Persecution of Jews and Muslims by Manuel I of Portugal
On 5 December 1496, King Manuel I of Portugal signed the decree of expulsion of Jews and Muslims to take effect by the end of October of the next year. Until the 15th century, some Jews occupied prominent places in Portuguese political and economic life. For example, Isaac Abrabanel was the treasurer of King Afonso V of Portugal. Many had an active role in Portuguese culture, they kept their reputation of diplomats and merchants. By this time, Lisbon and Évora were home to important Jewish communities. On 5 December 1496, King Manuel I of Portugal decreed that all Jews must convert to Catholicism or leave the country, because one clause in the contract of marriage between himself and Isabella, Princess of Asturias, stipulated he do so in order to win her hand; the King demonstrated his wish to and forever eradicate Judaism from Portugal by issuing two decrees. The initial edict of expulsion of 1496 was turned into an edict of forced conversion in 1497: Portuguese Jews were prevented from leaving the country and were forcibly baptized and converted to Christianity.
Those Jews who refused to pay taxes in protest were deported from Portugal and abandoned to their fate in the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, off the western coast of Africa. Hard times followed for the Portuguese conversos, with the massacre of 2,000 individuals in Lisbon in 1506 and the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536; when the King allowed conversos to leave after the Lisbon massacre of 1506, many went to the Ottoman Empire, notably Salonica and Constantinople, to the Wattasid Sultanate of Morocco. Smaller numbers went to Amsterdam, Brazil, Curaçao and the Antilles and New Amsterdam. In some of these places their presence can still be perceived in the use of the Ladino language by some Jewish communities in Greece and Turkey, the Portuguese-based dialects of the Antilles, or the multiple synagogues built by those who became known as the Spanish and Portuguese Jews, such as the Amsterdam Esnoga or the Willemstad Snoa; some of the most famous descendants of Portuguese Jews who lived outside Portugal are the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the classical economist David Ricardo.
Jews who converted to Christianity were known as New Christians, were always under the constant surveillance of the Inquisition. The dreaded presence of the Holy Office in Portugal lasted for three hundred years, until the Portuguese Inquisition was abolished in 1821 by the "General Extraordinary and Constituent Courts of the Portuguese Nation". Many of those New Christians were crypto-Jews; such was the case, for example, of the ancestors of Baruch Spinoza in the Netherlands. Some other Portuguese Jews few in number like the Belmonte Jews, opted for a different and radical solution, practicing their faith in a secret manner among a rural and isolated community. Known as the "Last of the Marranos", some have survived until today by their practice of intermarriage and their limited cultural contacts with the outside world. Only in the late 20th century, have they re-established contact with the international Jewish community and practice their religion in a public synagogue with a formal rabbi.
According to contemporary historian François Soyer, the expulsion of Muslims from Portugal has been overshadowed by the forced conversion of Jews in the country. While tolerance of Muslim minorities in Portugal was higher than in any other part of Europe, Muslims were still perceived as "alien." Anti-Muslim riots were regular in neighboring Valencia during the 1460s. In December 1496, Manuel I ordered all Muslim subjects to leave without any apparent provocation. According to 15th-century Portuguese historians Damião de Góis and Jerónimo Osório, the Portuguese government planned to forcibly convert or execute Muslims as they had done to Jews, but fear of retaliation from Muslim kingdoms in North Africa led the king to settle on deportations instead. Manuel I's motivation behind the order is unclear, but some contemporary historians say it was part of a greater goal of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand to rid the peninsula of Muslims and create "religious uniformity" and "monolithic Catholic Christian unity".
Other historians say it was influenced by ambitions of conquering Morocco, or by the suggestion of the Dominican confessor to the king, Friar Jorge Vogado. Some Muslims most fled to North Africa. In the 19th century, some affluent families of Sephardi Jewish Portuguese origin such as the Ruah and Bensaude, resettled in Portugal from Morocco; the first synagogue to be built in Portugal since the 15th century was the Lisbon Synagogue, inaugurated in 1904. In 2014 the Portuguese parliament changed the Portuguese nationality law in order to grant Portuguese nationality to descendants of Sephardi Jews expelled from Portugal; the law is a reaction to historical events that led to their expulsion from Portugal, but due to increased concerns over Jewish communities throughout Europe. In order to obtain Portuguese nationality, the person must have a family surname that attests to being a direct descendant of a Sephardi of Portuguese origin or family connections in a collateral line from a former Portuguese Sephardi community.
Use of expressions in Portuguese in Jewish rites or Judaeo-Portuguese or Ladino can be considered proof. From 2015 several hundred Turkish Jews who were able to prove descent from Portuguese Jews
History of the Jews in Amsterdam
Amsterdam has been the center of the Dutch Jewish community, has had a continuing Jewish community for the last 370 years. Amsterdam is known under the name "Mokum", given to the city by its Jewish inhabitants. Although the Holocaust affected the Jewish community, killing some 80% of the some 80,000 Jews at time present in Amsterdam, since the community has managed to rebuild a vibrant and living Jewish life for its 15,000 present members; the former Mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, is Jewish. Cohen was runner-up for the award of World Mayor in 2006. Permanent Jewish life in Amsterdam began with the arrival of pockets of Marrano and Sephardic Jews at the end of the 16th, beginning of the 17th century. Many Sephardi had been expelled from Spain in 1492 after the fall of Muslim Granada; those that moved to Portugal were forced to leave in 1497, where they were given the choice between conversion to Catholicism or death penalty on the grounds of heresy. From 1497, others remained in the Iberian peninsula.
The newly independent Dutch provinces provided an ideal opportunity for these crypto-Jews to re-establish themselves and practise their religion and they migrated, most notably to Amsterdam. Collectively, they brought economic growth and influence to the city as they established an international trading hub in Amsterdam during the 17th century, the so-called Dutch Golden Age. In 1593, Marrano Jews arrived in Amsterdam after having been refused admission to Middelburg and Haarlem; these Jews of Converso descent were important merchants, persons of great ability. Their expertise, contributed materially to the prosperity of the Netherlands, they became strenuous supporters of the contender House of Orange, were in return protected by the Stadholder. At this time, commerce in Holland was increasing. Quite new for the Netherlands, they held connections with the Levant and the Caribbean Antilles; the formal independence from Spain of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces, theoretically opened the door to public practice of Judaism.
Yet only in 1603 did a gathering take place, licensed by the city. The three original congregations formed in the first two decades of the 17th century merged in 1639 to form a united Sephardic congregation; the first Ashkenazim who arrived in Amsterdam were refugees from the Chmielnicki Uprising in Poland and the Thirty Years War. Their numbers soon swelled outnumbering the Sephardic Jews at the end of the 17th century. Many of the new Ashkenazi immigrants were poor, contrary to their wealthy Sephardic co-religionists, they were only allowed in Amsterdam because of the financial aid promised to them and other guarantees given to the Amsterdam city council by the Sephardic community, despite the religious and cultural differences between the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim and the Portuguese-speaking Sephardim. Only in 1671 did the large Ashkenazi community inaugurate their own synagogue, the Great Synagogue, which stood opposite to the Sephardic Esnoga Synagogue. Soon after, several other synagogues were built, among them the Obbene Shul, the Dritt Shul and the Neie Shul.
For a long time, the Ashkenazi community was focused on Central and Eastern Europe, the region where most of the Dutch Ashkenazi originated from. Rabbis and teachers hailed from Poland and Germany. Up until the 19th century, most of the Ashkenazi Jews spoke Yiddish, with some Dutch influences. Meanwhile, the community flourished. At the end of the 18th century, the 20,000-strong Ashkenazi community was one of the largest in Western and Central Europe. Occupation of Amsterdam by Nazi Germany began 10 May 1940. Amsterdam, Holland's largest city, had an estimated 75-80,000 Jews 53-57% of the country's Jewish population. Among them was Anne Frank. 25-35,000 of Holland's Jews were refugees. But most of these were not in Amsterdam. Although fewer than 10 percent of Amsterdam's population was Jewish, there were two contradictory outcomes: a general strike against mass Nazi arrests of Jews about 75-80% of the Jewish population was deported and murdered. Part of the Nazi plan included consolidating Holland's Jewish population into Amsterdam, prior to the "Final Solution."Canadian Forces liberated Amsterdam in the spring of 1945.
In 1964 Adje Cohen began Jewish classes with five children in his home. This grew into an Orthodox Jewish school that provides education for children from kindergarten through high school. Many Orthodox families would have left The Netherlands if not for the existence of the Cheider: Boys and girls learn separately as orthodox Judaism requires, the education is with a greater focus on the religious needs. By 1993 the Cheider had grown to over 230 60 Staff members; the Cheider moved into its current building at Zeeland Street in Amsterdam Buitenveldert. Many prominent Dutch Figures attended the opening, most noteworthy was Princess Margriet who opened the new building. Most of the Amsterdam Jewish community is affiliated to the Ashkenazi Nederlands Israëlitisch Kerkgenootschap; these congregations combined form the Nederlands-Israëlietische Hoofdsynagoge (N
Portuguese Inquisition
The Portuguese Inquisition was formally established in Portugal in 1536 at the request of its king, John III. Manuel I had asked for the installation of the Inquisition in 1515 to fulfill the commitment of marriage with Maria of Aragon, but it was only after his death that Pope Paul III acquiesced. In the period after the Medieval Inquisition, it was one of three different manifestations of the wider Christian Inquisition along with the Spanish Inquisition and Roman Inquisition; the major target of the Portuguese Inquisition were those who had converted from Judaism to Catholicism, the Conversos known as New Christians, Conversos or Marranos, who were suspected of secretly practicing Judaism. Many of these were Spanish Jews who had left Spain for Portugal, when Spain forced Jews to convert to Christianity or leave; the number of victims is estimated as around 40,000. As in Spain, the Inquisition was subject to the authority of the King, it was headed by a Grand Inquisitor, or General Inquisitor, named by the Pope but selected by the king, always from within the royal family.
The Grand Inquisitor would nominate other inquisitors. In Portugal, the first Grand Inquisitor was D. Diogo da Silva, personal confessor of King John III and Bishop of Ceuta, he was followed by Cardinal Henry, brother of John III, who would become king. There were Courts of the Inquisition in Lisbon, Évora, for a short time in Porto and Lamego, it held its first auto-da-fé in Portugal in 1540. Like the Spanish Inquisition, it concentrated its efforts on rooting out those who had converted from other faiths but did not adhere to the strictures of Catholic orthodoxy; the Portuguese Inquisition expanded its scope of operations from Portugal to Portugal's colonial possessions, including Brazil, Cape Verde, Goa, where it continued investigating and trying cases based on supposed breaches of orthodox Roman Catholicism until 1821. Under John III, the activity of the courts was extended to the censure of books, as well as undertaking cases of divination and bigamy. Aimed at religious matters, the Inquisition had an influence on every aspect of Portuguese life – political and social.
In Portuguese India, the Goa Inquisition turned its attention to Indian converts from Hinduism or Islam who were thought to have returned to their original ways. In addition, it prosecuted Hindus and Muslims who broke prohibitions against the observance of Hindu or Muslim rites or interfered with Portuguese attempts to forcibly convert non-Christians to Catholicism. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus were forced to move out of Goa, it was established in Goa in 1560 by Aleixo Dias Falcão and Francisco Marques, who occupied the palace of the Sabaio Adil Khan. The ancient Christian community of Malabar Nasranis on the south Indian coast was persecuted in the Portuguese Inquisition; the Portuguese described the Malabar Nasranis as Sabbath-keeping Judaizers and burnt their Syriac-Aramaic manuscripts at the Synod of Diamper. Among the main targets of the Inquisition were the Portuguese Christian traditions and movements that were not perceived as orthodox; the millenarian and national Feast of the Cult of the Empire of the Holy Spirit, dating from the mid 13th century, spread throughout all mainland Portugal from into the 14th century.
In the following centuries it spread throughout Portugal's Atlantic islands and empire, where it was the main target of prohibition and surveillance by the Inquisition after the 1540s, since it had disappeared from continental Portugal and India. This spiritual tradition, practiced by non-religious officials and popular Brotherhoods in the Middle Ages and following centuries, was restored only after the second half of the 20th century in some municipalities of mainland Portugal. By except for a few faithful and accurate local traditions, it had undergone major deletions and changes of the ancient rituals. According to the traditional Feast of the Empire of the Holy Spirit, celebrated at the feast of Pentecost, a future, third age would be governed by the Empire of Holy Spirit and would represent a monastic or fraternal governance, in which the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, the intermediaries, the organized Churches would be unnecessary, infidels would unite with Christians by free will.
Until the 16th century, this was the main annual festivity in most of the major Portuguese cities, with multiple celebrations in Lisbon and Coimbra. The Church and the Inquisition would not tolerate a spiritual tradition popular and without the mediation of the clergy at the time, most celebrating a future Age which would bring an end to the Church; the cult of the Holy Spirit survived in the Azores Islands among the local population and under the traditional protection of the Order of Christ. Here the arm of the Inquisition did not extend its power, despite reports from local ecclesiastical authorities. Beyond the Azores, the cult survived in many parts of Brazil and is celebrated today in all Brazilian states except two, as well as in pockets of Portuguese settlers in North America among those of Azorian descent; the movements and concepts of Sebastianism and of the Fifth Empire were sometimes targets of the Inquisition, both considered unorthodox and heretical. But targeting was intermittent and selective since some important familiares (associated pe
Pharisees
The Pharisees were at various times a political party, a social movement, a school of thought in the Holy Land during the time of Second Temple Judaism. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, Pharisaic beliefs became the foundational and ritualistic basis for Rabbinic Judaism. Conflicts between Pharisees and Sadducees took place in the context of much broader and longstanding social and religious conflicts among Jews, made worse by the Roman conquest. Another conflict was cultural, between those who favored those who resisted it. A third was juridico-religious, between those who emphasized the importance of the Second Temple with its rites and services, those who emphasized the importance of other Mosaic Laws. A fourth point of conflict religious, involved different interpretations of the Torah and how to apply it to current Jewish life, with Sadducees recognizing only the Written Torah and rejecting doctrines such as the Oral Torah, the Prophets, the Writings, the resurrection of the dead.
Josephus, believed by many historians to be a Pharisee, estimated the total Pharisee population before the fall of the Second Temple to be around 6,000. Josephus claimed that Pharisees received the full support and goodwill of the common people in contrast to the more elite Sadducees, who were the upper class. Pharisees claimed Mosaic authority for their interpretation of Jewish Laws, while Sadducees represented the authority of the priestly privileges and prerogatives established since the days of Solomon, when Zadok, their ancestor, officiated as High Priest; the phrase "common people" in Josephus' writings suggests that most Jews were "just Jewish people", distinguishing them from the main liturgical groups. Outside Jewish history and literature, Pharisees have been made notable by references in the New Testament to conflicts with John the Baptist and with Jesus. There are several references in the New Testament to the Apostle Paul being a Pharisee; the relationship between Early Christianity and Pharisees was not always hostile however: e.g. Gamaliel is cited as a Pharisaic leader, sympathetic to Christians.
"Pharisee" is derived from Ancient Greek Pharisaios, from Aramaic Pərīšā, plural Pərīšayyā, meaning "set apart, separated", related to Hebrew pārûš, plural pĕrûšîm, the Qal passive participle of the verb pāraš. The first historical mention of the Pharisees and their beliefs comes in the four gospels and the Book of Acts, in which both their meticulous adherence to their interpretation of the Torah as well as their eschatological views are described. A historical mention of the Pharisees comes from the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus in a description of the "four schools of thought", or "four sects", into which he divided the Jews in the 1st century CE. Other sects emerged at this time, such as the Early Christians in Jerusalem and the Therapeutae in Egypt. 2 Maccabees, a deuterocanonical book of the Bible, focuses on the Jews' revolt against the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes and concludes with the defeat of his general, Nicanor, in 161 BCE by Judas Maccabeus, the hero of the work. It was written by a Pharisee or someone sympathetic toward Pharisees, as it includes several theological innovations: propitiatory prayer for the dead, judgment day, intercession of saints and merits of the martyrs.
Judah haNasi redacted the Mishnah, an authoritative codification of Pharisaic interpretations, around 200 CE. Most of the authorities quoted in the Mishnah lived after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE; the Mishnah was supremely important because it compiled the oral interpretations and traditions of the Pharisees and on the Rabbis into a single authoritative text, thus allowing oral tradition within Judaism to survive the destruction of the Second Temple. However, none of the Rabbinic sources include identifiable eyewitness accounts of the Pharisees and their teachings; the deportation and exile of an unknown number of Jews of the ancient Kingdom of Judah to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar II, starting with the first deportation in 597 BCE and continuing after the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple in 587 BCE, resulted in dramatic changes to Jewish culture and religion. During the 70-year exile in Babylon, Jewish houses of assembly and houses of prayer were the primary meeting places for prayer, the house of study was the counterpart for the synagogue.
In 539 BCE the Persians conquered Babylon, in 537 BCE Cyrus the Great allowed Jews to return to Judea and rebuild the Temple. He did not, allow the restoration of the Judean monarchy, which left the Judean priests as the dominant authority. Without the constraining power of the monarchy, the authority of the Temple in civic life was amplified, it was around this time that the Sadducee party allied elites. However, the Second Temple, completed in 515 BCE, had been constructed under the auspices of a foreign power, there were lingering questions about its legitimacy; this provided the condition for the development of various sects or "schools of thought
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
The Index librorum prohibitorum was a list of publications deemed heretical, or contrary to morality by the Sacred Congregation of the Index and thus Catholics were forbidden to read them without permission. There were scattered attempts to censor individual books before the sixteenth century, notably the ninth-century Decretum Glasianum, but none of these were either official or widespread. Much a first version was promulgated by Pope Paul IV in 1559, which Paul F. Grendler believed marked "the turning-point for the freedom of enquiry in the Catholic world", which lasted less than a year, being replaced by what was called the Tridentine Index, which relaxed aspects of the Pauline Index, criticized and had prevented its acceptance; the 20th and final edition appeared in 1948, the Index was formally abolished on 14 June 1966 by Pope Paul VI. The aim of the list was to protect the faith and morals of the faithful by preventing the reading of theologically and politically disruptive books. Books thought to contain such errors included works by astronomers such as Johannes Kepler's Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae, on the Index from 1621 to 1835, by philosophers, like Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
The various editions of the Index contained the rules of the Church relating to the reading and pre-emptive censorship of books—editions and translations of the Bible that had not been approved by the Church could be banned. Latin Church canon law still recommends that works concerning sacred Scripture, canon law, church history, any writings which specially concern religion or morals, be submitted to the judgment of the local ordinary; the local ordinary consults someone whom he considers competent to give a judgment and, if that person gives the nihil obstat the local ordinary grants the imprimatur. Members of religious institutes require the imprimi potest of their major superior to publish books on matters of religion or morals; some of the scientific theories in works that were on early editions of the Index have long been taught at Catholic universities worldwide. The burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno, whose entire works were placed on the Index in 1603, was because of teaching the heresy of pantheism, not for heliocentrism or other scientific views.
Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, one of whose works was on the Index, was beatified in 2007. Some have argued that the developments since the abolition of the Index signify "the loss of relevance of the Index in the 21st century."A complete list of the authors and writings present in the successive editions of the Index is given in J. Martínez de Bujanda, Index Librorum Prohibitorum, 1600–1966. A list of the books that were on the Index can be found on the World Wide Web; the historical context in which the Index appeared involved the early restrictions on printing in Europe. The refinement of moveable type and the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440 changed the nature of book publishing, the mechanism by which information could be disseminated to the public. Books, once rare and kept in a small number of libraries, could be mass-produced and disseminated. In the 16th century, both the churches and governments in most European countries attempted to regulate and control printing because it allowed for rapid and widespread circulation of ideas and information.
The Protestant Reformation generated large quantities of polemical new writing by and within both the Catholic and Protestant camps, religious subject-matter was the area most subject to control. While governments and church encouraged printing in many ways, which allowed the dissemination of Bibles and government information, works of dissent and criticism could circulate rapidly; as a consequence, governments established controls over printers across Europe, requiring them to have official licenses to trade and produce books. The early versions of the Index began to appear from 1529 to 1571. In the same time frame, in 1557 the English Crown aimed to stem the flow of dissent by chartering the Stationers' Company; the right to print was restricted to two universities and to the 21 existing printers in the city of London, which had between them 53 printing presses. The French crown tightly controlled printing, the printer and writer Etienne Dolet was burned at the stake for atheism in 1546; the 1551 Edict of Châteaubriant comprehensively summarized censorship positions to date, included provisions for unpacking and inspecting all books brought into France.
The 1557 Edict of Compiègne applied the death penalty to heretics and resulted in the burning of a noblewoman at the stake. Printers were viewed as radical and rebellious, with 800 authors and book dealers being incarcerated in the Bastille. At times, the prohibitions of church and state followed each other, e.g. René Descartes was placed on the Index in the 1660s and the French government prohibited the teaching of Cartesianism in schools in the 1670s; the Copyright Act 1710 in Britain, copyright laws in France, eased this situation. However, historian Eckhard Höffner claims that copyright laws and their restrictions acted as a barrier to progress in those countries for over a century, since British publishers c
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet, known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer and philosopher famous for his wit, his criticism of Christianity the Roman Catholic Church, his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile and prolific writer, producing works in every literary form, including plays, novels and historical and scientific works, he wrote more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time; as a satirical polemicist, he made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma and the French institutions of his day. François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris, the youngest of the five children of François Arouet, a lawyer, a minor treasury official, his wife, Marie Marguerite Daumard, whose family was on the lowest rank of the French nobility; some speculation surrounds Voltaire's date of birth, because he claimed he was born on 20 February 1694 as the illegitimate son of a nobleman, Guérin de Rochebrune or Roquebrune.
Two of his older brothers—Armand-François and Robert—died in infancy, his surviving brother Armand and sister Marguerite-Catherine were nine and seven years older, respectively. Nicknamed "Zozo" by his family, Voltaire was baptized on 22 November 1694, with François de Castagnère, abbé de Châteauneuf, Marie Daumard, the wife of his mother's cousin, standing as godparents, he was educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Louis-le-Grand, where he was taught Latin and rhetoric. By the time he left school, Voltaire had decided he wanted to be a writer, against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to become a lawyer. Voltaire, pretending to work in Paris as an assistant to a notary, spent much of his time writing poetry; when his father found out, he sent Voltaire to study law, this time in Normandy. But the young man continued producing essays and historical studies. Voltaire's wit made him popular among some of the aristocratic families with. In 1713, his father obtained a job for him as a secretary to the new French ambassador in the Netherlands, the marquis de Châteauneuf, the brother of Voltaire's godfather.
At The Hague, Voltaire fell in love with a French Protestant refugee named Catherine Olympe Dunoyer. Their affair, considered scandalous, was discovered by de Châteauneuf and Voltaire was forced to return to France by the end of the year. Most of Voltaire's early life revolved around Paris. From early on, Voltaire had trouble with the authorities for critiques of the government; as a result, he was twice sentenced once to temporary exile to England. One satirical verse, in which Voltaire accused the Régent of incest with his daughter, resulted in an eleven-month imprisonment in the Bastille; the Comédie-Française had agreed in January 1717 to stage his debut play, Œdipe, it opened in mid-November 1718, seven months after his release. Its immediate critical and financial success established his reputation. Both the Régent and King George I of Great Britain presented Voltaire with medals as a mark of their appreciation, he argued for religious tolerance and freedom of thought. He campaigned to eradicate priestly and aristo-monarchical authority, supported a constitutional monarchy that protects people's rights.
The author adopted the name Voltaire following his incarceration at the Bastille. Its origin is unclear, it is an anagram of AROVET LI, the Latinized spelling of his surname and the initial letters of le jeune. According to a family tradition among the descendants of his sister, he was known as le petit volontaire as a child, he resurrected a variant of the name in his adult life; the name reverses the syllables of Airvault, his family's home town in the Poitou region. Richard Holmes supports the anagrammatic derivation of the name, but adds that a writer such as Voltaire would have intended it to convey connotations of speed and daring; these come from associations with words such as voltige, volte-face, volatile. "Arouet" was not a noble name fit for his growing reputation given that name's resonance with à rouer and roué. In a letter to Jean-Baptiste Rousseau in March 1719, Voltaire concludes by asking that, if Rousseau wishes to send him a return letter, he do so by addressing it to Monsieur de Voltaire.
A postscript explains: "J'ai été si malheureux sous le nom d'Arouet que j'en ai pris un autre surtout pour n'être plus confondu avec le poète Roi", This refers to Adenes le Roi, the'oi' diphthong was pronounced like modern'ouai', so the similarity to'Arouet' is clear, thus, it could well have been part of his rationale. Voltaire is known to have used at least 178 separate pen names during his lifetime. Voltaire's next play, Artémire, set in ancient Macedonia, opened on 15 February 1720, it was a flop and only fragments of the text survive. He instead turned to an epic poem about Henry IV of France that he had begun in early 1717. Denied a licence to publish, in August 1722 Voltaire headed north to find a publisher outside France. On the journey, he was acco
Rabbi
In Judaism, a rabbi is a teacher of Torah. The basic form of the rabbi developed in the Pharisaic and Talmudic era, when learned teachers assembled to codify Judaism's written and oral laws; the first sage for whom the Mishnah uses the title of rabbi was Yohanan ben Zakkai, active in the early-to-mid first century AD. In more recent centuries, the duties of a rabbi became influenced by the duties of the Protestant Christian minister, hence the title "pulpit rabbis", in 19th-century Germany and the United States rabbinic activities including sermons, pastoral counseling, representing the community to the outside, all increased in importance. Within the various Jewish denominations there are different requirements for rabbinic ordination, differences in opinion regarding, to be recognized as a rabbi. For example, Orthodox Judaism does not ordain women as rabbis. Non-Orthodox movements have chosen to do so for what they view as halakhic reasons as well as ethical reasons; the Hebrew word "master" רב rav, which means "great one", is the original Hebrew form of the title.
The form of the title in English and many other languages derives from the possessive form in Hebrew of rav: רַבִּי rabbi, meaning "My Master", the way a student would address a master of Torah. The word Rav in turn derives from the Semitic root ר-ב-ב, which in biblical Aramaic means "great" in many senses, including "revered", but appears as a prefix in construct forms. Although the usage rabbim "many" "the majority, the multitude" occurs for the assembly of the community in the Dead Sea scrolls there is no evidence to support an association with the title "Rabbi." The root is cognate to Arabic ربّ rabb, meaning "lord". As a sign of great respect, some great rabbis are called "The Rav". Rabbi is not an occupation found in the Hebrew Bible, ancient generations did not employ related titles such as Rabban, Ribbi, or Rab to describe either the Babylonian sages or the sages in Israel; the titles "Rabban" and "Rabbi" are first mentioned in the Mishnah. The term was first used for Rabban Gamaliel the elder, Rabban Simeon his son, Rabban Johanan ben Zakkai, all of whom were patriarchs or presidents of the Sanhedrin in the first century.
The title "Rabbi" occurs in the books of Matthew and John in the New Testament, where it is used in reference to "Scribes and Pharisees" as well as to Jesus. Sephardic and Yemenite Jews pronounce this word רִבִּי ribbī. Other variants are rəvī and, in Yiddish, rebbə; the word could be compared to the Syriac word ܪܒܝ rabi. In ancient Hebrew, rabbi was a proper term of address while speaking to a superior, in the second person, similar to a vocative case. While speaking about a superior, in the third person one could say rabbo; the term evolved into a formal title for members of the Patriarchate. Thus, the title gained an irregular plural form: רַבָּנִים rabbanim, not רַבָּי rabbay; the governments of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were based on a system that included the Jewish kings, the Jewish prophets, the legal authority of the high court of Jerusalem, the Great Sanhedrin, the ritual authority of the priesthood. Members of the Sanhedrin had to receive their ordination in an uninterrupted line of transmission from Moses, yet rather than being referred to as rabbis they were called priests or scribes, like Ezra, called in the Bible "Ezra, the priest, the scribe, a scribe of the words of God's commandments and of His statutes unto Israel."
"Rabbi" as a religious title does not appear in the Hebrew Bible. All of the above personalities would have been expected to be steeped in the wisdom of the Torah and the commandments, which would have made them "rabbis" in the modern sense of the word; this is illustrated by a two-thousand-year-old teaching in the Mishnah, Ethics of the Fathers, which observed about King David, "One who learns from their companion a single chapter, a single halakha, a single verse, a single Torah statement, or a single letter, must treat them with honor. For so we find with David King of Israel, who learned nothing from Ahitophel except two things, yet called him his teacher, his guide, his intimate, as it is said:'You are a man of my measure, my guide, my intimate'. One can derive from this the following: If David King of Israel who learned nothing from Ahitophel except for two things, called him his teacher, his guide, his intimate, one who learns from their companion a single chapter, a single halakha, a single verse, a single statement, or a single letter, how much more must they treat them with honor.
And honor is due only for Torah, as it is said:'The wise shall inherit honor','and the perfect shall inherit good'. And only Torah is good, as it is said:'I have given you a good teaching, do not forsake My Torah'." With the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem, the end of the Jewish monarchy, the decline of the dual institutions of prophets and the priesthood, the focus of scholarly and spiritual leadership within the Jewish people shifted to the sages of the Men of the Great Assembly. This assembly was composed of the earliest group of "rabbis" in the mor
