Ira Sharkansky: The wandering Jews of Portugal and Fall River

JERUSALEM A number of individuals from my home town of Fall River, Mass., have traveled to Ponta Delgada, in the Azores , to commemorate the refurbishing of a synagogue that they had financed. They also met with the one Jew still living in the islands.

The story is long and interesting, and ironic from both sides.

Jews had once been a major element in Portugal, but no more.

They also were a major element in Fall River, but no more.

Jewish history in Portugal resembled Jewish history in Spain. A sizable population developed in the early Middle Ages, by some reports a larger percentage of the total population than in Spain. In both countries the Jews were mostly eliminated by forced expulsion or conversion. Some remained, passing themselves off as Christians, and some returned when the anti-Jewish policy was relaxed.

The Portuguese first came to southeastern Massachusetts as crew members on whaling ships. The work was hard and risky enough to dissuade Americans, so the ships would sail from New Bedford and Nantucket with skeleton crews to the Azores, pick up men willing to serve, at least partly for the opportunity to remain in the  U.S. when the ships reached home port with the results of several years' hunting.  When the cotton industry began to develop in Fall River, mill owners sent labor recruiters to the Azores.

Jews came to the city from the latter part of the 19th Century, and served a growing industrial population as peddlers and small merchants. Their children, more than others, stayed in school and moved up the economic ladder to larger businesses and the professions. As the cotton mills closed in the face of competition from the South, another wave of Jews came, mostly from New York, to produce clothing, taking advantage of empty buildings and unemployed workers.

Then competition from China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and elsewhere did to their small factories what Southern cotton mills had done earlier.

At its height, the Jewish community amounted to several thousand individuals, with a number of small Orthodox synagogues and one grand Conservative temple.

If there is more than one Jew remaining in Fall River, there is not not enough for a daily minyan. For some years now, the Conservative temple has rented space that once served as classrooms to municipal social service agencies.

My first assignment as a student of political science led me to the city's problems. According to official statistics, 30 percent of Fall River teenagers did not finish high school, and the average adult had not gone beyond ninth grade.

The city stimulated my interest in ethnicity, and the topic for my Senior Thesis was "The Portuguese of Fall River." Demographic and political research was made easier by the few family names among the Portuguese. One of them was Franco.

There are Francos in our family. The grandparents of the Franco who married a niece came from Turkey, and earlier ones most likely went there from Spain or Portugal..

There are Portuguese in Fall River who say they are Jews, or that their family had been Jewish.

Gentile friends lament the absence of Jews. They say that the public high school has become an "inner-city school," and that few graduates apply to prestigious colleges.

The ambitious Jews of my generation had to apply to several places, insofar as the most desirable limited the number of Jews they would accept. Virtually none of us returned to the city after college.

Fall River's total population has dropped from more than 115,000 to less than 90,000. Tenements are empty and cheap. Boston relocated some of its homeless to the city.

The city's education profile hasn't changed in 60 years. Still close to 30 percent of teenagers fail to finish high school. Now the average adult has reached 10 grade, but has not finished it.

There are Jews who live outside of Fall River, while continuing to practice their professions in the city.

It's not only the Azores and Fall River where there are empty synagogues. There are about as many Jews in each of Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Algeria, and Afghanistan, all of which had been home to thousands..

Jews remain a significant population in the area of the former Soviet Union, despite about half of them--more than a million--having left since the late 1980s.

Estimates of Jews in Iran have declined from 100,000-150,000 in 1948 to about 80,000 prior to the revolution, and 17,000-25,000 currently.

Assessments of Jews' lives in Iran vary as widely as the population estimates.

Jews not only move. They also look for Jews in what for them are exotic places. The support of what had been Fall River's community for the Azorean synagogue is part of a wider tradition. Israelis do "roots" trips to their own, their parents', or their grandparents' former homes in Europe.

My wife, Varda, and I have seen where her parents grew up in Dusseldorf and Berlin, and visited the graves of her grandfather and a young cousin who died before the Holocaust. We have passed by the synagogues in a number of other European cities, walked the streets of Judeiria in Spain, and saw indentations in the stone alongside doorways in Gerona that most likely remain from when there was a mezuzah. .

After a professional conference in Moscow during 1979 I visited Jews in Samarkand, Bukhara and Tashkent. When I told one old man that I came from Jerusalem, he began to weep.

Neither of us has a desire to visit the ashes in Eastern Europe where family members perished.

Jewish movement has something to do with Jews' historic association with commerce. There are Biblical mandates about charging interest, and extensive Talmudic disputes about what constitutes interest, fair dealing, and the financial relations appropriate with Jews and others. Communities have invited Jews on account of their economic skills, and then turned against Jews for the same reason. Concerns for bookkeeping and commercial agreements may have contributed to the early development of literacy throughout the community, or at least among most of its males, and subsequent contributions in every field of science and culture..

Commerce is part of what we are, for the good and the bad associated with it. Including our capacity to move elsewhere when things turn sour.

While the Azores, Fall River, and many other places have empty synagogues, there are four within 100 meters of these fingers. All have daily minyans, even without my attendance.

Ira Sharkansky  is  an emeritus professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Chris Powell: That's so 'special needs'

MANCHESTER, Conn. 
When the Journal Inquirer reported the other day about the criminal sentencing 
of a "mildly retarded" rapist, representatives of groups serving the mentally 
retarded protested. The complaint was: "People don't use 'retarded' anymore." 

They likened it to the "N word" and the name of  Washington, D.C.'s football team, the Redskins. 
These comparisons were false, as the former was always an epithet, the latter 
always a way of evoking the supposed savagery of aboriginal people. 

But disparagement attached to "retarded" only recently. Indeed, until a few 
years ago Connecticut had the Department of Mental Retardation. What happened? 

Children began abusing the word with their peculiar cruelty. But more than that, 
society declined to enforce standards. Instead, those who behaved decently were 
told to change their terms. As usual government was the first to be intimidated 
by the special interest. 

Language evolves. Over the long term it belongs not just to the dictionary but 
to everyone who uses it. But capitulation to the slob culture is fairly resented 
and resisted. What is happening with "retarded" is only what long ago happened 
with "Jew." People heard "Jew" spoken with sneering contempt so often and were 
too meek to object that they began assuming the word itself to be disparaging. 
So now there are few Jews but lots of "Jewish people." 

The language police know perfectly well when disparagement is intended and when 
it is not, know perfectly well that a newspaper story about a rapist with mental 
retardation is different from the schoolgirl mocking a classmate as "retarded." 
But today's culture requires the decent people to change, not the miscreants. 

This has taken the country Through the Looking Glass, wherein Lewis Carroll's 
Humpty Dumpty berates Alice for doubting that words can be so flexible. 

 
"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said. 

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I 
meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'" 

"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected. 

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means 
just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." 

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many 
different things." 

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master --  that's all." 

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty 
began again. "They've a temper, some of them -- particularly verbs, they're the 
proudest. Adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs. However, I can 
manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say!" 

If news organizations are to be accurate, credible, and understood, they must 
stick to descriptive reality and not be intimidated by political correctness, 
avoiding what is merely preferred by elites or euphemistic and vague, like the 
term coming into fashion for the retarded and others, "special needs," which, by 
design, conveys little and can mean anything. Old Hump would be very happy with 
that. 

And what do we do when the kids start sneering at each other, "That's so 
'special needs'"? 

There will always be cruelty. People should stand up against it, not capitulate 
to it at the expense of the language. 

The big problem for the retarded in Connecticut long has been the shortage of 
group homes for retarded people living with aging parents, who fear that upon 
their death there will be no familiar and comfortable home for their kids. Those 
who care about the retarded should worry more about that than about contriving 
euphemisms. 

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn. 

Llewellyn King: In U.K.: Sex, booze, rock and Jihadism

  It is a simple question, but there are only fragments of an answer. The question is: Why do so many Muslims, born in Britain, turn to Jihadism?

The best numbers available show that more than 500 young, British-born Muslims have traveled to Syria to fight for the Islamic State. By comparison, an estimated 100 Americans have taken up arms for the Islamic State. As the population of the United States is 313 million, compared to 63 million for the whole of Britain, the disparity is huge.

The “the enemy within,” as the British media call these young people, has deeply disturbed the British public, as it looks to its political leaders to take action. One writer, in The Daily Telegraph, says that the government has been soft when it should have been tough, and tough when it should have been soft.

The truth is that successive British administrations have been silent on the consequences of immigration since the second Churchill government, in 1951-55. Everyone is to blame and no one is to blame.

Britain never saw a large influx of immigrants after the Norman Conquest, in 1066. In fact, it had become quite proud of its tolerance for émigrés; Karl Marx was the exemplar. The Jews were tolerated after the 1650s, but excluded from many occupations and social circles.

Past and present Britain is made up of enclaves remarkably uninterested in each other. Hence, a small island nation can support 53 distinct, regional accents and dialects.

Idealists believed that post-World War II immigration would change Britain for the better, sweeping away its imperial trappings. Actually if anything eroded the class structure, it was the great wave of pop music and fashion in the 1960s.

Surveys show that of the immigrants from the  Indian Subcontinent, the Indians, mostly Hindu, assimilated best and took to business -- and the class system -- with alacrity, many becoming millionaires. The Muslims, primarily from Pakistan, have fared the worst. They assimilated least and imported practices that are a savage affront to British values: forced and under-age marriages, honor killings, and halal butchers, opposed by many British animal-rights groups.

These same values have made life rough for young men of Pakistani descent. For working-class British youth, sex, booze, music and soccer are their safety valves. Sexual frustration is endemic all over the Muslim world; it is at work among devout, young Muslim men in Britain, where sex is celebrated in the culture.

British business had a role in the mix of immigrants in the 1960s. Businesses wanted workers for the textile mills and factories in northern England, who would do the dirty, poorly paid work nobody else wanted. The proprietor of large tire-retreading company boasted to me in 1961 how he had solved the labor problem by recruiting rural Pakistanis, who worked hard and cheaply and kept to themselves. His words have echoed with me down through the years.

This alone does not explain why, for example, a preponderance of the Jihadists are from London, or why some of them seem to be university types from the London School of Economics, King's College London, the School for Oriental and African Studies, and others. If you are young, male and Muslim, and even somewhat religious, it is easy to be convinced that you live among the infidels with their alcohol and preoccupation with coitus.

But, again, it is not explanation enough; not an explanation of why a generation of British-born young men are attracted to the life and values of their distant ancestors, or why they have shown such savagery.

Britain has comforted itself by dealing with self-identified “community leaders” in the Muslim community. Unfortunately the real leaders have been fiery, foreign-born imams who proselytize hatred in the mosques that serve Britain’s 2 million Muslims. The Muslim communities have been hidden in plain sight from the British mainstream.

Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com) is executive producer and host of "White House Chronicle," on PBS, and a long time international journalist, publisher and business consultant.