Interview

President of the Jewish Museum, Mr. Max Nahmias talks about the importance of Jewish Trajectory

President of the Jewish Museum, Mr. Max Nahmias

 

How did the hebrews stood firm in his religion?
Since the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 a.C.  a sage, Rabbi Iochanan ben Zakai, attached to a group of Jews, negotiated his release with the Romans. Is presented to the Roman governor to whom offers subservience in exchange for his permission to establish an academy of Judaism in Iavne. It is in this academy that the Jewish people prepared the foundation for a life without sovereignty, spread around the world, but focused in Sion, which converges with a firm foundation in religion, culture and history. Communities are created, the system of “responsibility”, the synagogues, religious services, even common languages, cultures and own behaviors.

The Jewish existence has been based on the willingness and decision to belong to the Jewish people, grasp the content of Judaism as a character and way of life, and believe in a common future, recognizing the sanctity and the eternal relevance of the Torah, which was 2000 years portable homeland of the Jews in the diaspora.

 

And the importance of tradition to Judaism?
The habits, customs, Jewish legends, and what might be called a tradition, are transmitted from generation to generation. Studying the Torah, faithfully observe the commandments of ethical and combat for human rights with a fairer society are part of the Jewish tradition.

What is the influence of Jewish culture in Brazilian society?
It is a great influence, beginning with the discovery of Brazil by Pedro Alvares Cabral, who had a Jewish ancestry, as well as Gaspar de Lemos, his interpreter and advisor. From the colonial period between 1500 to 1822 there are no in-depth studies of the Jewish presence, Jews also came with Estacio de Sa, but not a strong presence. This only could be intensified in 1822 with the freedom of foreign to maintain their religion. In 1840 it began a heavy immigration from North Africa (Morocco) to the Amazon that has contributed to the rubber cicle.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Jews, came to Brazil to escape from the Franco-prussian War. The Jewish immigration was most marked in the first decades of the twentieth century, with a large Jewish immigration from the eastern European (Poland) and Russia. In 1739, Antonio José (Jew) wrote the first play. The first printer was also introduced by a Jew, Antonio Isidoro da Fonseca in 1847. In London in 1808, Hipólito da Costa began to publish the first monthly newspaper, Correio Brasiliense. Several high-ranking military, as Lieutenant-Colonel Francisco Leão Cohen, who fought in the war of Paraguay, General Waldemar Levy Cardoso and other Jews. The Jews also give performance in mathematics, as Leopold Nachbin, in physics like Marcelo Gleiser, in arts like Lasar Segall, Faiga Ostrower and others, in the graphic arts, as Adolfo Bloch, literature, as Clarice Lispector, Moacyr Scliar, Samuel Rawet. The contribution of the Jews in Brazil’s development was important and ocurred in almost all areas of scientific, social and cultural knowledge. 

 

What is the difference between the Orthodox  Jewish and Liberal Jewish?
The orthodox Jew does not accept any change in the laws that regulate Jewish life (Halachá). There is no possibility of changing or adding anything. On the other hand the liberal Jewish get along with modernity. 

 

And the differences in dress?
The overcoat and black hat costumes were typical of the Orthodox Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. With the Enlightenment that led to integration with society, many religious Jews abolished this kind of clothing. 

 

Considerations on the conflict Jew, Palestinian.
Much of what is going on between Palestinians and Israelis is because of the region’s governments to pursue their own interests. Groups like Hamas, are funded by a government that has no interest in peace and there is also the problem of the constant interference of other countries. The road passes through solidarity and tolerance. 

 
Interview by Prof. Elaine Herrera – CPA / RJ

Elementary Education: Jewish oral tradition

Jewish education can be considered as a method since the oral tradition started, which was nothing more than the transmission of all the ethical, cultural and moral values, from generation to generation. The main strategy in this tradition was in the readings of the Torah and the Talmud.

Therefore, we can understand the oral tradition as the first teaching methodology of humanity, especially within the context of Jewish education. In the same sequence of understanding, the sacred writings – the Torah and the Talmud – contain the entire basis of moral, ethical and spiritual conduct, also served as an instructional resource in the process of teaching and learning of the Jewish people since the beginning of its history .

The mishnah is the key part of this methodology. From the Hebrew root shanah, mishnah means repetition, that is, repetition of tradition, which occurred orally. It was not reading associated with writing, but reading together with the repetition of sounds, letters, sentences to the understanding of texts. This whole process occurred until the maturity of reading for repetition and memorization of the Oral Law.

And then we come to the rabbis and priests as the first teachers, since they had the knowledge of the scriptures and played key role in the transmission of all this knowledge to the people. This transmission, implemented in a planned and instructional direction became the essence of Jewish education and the perpetuation of cultural values that we see to this day.

Nowadays, storytelling serves as a teaching methodology that brings important results in the classroom. A strategy very similar to the oral tradition maintained by the Jewish people in antiquity.

Reference List:

AUSUBEL, Nathan. Conhecimento Judaico II. Rio de Janeiro: Koogan, 1964.

Vida e Valores do Povo Judeu. Editora Perspectiva S.A. – São Paulo, 1999.

Wigoder, Geoffrey; S. Phil; Lewis, Bernard. The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia.  (Site: www.morasha.com.br)

Did you know…

Wall was destroyed by the Romans in 70 of the Christian era (Photo: Ronen Zvulun / Reuters

After a year and a half of excavation, the Antiquities Authority of Israel (IAA, in English) submitted in September 2008, at a news conference the results of a project that revealed parts of the wall surrounding the Holy City during the time of the Second Temple ( 518 b.C. to 70 a.C.). The director of the excavation, Yehiel Zelinger, said that the discovery “allows people to have a better idea of what was Jerusalem at that time, its greatest splendor.”

The scholar says that the wall was more than three feet tall. On this wall at the time of the Second Temple appeared another wall from the Byzantine period (324 a.C. to 640 a.C.).

Did you know…

Flogging Roman (flagrum or flagellum)

The Romans used the scourge to punish criminals and slaves of the provinces. This instrument of torture occured by using leather belts and sheaves of chains with balls or with metal hooks at the ends. In a more rudimentary way ropes were used with sharp pieces of bone fixed in their tips. 

This practice of punishment widely used at the time of Christ, provoked the first-suffering blisters on the skin. Continued stripes brought the raw sample. Many inmates died during the punishment, when the whips came to the bones. The use of the whip on suspected criminals, the flagellum, except for Roman citizens, gave rise to the term we know today as plagued, people tormented, punished. In addition to inspiring many slaveholders throughout history.

Did you know… Cleopatra x Herod

Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt and the Jewish king Herod the Great were contemporaries and great enemies. The reasons for this enmity is not yet clear, however, we can assume that the real reasons have to do with making many valuable territories once ruled by Herod the queen’s Roman lover, Mark Anthony.

While Anthony ruled the eastern portion of the Roman territory between 42 and 31 b.C., Herod was shown at all times as a reliable ally, because Antonio had, with the help of Octavian (the future Augustus) convinced the Senate in Rome to nominate Herod king of Judea. But after the union of the Roman general with the queen Cleopatra the situation changed: ambitious, the Egyptian called her lover to hand over many areas such as Cyprus, Phoenix, Armenia and the rich oases of the Jordan Valley, they coveted the production of spices and the now extincted balm of Judea (resin used to prepare incense and essences, which according to legend Cleopatra itself was used to seduce her lovers). 
 

Cleopatra on the terraces of Philae, Frederick Arthur Bridgeman, 1896. / Herod enters victorious in Jerusalem, Jean Fouquet, century. XV.

But luckily for Herod in 31 b.C. the forces of Cleopatra and Mark Antony were defeated at the Battle of Actium by Octavian who became the first Emperor of Rome. Aware that the new ruler of the world’s greatest power at that time would not welcome his lasting friendship with Antony, Herod sailed to the island of Rhodes, where he chose instead of denying his devotion to the defeated general promissed to serve his new master with equal fidelity.

Thus Octavian confirmed Herod as king of Judea, and also added another territory to its domain, saying the megalopsychia – the greatness of spirit – of Herod did not fit their kingdom as little as Judea. 

Reference List:

JOSEFO, Flavio. Antiguidades judias. Madri: Gredos, 1997.

_____________. Las guerras de los judíos. Madri: Gredos, 1997.

TYLDESLEY, Joyce. Cleópatra: la última reina de Egipto. Barcelona: Ariel, 2008.

Did You know…

There was a reference in the Palestinian Talmud on school attendance. Could it be the first sign of an elementary education and teaching as compulsory.

On the other hand the Babylonian Talmud mentions and explains another tradition: that parents would be responsible for teaching their children. If the child does not have a father, would not have access to education. Because of this, then was decreed the appointment of teachers in Jerusalem, which would bring formal education to children without a father. Still, there was a need to go to Jerusalem to be educated.

So it started to appoint teachers in different provinces, and allow the boys tickets to school at 16 or 17 years old. However, when the boys were punished for any reason, ended up rebelling and leaving the school. Therefore, it was decreed that teachers of children would be appointed in each district and in each city. In addition, the boys would join the school from six or seven years old.

It is interesting to observe the built of an education form, a structure very similar to public education of the present day, maintaining the proper proportions. 

Bibliographic Reference:

Vida e Valores do Povo Judeu. São Paulo, Editora Perspectiva S.A., 1999.

Did You Know – Caligula

Appointment of the horse as a Senator and the brothel Wives

Caligula was always seen and portrayed by the cinema as an emperor entirely devoted to debauchery and the pleasures of the flesh. However when analyzing his political career, through the side of the confrontation of forces between senate and emperor, emerges a picture of a strategist, skilled and insightful. Able to handle the mass to them and to destabilize the power of the Senate.

The episode of the nomination for the Senate from his horse forward the message to the senators, that this historical institution into the new Roman Empire did not represent anything and that the senate activity, in his point of view was only figurative, and may be exercised by anyone, including by a horse.

Another episode well architected and took off the senate’s credibility was the proposal to conduct the brothel women of the Senate with the justification to raise money for the treasury.

These two episodes demonstrate that Caligula’s pleasure was not only for the flesh but also in politics.

Uncovering the secrets of feijoada

By Prof. Ronaldo Silva

For a long time, we have heard about feijoada – a  dish of Brazilian cuisine – with many kinds of choices: rice, cassava chips, crackling, orange, caipirinha and others, and with its genesis in slavery. It was the way of feeding the black African slaves in Brazil on their meals in bondage.
This meal was made up of “leftovers” from small parts of pigs:  ear, tail, internal cracks, foot.

Food that there emerged in the slave quarters in Brazil during the eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century. Time when Brazil experienced the heyday of slavery, with the economic base in the cane sugar, coffee and mining.

We understand that the Brazilian economy revolved around these crops that sustained the country. We now find a Brazil agrarian monoculture and slave. The food supplement for both planters and the rest of the population needed to be imported.

The basic food consisted of manioc flour and / or maize since the beginning of slavery in Brazil, prepared with water and a few additions.

The slave society of Brazil in the eighteenth and part of  the nineteenth centuries was constantly affected by shortages and high prices of basic foods due to the monoculture that structured the country economically. Also because of the dedication to mining, and stimulating investment of the slave labor.

It was not rare to die by a feeding deficiency, also including the death of their European masters who composed the Brazilian ruling class. 

The black slaves were the driving force, they worked hard. We found them the main engine of human economic production, being the very high cost.

For all this kind of work we’ve found such a routine food sequenced, eating three times a day, with lunch at eight o’clock in the morning, dining at one o’clock in the afternoon and eating supper among the twenty and twenty one hour at night.

We can see in the menu of the slaves the presence of mush of corn or cassava flour, beans temperated with salt and fat, served very thin, with an occasional appearance of some piece of beef or pork.

On some occasions the presence of oranges harvested from the foot came as an addition. When there happened a good coffee harvest, the foreman could give a whole hog to slaves, but this was an exception. 

The correlation we found in this period among black slaves and their masters is multifaceted. Analyzing the typology is evident in this modern society of the time three types of power: economic power – that which is exercised through ownership of assets to control those who do not possess; ideological power – which is based on the influence of ideas over people, and political power – which is based on the possession of an instrument necessary to the exercise of a coercive power.

The power relationship is established in a typical phenomenon of social relations, noting however that the relationship between black slave and his master is based on authority, where the first one uses the ability to control or influence people by physical strength or skill of persuasion.

The food of this black slave in this moment depends upon the survival and necessity. The domestic slaves, for example, slaves of gain, can stay in the culinary ambience of their master.

A receipt dated 1889 by the Imperial Household in a butcher shop in Petropolis in the city of Rio de Janeiro, records the bought of fresh beef, veal, lamb, pork, sausage, blood sausage, liver, kidneys, tongue, brains, entrails of sauces and beef casings.
Proving that it was not only the slaves who ate these delicacies, and in no way considered “rests”. In 1817, the profession of tripeiro is regulated in Rio, and vendors got supplied in slaughterhouses for cattle, pig and parts of these animals.

The liver, heart and intestines were used to make mush, commonly sold for slaves of gain or bags in the squares and streets of the city.

Showing that so far the Brazilian cuisine was not inelastic, however, reflecting the manifestation of social relations that has always existed between master and slave in the Brazilian slavery.

This relationship does not allow us to support that the appearance of culinary feijoada is restricted to slaves in the slave quarters, where we have also found in the present European cuisine cooked by, mainly in Portugal in the regions of Extremadura, Beiras, Tras-os-Montes and Alto Douro .

Mixing sausage, pig’s foot and ear to cooked, very common in Europe. When this European in Brazil interacts with this African slave labor as a source of production and supply, leads us to conclude that the feijoada, a typical dish of Brazilian cuisine is a kind of food, has developed within the country from the influences brought by the European gastronomic culture and not necessarily originate directly and solely by the black slave.

In the early nineteenth century the feijoada was already well known within the Brazilian territory, entitled as the “Brazilian feijoada”, when in 1848,  the Official Journal of Pernambuco registers a notice disclosing the sale of beef and bacon to own feijoada the cost of eighty reis Libra.

In 1849, the Jornal do Comercio do Rio de Janeiro, reports that on the sixth of January in the newly installed Tavern “New Coffee Trade” by the bar on “Fame Coffee with Milk” would be served at the request of many customers to “beautiful the Brazilian feijoada” all Tuesdays and Thursdays. 
Luis da Camara Cascudo, historian, folklorist, anthropologist, lawyer and journalist, in one of his observations, concluded that the process of cooking feijoada was still in development.

The relationship of socioeconomic status when black African slaves in Brazil, it was basic totem – a phenomenon that some primitive societies consider themselves linked specifically. The contextualization of as feijoada dish culinary Brazilian genesis goes back to a contemporary legend, romanticized the social and cultural relations of slavery in Brazil.
Therefore, the Brazilian feijoada is merely a cultural hybridity, social and economic development. 

 
Bibliography References:

CASCUDO, Luís da Câmara – História da Alimentação no Brasil – 2 vols. 2ª ed. Itatitaia, Rio de Janeiro, 1983.

DITADI, Carlos Augusto Silva – Cozinha Brasileira: Feijoada Completa- Revista Gula, n. 67, Editora Trad, São Paulo. 1998.

ELIAS, Rodrigo – Breve História da Feijoada – Revista Nossa História, ano 1, n. 4, Editora Vera Cruz, São Paulo. Fevereiro de 2004.

FIGUEIREDO, Guilherme – Comidas, Meu Santo – Rio de Janeiro, Editora Civilização Brasileira, Rio de Janeiro, 1964.

Did You Know…

 DIE OF ENVY NASA BECAUSE THE FIRST COMPUTER WORLD WAS GREEK!

ANTIKYTHERA. This was the name given to the artifact.

Digital reconstruction done by computer, from CT

By the early twentieth century researchers found in a shipwreck off the coast of the island of Antikythera, a complex gear box with bronze. This is a mechanism to make high astronomical calculations. The grandfather of our modern computers would be able to predict solar and lunar eclipses, accurately describe the movements of the constellations of the zodiac and determine the time when these events occur.

Location wreck

An instrument as precise calculations would only be built by the Islamic peoples of the eighth century a.C., yet the Islamic astronomical clock would not be as accurate as the clock Antikythera and probably would have been done in the city of Rhodes in ancient Greece.

Reconstruction made by the Englishman John Gleave

 

Antikythera Mechanism in the state where it is today

Elementary Education: Writing

It is known that the Jewish culture has always valued the spoken word, the instruction based on reading, the repetition and the memorization. However, over time, the risk of not having any record of all traditions and laws of conduct, transmitted over generations was getting much near. The recording had become a fragile process, because of the population growth and the maintenance of culture. Moreover, Egypt and Mesopotamia, were passing through the writing process. In the case of Greece, the Hellenism had already begun to influence the Jewish education.

The so-called Talmudic Period ends between the fourth and fifth centuries, specifically in Palestine and in Babylon. Even exile contributed to this path, because the reports had to be sacred recorded for the Jewish people had access, regardless of location. Thus, it was necessary to overcome the practices concerning the Oral Law. The tradition that had survived for a long time suffered influences and subsequent modifications: it was the beginning of writing.

Fragment of the Septuagint of the Second Century b.C.

It was a dead end: all the information, values, notions of ethics and culture of several generations have needed a record.

It is important to reiterate that the whole structure of education and instruction passed through the Holy Scriptures. There was no other way to develop writing or teaching it. Follow the story of Professor. Jane Bichmacher of Glasman: “… None of them has dealt with Geography, astronomy and grammar at the interest that these subjects aroused among the subjects of the Caliph, the study was restricted to Jewish themes. Notable scholars emerged in these communities in Europe, making up in depth what they lacked in size. ”

As in the oral tradition we see the crucial role of the rabbis, with the beginning of writing, increases the participation of the scribes. The Historian Nathan Ausubel describes this moment: “… came to understand better what would collect and safeguard all records Jewish historical, literary, legal and intellectual activity” (1964, p. 269)

Thus, writing in the Jewish education is based primarily on records of all the law, ethics and cultural values contained in the sacred writings, and the exclusive domain of rabbis and scribes, so far.

The Hellenism, due to the very process of domination, has also become a decisive influence on writing. Since then, the Greek education began to intervene and influence in Jewish education.

 

Reference List:

AUSUBEL, Nathan. Conhecimento Judaico I. Rio de Janeiro, A. Koogan Editor, 1964

Vida e Valores do Povo Judeu. São Paulo, Editora Perspectiva S.A.,1999.

MILLER, Stephen M. e HUBER, Robert V. A Bíblia e sua História – o surgimento e o impacto da Bíblia. Sociedade Bíblica do Brasil, 2006.