Recently I was lucky to acquire a scarce and important work in the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) language with extraordinary provenance. Printed in Constantinople in 1913, it is titled Las Madres Judias, a didactic work on the women in Tanach, intended to provide examples of role models for Jewish women for whom Ladino was the preferred language of reading.
The haskamot note that this is the first work in Ladino geared to women, despite the era being the height of the Ladino printing period, with numerous rabbinic as well as fictional works being published. The approbation of Avraham Danan of Constantinople (Istanbul of today), for example, wrote that “he was happy to receive the book because it would fill a gap in Ladino literature. By describing the good qualities of Jewish women, it would breathe a living soul into the daughters of today, helping them understand how a Jewish woman should live.”
Chacham Ben-Zion Avraham Cuenque of Jerusalem (editor of HaMe’assef), wrote modern-day women barely remember or had ever known the way of Jewish family life and modesty, and that he rejoiced that this book had been issued by a man so well-versed in “all the corners of our literature” so that everyone would recognize the importance of his work.
The author, R. Zemach Rabbiner (1862-1936) was an unusual figure in the history of Ladino literature, having been born in Bausk, Latvia, to an Ashkenazi family. After serving as rabbi of Sofia from 1902 and Plovdiv from 1907, he declared himself to be neither Sephardic nor Ashkenazi but rather a Jew. He led a secluded personal life with no family connections. He often said: “The Torah is my wife.” An erudite person, as a preacher he visited all Jewish communities in Bulgaria. During the last ten years of his life, he was a member of the Central Consistory of the Jews in Bulgaria. He served as rabbi in Bulgaria until he passed away in 1936.
The copy was owned and signed by a great hero and rabbi of the Greek Jewish community, Rabbi Moshe Shimon Pesach. Born in 1869, along with the local bishop of Volos, Greece, the rabbi was instrumental in saving the bulk of his Jewish community. In 1943 on Rosh Hashana, Kurt Rikert, the German military governor locally, demanded a list of all the Jews in the city, with the reason given that the Germans needed to determine how much food to ration to the Jewish community. Rabbi Pesach sensed the true intention and requested and received a three-day extension to come up with the list. The rabbi proceeded to confer with his friend, the bishop of Volos, to ask for his intervention and find out the Germans’ intentions. The bishop contacted Helmut Sheffel, the German consul in Volos, with whom he was on good terms and who told him that the Jews must leave Volos immediately. Bishop Alexopoulos promptly informed Rabbi Pesach and gave him a letter addressed to the clergymen of the villages surrounding Volos, urging the countrymen to protect the Jews. All but 130 Jews were taken into hiding by local Greeks who provided their sustenance during their period of hiding. Rabbi Pesach’s two sons were in Salonika and Didymoteicho, Greece, and were murdered by the Nazis, but after the war the rabbi returned to Volos with 700 members of the Jewish community. The Greek King Paul and the commander of the Allied forces in the Mediterranean decorated Rabbi Pesach for his actions. Rabbi Pesach became the chief rabbi of Greece after the war in 1946.
