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Articles by Alan Verskin
Alexander Bevilacqua
David Reubeni posed a puzzle to contemporaries; he still poses one today. The Mediterranean world was turbulent in the early decades of the 16th century. The Ottoman Empire toppled the Mamluks in 1517, giving the sultan control over Egypt, Syria and much of the Arabian Peninsula; Western Christian rulers feared that they might be next. In the wake of Martin Luther’s censure of the Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire was deeply divided.
David Reubeni and Africa’s Lost Tribe of Israel
In 1524 a Black man named David Reubeni arrived in Venice with a bold plan to save the Jews. No one doubted that the Jews needed saving. Over the preceding centuries, they had been driven from much of Europe by expulsions, massacres and forced conversions. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella had banned Judaism in Spain and, in Reubeni’s own time, their grandson, Charles V, who commanded an empire that spanned Europe and the New World, seemed eager to spread his grandparents’ anti-Jewish policies.
Prince of the Lost Tribes
In the 1520s, a striking black man—the Italian-Jewish scholar Gedaliah ibn Yahya described him as “black as a Nubian (shahor ke-kushi)”—showed up in North Africa, claiming to be the son of a certain late King Solomon and the younger brother of King Joseph, who ruled a Jewish kingdom in the desert of Habor, somewhere in Arabia.
Insiders and Outsiders
In the fourteenth century, the illustrious Andalusian rabbi David Abudarham reported a remarkable legal innovation: Never in Jewish history has so much hung on cholent. Why? The answer lies in Karaism, a Jewish minority sect that rejected rabbinic Judaism by denying its central doctrine: that on Mount Sinai, Moses received an oral Torah that illuminated and expanded upon the written one.
Talmuds and Dragons
The Inquisitor’s Tale is not a typical “Jewish kids’ book.” It does not instill Jewish identity, and most of its characters are non-Jews. Nonetheless, having stumbled upon it in my capacity as my children’s chief procurer of bedtime stories featuring magic and swordfights, I have come to view it as offering a singularly groundbreaking model, albeit a flawed one, for thinking about the possibilities of Jewish children’s literature.
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