Tea at Trianon: Black Synagogues

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, January 9, 2021

Black Synagogues

From The Times of Israel:

Among the Black congregations highlighted by Sapoznik were The Moorish Zionist Temple founded by Rabbi Mordechai Herman, who claimed direct Ethiopian lineage, and Congregation Beth B’nai Abraham founded in 1929 by the Barbados-born Rabbi Arnold Josiah Ford. Rabbi Wentworth Arthur Matthew, a West Indian immigrant, founded The Commandment Keepers Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in 1919, and would go on to establish a network of synagogues in the US and the Caribbean based on traditional Orthodox Ashkenazi traditions. Sapoznik surmised that Blacks from the Caribbean may have adopted the religion of Jewish slaveholders, and that Blacks claiming Abyssinian (Ethiopian) lineage did so as a way of claiming a connection to Old Testament Hebrews. (Read more.)