"O GERME do homem e de todas as criaturas,: setembro 2014

quarta-feira, 24 de setembro de 2014

Francis A. & Edward K.- Frank Sinatra, Sunny

Simão da Fonseca

Another rabbi of the community was Isaac Aboab da Fonseca (1605–93), and it was he who had been most directly and deeply imbued with the spirit of Lurianic kabbalah, which he transmitted to the young men who studied with him, so that a significant number of them also claimed themselves as disciples of the esoteric tradition. The rabbi had been baptized Simão da Fonseca in Castro Daire, Portugal, and the family had fled when he was a child, first to France and then to Amsterdam. He was a disciple of the only kabbalist to have written in Spanish, Abraham Herrera (c. 1570–1635), who was also of a Marrano family and born in Portugal. Herrera’s studies of Neoplatonism, as it was taught in the Florentine Academy, together with his studies of Lurianic kabbalah (which also, as was pointed out above, has a strong Neoplatonic cast, inherited from the original kabbalists of Gerona), resulted in his own synthesis. Aboab translated into Hebrew such works of Herrera’s as his Puerta del cielo (Gates of Heaven), and these translations were in Spinoza’s library at his death, presenting once again the tantalizing suggestion that Spinoza’s own strongly Platonic orientation, most especially the focus on salvation, which sets him apart from his rationalist confreres Descartes and Leibniz, might have been transmitted to him by way of the kabbalist influence. Interestingly, Herrera also wrote a treatise on logic, Epítome y compendio de la lógica o dialéctica, which was his only published work.

(...)
Aboab left Amsterdam, accepting the invitation to become the rabbi of the prosperous community of Recife, Brazil, which was then under the rule of the Dutch, making him the first American rabbi. His departure might very well have been a result of the fracas regarding the afterlife. He remained in Brazil from 1642 until the reconquest of Recife by the Portuguese in 1654, when all the Jews were forced to leave. Twenty-three of the refugees—men, women, and children—ended up in Dutch New Amsterdam after their ship was attacked by a Spanish privateer who deprived them of their possessions. Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch colonial governor, was ill-disposed toward Jews and disinclined to allow these particular Jews—now indigent—to stay. Their former Jewish neighbors back in Holland interceded on their behalf with the Dutch West India Company, which directed Stuyvesant to tolerate their presence, so long as they proved no burden to the community. In this way these twenty-three from Recife became the first Jewish New Yorkers—even before there was a New York.

Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza:The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, p.147 e 157

quarta-feira, 10 de setembro de 2014

Jordi Savall, Montserrat Figueras, "El Moro de Antequera" (Sephardic Jewish music from Rhodes)

So, rushing forwards on that lifeless slick,
there jerked up, fronting me, one brimming slime
who spoke: 'so who - you come too soon! - are you?'
And my riposte: 'I come, perhaps; I'll not rermain.
But who might you be, brutishly befouled?'
His answer was: 'Just look at me. I'm one
who weeps.' And I to him: 'Weep on. In grief,
may you remain, you spirit of damnation!
I know who you are, filth as you may be.'
And then he stretched both hands towards our gunwales.
My teacher, though - alert - soon drove him back,
saying: 'get down! Be off with all that dog pack!'
And then he ringed both arms around my neck.
He kissed my face, then said: 'You wrathful soul!
Blessed the one that held you in her womb.
That man, alive, flaunted his arrogance,
and nothing good adorns his memory.
So here his shadow is possessed with rage.
How many, in the word above, pose there
as kings but here lie like pigs in muck,
leaving behind them horrible dispraise.'

(tr. Robin kirkpatrick)