintly one?

Regrets that I am unable to acknowledge the maker of the splendid cartoon at the top of this page. I found it, by random google-search, here. If you know who the cartoonist was, please contact me and I will happily update this page with a full congratulation. The caption beneath it belongs to me.

You can find Don Quijote, in his Spanish spelling, on a journey through modern America, by clicking here.


And two more dates that didn't make it into "A Journey In Time":


Edward Gibbon completed "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", today in 1787 


Route 66 was decertified, today in 1985. Last kicks here! 
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September 30

Originally the Bevis Mark synagogue, no "s"
1701
History (which is all-too-often incorrect) records that Antonio Fernandez Carvajal was the first Jew to settle in Britain after the expulsion of 1290. He came in 1632, fleeing from the destruction of the community in Rouen, and was technically an illegal immigrant for the next twenty-two years.

 The official date of the return is the Whitehall Conference of 1655, the year in which Manoel Dias Soeiro (Menasseh ben Israel in the history books) came to London from Amsterdam to argue the case for Jewish admission. In fact, the Whitehall Conference was unproductive, and it was only in 1656 that the prohibition of Jews in England was formally repealed. On December 19th of that year, Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of England, approved an agreement between Carvajal and the wardens of St Katherine's Cree Church to lease 5 Cree Church Lane for use as a synagogue, for an initial period of twenty-one years, at £40 per annum; space was provided for a cemetery soon afterwards.

 Unaware that it was Simchat Torah, the joyously partying festival that marks the end of Sukkot with the dancing of the Torah scrolls around the synagogue, Samuel Pepys and his wife attended a service at the Cree Church Lane Synagogue on October 14th 1663, and noted the occasion (somewhat illiterately it must be said) in his diary:
“After dinner my wife and I, by Mr. Rawlinson’s conduct, to the Jewish Synagogue… Their service all in a singing way, and in Hebrew. And anon their Laws that they take out of the press are carried by several men, four or five several burthens in all, and they do relieve one another; and whether it is that every one desires to have the carrying of it, I cannot tell, thus they carried it round about the room while such a service is singing. And in the end they had a prayer for the King, which they pronounced his name in Portugall; but the prayer, like the rest, in Hebrew. But, Lord! to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service… would make a man forswear ever seeing them more and indeed I never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this”.
But I have come to this date to record the dedication of what claims to be the oldest surviving synagogue in Britain, which is not the one on Cree Church Street, but the Bevis Mark synagogue in Heneage Lane (no one is quite sure when Mark became Marks, or why, but no one disputes either that the building was adapted to provide a synagogue, rather than built to be one), just a few minutes walk further north, at the eastern corner of the City of London, just inside the ancient Roman wall, acquired to replace the by-then-inadequate Cree Church Lane synagogue in 1701.

My delvings in those various libraries, book and electronic, that are available, have thrown up a sixty-page pamphlet entitled "The Mitzvot of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews' Congregation, London - a guide for Parnasim", published "for the society of Heshaim at the University Press, Oxford, 1969", which is obviously a reprint of an original work, and the original, dating from the period of the community's revival, confirms its strength from its earliest days.

A.M. Hyamson's "Sephardim of England" (the same Albert Montefiore Hyamson whose scholarship determined that the Mansion House, home of the Lord Mayor of London since its erection three quarters of a century after the Great Fire, was previously the site of another Jewish synagogue, destroyed in the fire), as well as Elkan Nathan Adler's "History of the Jews of London", have provided a list of fascinating names (as opposed to a fascinating list of names, which would not be the same thing) of the key figures of the resettlement.

Portrait of Rabbi Jacob Ben Aaron Sasportas
by Isaac Luttichuys
Jacob ben Aaron Sasportas (1610-1698), a North African Rabbi and passionate opponent of the Shabtai Zvi, who was sacked from his ministry in Tlemçen in 1647, arrived in London in 1664, but fled again the following year because of the plague, thereby avoiding becoming one of the significant number of Jews whose homes were destroyed in the Great Fire of the following year, and finished his life as Rabbi of Amsterdam. Sasportas is best remembered for his anti-Shabbatean polemic "Zizat Novel Zevi", a title which I take to be Arabic. A portrait of him in the Israel Museum in Jersualem shows a characteristically Rembrandt Jew with Fagin's beard and eyebrows, and a forehead as high as civilisation.
Next, Jacob Abendana, scion of an illustrious Dutch family, Marrano Jews with branches in the three principal Sephardi cities as far as Western Europe became concerned: Amsterdam, Hamburg and London. David Abendana, who died in 1625, had fled the Inquisition in Portugal. Isaac Abendana (1640-1710) taught Hebrew at both Oxford and Cambridge. Isaac Sardo Abendana traded diamonds in India. Jacob ben Joseph Abendana served as Rabbi in London, before moving back in the same capacity to Amsterdam. Was Abendana originally ibn Danan? And if so, are they the ancestors of the Danan family, now resident in Leeds, whose son Benjamin I taught in the early years of this century? Highly likely. It was a most distinguished pedigree, even before the London branch was established. Sa'adiah ben Maimon ibn Danan was a physician, poet and halachist in Granada and Oran in the 15th century. Samuel ibn Danan was Rabbi of Constantinople in the first half of the 16th century. Later the family produced the Av Beit Din of Rabat in Morocco (Solomon, 1848-1929), and the Chief Rabbi of Morocco, Solomon's son Saul, was the very last Chief Rabbi of that country, the one who led his people to Israel after Independence in 1948.
The list also contains the names Joshua da Silva, Solomon ben Jacob Ayllon and David Nieto, all worthy of biographising. Da Silva was not, alas, Antonio Jose da Silva, the Portuguese playwright who came from Rio de Janeiro to die a victim of the Lisbon auto-da-fés, but the Rabbi whose wife published his "Discursos Predycaves" after his death, in Amsterdam in 1688. I am only guessing, but I suspect that Rabbi da Silva was not one of the Jews who came to London at the time of the resettlement, but in fact was the scion of da Silvas who were already there, and who had been well established for more than a century already: the hidden Jews of London and Bristol whose story - but I will return to this at the end of the essay.
Solomon ben Jacob Ayllon was born in Salonika in 1655, moved to Zefat (Safed) in Israel in 1680, then came to London as "chacham" - the community's "wise man" - for eleven years between 1689 and 1700, before finishing his days - where else? - in Amsterdam. With him too the Shabbatean battle took centrestage, and he a centrist stance. Controversies are particularly recorded with Zevi Ashkenazi, likewise an erstwhile Salonikan, though in his case not by birth; Zevi also became an Amsterdam Rabbi later on, and it was probably the controversy with Ayllon that led him to leave Amsterdam and settle in Lvov, in 1714.
Finally, David Nieto (1654-1728): philosopher, Rabbi, dayan, physician, defender of the oral law, author of "Matteh Dan". This was the era of Spinoza, and Nieto was accused of being a disciple - it was Zevi Ashkenazi who publicly exonerated him, saving him thereby from excommunication.



 I wish there were a clearer and more detailed map, but at least this one is of the right date. It reveals several strata of an extraordinary tel, for it is precisely the same area of London, just outside the city wall (just inside the ancient Roman wall, but just outside the Norman delineation of the City of London), on the eastern side which had provided habitation for Jewry in the Norman epoch, and which now did so again at the resettlement, and would a third time, when Jews were again permitted to settle in England, in the middle of the 19th century. My own family were among that latter group, arriving maternally at the turn of the 20th century and settling at the easternmost point, where London properly becomes Essex, my paternal grandfather establishing his dress factory and warehouse on Mansell Street and Petticoat Lane, my Uncle Max his clinic on Leadenhall Street, right there by the Aldgate, just yards from Cree Church Lane and what by then was known as Bevis Marks, with a final "s". A thousand years of Jewish settlement in the same tiny quarter. A thousand years, except for the two separate three hundred year periods during which they were prohibited.
Bevis Marks is not in fact the oldest, but it is the oldest surviving and still in regular use. Once the Sephardim had begun to settle, Ashkenazim quickly followed, especially from Amsterdam and Hamburg. The first Rabbi, Judah Loeb ben Ephrayim Anschel ha-Kohen, moved on again to Rotterdam because he couldn't take the communal squabbling (plus ça change!). The first Ashkenazi synagogue was established alongside that first cemetery, in Alderney Road, by one Benjamin Levy, five years before Bevis Marks, in 1696; but it is long vanished. Sandy's Row Synagogue in Spitalfields is London's oldest surviving and still-in-use Ashkenazi Synagogue; founded in 1854 on what had previously been the site of a French Huguenot Church, itself built in 1766.


 A fuller account of the (extremely bizarre) events leading to the resettlement in 1656 is told in my story "The Hidden Jews of Cartagena", scheduled to be published in "Travels In Familiar Lands" very soon. And the tale of another Carvajal, who may or may not be related to this one, coming soon on December 8.

But I began this essay with the statement that "History (which is all-too-often incorrect) records that Antonio Fernandez Carvajal was the first Jew to settle in Britain after the expulsion of 1290", and the truth is, history on this occasion is not simply incorrect, but I can only assume wilfully so, deliberately so, indeed I would go so far as to suggest anti-Semitically so, because Jews came into England, with the full blessing of the king, and at his behest and bequest so that he could take advantage of their many services, probably as early as 1493, when they were expelled from Spain, and definitely from Portugal just three years later, and unquestionably during the reign of Henry VIII, who refused to accept instruction to get rid of them again, delivered personally by a Papal envoy, and which may have been a rather more significant factor in the Reformation than the mere inability of Queen Katharine to provide a son.
   For more on this, and the central role they played in transforming England on every level through the Tudor period, you will have to wait for the publication of my novel "The Plausible Tragedie of Roderigo Lopes", due out very soon (click here)


Menasseh ben Israel



 Amber pages
Hans Geiger, German physicist, born today in 1882; the co-inventor of the Geiger counter, but its name only remembers his half; the Sherpa Tenzing on this occasion was Walther Mueller...



Truman Streckfus Persons, born today in 1924. Never heard of him? That was how the young Harper Lee knew him, the teenager she renamed Dill in "To Kill A Mockingbird". Truman Capote when he started penning his own books. I wonder if "Persons" was originally a Portuguese name, like Merrick and Reis and...


Elie Wiesel, Holocaust witness, born today in 1928


Today in 1946, the verdicts of the Nuremberg trials were announced, and three years to the day later the Berlin Airlift ended



Independence Day in Botswana, formerly Bechuanaland, today in 1966 - click here.


And how odd a coincidence, that today should begin with the Geiger Counter and end with the Richter Scale. Charles Francis Richter, who developed it, died today in 1985





You can find David Prashker at:


Copyright © 2016/2024 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press

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August 21

1893, 1923


Working at that point of the Book of Psalms for TheBibleNet, I went hunting for a musical adaptation of Psalm 130, and came upon Lili Boulanger’s setting: "Psaume 130", in her world. She actually entitled her piece "Du fond de l'abîme", though for some reason it has been Latinised into "De Profundis" in several renditions that I found. And I wanted several, because I wanted to hear it again, and then again, to hear what different choirs and orchestras had made of its quite extraordinary gorgeousness! Found entirely randomly, I had never even heard of her, though I thought I had; I mean, I recognised the name Boulanger, and associated it with classical music, but the one I vaguely knew turned out to be her sister Nadia, not Lili.

Both composed (listen to Nadia's wonderful "Fantaisie pour piano et orchestre" here), both were protégées of Fauré. Lili died on March 15th 1918, ridiculously young, aged just 24, and Nadia was so shattered that she gave up composing and took up teaching instead – counting Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Thea Musgrave, Leonard Bernstein and Philip Glass among her pupils.

But it is Lili  that I want to know more about, in this centenary year of her death. Full name: Marie-Juliette Olga Boulanger; Lili was a pet-name. Born today, August 21st 1893. Friend-of-the-family Gabriel Fauré recognised that she had perfect pitch when she was just two; the same age at which she contracted the bronchial pneumonia that would wreck her immune system and lead to such an early death.

She was born into an extraordinary family, so her surfeit of talent was only to be expected. Mum was a Russian princess who fell in love with her teacher at the Paris Conservatoire, Ernest Boulanger, and both her grandparents (on the Boulanger side) had been musicians. Besides singing, Lili played piano, violin, cello, harp and organ – not surprising, with Fauré guiding you. She also composed; in much the way that Michelangelo, despite his protestations, also did fresco – it was her cantata "Faust et Hélène" (strongly Wagnerian, hints of Debussy, according to the experts; and extremely lush harmonies) that enabled her to become the first woman to win the Prix de Rome, sharing it in 1913 with Claude Delvincourt.

The Naxos site where I found one of the recordings has an obit, which is much better than my prose, and contains everything one could possibly need, and more, to compose an "In Memoriam Lili Boulanger". But why compose it, when there is already this: Lili Boulanger, as remembered by her sister Nadia:
Music was second nature for my younger sister, Lili, born on 21st August 1893 in Paris. She had perfect pitch and a love of singing even as a child. Fauré himself used to come to our home to read his latest songs with her. From the age of six to sixteen, she studied harmony, played a little piano, violin, cello and even the harp, while discovering new scores, such as Debussy’s Pelléas. Her very poor health kept her away from school, as well as from practicing too hard. In fact, she mastered composition with Paul Vidal and Georges Caussade in only three years. At the age of nineteen, she made history by being the first woman to be awarded the prestigious Premier Grand Prix de Rome for composition. After the great Parisian success of her cantata Faust et Hélène, she travelled through Italy and wrote some of her best works in the Villa Medici in Rome.
These happy times were interrupted by the war. Back home, she devoted herself to caring for wounded soldiers. Knowing that her days were numbered, she worked feverishly. Towards the end of her life, she dictated to me her Pie Jésu. On her deathbed, her strong faith gave her a sense of serenity. She died on 15th March 1918. 
Though there are no technical novelties in Lili’s writing (she lived in an age when intellectual speculation had not yet arrived), she was able to find the necessary elements for expressing her own very personal message, leaving a short but lasting mark in musical history.
Nadia Boulanger Paris, 1968

So I went on hunting, in hope of finding lots and lots more by this virtually anonymous great talent. But there aren’t lots and lots more. "D'un soir triste" turned out to be the very last piece that she wrote before she died. You can listen to several of the best by clicking here.




1923
 

Not a newspaper that I generally read, I am nonetheless grateful to The London "Daily Telegraph" for providing this list of "stupid laws" to supplement my story "The Edict", on page 141 of "The Captive Bride". As my tale related to a law passed on Monday August 21st, 1923, I am placing it here under the same date.

These are the stupidest British laws, according to a percentage share of public vote.


1. It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament (27%)

2. It is an act of treason to place a postage stamp bearing the British monarch upside-down (7%)
(like this, just in case you weren't sure what it meant precisely)

3. In Liverpool, it is illegal for a woman to be topless except as a clerk in a tropical fish store (6%)

4. Mince pies cannot be eaten on Christmas Day (5%)

5. In Scotland, if someone knocks on your door and requires the use of your toilet, you must let them enter (4%)

6. In the UK a pregnant woman can legally relieve herself anywhere she wants, including in a policeman's helmet (4%)

7. The head of any dead whale found on the British coast automatically becomes the property of the King, and the tail of the Queen (3.5%)

8. It is illegal not to tell the tax man anything you do not want him to know, but legal not to tell him information you do not mind him knowing (3%)

9. It is illegal to enter the Houses of Parliament in a suit of armour

10. In the city of York it is legal to murder a Scotsman within the ancient city walls, but only if he is carrying a bow and arrow (2%)

Most ridiculous laws from other countries:

1. In Ohio, it is illegal to get a fish drunk (9%)

2. In Indonesia, the penalty for masturbation is decapitation (8%)

3. In Bahrain, a male doctor can only examine the genitals of a woman in the reflection of a mirror (7%)

4. In Switzerland, a man may not relieve himself standing up after 10pm (6%)

5. In Alabama, it is illegal to be blindfolded while driving a vehicle (6%)

6. In Florida, unmarried women who parachute on a Sunday could be jailed (6%)

7. In Vermont, women must obtain written permission from their husbands to wear false teeth (6%)

8. In Milan, it is a legal requirement to smile at all times, except during funerals or hospital visits (5%)

9. In Japan, there is no age of consent (5%)

10. In France, it is illegal to name a pig Napoleon (4%)


It should also be pointed out that, on September 5th 1698, Peter the Great of Russia announced the imposition of a tax on beards, which some have suggested was an anti-Semitic ruse to rob the synagogues and yeshivahs of their tzedakah boxes and to force all the Rabbinic Samsons to defile their Nazaritic status, but was probably just a phobia that he had about beards, and the need for extra revenue. The Poles also banned Jews from having beards, in 1921 it was, but they called it "compulsory conscription".



Amber pages


Nat Turner led a rebellion of negro slaves, today (actually, well after the sun set, and over night, which is why many history books record it as happening on August 22nd); so "these two days" if you prefer, in 1831 - see October 2 for the full story.


The Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre, today in 1911


And today in 1968, the end of the "Prague Spring", the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces.



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February 22

1636, 1788
1636


The Internet is full of Books of Days. You can obtain long lists of who was born and died this day in history, or what events deemed to be significant took place. And so it is. But how much is excluded from those lists, and why? Facts are meaningless without context and commentary (Santorio Sanctorius, born March 29th 1561, Trieste). Facts are not knowledge, simply because they can be repeated in an exam or on a quiz-show (my father liked to challenge know-alls by asking them to name the four principal islands of Japan). 

Without context, without awareness of the agenda of the historian who selected them in, or out, we cannot determine what is "true" or "correct", let alone draw lessons from them. English-language almanacs, for example, are quite remarkably anglocentric, or extend into the wider world only when they have an anglo-connection, or are so universal as to be unignorable; I imagine the same is true for every language. I also imagine a future history book which will declare that Bradley (Chelsea) Manning and Edward Snowden and Julian Assange were heroes in the cause of freedom, and another which will declare them traitors to the same cause, just as Balfour is a hero to the Jews but an object of detestation to the Palestinians, and adoration of Margaret Thatcher is a fetish of right-wing conservatives. How then can we make an intelligent determination, and use history to construct the future?

We create history fictionally by misremembering the past. Sometimes willfully, as propaganda, to acculturate patriotism, to ensure the past is remembered as we wish it to be; sometimes by denial, as Holocaust revisionists attempt; sometimes by ignoring evidence, as in the case of Roderigo Lopes - another of my books scheduled for release very soon (click here). Once the fictional version is established as "history", we reinforce it by repetition - the myth of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot for example (see Nov 5), or that other residue of pre-Christian paganism transformed into a political hero, Robin Hood: I shall return to both later in the year.

 And what of the aforementioned Sanctorius, with whom you are certainly unfamiliar? In 1610 he devised a temperature scale for Galileo's recently invented air thermometer, long before Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Celsius. In 1613 he developed it for use with humans, and then produced a hygrometer, which measures the density of gases. A remarkable man, who would be a Nobel candidate today, and deserves to be remembered for his life, but also for his death - yet he is absent from most history books. He died on February 22nd 1636, in Venice, burned at the stake by the Inquisition as a heretic. His crime: the pursuit of science.



1788


Of Arthur Schopenhauer (born today 1788) Jung wrote:

"He was the first to speak of the suffering of the world, which visibly and glaringly surrounds us, and of confusion, passion, evil - all those things which other philosophers hardly seemed to notice and always tried to resolve into all-embracing harmony and comprehensibility. Here at last was a philosopher who had the courage to see that all was not for the best in the fundaments of the universe."
(Memories, Dreams, Reflections)


To understand my piece about Sanctorius, you need to read Wittgenstein
To understand Wittgenstein you need to read Nietzsche
To understand Nietzsche you need to read Schopenhauer
To understand Schopenhauer you need to read Kant
          especially the concept of the "thing-in-itself"
To understand Kant...

The metaphysical structure, modelled on "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung" (1818, 1859)


But there is also what he did not do, the "roads-not-taken", to borrow a line from Robert Frost:-
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