Tag Archives: Holy Land

Jew of the Week: Marc Chagall

The Colour Master

Moishe Shagal (1887-1985) was born in the shtetl of Liozna, in what is today Belarus, the oldest of nine children in a Hasidic Jewish family. Shagal went to a religious heder school until age 13, but wanted to learn a wider breadth of subjects, so his mother managed to bribe a local high school to take him in. (Jews were then forbidden from public schools, and the bribe was a whopping 50 roubles—three months salary—a small fortune for their impoverished family.) This is where he discovered his passion for art. He soon enrolled in Yehuda Pen’s art school in Vitebsk, and was given free tuition since he was so poor. While most Jewish artists in Russia at the time hid their Jewishness, Shagal embraced it. He would later say how Hasidism greatly influenced his artwork, and many of his pieces are deliberately meant to preserve Jewish culture. He wrote that every single one of his artworks “breathed” with the “spirit and reflection” of his childhood home and memories. In 1906, Shagal moved to St. Petersburg and joined a prestigious art academy (using a friend’s passport). A few years later, he left to Paris and henceforth went by “Marc Chagall”. Among his biggest influences were Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and (former Jew of the Week) Pissarro, though he did not want to be associated with any particular type of art. An exhibit in Germany in 1914 first brought him wider renown. He then returned to Russia to get married and start a family. In 1917, while broke and going hungry for days, Chagall was offered a job as arts commissar in Vitebsk. He accepted, and went on to found the Vitebsk Arts College which would go on to become the top art academy in the USSR. A few years later, Chagall moved to Moscow to be the stage designer of the State Jewish Chamber Theater, where he produced some of his most famous murals. In 1923, Chagall moved yet again, back to France, and partnered with Ambroise Vollard. The latter commissioned many of Chagall’s greatest works, including illustrations from the Tanakh. For inspiration, Chagall moved to Tel-Aviv and stayed at the home of Meir Dizengoff, the city’s first mayor. (That home was where the State of Israel would be proclaimed in 1948, and is today known as Independence Hall.) The Holy Land made a huge impact on Chagall, causing him to become something of a ba’al teshuva and return to his Jewish faith. He immersed himself in Jewish studies, and worked diligently on his “Old Testament” collection (which took until 1956 to complete, and was then hailed as being “full of divine inspiration”). Chagall returned to France shortly before the Nazi invasion. He was imprisoned and had his citizenship revoked. Pressure from the United States got him released, and he arrived in New York in the summer of 1941. His favourite hangout was the heavily-Jewish Lower East Side, where Chagall felt at home and spent much of his time socializing in Yiddish. Meanwhile, Chagall worked as a set and costume designer for the Ballet Theatre. He would return to France after the war, and in his later years produced sculptures, ceramics, tapestries, and stained glass. He painted the ceiling of the Paris Opera (covering 2400 square feet and using 200 kilos of paint), and wrote an autobiography, too. Chagall has been called the “greatest image-maker” of our time, and Picasso said that he was “the only painter left who understands what colour is.”

Words of the Week

I did not see the Bible, I dreamed it. Ever since early childhood, I have been captivated by the Bible. It has always seemed to me and still seems today the greatest source of poetry of all time.
– Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall’s “Abraham and the Three Angels”

Jew of the Week: Benjamin of Tudela

The Jew Who Inspired Marco Polo

A 19th century engraving of ‘Benjamin of Tudela in the Sahara’

Binyamin MiTudela (1130-1173) was born to a religious Sephardic family in the town of Tudela, now in Spain. In 1165, he set out for what is believed to be a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He had a larger objective in mind as well, since this was at the height of the Crusades and a perilous time for anyone to make a pilgrimage, especially Jews. Binyamin wanted to explore all the Jewish communities along the way and to create a detailed map showing the route one should take and where a Jew can find safe refuge on his journey. This would open the door for more Jews to take a trip to their beloved Holy Land. A lover of history and geography, he also wished to leave a record of what the Jewish (and non-Jewish) world looked like in the 12th century. Binyamin recorded all that he saw in his Sefer haMasa’at, “Book of Travels”, also known as Masa’aot Binyamin. His adventures were so popular they were soon translated into just about every European language. Today, the book is among the most important historical documents for scholars of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as well as of Jewish and Muslim history. A great deal of what we know about that era, including the daily lives of simple people, comes from his book. Some believe that it was this book that may have inspired another, more famous, adventurer about a century later: Marco Polo. Binyamin’s travels took him to France and the Italian Peninsula, then to Greece and across what is today Turkey to the Near East, then to Persia, back around the Arabian Peninsula, to Egypt, and returning to Iberia by way of North Africa. While in Ethiopia, he describes a large Jewish community, which was a key source of information allowing modern-day Ethiopian Jews to be accepted by the State of Israel and the rabbinate. He is possibly the first writer to detail the community of Al-Hashishin, better known as “Assassins”, as well as among the first to describe the Druze. In Posquières, he meets and describes the great Raavad. In Rome, he sees a Rabbi Yechiel, who is an advisor to the Pope, and has “free access to the Pope’s palace”! While in Baghdad, he writes of the Caliph, who is “like a Pope” for Muslims, and that the Caliph is fluent in Hebrew and knows Torah law extensively, though he rules with an iron fist. All in all, Benjamin of Tudela visited and wrote about some 300 cities. Today, there are streets named after him in Jerusalem and in Tudela, Spain, where there is also a high school bearing his name.

Words of the Week

One day I learned that dreams exist to come true, and since that day I do not sleep for rest. I sleep just to dream.
– Walt Disney

Jews of the Week: Rabbi Yehuda Bibas and Rabbi Yehuda Alkali

The Unbelievable True Story of the Real Founders of Zionism

Yehuda Aryeh Leon Bibas (1789-1852) was born in Gibralter to a long line of Sephardi rabbis. After his father’s untimely death, the young Bibas moved to Livorno to be raised by his grandfather. There, he studied both at the yeshiva and the university, becoming a rabbi and physician. He returned to Gibralter to head its yeshiva, attracting many students from across Europe and North Africa. In 1831, he was appointed chief rabbi of Corfu (a Greek island that had a large population in those days). Over the next decade, he understood the terrible predicament that Jews were in, and resolved that restoring an independent Jewish state in the Holy Land was the only solution. In 1839, he embarked on an international tour to encourage Jews all over the world to make aliyah. Some credit him with being the first prominent figure to do so in modern times. He was supported by the great Moses Montefiore, a wealthy Sephardic Jew who financed the first printing press and textile factory in the land of Israel, refurbished many of its Jewish holy sites, and established several Jewish agricultural colonies.

Rabbi Alkali

It was during Rabbi Bibas’ global tour that he met Rabbi Yehuda Alkali (1798-1878). Rabbi Alkali was born in Sarajevo and studied in Jerusalem under the tutelage of the holy city’s greatest Kabbalists. He went on to become the chief rabbi of Semlin, Serbia. Partly inspired by Serbia’s own nationalist movement, and further spurred by an 1840 blood libel against the Jews of Damascus, Rabbi Alkali was convinced that Jews must have a state of their own after meeting Rabbi Bibas. Rabbi Alkali established the Society of the Settlement of Eretz Yisrael and began a campaign to encourage Jews to settle in their ancestral home. Based on a famous prophecy in the Zohar, Rabbi Alkali proclaimed that the year 1840 would be the start of the process of Redemption, and that it would take one hundred years to accomplish. In an incredible prediction, he said that if Jews failed to take advantage of this spiritually-auspicious century, then by 1940 the Redemption would begin anyway, but in a much more difficult way, and only through “an outpouring of wrath will our dispersed be gathered”. History has eerily confirmed his prophecy. More amazing still, Rabbi Alkali published a book in 1857 titled Goral L’Adonai (“Lot for the Lord”) which clearly outlined the steps to re-establish a Jewish state in Israel. He presented one of the first copies of the book to his dear friend, and a member of his Semlin synagogue, named Simon Loeb Herzl. This happened to be the grandfather of Theodor Herzl, who would inherit the book. Scholars agree that Rabbi Alkali and his 1857 treatise played a major role in influencing Theodor Herzl, and thus the whole Zionist movement. In fact, it was Rabbi Alkali who first proposed restoring Hebrew as the primary spoken language of the Jews, who argued that the Holy Land should be legally purchased piece by piece, and that Jews must re-learn to become agriculturalists for the whole endeavour to work. (All three of these things would soon materialize.) Both Rabbi Bibas and Rabbi Alkali practiced what they preached and made aliyah to Israel. Rabbi Bibas first joined his disciples in Yaffo, then moved to Hebron and opened a library. He passed away shortly after, and is buried in Hebron’s Jewish Cemetery. Rabbi Alkali, meanwhile, founded a settlement near Jerusalem and lived there for the remainder of his life. He is buried in Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives Cemetery.

Did You Know These Famous People are Sephardic Jews?

Words of the Week

It was a city of wonders. Everything was written in Hebrew. People were speaking Hebrew. I thought, This is redemption. This is the city of the Messiah.
– Amnon Shamosh, Syrian-Israeli novelist, on first arriving to Tel-Aviv in 1937