Circassian: A Most Difficult Language

Caucasian Tongue Has Phenomenal Number of Consonants

By Philologos for The Jewish Daily Forward

The other day, I was in the waiting room of a doctor’s office in Haifa, when three people walked in and sat behind me. Two were men dressed in Western clothes, one looking to be in his 30s and the other in his 50s or 60s; the third was a woman in her 20s of extremely fair complexion, wearing a black chador and a white headscarf that crossed her forehead in a horizontal line just above her eyebrows.

I took them to be Israeli Arabs — a wife, her husband and her father — most likely Druze, to judge from the headscarf. Yet when they began to speak in low voices, they quite clearly weren’t speaking Arabic. In fact, they weren’t speaking any language I had ever heard. It wasn’t Persian, or Turkish, or anything I could connect to an obviously Muslim woman in a chador. I sat and thought. In the end, both the husband and I rose to stretch our legs. “Excuse me for asking,” I said to him, “but were you speaking Circassian?”
He nodded without asking me how I knew, we both returned to our seats, and that was the sum of our interchange. It left me, though, with a small measure of satisfaction, the way one feels when successfully solving an unusual, if not particularly difficult, puzzle.

The Circassians, 3,000 of whom live in the two villages of Kfar Kama and Rihaniya in the Galilee, are Israel’s smallest indigenous non-Jewish population, so small that most Israelis have never met even one of them, and many don’t know of their existence. Called tsherkesim in Hebrew, their ancestral roots are in the Caucasus, which they left for Palestine in the 1870s. They were part of an emigration — mass flight might be more accurate — of more than 1 million of their people, which took place after the Russian conquest of their homeland from the Turks in the 1860s and the brutal anti-Muslim ethnic cleansing that followed. A majority resettled in Turkey; some wandered farther. Today, an estimated 130,000 live in Jordan with another 100,000 in Syria (at least prior to the current hostilities there), and some 35,000 in Iraq. In all these countries they have undergone linguistic assimilation, but Circassian continues to be spoken by some of them, including those who live in Israel.

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What Happens When Ex-Orthodox Jews Need To Learn How To Date?

by Jessica Wakeman for TheFrisky.com

Dating is hard enough. But what about dating when you’ve recently left an insular religious community that pretty much forbade interaction with the opposite sex?

Such is the problem faced by ex-Orthodox Jews who are “Off the Derech” (derech is Hebrew for path), or OTD, and assimilating into secular society. Hasidic communities separate boys and girls while young; girls often marry around 18 or 19, while boys tie the knot in their early 20s, having children shortly after. Touching members of the opposite sex to whom you are not related is forbidden and interaction is generally discouraged. Is it any wonder ex-Orthodox Jews are utterly bamboozled when it comes to l’amour?

That’s where dating coach Israel Irenstein comes in.

In a profile on Slate.com, Irenstein explains how he uses his own status as an ex-Orthodox Jew to help teach OTD guys how to date in secular society. He left the lifestyle after he was married with two kids when he became concerned about how Hasidic teachings were affecting his young children. Not surprisingly, he says, after his divorce he had “no idea how to talk to women.” It’s likely that parents and/or a matchmaker were involved in any marriages in the Hasidic community, so men need to learn basic dating skills, like how to flirt and how to get a woman’s number. Then they need assistance with more high-level queries, Irenstein explained, like whether it’s acceptable to pay a woman for a date, what to wear on dates, and how to handle the splitting of the check.

Oftentimes I turn a critical eye towards dating coaches and their douchier cousins, pick-up artists, for enforcing outdated gender roles (instead of encouraging people to just be who they are) and boiling down romance to “tricks.” But I think nothing but good things can come from helping people who were formerly blocked off from a huge swath of the modern Western human experience get acclimated. Being close friends with an ex-Hasid myself (who recommended that I link to the nonprofit support network Footsteps for anyone in similar straights), I know it’s a lonely, confusing road. And — I mean this with affection and respect — they deserve all the assistance they can get.


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Europe's Oldest Mikveh

by Jacqueline Alio for Best of Sicily Magazine

The island of Ortygia is an ancient district of Siracusa (Syracuse) that was inhabited into the Middle Ages, long after most areas of equal antiquity (now the archaeological park on the edge of the "modern" city) had been abandoned. It is here, among graceful limestone palaces, castles, churches and houses, that we find many of the city's rare treasures. A few have been rediscovered following centuries passed - literally - in the dark. One is the mikveh in the Giudecca, the city's Jewish quarter until 1493.

Indeed, this is the oldest mikveh (or mikvah or miqwa) known to survive in Europe. By definition, a mikveh is a ritual bath, consisting of at least one pool but perhaps several. The mikveh is an important part of Jewish tradition, and it was the inspiration - or at least the precedent - for analogous practices in Christianity (Baptism) and then Islam (Ghusl). Whereas Baptism is a sacrament that is performed only once (originally by full immersion as it is still practiced in the Eastern Orthodox Churches), Ghusl customs are more similar to Judaic practice. Obviously, one form or another of ritual bathing is a shared legacy of all three Abrahamic religions.

In Judaism, ritual bathing, or ablution, in the form of tevilah (full-body immersion) in fresh water, may date from Mosaic times, and has certainly been practiced since the period during which the Book of Leviticus was authored, before 322 BC (BCE). Both the Mishnah and the Talmud refer to the practice, and many Jewish rituals are rooted in this era.

The Jewish congregation of Syracuse was probably the first to be established in Sicily, and one of the first few in what is now Italy. Judaism was present here long before the arrival of Christianity on Sicilian shores.

The first Jews of Sicily were present during Roman times (archaeological evidence indicates that a community of the Samaritan sect also flourished in Syracuse). It is thought that while in Syracuse circa AD (CE) 59, Paul of Tarsus preached to Jews as well as Greeks. Of particular note, a few Jews arrived as slaves following the Siege of Jerusalem a decade later in AD 70 during the First Jewish-Roman War (The Great Revolt), commemorated in Rome's Arch of Titus where one of the earliest depictions of a menorah appears as a spoil of war.

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When the Talmud Replaced the Temple as the Structure at the Heart of Jewish Life

Judaism became a religion of laws, haunted and bound by the absence of a home for Jewish sovereignty

By Adam Kirsch for Tablet Magazine

Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world.

The destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. might easily have meant the death of Judaism. As we have seen again and again in the Talmud, the Temple was the center of Jewish belief and practice in a way that we can hardly imagine today. It was the only place where Jews could sacrifice to God, the only place where God’s spirit dwelled on Earth—not to mention a powerful symbol of Jewish sovereignty. The fact that Judaism managed to survive after the Temple was burned to the ground is the most remarkable of the many acts of renewal and transformation that have preserved Jewish life over thousands of years.

The legend of Yochanan ben Zakkai is a vivid parable of how Judaism managed to endure that trauma. According to tradition, Yochanan, the leading rabbinic sage of his generation, was trapped in Jerusalem during the Roman siege. The historian Josephus describes this as a time of horrific suffering, when starvation led to infanticide and cannibalism. Yochanan, seeing which way the wind was blowing, decided that his duty was not to perish with the city but to escape. You could not simply walk out of besieged Jerusalem, however—not because of the Romans, but because the Jewish Zealots in charge of the city killed anyone who tried to go over to the enemy.

The dead, however, could be taken out of Jerusalem for burial. So, Yochanan pretended to be a corpse and had himself smuggled out of the city in a coffin. Once he made it to the Roman lines, he pleased the general Vespasian by prophesying that he would one day become emperor—a prediction that indeed came true. In exchange, Vespasian granted Yochanan’s request to set up a new Jewish academy and court in Yavneh. In this way, Yochanan and Judaism itself passed through death into a new, different kind of life. From then on, Judaism would no longer be a Temple-centered religion but a religion of laws. The Talmud itself would replace the Temple as the “structure” at the heart of Jewish life.

The absence of the Temple cannot help but haunt the Talmud, especially in Order Moed, the section that Daf Yomi readers have been exploring for the last two years. These tractates deal with the Jewish holidays, many of which used to be highly Temple-centric. Yom Kippur, for instance, was the occasion of an elaborately choreographed sacrificial ritual in which the high priest would atone for the people’s sins. Rosh Hashanah, too, had its special Temple practices. In Rosh Hashanah 29b, we learn that when the holiday fell on Shabbat, it was forbidden to blow the shofar; but an exception was made for the Temple, where it was allowed.

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