Dozens of Marranos (known in Hebrew as Bnei Anousim) in southern Italy and Sicily have gathered for a seminar to return to their roots. They and other people of Jewish descent from across the region gathered Tuesday and Wednesday in the city of Syracuse to explore their Jewish heritage. Participants came from across Sicily, as well as the southern Italian regions of Puglia and Calabria.
This year marks the 500th anniversary of the first Auto-de-Fe in Sicily, when the Inquisition executed nine Marranos in Palermo in June 1511 for secretly practicing Judaism.
Under state pressure in the late 15th century, an estimated 100,000–200,000 Jews in the Iberian Peninsula converted to Christianity. Sicily and Sardinia, with Inquisitions introduced in 1487 and 1493 respectively, had no Jews living in them by the middle of the 16th century. Many of those who had been compelled to convert to Catholicism – known by the Hebrew term Bnei Anousim – remained behind, where they nonetheless continued to preserve their Jewish identity and to practice Jewish tradition covertly, away from the prying eyes of the Inquisition and its enforcers.
The seminar, the first of its kind, was organized by the Jerusalem-based Shavei Israel organization together with the Union of Italian Jewish Committees (UCEI), the Jewish community of Naples and the Sicilian Sephardic Center.
Entitled “The New Frontier of Italian Judaism,” the gathering included lectures and classes on a range of Jewish cultural and religious subjects. Also included was a walking tour of Jewish historical sites in the Giudecca (old Jewish quarter) of Syracuse. One of the sites featured was the ancient Mikveh (ritual pool), said to be the oldest ever discovered in Europe.
Among those leading the seminar was Rabbi Roberto Della Rocca, director of the Education and Culture Department for the UCEI; Rabbi Eliyahu Birnbaum, Chief Rabbi of Turin and rabbi of Shavei Israel; Rabbi Shalom Bahbout, Chief Rabbi of Naples; Dr. Gadi Piperno, UCEI project manager; and Michael Freund, founder and chairman of Shavei Israel.
