Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

July 27, 2016

A 200-Year-Old English Translation of a Spanish Prayer Book

And what it says about the origins of English Jewry.

Following the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, and the forced conversion of Portuguese Jewry shortly thereafter, many converted Jews and their descendants continued to observe Jewish rituals in private. But knowledge of Hebrew was gradually lost among them, and many who eventually found their way to other parts of Western Europe continued to pray in Spanish. The scholar Aron Sterk’s recent discovery of an English-language prayer book casts some light on the first of these Jews to make their way to England—perhaps even before the formal re-admission of Jews in 1656. Jenni Frazer writes:

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