MARC Record from marc_columbia

LEADER: 03887fam a2200445 a 4500
001 1608883
005 20220608195706.0
008 940705s1995 nyua b 001 0deng
010 $a 94026788
020 $a0394583515 :$c$25.00
035 $a(OCoLC)30810930
035 $a(OCoLC)ocm30810930
035 $9AKL5351CU
035 $a(NNC)1608883
035 $a1608883
040 $aDLC$cDLC$dNNC$dOrLoB
050 00 $aDS134$b.P47 1995
082 00 $a929/.2/089924046$220
100 1 $aPerera, Victor,$d1934-$0http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n82004969
245 14 $aThe cross and the pear tree :$ba Sephardic journey /$cVictor Perera.
250 $a1st ed.
260 $aNew York :$bKnopf,$c1995.
263 $a9504
300 $a282 pages :$billustrations ;$c24 cm
336 $atext$btxt$2rdacontent
337 $aunmediated$bn$2rdamedia
504 $aIncludes bibliographical references and index.
520 $aTracing the dramatic lives, through 500 years, of the old and distinguished Sephardic Jewish family from whom he is descended, Victor Perera brilliantly re-creates the history not only of his own people but of an entire culture.
520 8 $aThe story he tells begins in Spain in the fifteenth century, when the Sephardim are offered a choice of conversion, exile or death. It is the story of a richly flourishing tradition - intellectual, religious, worldly and spiritual - interrupted by massively cruel events; a story of persecution, escape and renewal, carrying us from the Iberian Peninsula across Europe to the Holy Land and Central America.
520 8 $aAnd the Pere(i)ras whose lives we enter are both fascinating in themselves and emblematic of the Sephardic diaspora created by the Inquisition and the Expulsion - some of them, under threat of torture and execution, capitulating to the Cross or becoming Marranos, crypto-Jews who practiced their ancestral religion in secret; others remaining loyal to the pear tree that became their symbol and crest.
520 8 $aAmong the Marranos: Ana Pereira, a merchant's daughter, a Sephardic convert in Portugal who, at age fifteen, was sentenced to wear penitential raiment and undergo spiritual penances in prison, where, under torture, she incriminated fifteen of her close relations.
520 8 $aAmong the reclaimed: the fabulously wealthy magnate and author Abraham Israel Pereira, who participated in the excommunication of philosopher Baruch Spinoza; and the beautiful Maria Nunes, who was abducted to Shakespeare's England, and rejected the marriage proposal of a duke and Queen Elizabeth's entreaties on his behalf, marrying instead a cousin in Amsterdam's first Jewish wedding. In nineteenth-century France we follow the meteoric rise of the brothers Emile and Isaac Pereire, who founded the French railroads and the Credit Mobilier banking system.
520 8 $aOver the centuries, the stories of Pereras in all walks of life - among them rabbis and Kabbalistic scholars in the Holy Land - unfold.
520 8 $aFinally it is Victor Perera's own father and the rigorous patriarchal tradition of his father's Jerusalem in the last days of the Ottoman Empire that dominate this chronicle, compelling the author to search out the life of the grandfather he never knew, and ultimately to recover his own Jewish identity and liberate himself from a generations-old family curse.
520 8 $aHe recounts his quest in a book that richly brings alive the too-little-known Sephardic culture in all its abundance, profundity, color and compelling particularity.
650 0 $aSephardim$xHistory.$0http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh2008111531
600 30 $aPereira family.$0http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85099781
650 0 $aJews$vGenealogy.$0http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85070392
852 00 $bglx$hDS134$i.P47 1995
852 00 $boff,glx$hDS134$i.P47 1995