Four weddings and some Wolseley funerals: stories of marriage and divorce in a Staffordshire family

Wolseley Hall, destroyed in a serious fire in the early 1950s and demolished in 1966 … the ancestral home of the Wolseley family

Patrick Comerford

I have been writing in recent weeks about the divorce scandal in the Talbot and Chetwynd family that becoming a sensation far beyond polite social circles in Victorian Rugeley and Lichfield in the 1860s and filled column after column in newspapers across the world.

During my summer rambles through Stafford, Rugeley, Wolseley, Lichfield and Tamworth, I was reminded of some of these marriages and divorces, with stories that must have created gossip among people who saw themselves at the centre of social life in south Staffordshire 150 or 200 years ago.

William Henry Chetwynd (1811-1890) and his wife Blanche Mary Talbot (1836-1898), 25 years his junior and a niece Henry Chetwynd-Talbot, 18th Earl of Shrewsbury, were involved in a sensational divorce case in 1864-1865. The gossip created by the case of Chetwynd v Chetwynd echoed, in many ways, the attention a century earlier to the bigamy and divorce trials involving the widowed Sir William Wolseley (1692-1779) and the widowed Ann Whitbey (1724-1782), a case that dragged on in civil and church courts over two years, from 1752 to 1754.

But I was reminded too during those summer walks of at least four other marriages in the Wolseley family down through the generations that were interesting and colourful. They may not have created scandal in the same ways but, at times, they saved the Wolseley family from what seemed like certain financial and social ruin.

The coat-of-arms used by the Duques de Losada y Lousada … but were they really entitled to their titles? (Source)

1, The Jamaican planter: was he a Spanish duke?

Marianne Wolseley (1813-1881) of Wolseley and Count Francis Baruch Lousada (1813-1870), who was born into a rich family of sugar planters in Jamaica, were married in Saint George’s Church, Hanover Square, London, on 25 November 1834. Marianne’s father, Sir Charles Wolseley (1769-1838), had succeeded as the seventh baronet in 1817 and was a radical politician who was at the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and was surety for some of the victims of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819. He was jailed in 1820 for sedition and conspiracy, and his political activism threatened the financial stability of his family.

However, his daughter Marianne managed to avoid her own possible financial and social ruin in 1834 when she married Count Francis Baruch Lousada. The Baruch Lousada family in Jamaica commissioned a Spanish herald and genealogist to produce a set of lurid, expensive-looking but specious documents enabling them to claim they were the successors to the titles of the Duque de Losada.

Isaac Lousada (1783-1857) assumed the title of Duque de Losada in 1848, and after he died his eldest son, Emanuel de Lousada, lost little time in making himself known as the Duke de Losada y Lousada, drafting and fabricating a family tree for an entry in Burke’s Peerage.

It is a pointless genealogical exercise to explain his claimed link to the Spanish duke, and there is no logical way to trace how the dukes inherited – in Spain – a moribund Italian title that had been held by someone they were not related to. The creative, but nonetheless fictitious, explanations are found in the work of the Spanish herald and genealogist, the gullibility of the genealogical authorities in Spain and London, and the audacity of Emanuel.

The reward for the whole escapade and the social and political compensation for the expenses in pursuing this genealogical deception were many: Emanuel received a British passport in 1862; his brother Francis married into the minor ranks of the British nobility when he married Marianne Wolseley, wangled another title in the court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and became a British diplomat in the US. Indeed, three further members of his immediate family went unchallenged in their use of the title of duke.

Another version of the coat-of-arms used by the Duque de Losada y Lousada … Marianne Wolseley was daughter-in-law of the first duke, sister-in-law of the second duke, and mother of the third and fourth dukes (Source)

In polite Victorian society, most people seem never to have queried the standing of the soi-disant dukes, overlooking their peculiar change of name, their use of a hybrid coat of arms and the lack of official authentication. Members of the Lousada family married into leading Sephardic families in England, including the Montefiore and Mocatta families.

Twelve years Marianne and Francis were married, Francis was given the title of Marchese de San Miniato by the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1846. It was said widely at the time that he paid for the title while Marianne was a lady-in-waiting in London to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany.

Francis Lousada was the British Consul in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and died in Boston in 1870. Marianne died on 1 November 1884 in Tarvis in Carinthia, Austria, now Tarvisio in Italy. Their eldest son, Horace Francis Lousada (1837-1905), succeeded his father as the second marchese and his uncle as the third duke. The fifth and last duke, Edward Eugene Lousada (1853-1941), returned to live in Jamaica.

The confirmation by Pope Leo XIII of Anita Murphy, later Lady Wolseley … a painting in the Villa Magistrale on the Aventine in Rome

2, the daughter of an American Papal ‘marchese’:

Marianne Wolseley’s marriage to this soi-disant marchese, and the titles used by her children create a story with many parallels in that of the marriage almost 30 years later in 1883 of her nephew, Sir Charles Wolseley (1846-1931), the ninth baronet, and Anita Murphy, the daughter of an Irish-American magnate, Daniel T Murphy, who bought the title of marchese from the Pope.

Sir Charles Wolseley may have found a role model or inspiration in his aunt Marianne, for he married into a wealthy family with a title that had been bought and in the hope of rescuing lost fortunes and social status.

Esther (née Chichester) Grehan wrote from London in 1882 to her husband in Dublin, Stephen Grehan (1859-1937), describing how Charles came to London to look for an heiress. My interest is added to by Stephen’s descent through his mother from the Langton and Comerford families of Danganmore Castle, Co Kilkenny. In her letters, laden with snobbery, elitism and disdain, Esther describes how Charles was introduced to two Irish-American Murphy sisters from San Francisco, who were ‘vulgar but pretty.’ He fell in love, but had a reputation as a fortune hunter, and was distraught when he was rejected.

But, undeterred, Charles married the elder sister, Anna Theresa (Anita) Murphy in 1883. Her father, an Irish-American entrepreneur Daniel T Murphy, founded the pioneer house of Murphy, Grant & Co, and was living in San Francisco. Anita, her sisters and her mother had moved to London, and they moved in fashionable circles in England and Europe. Anita was confirmed by Pope Leo XIII and a painting of Anita and her sister at their confirmation by Pope Leo XIII was once in the Wolseley family collection, and was still at Wolseley in 1971 when I interviewed Sir Charles Wolseley for the Lichfield Mercury and the Rugeley Mercury.

Later, Anita was presented at the Court of Saint James. She visited Osborne, the royal residence on the Isle of Wight, where she met Queen Victoria and Princess Beatrice, ancestor of the Mountbatten family. In her diary, Anita tells how she turned down a proposal of marriage from Prince Luigi del Drago, an Italian whose family included many cardinals and princes. Back in England, Anita’s first choice as husband was George Brundenell-Bruce, then known as Viscount Savernake and later 4th Marquess of Ailesbury. But Willie, as he was known, was an incessant gambler with an excessive lifestyle, and he brought his family to the brink of financial disaster. Eventually, he married Dolly Tester, a music hall actress, and Anita had a fortuitous escape from certain calamity.

Anita’s father, Daniel T Murphy, was a self-made multi-millionaire who had more money than he could spend. In 1857, he married Anna Geoghagan, also from an Irish family. The couple were the parents of four daughters, Isabella (Issy), Helene (Nellie), Anna Theresa (Anita) and Frances (Fanny), and three sons, Eugene, Daniel and Samuel.

Daniel Murphy visited his wife and daughters in London at least once a year. He was a staunch Roman Catholic and donated $5 million to Pope Pius IX. In return, the Pope made Murphy first a Knight and then a Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Gregory. Pope Leo XIII, who confirmed two of his daughters in Rome, gave Murphy the Grand Cross of Saint Gregory, and with a royal and papal patent of nobility, gave him the papal title of marchese or marquis, with the right of succession to his eldest son and his heirs.

Murphy enjoyed showing his American friends the papal patent, but he never used the title in public and his wife continued to be known in London only as Mrs Murphy and not as marchesa.

Anita Murphy and Sir Charles Wolseley were married on 17 July 1883 in the Catholic Pro-Cathedral in Kensington. The four bridesmaids were her three sisters, Nellie, Frances and Isabella, and a Miss Bedingfeld. The wedding Mass was said by the Revd Cuthbert Wolseley, OP, a Dominican priest and a younger brother of the groom – he was born Robert Joseph Wolseley (1850-1920). The wedding was blessed by Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, and there was a telegram from Pope Leo XIII.

The newspapers of the day delighted in lengthy lists of the titled and public figures who attended, including the US ambassador and poet James Russell Lowell, the Duke of Norfolk, Prince Doria Pamphilji, a son-in-law of the Earl of Shrewsbury, the Marquis of Bute and Lady Londonderry.

Anita (Murphy) Wolseley tired of life at Wolseley Hall and travelled abroad, alone … it was divorce Catholic-style in the early 20th century

On the day Anita and Charles were married, Mrs Murphy gave her first-born a cheque for $5 million drawn on the Bank of England. Daniel T Murphy died within two years in the Windsor Hotel, New York, on 3 June 1885. Many of his business interests passed to his brother Henry M Murphy and son, also Daniel T Murphy. His wife had arrived from England earlier that week and was with him when he died, as were two of his sons and a daughter.

In his will, dated 15 May 1883, Murphy left various bequests to the Catholic Church and family members, with his daughters receiving at least $50,000 each, even if that meant his sons received less. At first, Anita’s inheritance was estimated at $2 million, but Charles Wolseley never got his hands on it. By the time the marriage contract had been signed, Daniel T Murphy had died Anita’s sisters contested their father’s will. When Anita received her money, it was for her personally and not for her husband.

Jeannie Wolseley later said the marriage was relatively happy to begin with; the couple were the parents of two sons, Sir Edric Charles Joseph Wolseley (1886-1954) and Colonel William Wolseley (1887-1977). But Anita soon tired of life at Wolseley Hall and in rural Staffordshire, and she began travelling abroad, alone. She sent Charles a regular allowance, but this dropped steadily. It was divorce Catholic-style in the early 20th century.

By 1919, he had to sell almost all the contents of Wolseley Hall and several hundred acres of his estate. A broken man, he moved to Surrey and died on 30 January 1931, and was brought back to Rugeley to be buried in Saint Joseph and Saint Etheldreda churchyard, where he had donated the East Window by Hardman and Powell; Anita died on 11 October 1937.

The grave of Sir Charles Wolseley (1846-1931), the ninth baronet, in Saint Joseph and Saint Etheldreda churchyard, Rugeley (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

3, Colonel William Wolseley and the Catholic Church:

When Sir Charles Wolseley died in 1931, the Wolseley title and estate passed to his elder son, Sir Edric Wolseley, tenth baronet and grandfather of the late Sir Charles Wolseley. Their younger son, Colonel William Wolseley (1887-1977), also had an interesting life and his life story is also the story of yet another interesting Wolseley marriage.

William Ralph Joseph Wolseley was born in London on 1 July 1887, the younger son of Sir Charles Michael Wolseley and Anita Murphy. He was a captain in the Staffordshire Yeomanry during World War I, and was mentioned in dispatches and decorated. He was a Justice of the Peace for Shropshire from 1939, and during World War II he was a colonel in the Royal Pioneer Corps.

William Wolseley married a vicar’s granddaughter, Ruth Gertrude Hargreaves (1893-1962), in Gnosall on 10 November 1923. Ruth was one of three daughters of Colonel Robert Halstead Hargreaves (1861-1909) of Knightley Grange, near Eccleshall. Her maternal grandfather was the Revd Charles Holden Steward (1859-1915).

The Wolseley family were staunchly Catholic, but when William married Ruth, the vicar’s granddaughter she would not agree to bring up any future children as Roman Catholics. In order to go ahead with the marriage, William had to leave the Catholic Church and he was excommunicated.

Ruth (Hargreaves) Wolseley (left) as a child with her sisters Violet (centre) and Nancy

Family members tell me Ruth ‘smoked cigars like a chimney and swore like a trooper’. She was, by all accounts, a tiny woman with a very domineering character, who probably gave William little choice but to leave the Catholic Church in order to marry her. They lived at Knightley Grange, and during World War II Ruth was in the Women’s Land Army and the WVS. Although William was devoted to Ruth, family members believe his decision to leave the Catholic Church caused him great upset in later life.

Ruth and William were the parents of a son and daughter: Robert William Hargreaves Wolseley (1924-1998), and Veronica Ruth Theresa Rose Wolseley (1928-2019). Ruth died at Knightley Grange in 1962, William Wolseley died in 1977. Some of the more valuable contents of Knightley Grange were sold off at auction over two days in June 1966, and the property, which had been in the Hargreaves family for over 100 years, was sold in 1967.

The house at Knightley Grange was finally demolished in 2019.

The house at Knightley Grange where Ruth and William Wolseley lived after they married in 1923 was demolished in 2019

4, Another American in the family:

William Wolseley’s elder brother, Sir Edric Wolseley (1886-1954), was the grandfather of the late Sir Charles Wolseley (1944-2018), the 11th baronet. A painting of two of the Murphy girls at their confirmation by Pope Leo XIII was once among the paintings in the Wolseley family collection. It was still at Wolseley Park in 1971 when I interviewed Sir Charles for the Lichfield Mercury and the Rugeley Mercury.

It was a well-edited feature, with a fine photograph of Charles and his first Anita (Fried) and their eldest daughter. They warmly welcomed me to Wolseley Park House, more features followed on the Dyott, Anson, Levett and other families, and I built up a portfolio that helped to set me up for a 30-year career as a journalist.

At the time, I was in my late teens training as a chartered surveyor, and Charles Wolseley was then a chartered surveyor with Smith Gore in Lichfield, driving a trademark red sports car around town, commuting daily between Lichfield and Wolseley.

Charles and Anita were divorced in 1984, and later that year he married the American writer Imogen (Jeannie) Brown (1943-2024), who was researching a book on American heiresses who married impoverished English aristocrats.

When Charles and Jeannie had to move out of Wolseley to Penkridge after he was declared bankrupt, she talked about the painting being so large that it would be better placed in a museum in San Francisco. Today it is in the Villa Magistrale on the Aventine in Rome, where it was identified some years ago by Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen when he was the Hungarian Ambassador to the Vatican.

Sir Charles Wolseley and his second wife, Imogene (Jeannie) Brown, in 1992 … after their bankruptcy, they relied on the generosity of neighbours and friends

Family members recall how Charles and Jeannie Wolseley spoke openly of their situation and how people would come up to Charles in the supermarket in Rugeley and place a £10 note in his hand. Frequently they discovered gifts of food, money and even a car delivered to the house.

‘They were clearly a strong couple,’ a family member told me.

I wrote to him when I heard about his problems, enclosed a cutting of that full-page feature in the Lichfield Mercury and the Rugeley Mercury. I thanked him for an opportunity that secured a career in journalism that lasted most of my adult life, and thanked him too for that offer at Smiths Gore.

Despite his divorce and remarriage, Charles seems to have had a happier relationship with the Catholic Church than his uncle William. Charles died on 5 March 2018 and his funeral took place in Saint Joseph and Saint Etheldreda Church on 24 March 2018. His widow Jeannie died in Rugeley two years ago, on 11 July 2024, and her funeral was held in the church on 26 July 2024.

The Wolseley Arms by the River Trent near Rugeley in Staffordshire (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2026)

Remembering 11 July 1942, the tragedy of ‘Black Saturday’ and the destruction of Jewish life in Thessaloniki

The Jewish Holocaust Memorial at Liberty Square, Thessaloniki … a bronze sculpture by Nandor Glid of a menorah whose flames are wrapped around human bodies (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

This year marks the 110th anniversary of the time my grandfather was in Thessaloniki and picked up a deadly strain of malaria. He was sent home from World War I in 1916, and that may have saved him from being sent to the trenches in France, and also provided a time gap in which my father was conceived and born.

None of my father’s sibling – brothers and sisters, half-brothers and half-sisters – had any children. So, without picking up malaria in Thessaloniki 100 years ago, my father would not have been born, and my grandfather would have no living descendants.

But malaria was a killer in those days. Within five years of contracting malaria in Greece, Stephen Edward Comerford had died a sad and lonely death in a hospital ward.

Thessaloniki has been a favourite city of mine in Greece for many years, and I was familiar with and fond of its street and buildings, its history and stories, its poetry and music, its synagogues, churches and monasteries, long before I realised the true and sad story of how my grandfather died. When I realised his story, I went back to Thessaloniki to retrace his steps.

The names of Holocaust victims on the pavement in Vassilisis Olgas Avenue (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

But, as I think of anniversaries in Thessaloniki, I also remember today that another anniversary, 11 July 1942, is remembered in Thessaloniki as ‘Black Saturday’ – the day when the Nazis forced 9,000 Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 45 to assemble in Liberty Square. For hours in the blazing summer heat, German soldiers beat and humiliated them before crowds of onlookers. About 2,000 were sent to forced labour; the rest were eventually ransomed by the community, which sold its ancient cemetery to raise the sum demanded.

Shortly before my grandfather arrived in Thessaloniki, Greece had taken Thessaloniki from the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars and it was incorporated into the modern Greek state in 1912. The Jewish community in the city was 70,000 strong at the time, and was the city’s largest ethnic group.

The port city closed every Saturday. Most workers – including the dockworkers – were Jewish and observed Shabbat. Street signs were in Ladino, the Judaeo-Spanish language of Sephardic Jews. Synagogues were found in almost every neighbourhood, newspapers published in four languages served the cosmopolitan population, but Ladino and Greek were the main languages and the dominant voice in the synagogues was Spanish-inflected Hebrew prayers.

In those days, Thessaloniki was known as the ‘Mother of Israel’ and the ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans.’ For over three centuries, it was the largest Sephardic Jewish city in the world and the only major European city where Jews formed the majority.

By 1613, Jews were 68 per cent of Thessaloniki's population – a percentage unmatched anywhere else in Europe, before or since. This was a living reality into the 20th century: Sabbath observance shut down commerce, rabbinical courts wielded authority, Ladino echoed through marketplaces and Jewish printing presses produced books shipped across the Mediterranean.

But, in the space of five months in 1943, the Nazis erased all that almost completely.

Jews started arriving in Thessaloniki in large numbers following the expulsions from Spain in 1492 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The story begins in 1492, with catastrophe transformed into refuge. When Spain’s Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand issued the Alhambra Decree expelling all Jews from Spain, between 15,000 and 20,000 Sephardic Jews fled across the Mediterranean. Many settled in Thessaloniki, a bustling port city in the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II welcomed them. He realised that Spain’s loss could be his empire’s gain. The Jewish refugees brought skills in medicine, printing, textiles, metalwork, and international trade, they spoke multiple languages and they had commercial networks spanning continents.

‘The Spanish king is a fool,’ Bayezid reportedly said, ‘impoverishing his own country to enrich mine.’

The Sephardic Jews transformed Thessaloniki. They established the city’s first printing press in the late 15th century, making Thessaloniki a centre of Jewish scholarship and book production. They built synagogues – eventually 42 of them – each named after the Spanish or Portuguese city their founders had fled: Catalán Yashan (Old Catalan), Aragon, Lisboa, Evora, Castile.

They created networks that made Thessaloniki one of the Ottoman Empire’s most important trading hubs. Jewish merchants shipped wool, silk and ceramics across the Mediterranean, Jewish craftsmen became the exclusive tailors for the Ottoman Janissaries, and Jewish bankers facilitated trade between east and west.

By 1519, just 27 years after the expulsion, Jews made up 56 per cent of Thessaloniki’s population. By 1613, that figure reached 68 per cent. Thessaloniki became the only major European city where Christians and Muslims were minorities.

The former Bank of Thessaloniki founded by the Allatini family … now the Malakopi Arcade (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

For over 300 years, from the 16th to the early 20th century, Jewish life defined the rhythm of life in Thessaloniki. The city essentially shut down from Friday evening until Saturday night, honouring the Jewish Sabbath alongside the Muslim Friday prayers and Christian Sunday observance.

The community thrived during the Ottoman era. The millet system granted religious minorities autonomy to order their own affairs. Jewish courts handled civil disputes, rabbinical authorities oversaw education, marriage and religious life, and the community paid collective taxes but otherwise it was self-governing.

Wealthy Jewish entrepreneurs led Thessaloniki’s industrialisation in the mid-19th century. The Allatini brothers established the first modern flour-milling plant in 1854, followed by textile factories, brickmaking facilities, and tobacco-processing plants. By the early 20th century, Jews owned 38 of the city’s 54 largest trading houses.

The community also had a vibrant working class. Jewish stevedores controlled the docks, Jewish weavers supplied textiles throughout the Balkans, and Jewish printers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and merchants filled every sector of urban life.

Intellectually, Thessaloniki became a Jewish powerhouse. Schools flourished; the Alliance Israélite Universelle opened modern educational institutions that taught French alongside traditional Jewish subjects; a whole generation became conversant with both Jewish tradition and European modernity; and newspapers in Ladino connected the community with Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman world.

Politically, Thessaloniki’s Jews were active in Ottoman reform movements. Many supported the Young Turks revolution of 1908, which sought to modernise the empire with constitutional government.

Zionist leaders who visited the city saw it as a model. David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky all visited Thessaloniki in the early 20th century, seeing in its Jewish majority a preview of how a Jewish state might work.

The Jewish Memorial at the Aristotele University of Thessaloniki, on the site of the city’s ancient Jewish cemetery (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

But even as Thessaloniki’s Jewish community reached its peak, forces were gathering that would unravel its world. Four years before my grandfather’s arrival there, Greece captured Thessaloniki in 1912 during the Balkan Wars. The Jewish community – 70,000 strong at the time and the city’s largest ethnic group – faced an uncertain future.

At first, the Greek government recognised the community’s rights and traditions. But tensions simmered, Greek merchants resented Jewish commercial sway, and some people saw the Jewish presence as a remnant of Ottoman rule.

On 18 August 1917, a small kitchen fire in central Thessaloniki exploded into an inferno. For 32 hours, flames consumed over one-third of the city. The fire destroyed 9,500 buildings, and left 70,000 people homeless, 52,000 of them Jews, and 16 of the 33 synagogues were burned. Jewish schools, libraries, charitable institutions, and the grand rabbinate's archives, with the records of centuries of births, marriages and deaths, rabbinical decisions and community history, vanished in smoke.

The entire documented history of one of the world’s great Jewish communities went up in flames, and the fire devastated Jewish Thessaloniki. Over 20,000 Jews, unable to find shelter, left the city for Athens, France, the US and Palestine.

The community rebuilt itself on the outskirts of the city, but it never recovered its former glory. The balance in the population shifted dramatically in 1923 when Greece and Turkey negotiated a population exchange. About 1.5 million Greek Orthodox Christians were moved to Greece from Turkey, with roughly 100,000 settling in Thessaloniki. For the first time in four centuries, Jews had become a minority in the city they had once defined.

The tracks to Auschwitz … old railway tracks at the port where the convoys left for the death camps (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

By 1940, Thessaloniki had a Jewish population of about 56,000 in a city that had grown to about 250,000 residents. The community had survived fires, political upheaval, and demographic transformation, they kept open their synagogues, schools and cultural institutions, and they remained a vital part of the city’s fabric. But nothing prepared them for what came next.

On 9 April 1941, German forces occupied Thessaloniki. Within a week, Nazi authorities arrested Jewish community leaders, confiscated Jewish homes and hospitals, and began the systematic looting of Jewish cultural property. Tens of thousands of books, religious artifacts, and artworks were shipped to Germany.

On 11 July 1942 – a date remembered to this day as ‘Black Saturday’ – the Nazis forcibly rounded up 9,000 Jewish men aged between 18 and 45 in Plateia Eleftherias (Πλατεία Ελευθερίας, Liberty Square). For hours in the blazing summer heat, German soldiers beat and humiliated them before the crowds. About 2,000 were sent to forced labour. The rest were eventually ransomed by the community, which sold its ancient cemetery to raise the demanded sum.

The Jewish cemetery, with 20 generations and over 500 years of burials, was destroyed. The tombstones were purloined as building materials for footpaths, university stairs, and barrack latrines. Aristotle University now stands where the Jewish dead had been buried rested.

In February 1943, Adolf Eichmann sent Dieter Wisliceny and Alois Brunner to Thessaloniki. They were specialists in Jewish deportation and they implemented the Nuremberg Laws immediately, imposing yellow stars, movement restrictions, property confiscation. Within days, Jews were forced into three ghettos. The largest, the Baron Hirsch transit camp, was beside the railway station.

The first train left Thessaloniki on 15 March 1943. Between March and August 1943, 19 trains took as many as 46,000 Jews from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Each train held 1,000 to 4,000 people crammed into cattle cars. The seven-day journey across Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria, and Czechoslovakia was torture itself, with no food, no water and no sanitation, bodies crushed together in suffocating heat or freezing cold.

When the trains arrived at Auschwitz, SS doctors carried out ‘selections’ on the platform. Most were sent directly to gas chambers. Of the 46,000 deported, about 1,950 or 4 per cent survived. The Jewish population that had comprised 68 per cent of Thessaloniki in 1613; 96 per cent of the city’s Jewish population was exterminated in 1943. In five months, the Nazis accomplished what four centuries of disasters – plagues, fires, wars, and economic transformations – had failed to do: they destroyed the Jerusalem of the Balkans.

The survivors who returned after the camps were liberated found a ghost community. Fewer than 2,000 Jews remained in Thessaloniki. Their synagogues were destroyed or vandalised, their homes had become the homes of others, their cemetery was razed, their archives were burned, their commercial networks were shattered.

Many survivors could not bear to stay and emigrated to Palestine, the USA or other diaspora communities. Others rebuilt what they could, establishing small institutions to preserve memory.

The Monasterioton Synagogue is the only surviving, pre-war working synagogue in Thessaloniki (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Today, about 1,000 Jews live in Thessaloniki, less than 0.2 per cent of the city’s population of over 800,000. Three synagogues remain of the original 42. The Monastir Synagogue survived only because Nazis used it as a Red Cross warehouse. The Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, which attracts about 30,000 visitors a year 2023, documents the community’s history.

Dr Leon Saltiel is a historian specialising in the Holocaust in Greece. His publications include The Holocaust in Thessaloniki: Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942-1943, which won the 2021 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research, and ‘Do Not Forget Me’: Three Jewish Mothers Write to their Sons from the Thessaloniki Ghetto.

Dr Saltiel is a member of the Central Board of Jewish Communities of Greece and of the Greek delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. He currently serves as Director of Diplomacy, Representative at the UN Geneva and UNESCO, and Coordinator on Countering Antisemitism for the World Jewish Congress.

A lecture organised by the Melbourne Holocaust Museum included an excerpt from ‘Do Not Forget Me’, directed by Grigoris Apostolopoulos, and written by Dr Leon Saltiel.

On 15 March each year, the anniversary of the first deportation, thousands gather for a silent march from the city centre to the old railway station, holding white balloons reading ‘Never Again’ and place flowers on the train tracks.

In 2008, Thessaloniki erected a Holocaust memorial by Nandor Glid near Liberty Square, where Jewish men were beaten on Black Saturday, 11 July 1942. One of Thessaloniki’s last Holocaust survivors, Heinz Kounio, died earlier this year (April 2026) at the age of 98. The Holocaust Museum of Greece (Μουσείο Ολοκαυτώματος Ελλάδος) in Thessaloniki is due to open later this year (2026). It will be the first museum dedicated specifically to telling the story of Sephardic Jews in the Holocaust.

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎


The Jews of Thessaloniki: From antiquity and the Inquisition, to the Holocaust and today (Melbourne Holocaust Museum)

The ‘lost Jews’ of Malacca survived the Inquisition but are losing their language, heritage and identity

The Kristang or ‘Portuguese-Eurasians’ of Malacca include people of Sephardic descent

Patrick Comerford

During my first visit to Sarawak at the end of 2024, I tried to learn about the history and the stories of Malaysian Jews, and heard about the lost community of the Jews of Penang from Zayn Al-Abideen Gregory, the Kuching-based writer and academic and author of The Last Jews of Penang.

Penang was home to a Jewish community until the late 1970s. But there were Jewish communities in other parts of Malaysia too, especially in Negeri Sembilan and Malacca.

Traces of these lost Jewish communities were found among Mizrahi Jews, the majority of whom are Baghdadi Jews, Malabar Jews and Ashkenazi Jews. But there are also people of Sephardic descent who continue to live among the Kristang people and who have tried to maintain or recover their traditions.

The Kristang – also known as ‘Portuguese-Eurasians’ or ‘Malacca Portuguese’ – are a creole ethnic group of people primarily of Portuguese and Malay descent, but also with substantial Chinese and Indian ancestry. They are found mostly in Malaysia, Singapore and Australia.

The number of Kristang people is estimated at between 37,000 and 54,000 and in Malaysia they are found particularly in Malacca, Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Johor. Kristang groups are also found in Singapore, and due to significant migration in the second half of the 20th century there is a diaspora that has spread to Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

The Jenti Kristang or Orang Serani people are predominantly Roman Catholics, but small numbers of them are Jews, and some are Sunni Muslims and secular people too. Their languages are Papia Kristang, English and Malay.

These people are mainly Malay and Portuguese in their ancestry, but they also have some Dutch ancestry due to intermarriage. This group emerged with their own particular identity in Malacca in the 16th and 17th centuries, when it was part of the Portuguese Empire. Today the Malaysian government classifies them as Portuguese-Eurasians.

The name Kristang comes from the Portuguese creole Kristang, meaning Christian, and in turn it is derived from the Portuguese Cristão. A derogatory term for the Malacca Portuguese community was Grago or Gragok, a slang term for Portuguese camarão (shrimp), referring to the fact that the Portuguese Malaccans were traditionally shrimp fishermen. They also call themselves Gente Kristang (Christian people).

The Padrão dos Descobrimentos or Monument to the Discoveries in Lisbon recalls the Portuguese explorers who set out for the new world (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Portugal was once one of the world’s largest and longest-lived maritime empires, with colonies that included Brazil in Latin America, many African countries such as Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and many port cities throughout Asia, including Goa and Macao. Places that were once part of the Portuguese Empire remain home to small ethnic groups of mixed heritage such as the Macanese in Macau, and the Kristang people in Singapore and Malaysia, with their own unique languages.

The Kristang community traces its origins back to Portuguese sailors, soldiers and traders who came to Malacca during the age of Portuguese explorations and colonialism. There they formed relationships with local women who were indigenous people, Malays and Chinese.

The arrival of Vasco da Gama in India in 1498 sparked Portuguese interest in Malacca as a key, wealthy spice trade hub, and Malacca became a major destination in the great wave of sea expeditions launched by Portugal, becoming part of the Portuguese Empire. The first Portuguese expedition to reach Malacca landed in 1507. The geographic and fiscal advantages of Malacca were obvious, as one Portuguese official noted: ‘Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice’, the Venetians being the great rivals of the Portuguese as importers of spices to Europe.

In the early years, the Malays called the Portuguese Serani, a Malay contraction of the Arabic Nasrani, meaning followers of Jesus of Nazareth. One story records a Portuguese landing party inadvertently insulted the Malaccan sultan by placing a garland of flowers on his head, and he had them detained. A Portuguese fleet was sent from India to free the group in 1511 and then conquered Malacca.

From 1511 on, Portuguese officials encouraged the explorers to marry local indigenous women, under a policy endorsed by Afonso de Albuquerque, then Viceroy of India. The King of Portugal granted freeman status and tax exemption to Portuguese men (casados) who ventured overseas and married local women. With Albuquerque’s encouragement, these mixed marriages flourished and 200 were recorded by 1604, leading to new families and settled communities.

The Dutch took Malacca from the Portuguese in 1641, and almost all political contact between Portugal and Malacca ended. A large number of people of Portuguese descent were sent to Batavia (now Jakarta), the Dutch East India Company headquarters, as war captives and there they settled in an area called Kampung Tugu.

The tomb of Vasco da Gama in the church in Belém in Lisbon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Even after Portugal lost Malacca in 1641, the Kristang community largely preserved its traditions, practicing Catholicism and using the Portuguese language, and they also absorbed some Dutch crypto-Catholics.

Many Sephardic Jews from Portugal and around the Red Sea and Malabar settled in Malacca in the 16th and 17th centuries, and then assimilated into the local Portuguese-Malay community to escape persecution. They were anusim or conversos – Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism under the pressure of the Inquisition. It continued in the Portuguese colonies until 1821, enforcing Catholic orthodoxy, policing ‘blood purity’, suppressing heresy, and persecuting Jewish ‘New Christians’, often resorting to extreme severity, including public torture and execution.

In the 16th century, Malacca was a significant hub for these communities, with reports of active, though often hidden, Jewish culture. Many of the Jews who remained in Malacca during Portuguese rule (1511-1641) integrated into the local Eurasian or Kristang community, which carries a mixture of Portuguese, Dutch, Jewish, and local Malay heritage.

Diego Hernández Vitoria ‘the elder’ (or Diogo Fernandes Victória) was a Portuguese merchant from Porto but also a Judaeo-converso and one of the most important Sephardic merchants in the late 16th century. He protected and financially helped the Judaeo-conversos who were poor or on the run and also tried to develop a closer relationship with the Jesuits.

Diego Hernández Vitoria lived in Spanish America, South-East Asia and Manila. His commercial network extended through Mozambique, Mombasa, Cambay, Gujarat, Sindh, Bijapur, Golconda, Malabar, Ceylon, Coromandel, Bengal, Orissa, Pegu, Siam, Malacca, Moluccas, China and Japan. In these places, 89 per cent of Vitoria’s investments were centred on trade with China and Japan. But because his Jewish origins were well-known In Malacca, he was ostracised by the resident Portuguese trading community.

Thanks to the protection that Vitoria granted to the Judaeo-conversos living between China, Japan and the Philippines, it is possible to list the main traders of Jewish ancestry who had settled in the region: Afonso Vaez, Diego Jorge, Francisco Rodrigues Pinto, Francisco Vaez, Góis, Luís Rodrigues (Manuel Fernandes), Manuel de Mora, Manuel Farias (Manuel Faria), Manuel Gil de la Guardia, Manuel Rodrigues (Manuel Rodrigues Navarro), Paulo Gonçalves, Pero Nabo, Pero Rodrigues, Rui Perez and Vilela Vaz.

The rules surrounding ‘the status of purify of blood’ (limpeza de sangue) blocked any convert or a descendant of converts from many spheres of public activity, and from many privileges, including honorific titles. This discriminatory legislation was based on racial criteria: it was no longer a question of religion but of ‘blood’. One had to provide a certificate, following thorough genealogical investigations, going back as far as possible in the lineage, that one had no Jewish ancestor in his genealogical tree.

A memorial at the Igreja e Convento de Sao Bento da Vitória in Porto apologises for the treatment of Jews during the Portuguese Inquisition (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Inquisition continued its presence until the Dutch captured Malacca in 1641. Because of its persecution of Jews, many of the Jews of Malacca assimilated into the Kristang community. Most of the Sephardic-Asian creoles became genuine Christians, but in some cases, conversos managed to preserve their Jewishness in secret.

Nowadays, intermarriage occurs more frequently between Kristang and people of Chinese and Indian ethnicity rather than Malay because of religious laws that require non-Muslims who marry Malay Muslims first to convert to Islam.

The Kristang people in Malaysia do not have full bumiputera status, a status that applies to indigenous ethnic groups. Since Portuguese times, the Kristang have been living by the sea. It is still an important part of their culture. Even today, with only 10 percent of the community earning their living by fishing, many men go fishing to supplement their income.

Kristang traditional music and dance, such as the Branyo and the Farrapeira are derived from Portuguese folk dances, Kristang or Malacca Portuguese cuisine is similar to the Eurasian cuisine of Singapore and Malaysia, and the Kristang people traditionally used Portuguese and Christian first names, while their surnames were Portuguese.

In general the Kristang practice Roman Catholicism. Christmas (Natal) is the most festival and celebrate many saints’ days, including Saint John (San Juang) on 24 June and Saint Peter (San Pedro) on 29 June.

Kristang Jews are a small, often hidden, subgroup. They trace their ancestry to the Sephardic Jews who survived the Inquisition in Portuguese-controlled Malacca. They had assimilated into the Catholic Kristang community but retained some residual cultural practices. These ‘hidden’ Sephardic Jews are identified in a number of analyses of Asian communities with Jewish roots.

In recent decades, some Kristang people were interested in rediscovering their forgotten Jewish heritage. This led to the formation of the Kristang Community for Cultural Judaism (KCCJ) in 2010, although it is no longer active. Edgar Pinto Xavier also wrote a book about the Jewish history of Malaysia and how the Inquisition persecuted heretics and non-Christians in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in Asia.

Today the Kristang community in Malaysia is primarily based in the Portuguese Settlement in Ujong Pasir, Malacca. They speak Papia Kristang (Malacca Portuguese Creole), a language that continues to mark them out from their Chinese and Malay neighbours.

The Kristang language is threatened with extinction and is classified as critically endangered by Unesco. The work of Kristang language activists has been compared by one writer to that of Yiddishists. But their work in Malaysia and Singapore is no guarantee that Kristang will survive as a living language for future generations.

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎

The Melaka or Malacca River … once known to European seafarers as the ‘Venice of the East’ (Photograph: Engin Akyurt - Pixabay / Wikipedia)

Nicolás Maduro and the claims of the kidnapped president of Venezuela to Sephardic ancestry

Nicolás Maduro Moro claimed Sephardic Jewish ancestry in an interview 13 years ago

Patrick Comerford

The kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Moro claimed Sephardic Jewish ancestry 13 years ago, although he has never identified himself as Jewish in terms of religion, nor has he ever practised Judaism. In an interview in 2013, Maduro spoke of how his grandparents were descended from Sephardic families but had converted from Judaism to Catholicism in Venezuela.

The Antilles and the Caribbean have long had an important Jewish presence, and a large proportion of the Jewish families in the region are Sephardic in origin, as I learned during a course in Sephardic genealogy and history that I took during the Covid-19 lockdown. The series of weekly Zoom seminars or webinars on Sephardic history was organised by the Bevis Marks Synagogue and the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish Community in London in May and June 2020.

Researchers recently claimed Christopher Columbus may have been a Sephardic Jew from Spain rather than being from Genoa. They announced their conclusions in October 2024 after 20 years of DNA and genetic tests on part of his remains that are said to be held in a tomb in the Cathedral in Seville.

Maduro’s claims to Jewish ancestry are not unique for a Latin American president: President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo of Mexico, whose 83% approval ratings make her one of the most popular leaders in the world today, is the first Jewish president in a country with one of the largest Catholic populations. Although she is not a religiously observant Jew, Dr Sheinbaum identifies as culturally Jewish and has spoken proudly about her heritage. Her father Carlos Sheinbaum was of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, from a family who emigrated from Lithuania in 1928; her mother Annie Pardo is from a Sephardi Jewish family who fled to Mexico from the persecution of Jews in Bulgaria during World War II.

The first Jewish immigrants to Venezuela were found in the Dutch colonies in South America in the 17th century. Jews escaping the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions found refuge and freedom of worship in places such as Recife in Dutch Brazil, although, even after Simon Bolivar’s wars of liberation, Jews faced anti-Jewish discrimination.

Maduro is a classic Sephardic name and is a common name on the island of Curaçao in the Dutch Antilles, which has an extensive Jewish heritage. Both of Nicolás Maduro’s parents – Nicolás Maduro García (d. 1989), and Teresa de Jesús Moros (d. 1994) – were descended from Sephardic families whose ancestors were among Iberian Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the late 15th century and who moved to the Netherlands.

The Maduro family moved from Amsterdam to the Caribbean in the 18th century, first to Curaçao and then to Aruba in the Dutch Antilles, where they were among the islands’ earliest settlers. Over generations, members of the family migrated from Aruba to Colombia and later to Venezuela, through the coasts of Falcón state and then on to Lara and Zulia states, where some family members converted to Catholicism.

Salomon Elias Levy Maduro (Papa Monchi) bought the Maduro plantation in Curaçao in 1853

The first family member to move to Aruba, Moses Solomon Levy Maduro, arrived in 1754 while working for the Dutch West India Company. Salomón de Moisés Levy Maduro and his wife Sara, daughter of Jacob de Samuel Levy Maduro, were living in Aruba in 1764.

The Mongui Maduro Museum is housed in the former Rooi Catootje plantation house in the Dutch Antilles island of Curaçao. The house dates from 1735, and the museum tells the story of four generations of the Levy Maduro family and its Sephardic Jewish ancestry, with displays that include the family tree of Salomon Abraham (Mongui) Levy Maduro.

Their stories and influence on the social and economic history of Curaçao are told in the museum, and the displays include antiques and heirlooms. Mongui Maduro’s grandfather Salomon Elias Levy Maduro (Papa Monchi) was a businessman who bought Rooi Catootje in 1853 and built a legacy that continues today. Mongui Maduro was raised by his uncle Manchi and spent a lifetime collecting Judaica and Antillana books and newspaper clippings. His collection evolved into a fully functioning reference library through the efforts of his daughter Ena in 2010.

The history of the Jews in Venezuela dates from the mid-17th century, when groups of marranos or Spanish and Portuguese descendants of baptised Jews who may have secretly continued to adhere to Judaism, lived in Tucacas, Caracas and Maracaibo. The Jewish Cemetery in Santa Ana de Coro is the oldest Jewish cemetery in continuous use in the Americas.

The vast majority of Venezuela’s Jews left during the past two decades, under Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez. They left for Israel and the US, as well as Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica and Guatemala. Maduro may have been anxious to assert his claims to Sephardic ancestry in an interview in 2013 as a response to accusations that his regime tolerated or even encouraged antisemitism in Venezuela.

After Chávez was elected in 1998, he began to engineer a campaign against Venezuela’s Jews, and his anti-Zionism often descended into antisemitism. During a demonstration outside the main Sephardi synagogue in Caracas, the wall was scrawled with the words ‘Jews, killers – leave’. Police raided the Club Hebraica in Los Chorros, an upmarket neighbourhood in East Caracas, in November 2004, after the murder of a public prosecutor, Danilo Anderson, and accused the club of storing Mossad weapons alleged to have been used in the killing. Chávez later said ‘the descendants of those who killed Christ had taken possession of all the wealth in the world.’

Maduro was Foreign Minister and then Vice-President under Chávez. At times, Maduro publicised his contacts with Jewish figures in Venezuela. When he announced in 2013 that his grandparents were Sephardim and had converted to Catholicism, he may have been anxious to counter accusations of antisemitism made against his regime. He met Jewish leaders in Caracas, including Rabbi Isaac Cohen of the Asociación Israelita de Venezuela, in 2017 framing the meeting as a dialogue on coexistence. In Maduro met Rabbi Shlomo Moshe Amar, the Sephardic chief rabbi, who was visiting Venezuela in 2018, and during that visit awarded a medal to Rabbi Isaac Cohen.

On the other hand, Maduro’s recent election rival, Henrique Capriles Radonski, who was raised a Catholic, also has Sephardi Jewish and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry: his maternal grandparents, Andrés Radonski and Lili Bochenek, survived the Holocaust and emigrated from Poland with his mother to Venezuela in 1947. His great-grandparents were murdered in Treblinka during the Holocaust; his maternal grandmother, Lili Bochenek, lived for 20 months in the Warsaw Ghetto; and his paternal grandfather, Armando Capriles-Myerston, was a Sephardi Jew.

The attacks on Jews lessened during Maduro’s presidency, but by then many Jews had left Venezuela. After his kidnapping, the now acting President, Delcy Rodríguez, alleged his capture of Maduro and the US attack were a ‘Zionist’ attack. Her claims were seen as a thinly-veiled attempt to scapegoat to the ever-shrinking Jewish community in Venezuela. Venezuela had a Jewish community of about 22,000 people when Chávez took office in 1999. Today there are fewer than 6,000 Jews in the country.

• These links offer closer looks at the family tree of the Maduro family in Curaçao: a genealogical profile of Susana Maduro, grandmother of Nicolás Maduro on Geneanet and her ancestral connections HERE; and the story of Sephardic Jews in Aruba, with details of the arrival of the Maduro family in Aruba HERE.

Four generations of the Levy Maduro family were owners of Landhuis Rooi Catootje from 1853 to 1974

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎

Pumpkins are kosher, but what about the antisemitic images that are hidden in the Hallowe’en traditions?

Pumpkins for Hallowe’en in a supermarket in Stony Stratford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

Tonight is Hallowe’en, and you are probably going to have a number of visitors calling at your door during the evening, exclaiming: ‘Trick or Treat!’

Everyone knows pumpkins are kosher, as are most fruits and vegetables, with the caveat that they must be free of insects and other contaminants. Pumpkins are also considered kosher for Passover, and they have a long history of use in Jewish cuisine, particularly among Sephardic Jews, who have traditions of eating pumpkins at Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot.

Still, you might wonder what it is like for Jewish families, and Jewish children in particular, having Hallowe’en callers at the door, interrupting the sabbath meal this evening, perhaps even wondering – if they catch a glimpse inside – about the two lit shabbat candles.

Indeed, I am sometimes asked whether Jews have objections to celebrating Hallowe’en.

The plain simple answer is No, particularly among Orthodox Jews, although it is always difficult to generalise in cases such as this.

Tracy Morgan sang ‘Werewolf Bar Mitzvah’ on ‘30 Rock’, But Jewish werewolves are common and Jewish authors and commentators have sometimes used this term to describe other Jews. The novelty song was featured in just a few seconds of one episode of 30 Rock around 2010, but many it to become a Hallowe’en favourite.

Mara Kleinberg is a Jewish culture and entertainment writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in many magazines, and she is also the founder and writer behind the Substack blog ‘Musings with Mara’, where she writes about everything from Judaism to grocery shops.

In a feature last year (21 October 2024), she looked at the Jewish lore behind many favourite Halloween creatures and themes, from goblins and werewolves to witches, from Jewish lore to antisemitic stereotypes and mythical creatures.

She says the most frightening element of this season is the rampant historical antisemitism that spawned many of these characters.

‘The Werewolf Hunter’ … recalling the graphic life of Viennese-born artist Lily Renée (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Some years ago, I visited an exhibition in the Jewish Museum in Judenplatz celebrating the work of Lily Renée, a Viennese-born artist who escaped the Holocaust and became a comic book pioneer in the US in the 1940s and 1950s.

She is best known as one of the earliest women in the comic-book industry, beginning in the period in the 1940s known as the ‘Golden Age of Comics.’ As a child she would sit under the dining table in her parents’ home, drawing mythical creatures or magnificent robes. She escaped from Nazi-occupied Vienna to England and later to New York, where she found work as a penciller and inker at the comics publisher Fiction House, working on such features as The Werewolf Hunter,’ ‘Jane Martin,’ ‘ ‘The Lost World’ and ‘Senorita Rio.’

She illustrated the feature ‘The Werewolf Hunter,’ with scripts credited to ‘Armand Weygand’ and ‘Armand Broussard,’ in Rangers Comics from December 1943 to April 1948. ‘The Werewolf Hunter’ was about a professor and monster hunter. A graphic biography, Lily Renée, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer (2011), chronicles her escape from the Nazis and her early years at Fiction House.

Mara Kleinberg recalled last year how werewolves initially appeared in ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’ and in Greek mythology, and there were werewolf trials in Europe in the 1400s. The connection between Jews and werewolves may have been made because Jews were also outsiders, following a lunar calendar and disappearing at night for Jewish holidays that begin at sunset.

The mediaeval Rabbi Ephraim ben Shimshon described Jacob’s son Benjamin as a werewolf, writing, ‘There is a type of wolf that is calledloup-garou (werewolf), which is a person that changes into a wolf. When it changes into a wolf, his feet emerge from between his shoulders. So too with Benjamin – ‘he dwells between the shoulders’ (Deuteronomy 33:12).’

The rabbi wrote that the fear was not that Benjamin was not that killed ravenously, but that he would shift in front of others and be harmed as a result.

The Russian writer H Leyvick (Leyvik Halpern), is known for his 1921 dramatic Yiddish poem in eight scenes, The Golem. His 1920 Yiddish poem ‘The Wolf’ describes a rabbi who was the lone survivor in the aftermath of his destroyed town, and is transformed into a werewolf.

When other residents return to rebuild the town, the werewolf rabbi attacks the townspeople, eventually dying at their hands:

For on the floor, tortured, in a river of blood
Lay not a wolf but a Jew in a rabbinical fur hat.

The poem is a metaphor for the pogroms and the idea that Jews are no better than their oppressors, fighting each other to survive instead of turning their anger towards their attackers.

The film An American Werewolf in London (1981) follows Jewish werewolves like Leyvick’s werewolf. After being attacked by a werewolf in London, David Kessler wakes up in a hospital and learns he now suffers the same fate as his attacker. In the hospital, the nurses point out that he is Jewish. In his dreams, he and his family are attacked by Nazi zombie-werewolves.

Forty years earlier, the film The Wolf Man (1941) was written by Curt Siodmak, a Jewish screenwriter who fled Poland in the 1930s.

Is Bram Stoker’s Dracula the Eastern European outsider who represents the perceived threat of Jewish immigration? … street art in Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford

Hobgoblins or goblins are seemingly friendly but evil at heart. In a scene in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry Potter sees goblins in Gringotts Bank in Diagon Alley. They are clever but not friendly, and with their long noses, sharp teeth, short bodies, long fingers, and pointy ears, they have sometimes been criticised as antisemitic portrayals, with a resemblance to longstanding caricatures of Jewish people and antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish bankers.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism said JK Rowling’s goblins are a product of these depictions in the past, and some critics compare her portrayal of goblins with images in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Some critics also see the portrayal of dwarves by JRR Tolkien in the The Lord of the Rings draws on another mythological creature that served as an allegory for Jewish people.

The myth of the vampire was widespread throughout mediaeval Europe, and for centuries, Jewish people have been depicted as scary vampires, drinking blood from unsuspecting Christians and corrupting them. The origin of this imagery comes from blood libel conspiracy theories that claim that Jews pray on gentile strangers, drinking their blood as a means for youth and freedom.

These myths date back to England in 1144, when a young boy named William went missing and a monk claimed Jews had taken him and crucified him for a ritual sacrifice. In France, a Jewish community of 40 was burned alive in 1171 following accusations they had killed a child in a ritual murder.

In Jewish folklore, there are Jewish-female vampires too. Known as estries, these creatures first appeared in the Sefer Hasidim, a mediaeval book by Italian Kabbalist Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg describing the life of pious Jews, including morals and tales. Estries are shape-shifters who only prey on Jewish people and are said to be the daughters of Lilith. There is also an alukah, the first Jewish vampire and demon, related to Lilith.

Many interpretations of Dracula can be viewed through a Jewish lens. Some scholars say that in Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula is the Eastern European outsider who represents the perceived threat of Jewish immigration to the UK at the time.

Souvenir figures of the Golem in a shopfront in the Jewish Quarter in Prague (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

In the decade before the rise of the Nazis, the silent film Nosferatu (1922), Count Orlock is seen as a threat to the values of Christians and a sexual predator, and he wears a six-pointed pendant around his neck. His role as the outsider reflects the increasing antisemitic views of Germans at the time. The film villain wears a six-pointed pendant that could represent the Star of David.

Witches to have a place an antisemitic history, and their depictions, with hooked noses and claws are associated with the blood libel. In stories like Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel or Roald Dahl’s The Witches, witches target children, and eat them, in a retelling of the blood libel stories.

If I want an appropriate image from central Europe to counter the barely-hidden antisemitism found in many Hallowe’en traditions, then perhaps I should return to reading stories of the Golem in Prague.

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום‎

Shabbat greetings for this weekend received today from an Irish-Jewish friend living in Israel

‘To seek justice for those who have it worse than we,To make things right with those we’ve harmed’

Patrick Comerford

Tisha BeAb or Tisha B’Av (תִּשְׁעָה בְּאָב), literally ‘the Ninth of Av,’ is an annual fast day in the Hebrew calendar. The fast commemorates the destruction of both the First Temple and Second Temple in Jerusalem, which occurred about 655 years apart, but on the same date in the Hebrew calendar. This year is the Hebrew year 5785, and Tisha B’Av begins at sundown this evening (2 August 2025) and ends at nightfall tomorrow (3 August 2025).

I spent some time atthe Japanese Peace Pagoda at Willen Lake yesterday, filming a brief contribution to two planned commemorations next week of the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August). It is not without poignancy that these two anniversaries come so close to Tisha B’Av this year.

Today is known as Shabbat Chazon, which began at sundown last night (1 August 2025) and ends at nightfall tonight (2 August 2025). Shabbat Chazon, or the Sabbath of Vision, takes its name from the Haftarah that is read immediately before Tisha B’Av, with words of rebuke and doom from Isaiah (1: 1-27).

This Saturday is also known as the ‘Black Sabbath’. But this has nothing to do with Ozzy Osbourne, whose funeral took place in Birmingham this week. It is known as the ‘Black Sabbath’ because for Jews it is the saddest Shabbat of the year, as opposed to the ‘White Sabbath’, Shabbat Shuvah, that comes immediately before Yom Kippur.

Tisha B’Av recalls many disasters in the course of Jewish history, particularly the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans.

Traditionally, the day is observed through five prohibitions, including a 25-hour fast. The Book of Lamentations, which is read in synagogues, mourns the destruction of Jerusalem, followed by the recitation of kinot or liturgical dirges that lament the loss of the Temples and of Jerusalem and recall events such as the murder of the Ten Martyrs by the Romans, massacres of mediaeval Jewish communities during the Crusades, the expulsions of Jews from Spain by the Inquisition, and the Holocaust.

According to the Mishnah (Taanit 4: 6), five events occurred on the Ninth of Av that are recalled in the traditional fasting.

The First Temple built by King Solomon was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BCE, and the people of Judah were sent into exile in Babylon. The destruction of the Temple began on the 7th of Av (II Kings 25: 8) and continued until the 10th (Jeremiah 52: 12).

According to the Talmud, the actual destruction began on the Ninth of Av and it continued to burn throughout the 10th of Av.

The Second Temple was built by Ezra and Nehemiah and was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, scattering the people of Judea and commencing the exile of the Jewish people. The Romans later crushed Bar Kokhba’s revolt and killed over 500,000 people, and then razed the site of the Temple in Jerusalem and the surrounding area in 135 CE.

Over time, Tisha B’Av has come to be a day of mourning not only for these events, but also for later tragedies, including:

• The First Crusade began on 15 August 1096 (24 Av), and 10,000 Jews were slaughtered in its first month in France and the Rhineland.
• The Jews were expelled from England on 18 July 1290 (9 Av).
• The Jews were expelled from France on 22 July 1306 (10 Av).
• The Jews were expelled from Spain on 31 July 1492 (7 Av).
• Germany entered World War I on 1-2 August 1914 (9-10 Av).
• Himmler formally received approval from the Nazis for the ‘Final Solution’ on 2 August 1941 (9 Av).
• The mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto began on 23 July 1942 (9 Av).
• 85 people were killed in a bomb attack on a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires on 18 July 1994 (10 Av).

Many religious communities mourn the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust on Tisha B’Av, adding the recitation of special kinot related to the Holocaust. Additionally, as members of the Cork Jewish Community were reminded in preparation for commemorations some years ago, ‘contemporary Jews often use this day to acknowledge that evil exists in the world, whether we want it to or not, and to reflect how we can make the world a kinder, more welcoming place for everyone. What can you do to give back in a meaningful way?’



Tisha BeAb is significant in the Sephardic tradition in ways that surpass how other holidays are observed, or even how this date is observed in other Jewish traditions. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain issues their Edict of Expulsion on 31 March and it was to be completed in four months by the end of July. That date was the day before 9 Ab, making the link to the earlier destruction of Jerusalem particularly strong for Sephardic Jews.

This connection is even stronger because, according to the prophet Obadiah, the Jews of Sepharad were descendants of the exiles of Jerusalem (Galut Yershushalayim Asher B’Spharad), and the the rabbis of Spain understood Sepharad to mean Spain.

The fast on Tisha B’Av lasts about 25 hours, beginning at sunset on the preceding evening and lasting until nightfall the next day. The five traditional prohibitions on Tisha B’Av are:

• eating or drinking;
• washing or bathing;
• application of creams or oils;
• wearing (leather) shoes;
• marital or sexual relations.

If possible, work is avoided during this period. Ritual washing up to the knuckles is allowed, as is washing to remove dirt or mud from one’s body.

Torah study is forbidden as it is considered a spiritually enjoyable activity, although one may study texts such as the Book of Lamentations, the Book of Job, portions of Jeremiah and chapters of the Talmud that discuss mourning and the destruction of the Temple.

Before the evening services begin in synagogues, the parochet covering the Torah Ark is removed or drawn aside, lasting until the Mincha prayer service. Old prayer-books and Torah scrolls are often buried on this day.

Plaza de Juda Levi in Córdoba … recalling Judah Halevi, who wrote ‘kinot’ for Tisha B’Av (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The scroll of Eicha (Lamentations) is read in synagogues in the evening, and in many Sephardic congregations the Book of Job is read in the morning. The morning is spent chanting or reading kinot mourning the loss of the Temples and the subsequent persecutions, often referring to post-exilic disasters.

The most popular kinot were written by the eighth-century liturgical poet Elazar Hakallir, Judah Halevi (1085-1145), the Spanish philosopher regarded by many as the greatest post-biblical poet, and Solomon ibn Gabirol (1021-1058).

Other kinot were written in response to tragedies in Jewish history, including the public burning of the Torah in Paris, the massacres during the first Crusade, the slaughter of the Jews of York, and the annihilation of European Jewry in the Holocaust.

This year, Bevis Marks Synagogue is once again welcoming Hazzan Nachshon Rodrigues Pereira from the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam to lead the services on Tisha BeAb, this evening and tomorrow morning. This evening’s service is an opportunity to hear haunting melodies and to see the synagogue draped in black, illuminated by candlelight.

In western Sephardi Tisha BeAb services, there is a tendency to emphasise hope for ultimate redemption and national and spiritual restoration, as part of the recalled collective grief.

This is reflected in one the most celebrated compositions by Judah ha-Levi often heard in synagogues on Tisha B’Av:

Zion, wilt thou not ask if peace’s wing
Shadows the captives that ensue thy peace
Left lonely from thine ancient shepherding?
Lo! west and east and north and south – worldwide
All those from far and near, without surcease
Salute thee: Peace and Peace from every side.

The way Tisha BeAb is marked at Bevis Marks Synagogue in London, for example, poignantly evokes melancholy emotions. The Hehal (ark) is draped in a black cloth, as is the Sepher (Torah scroll). Furthermore, the synagogue, famous for its chandeliers, instead uses ‘low lights’ for illumination. These candles attached to the benches themselves, provide just a minimal glow so that the prayers can be recited.

This is one of the most intricate musical services of the year in a synagogue with such an elaborate liturgical tradition. Each kinah (‘lamentation’) is read according to a unique melody, reflecting the significance of the sufferings remembered on this day.

The traditional greeting for 9 Ab in Spanish and Portuguese communities is Morir habemos, to which the reply is Ya lo sabemos.

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, who has been named by the Forward as one of ‘America’s Most Inspiring Rabbis’, recently wrote ‘Eikhah for Israel and Gaza’ as part of the Liturgical Arts Working Group at Bayit, and shared it there as part of their Tisha b’Av collection. She also posted this poem on her blog, Velveteen Rabbi, last year (8 August 2024):

Eikhah for Israel and Gaza

Walls burned or broken
Peacemakers kidnapped and slaughtered
Children terrorized

Buildings bombed to rubble
Hospitals destroyed
Cisterns emptied

Everywhere pictures of the hostages
Everywhere reminders of the martyrs
Everywhere parents burying children

Our grief and fury could wash away creation.
Will anyone survive, clinging to this battered ark?
Is there an olive tree left anywhere?

Rabbi Rachel Barenblat



Some years ago, Rabbi Rachel Barenblat wrote another poem, ‘What Gets Me’, for this sombre day after travelling in Israel, when she ‘was profoundly struck by the reminder of how many peoples have hated us and tried to wipe us out. It’s history I’ve always known, of course. But it lands differently now.’

‘Once I had the luxury of imagining that antisemitism was outdated and fading away,’ she wrote. ‘With the ugly rise of white nationalism and ‘Christian nationalism’ both here and elsewhere – with the reality that my synagogue now keeps its doors locked – with praise for Hitler coming from public figures – every Jew I know lives with the sickening awareness that there are people who want to exterminate us.’

‘Most of the time I keep the fear and grief at bay,’ she said. ‘But Tisha b’Av is in part about letting ourselves feel the things we keep at arm’s length. We let our walls come down and face what feels annihilating. From the other side of that brokenness we begin the ascent to the Days of Awe.’

What Gets Me

Not just the litany of destruction: Babylon, Rome, the first Crusade.
Forced out of England, and France, and Spain.
Or how on this day in 1941 the Nazi Party approved
“The Final Solution,” the mass graves, the gas chambers.

Or the old claim that we make matzah with their children’s blood,
or the cartoons that show us hook-nosed and greedy,
money-grubbing, conspiring, defiling the world
with our stubborn insistence that we deserve to exist.

What gets me is that these hatreds persist.
In every antisemitic flyer and QAnon meme.
In every synagogue shooting.
In the uneasy fear that we might be next.

And still somehow we’re meant to look inside, to do the work,
To seek justice for those who have it worse than we,
To make things right with those we’ve harmed,
And if we must, to die like our ancestors –

– with the Sh’ma on our lips.

As Rabbi Rachel Barenblat said when she wrote that poem, may this year’s Tisha b’Av be what we need it to be, and may it move us closer to a world redeemed.