Monthly Archives: July 2019

The Sephardic Exodus to the Ottoman Empire How Jews fleeing Spain and Portugal transformed the region. BY ELI BARNAVI

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( Shared by Dr. Ehtisham)

Emergence of the Ottoman Empire

The Ottomans began to emerge as a great political and military power from the early 14th century. Uthman, founder of a dynasty, came from a small Turkish principality, which in time grew into a vast empire. The swords of his successors brought to an end the centuries‑long Greek influence in the south of the Mediterranean basin, replacing it with Muslim domination. Extending deep into the European continent, Ottoman expansion turned Vienna into an outpost of Christendom.

The Greek‑speaking Jewish communities, which the immigrants from Spain and Portugal later called “Romaniots” or “Gregos,” were all under Ottoman rule at the time of the fall of Constantinople — renamed Istanbul — in 1453. The Arabic‑speaking Jews (“Mustarabs” in the idiom of the Iberian refugees), were the other important indigenous group. They lived in “Arabistan”–countries conquered mainly during the reign of Selim I (1512‑1520) and of his son Suleiman the Magnificent (1520‑1566). For all the Jews the conquest was a salvation, as their situation in the 14th and 15th centuries under Byzantine and Mamluk rule had been extremely difficult.

Haven for Jewish Refugees from Spain and Portugal

Then, in the wake of the expulsion from Spain (1492) and the forced conversion in Portugal (1497), tens of thousands of Iberian Jews arrived in Ottoman territories. As all that was required of them was the payment of a poll‑tax and acknowledgement of’ the superiority of Islam, the empire became a haven for these refugees.

From early in the 16th century, the Jewish community in the Ottoman Empire became largest in the world. Constantinople and Salonika each had a community of approximately 20,000 people. Immigration from the Iberian peninsula, arriving in several waves throughout the 16th century, also transformed the character of Ottoman Jewry. Far more numerous than the local Jews, the Spaniards and the Portuguese soon submerged the Romaniots, and the indigenous population was assimilated into the culture and community of the new immigrants.

After the conquest of Constantinople, Muhammad II, wishing to aggrandize the city and make it into a capital befitting a great empire, brought into it many people from the provinces. This migration affected the Jewish community and changed the character it had acquired during the Byzantine period.

The economic and religious situation was indeed ameliorated; but many of the older Romaniot congregations disappeared, their memory preserved only in the names of several synagogues in Istanbul. The congregations which replaced them in the capital as well as in Salonika or in Tiriya in western Anatolia, were purely Spanish.

Jewish Prosperity and Cultural Blossoming

Within the communities, the congregations were organized according to the geographic origin of their members. Grouped around synagogues, the Jewish organizations provided all the religious, legal, educational, and social services, thus creating an almost autonomous society. Until the end of the 16th century, these institutions were very flexible, allowing significant mobility within them. The geographic origin of its members soon lost its importance, and the development of the congregation was determined by power struggles between rich individuals or groups with conflicting interests.

Throughout the 16th century, the Jews in the Ottoman Empire enjoyed remarkable prosperity. The empire was rapidly expanding, and economic demand rose accordingly. Thus the Jewish population could easily enter into trade with Christian Europe, and into industries such as wool weaving that were only then beginning to evolve. Under the leadership of figures like Don Joseph Nasi and Solomon ibn Yaish, they could take advantage of their worldwide network of family connections and their knowledge of European affairs in order to promote the concerns of the Sublime Porte, as well as to protect their personal interests and those of their community.

This was also a time of cultural blossoming: Hebrew law was enriched by Joseph Caro’s Shulhan Arukh (the “Prepared Table”) which was to become the authoritative code for the entire Jewish nation, while from Safed in Palestine emerged the Lurianic Kabbalah of Ha-Ari, one of the most influential trends in Jewish mysticism. It seems that these communities of exiles, suddenly liberated from the danger of extinction, could give expression to an outburst of cultural forces which had been stifled by centuries of persecution.

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The Story of Humans and Neanderthals in Europe Is Being Rewritten

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Worth reading article by Ed Yong in Atlantis.

In 1978, in a cave called Apidima at the southern end of Greece, a group of anthropologists found a pair of human-like skulls. One had a face, but was badly distorted; the other was just the left half of a braincase. Researchers guessed that they might be Neanderthals, or perhaps another ancient hominin. And since they were entombed together, in a block of stone no bigger than a microwave, “it was always assumed that they were the same [species] and came from the same time period,” says Katerina Harvati from Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.

That’s wrong. By thoroughly analyzing both skulls using modern techniques, Harvati and her colleagues have shown that they are very different, in both age and identity.

The one with the face, known as Apidima 2, is a 170,000-year-old Neanderthal—no surprises there. But the other, Apidima 1, was one of us—a 210,000-year-old modern human. And if the team is right about that, the partial skull is the oldest specimen of Homo sapiens outside Africa, handily beating the previous record holder, a jawbone from Israel’s Misliya Cave that’s about 180,000 years old. “I couldn’t believe it at first,” Harvati says, “but all the analyses we conducted gave the same result.”

Until now, most researchers have focused on the more complete (but less interesting) of the two skulls. “Apidima 1 has just been ignored,” says Harvati. But its antiquity matters for three reasons. First, it pushes back the known presence of modern humans outside Africa by some 30,000 years. Second, it’s considerably older than all other Homo sapiens fossils from Europe, all of which are 40,000 years old or younger. Third, it’s older than the Neanderthal skull next to it.

Collectively, these traits mess up the standard story of Neanderthal and modern-human evolution. According to that narrative, Neanderthals slowly evolved in Europe, largely isolated from other kinds of hominins. When modern humans expanded out of Africa, their movements into Europe might have been stalled by the presence of the already successful Neanderthals. That explains why Homo sapiens stuck to a more southerly route into Asia, and why they left no European fossils until about 40,000 years ago. “The idea of Europe as ‘fortress Neanderthal’ has been gaining ground,” says Rebecca Wragg Sykes, an archaeologist from the University of Bordeaux, but identifying a 210,000-year-old Homo sapiens skull from Europe “really undermines that.”

“It suggests that early Homo sapiens groups got farther than we may have previously thought, occasionally occupying territories that later became that of Neanderthals,” adds Shara Bailey, an anthropologist at NYU. “Findings like this are very important for informing us on the evolution of our species.”

The identity of Apidima 1 could also cast doubt on other archaeological finds from Europe, such as stone tools with no accompanying fossils. Researchers had long assumed that within a certain time window, “any archaeology was all the work of Neanderthals,” says Wragg Sykes. But if modern humans also occupied this “safe range,” which species actually created those artifacts?

These interpretations depend on the dating of the Apidima skulls, which has always been difficult. They were found in an odd place—a small niche near the cave ceiling, separated from any sediments that could have been easily dated. They were also entombed in breccia, a composite rock made from fragments that have been cemented together. It seems that, as ice ages came and went and sea levels rose and fell, parts of the cave’s interior were flooded and eroded, and both skulls were dislodged from their original resting places. They fell into a cavity and got stuck.

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Why our brains see the things what we want it to see?-which may be divorced from reality.

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Fascinating article by Daniel Yan in Aeon on how our brain see the things based upon our preformed expectations. f.sheikh 

The Book of Days (1864) by the Scottish author Robert Chambers reports a curious legal case: in 1457 in the town of Lavegny, a sow and her piglets were charged and tried for the murder of a partially eaten small child. After much deliberation, the court condemned the sow to death for her part in the act, but acquitted the naive piglets who were too young to appreciate the gravity of their crimes.

Subjecting a pig to a criminal trial seems perverse through modern eyes, since many of us believe that humans possess an awareness of actions and outcomes that separates us from other animals. While a grazing pig might not know what it is chewing, human beings are surely abreast of their actions and alert to their unfolding consequences. However, while our identities and our societies are built on this assumption of insight, psychology and neuroscience are beginning to reveal how difficult it is for our brains to monitor even our simplest interactions with the physical and social world. In the face of these obstacles, our brains rely on predictive mechanisms that align our experience with our expectations. While such alignments are often useful, they can cause our experiences to depart from objective reality – reducing the clear-cut insight that supposedly separates us from the Lavegny pigs.

One challenge that our brains face in monitoring our actions is the inherently ambiguous information they receive. We experience the world outside our heads through the veil of our sensory systems: the peripheral organs and nervous tissues that pick up and process different physical signals, such as light that hits the eyes or pressure on the skin. Though these circuits are remarkably complex, the sensory wetware of our brain possesses the weaknesses common to many biological systems: the wiring is not perfect, transmission is leaky, and the system is plagued by noise – much like how the crackle of a poorly tuned radio masks the real transmission.

But noise is not the only obstacle. Even if these circuits transmitted with perfect fidelity, our perceptual experience would still be incomplete. This is because the veil of our sensory apparatus picks up only the ‘shadows’ of objects in the outside world. To illustrate this, think about how our visual system works. When we look out on the world around us, we sample spatial patterns of light that bounce off different objects and land on the flat surface of the eye. This two-dimensional map of the world is preserved throughout the earliest parts of the visual brain, and forms the basis of what we see. But while this process is impressive, it leaves observers with the challenge of reconstructing the real three-dimensional world from the two-dimensional shadow that has been cast on its sensory surface.

Thinking about our own experience, it seems like this challenge isn’t too hard to solve. Most of us see the world in 3D. For example, when you look at your own hand, a particular 2D sensory shadow is cast on your eyes, and your brain successfully constructs a 3D image of a hand-shaped block of skin, flesh and bone. However, reconstructing a 3D object from a 2D shadow is what engineers call an ‘ill-posed problem’ – basically impossible to solve from the sampled data alone. This is because infinitely many different objects all cast the same shadow as the real hand. How does your brain pick out the right interpretation from all the possible contenders?

Perception is difficult because two different objects can cast the same ‘shadow’ on your sensory system. Your brain could solve this problem by relying on what it already knows about the size and shape of things like hands.

The second challenge we face in effectively monitoring our actions is the problem of pace. Our sensory systems have to depict a rapid and continuous flow of incoming information. Rapidly perceiving these dynamic changes is important even for the simplest of movements: we will likely end up wearing our morning coffee if we can’t precisely anticipate when the cup will reach our lips. But, once again, the imperfect biological machinery we use to detect and transmit sensory signals makes it very difficult for our brains to quickly generate an accurate picture of what we’re doing. And time is not cheap: while it takes only a fraction of a second for signals to get from the eye to the brain, and fractions more to use this information to guide an ongoing action, these fractions can be the difference between a dry shirt and a wet one.

Psychologists and neuroscientists have long wondered what strategies our brains might use to overcome the problems of ambiguity and pace. There is a growing appreciation that both challenges could be overcome using prediction. The key idea here is that observers do not simply rely on the current input coming in to their sensory systems, but combine it with ‘top-down’ expectations about what the world contains.

David Brooks and the five lies culture tells us-by Massimo Pigliucci

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Readers who have followed several incarnations of my blogs (like this one, and this one, and this one) will have easily figured out that, politically speaking, I lean left, though with a number of qualifications and caveats. But I make a point of reading conservative authors and columnists, for a couple of reasons: first, to keep up with what they say and how they think (so to sharpen my own opinions and arguments), and second because they too, at least some of the times, have something interesting or constructive to say.

A recent example is David Brooks, a regular New York Times columnist, who is defined by Wikipedia as a Canadian-born American conservative political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times. On April 15, he has published a column for said newspaper entitled “Five lies our culture tells us.” I’d like to examine each of the lies in turn, in order to stimulate a discussion that may help us all see why such lies contribute to (or even, as Brooks argues, are at the root of) our political problems.

Lie n. 1: Career success is fulfilling. Brooks suggests that this lie is most evident at the point of college admissions, which put a lot of pressure on students (and their families) by instilling status anxiety. I think he is far too modest in his claim. Status anxiety is built into the very fabric of American society from the moment people are born. I live in Manhattan, and I know parents who fiercely compete (and pay outrageous amounts of money, and sometimes cheat) so that their five-year olds get into the best elementary schools. And it only gets worse from there.

A number of my students tell me that they have to defend tooth and nails their decision to major in philosophy because both peers and relatives are of the opinion that they are wasting their time and won’t make any money. (Which, incidentally, is not true.) Everyone is after grades, not learning, because they think the former, and not so much the latter, are what will get them a well paying job.

Also, as Brooks puts it, actually achieving things — even things you really wanted and thought meaningful — isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. He recalls the instance when his editor called him to tell him that his first book had made the best-sellers list. “It felt like … nothing. It was external to me.” I have had similar experiences, when my books come out, when I got my PhD in biology from the University of Connecticut, or the one in philosophy from the University of Tennessee. When I got my first academic job. And then the second. And the third. And the fourth.

But Brooks goes overboard when he implies that career achievements are not fulfilling. They can be. Especially if the career is meaningful in a broader sense. I’m sure he feels good about being a journalist and writer, contributing to society in a positive fashion. So do I, as a teacher and writer. The reason we don’t feel much once a goal has been accomplished is because we are already thinking of the next goal. The book just published has been in the rear mirror for months, and we have been working hard to finish the next one. Writing is a telic activity, as Aristotle pointed out, so it needs to be constantly renewed.

It also depends on what sort of contribution to society your career makes. If you are in the business of helping people, one way or another, that’s fulfilling (think of doctors, teachers, even lawyers). If you are in the business of harming them (e.g., working for a company that pollutes the environment, or makes weapons, or exploits people), not so much. And most businesses are neutral, neither making society better nor worse. Which means that the people who pursuit those careers tend to think of what they do as a means to pay bills, not a source of meaning for their lives.

Lie n. 2: I can make myself happy. The problem here, according to Brooks, is with the notion that happiness is an individual accomplishment, dependent on things such as winning one more time, losing ten more pounds, becoming better at whatever. By contrast, he points out, research shows that people on their deathbeds say that the things that made their lives worth living were loving relationships, not accomplishments.

Here I agree to a point. Yes, relationships are most definitely crucial for happiness. We are, after all, highly social animals. But relationships are hard to maintain, regardless of whether we are talking about friends, relatives, or partners. And sometimes it is a good thing to let go of a relationship, because it has gotten to the point of being more harmful than beneficial.

Moreover, there is something to the notion that happiness is “an inside job,” so to speak. Meaning is a human construct, and we — individually — are in charge of the particular meaning we invest other people, or what we do, with. So I would say that in a sense our happiness is up to us, and yet it does very much involve the way we relate to other people. One thing I know for sure, and I think Brooks will agree: when I’ll be on my deathbed, I won’t regret having forgone writing one more technical paper, especially at the expense of cultivating deep relationships with the people I love. But I will also cherish the memory of those few books that I wrote and I’m actually proud of…

Lie n. 3: Life is an individual journey. Brooks suggests that too many people think that a good life consists in racking up accomplishments, as if they were points in a video game. What matters is to get to the next level. And then the next one. Hence the bizarre American obsession with “bucket lists,” and the success of books like “1,000 Movies to See Before You Die.”

A corollary of this attitude is that we should be free in the sense of unimpeded by close ties and relationships. I remember when I first moved to New York, back in 2006, I saw advertisements (I forgot for what!) that said “If opportunity is around the corner, turn often.”

But that’s an impoverished view of “happiness,” one that is hedonistic in nature, discounting the fact that — on the contrary — in order to live a meaningful life we need to have bonds with others. Again, we are eminently social animals. I’m not sure I’d go as far as Brooks does when he writes that “it’s the chains we choose that set us free,” but that’s partly because I don’t consider my ties with my partner, my daughter, or my friends to be “chains.” They are more like symbiotic tendrils, through which life-giving substances flow back and forth between myself and those I love.

Lie n. 4: You have to find your own truth. Brooks calls this the “privatization of meaning.” He objects to what he sees as an attitude according to which everyone gets to choose their own values, their own answer to the ultimate questions in life. He mockingly warns that, unless your name is Aristotle, you ain’t likely to succeed, arguing instead that values are created by communities, in a group process that takes generations.

Yes. And No. There is no question that values — again, being a human construct — are created by people, and that such creation is indeed a group affair. If nothing else because if your values aren’t recognized by at least a minority of people in your community you are going to have a really tough time pursuing them.

But values also change over time, which I suppose it’s something that Brooks may less often be happy about. I mean, there is a reason why people use the word “conservative.” For instance, we are slowly — and certainly not inevitably — moving toward a society where gender, race, and religious affiliation don’t matter to someone’s prospects of living a good, fulfilling life. While we are still very far from that ideal, an increasing number of people do recognize it as an ideal to be pursued.

Let’s not forget that this wasn’t always the case. The 1926 (please notice the late date!) slavery convention, for instance, has been ratified as recently as 1953 by Australia, Canada, Liberia, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland, and the UK. By 12 more countries (including Italy) the following year. Nine more nations (including Israel) followed in 1954. Paraguay and Mauritania have joined the club only in 2007, and Kazakhstan only the following year. And of course the abolition of slavery doesn’t mean the extinction of racism.

Do we want to consider women’s right to vote instead? Saudi Arabia has granted it as late as 2015. But even Switzerland agreed only in 1971, Portugal in 1968, and Colombia in 1957. Even the so-called “greatest democracy in the world,” the United States, approved women’s suffrage as late as 1920. And of course there is the issue of gay and transgender rights, very much a work in progress. At best.

So, yes, values are not individual, they are societal. But societies evolve, and we — as individuals — do play a role in nudging the process forward, or at least not allowing it to slide backwards.

Lie n. 5: Rich and successful people are worth more than poorer and less successful people.Or, as Epictetus puts it with characteristic sarcasm:

“The following are non-sequiturs: ‘I am richer, therefore superior to you’; or ‘I am a better speaker, therefore a better person, than you.’” (Enchiridion 44)

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posted by f.sheikh