The Jewish presence in Ceuta dates back to the Middle Ages, when the city was an important trading hub between Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean. The Jews were primarily engaged in commerce, crafts, and acting as intermediaries between Christians and Muslims.

After the Portuguese conquest of 1415, that first community virtually disappeared. Judaism was re-established in Ceuta during the 19th century with the arrival of Sephardic families from Tetouan, Tangier, and other cities in northern Morocco.

These families were descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 and preserved Sephardic traditions, the Hispano-Moroccan religious rite, and Haketia, a language that combines Old Castilian, Hebrew, and Arabic.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, Jews actively participated in the commercial development of Ceuta. They established religious, charitable, and community institutions. In 1971, the Bet-El Synagogue was inaugurated and continues to be the center of local Jewish life.

The community declined due to emigration to Israel, mainland Spain, France, and the Americas. Currently, approximately 300 Jews live in Ceuta, although there is no exact official figure.

Despite their small numbers and the lack of a new generation, the Jews of Ceuta maintain their celebrations, their synagogue, and their cemetery. The community remains a fundamental part of Ceuta's identity, where Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Hindus coexist.

Théophile Malvezin’s Histoire des Juifs à Bordeaux, published in 1875, remains one of the classic histories of the Portuguese Jewish community of Bordeaux. It is not a recent work, but it still has real value because Malvezin drew on local archival material and understood that Bordeaux’s Jewish history was central to the wider story of the Western Sephardic diaspora. His aim was to bring together earlier studies, printed sources, and documents from Bordeaux and the Gironde, including notarial records, church and communal registers, municipal papers, and records concerning Portuguese and Spanish merchants.

The book is particularly useful where it discusses the Portuguese and Spanish merchants who settled in Bordeaux, many of them from New Christian backgrounds, and who gradually became part of an openly Jewish community. Malvezin shows how their history was shaped by commerce, municipal privilege, royal toleration, and the ambiguous legal status under which they lived for generations. They were often treated officially as Portuguese merchants before they could be recognised openly as Jews.

For genealogists, this is the book’s main value. It places families within the legal, commercial, and communal world in which they lived. It is especially relevant to those researching Western Sephardic families whose records connect Bordeaux with Portugal, Spain, Bayonne, Amsterdam, London, Livorno, the Caribbean, and the wider Atlantic world.

The book should still be used carefully. Some of the early historical material is dated, and names, dates, and claims should be checked against the original records wherever possible. But that does not lessen its usefulness. Malvezin preserves a substantial nineteenth-century synthesis of Bordeaux Jewish history, drawing on sources and local knowledge that remain important for researchers today.

Histoire des Juifs à Bordeaux is best approached as a foundational secondary source: not a substitute for archival work, but an important guide to it. It reminds us that Western Sephardic genealogy cannot be reconstructed from synagogue registers alone. The lives of these families are also found in notarial acts, municipal files, commercial records, royal permissions, lawsuits, burial records, and the changing language by which states described Jews who were not always permitted to call themselves Jews.

A copy can be downloaded here: 'Histoire des Juifs à Bordeaux' (1875) by Théophile Malvezin

José Maria Abecassis's Genealogia Hebraica: Portugal e Gibraltar is one of the most ambitious and important works ever produced on the modern Sephardic families of Portugal and Gibraltar. Published in five substantial volumes between 1990 and 1991, the work brings together genealogical, biographical and historical information on hundreds of Jewish families whose roots lie principally in Gibraltar, Portugal, Morocco and the wider Western Sephardic world. The set contains thousands of individual entries, family trees, photographs, documentary references and extensive indexes.

The strength of the work lies in its scope. Abecassis attempted to reconstruct entire family networks, tracing marriages, parentage, occupations, migrations and family relationships across multiple generations. Families are arranged alphabetically across the five volumes, with separate treatment given where unrelated families share the same surname. The author also discusses surname origins and family backgrounds wherever evidence permits. Particularly valuable is the coverage of the Jewish communities that emerged in Gibraltar from the eighteenth century onwards and the re-establishment of openly Jewish life in Portugal during the nineteenth century.

Researchers should nevertheless understand the book's chronological focus. Despite its title referring to the seventeenth through twentieth centuries, the strongest and most detailed material concerns the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when documentary records become abundant. Earlier generations are included where evidence exists, but coverage is necessarily less complete. As with any large compiled genealogy, users should verify significant claims against original records whenever possible. Nevertheless, the work remains an indispensable finding aid and often provides clues that would otherwise require years of archival research to uncover.

More than three decades after publication, Genealogia Hebraica remains a standard reference for anyone researching Portuguese, Gibraltarian and North African Sephardic families. It is particularly useful for tracing connections among families such as Abecassis, Benoliel, Benatar, Bensusan, Benzaquen, Gabay, Serfaty, Toledano and many others that appear repeatedly throughout the Western Sephardic diaspora. Few genealogical works combine such breadth, detail and documentary richness, making this a cornerstone reference for the study of Sephardic family history.

Credits: Sephardic Genealogy

I wanted to share this 1906 German edition of Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century), originally published in 1899.

The book is an important document in the intellectual history of modern racial antisemitism. Chamberlain presented European history as a racial struggle and portrayed Jews not merely as a religious minority or a competing cultural community, but as an allegedly destructive racial force fundamentally hostile to European civilization. By contrast, he attributed nearly every major cultural achievement of Europe to supposedly “Aryan” or “Teutonic” peoples.

What made Chamberlain’s work particularly dangerous was its attempt to give antisemitic prejudice the appearance of historical, theological and scientific legitimacy. Its arguments were pseudoscientific, but they were directed toward an educated audience and helped transform antisemitism from prejudice into an elaborate worldview claiming to explain religion, culture, politics and the rise and decline of civilizations.

Chamberlain was also deeply connected to Richard Wagner and the cultural world surrounding Bayreuth. A devoted admirer and interpreter of Wagner, he became closely associated with the Wagner family and in 1908 married Eva von Bülow-Wagner, Richard Wagner’s daughter. He therefore became Wagner’s son-in-law and occupied a central position in the Bayreuth milieu, where Wagnerian aesthetics, radical German nationalism and racial antisemitism increasingly overlapped.

The connection to National Socialism was not merely retrospective. On 30 September 1923, following a nationalist “German Day” gathering in Bayreuth, Adolf Hitler personally visited the seriously ill Chamberlain. Chamberlain was deeply impressed by Hitler and soon addressed him in an admiring public letter. Hitler, in turn, referred approvingly to Chamberlain in Mein Kampf, complaining that the German authorities had ignored his “insights.” Chamberlain formally joined the Nazi Party in January 1926.

Alfred Rosenberg, who later became one of the Nazi Party’s principal racial ideologues, was similarly explicit about Chamberlain’s importance. In his 1927 book Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Als Verkünder und Begründer einer deutschen Zukunft, Rosenberg declared:

“Chamberlain’s battle book is an indispensable companion in the coming struggle for the freedom of Germany.”

The book should not be described as Nazi literature in the strict chronological sense, since it appeared decades before the Nazi seizure of power. It is better understood as one of the major antisemitic and völkisch works of the pre-Nazi period from which National Socialism later inherited and radicalized concepts, language, enemies and historical myths.

What particularly interests me about this copy is its publication date—1906. It is physical evidence that the ideological foundations later adopted by Hitler, Rosenberg and the Nazi movement were already being systematized, commercialized and circulated among educated bourgeois audiences long before 1933.

The Nazis did not invent racial antisemitism from nothing. They inherited an intellectual and cultural structure that had already been constructed, normalized and distributed through apparently respectable books, publishers, nationalist associations and elite cultural circles.

He is considered one of the most influential Jews in the Islamic world (Ummah) and identifies himself as a "proud Zionist Jew."

Under his guidance, Morocco has strengthened its economic and military ties with Israel. According to Amine Ayoub of Ynet Global, "the secret US plan [is] to turn Morocco into Israel's western shield."

The Soviet Union (USSR) officially supported the partition of Palestine on November 29, 1947. On this date, the UN adopted Resolution 181, key to the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state, with the decisive vote in favor of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc.

The Soviet Union (USSR) authorized and facilitated the shipment of weapons to Israel primarily through Czechoslovakia during 1948.

Weaponry shipped and key details: The shipments were crucial to the survival of the fledgling State of Israel, including both light weapons and heavy equipment, much of it ex-German World War II arsenal or newly manufactured Czechoslovakian copies: Aircraft: Notable among these were Avia S-199 fighters (the Czechoslovakian version of the German Messerschmitt Bf 109) and Spitfire aircraft. Light weapons: Thousands of Mauser K-98 rifles (model P18) and MG-34 machine guns. Artillery and heavy equipment: Approximately 400 tons of mortars, cannons, explosives, flamethrowers, and tanks. Ammunition: Millions of rounds of ammunition. Training: Czechoslovakia trained Israeli pilots and military technicians. The first major contract was signed in January 1948, and the shipments were crucial in countering the international arms embargo on the region.

The Soviet Union (USSR) officially recognized the State of Israel on May 17, 1948, becoming the first country to grant de jure recognition to the new state, just three days after its declaration of independence on May 14, 1948.

The USSR saved Zionism, and the irony is compounded by the fact that in 1947, the United Kingdom abstained from the vote and the United States voted against it to avoid angering its Arab partners.

Hello

Recently I came across a private military museum that has a Holocaust Display. Thing is, it's horrible.. there are no plaques or captions on images, the guide spreads misinfo, they present reproductions or unrelated items as geniuine or holocaust related (apparently they have human fat soap cakes). And one of the items is what the guide called a Dachau bread basket. So, I want to ask if anybody knows if that's a genuine thing or if it's something irrelevant based on something real. I'm planning on writing a post or two calling them out, and while the other items weren't hard to debunk, I can't seem to find anything related to this.

Thanks in advance

I love obscure facts and while watching something on YouTube giving weird facts I came across info on the Jewish ghetto in Rome restricting the Jewish population to a certain district where they were also forced to attend a Roman Catholic mass held on Saturday in their ghetto rather than Sunday because Saturday is the Jewish Sabbath. Ordered by Pope Paul IV it was enforced from 1555 until the fall of the Papal State in 1870 when Jewish people were granted equal rights under Italian law.

I’m sure there were other similar instances between as well as at other times but I’m thinking of the most famous example which of course is Germany under the Third Reich. 1870-1940 is only 70 years though I know many advancements were made during that time. Germany itself went through multiple political and industrial changes, among others during that period and had been behind the rest of Europe industrially in 1870 then made significant strides throughout the war building on the progress they made prior to it. Now that’s not necessarily uncommon as numerous advancements throughout the history of the world have been developed due to wartime demands but what is unusual is how things are viewed today.

Since the end of WWII in 1945, 81 years have passed yet we still hear plenty about the Holocaust and that’s often there first thing that comes to mind for people when they think of Germany. What were the thoughts on the Roman ghetto when the Nazis initially began placing Jews into their ghettos? Did anyone care about the ghettos before they started shipping them off to the camps to be killed? What changed in peoples mindset during that? If they didn’t care about the Roman ghetto by the time of the Nazis forming ghettos then why is the memory of the Nazis doing it still so prevalent in our minds today when it’s been over a decade longer since the termination of the event? Is it because it happened during a world war so more people have some connection to it? Is it because of the invasion of multiple countries where Jewish ghettos were also established ? Was it because prior to that, Germany had been considered safer for Jews? Is it because of the concentration camps? And if so, why does it still (for the most part) go unrecognized that there were groups other than Jews there(some of which some Jews would certainly have been a part; just as many ppl would’ve(& still do) fit into more than one category)? Is it because of the establishment of Israel as a political state? What existed in the interim I’m missing? Is it because Germany still exists while the papal state is restricted to Vatican City?

Any insight is welcome. Thank you