The real problem in Australia, from where we have good news for our portfolio, is that the key to Labour holding power is in the hands of the anti-business Greens, who are more or less Reds. They will insist on new taxes on mining after plans to impose them were cut by Labour during the campaign, on environmental grounds and because they don’t like business.
There is plenty of US data due this week to set the tone of markets, starting with existing
(Tues.) and new (Weds.) home sales, durable goods (also Weds.) , and then GDP on Friday. Wall Street will fall if there are any hints that housing is slowing more and if there are more indications of the famous double dip. GDP revisions are forecast to be downward, to 1.4% from 2.4% mainly from trade and inventory figure changes. If it is worse than that, take cover. But our economic sources say that private demand will show continued strength in Q2 figures so that the US economy will still be growing, if modestly.
Strong imports growth is a proof of strong USA demand. So my view is that Ben Shalom Bernanke’s speech on the economic outlook on Friday night will not indicate that the Fed means to print more money.
My note on the Crypto-Jews of Belmonte drew much comment including one from a DC reader who noted that Jewish women confined to the balcony in Orthodox synagogues do not maintain silence during the service. My idea was that from being the sacerdotas of the crypto-Jewish ceremonials, the ladies would not like to take second place to bearded rabbis officiating at the service in their stead.
A major and controversial academic expert on crypto-Judaism was Ben-Zion Netanyahu, father of the Israeli Premier. The elder man argued (based mostly on New World evidence) that crypto-Jews did not exist when the Inquisition began trying to root out “Judaicizers”. The motive for the attack on New Christians, he insisted, was to get hold of their wealth, rather than concern for their Catholic orthodoxy or its risks for the country.
The Netanyahu thesis required that he deny any Jewish content to the ceremonies discovered in Belmonte, like the baking of matzohs (unleavened bread) for the Passover Seder, deliberately done a month after the date of Passover (the 15th of Nissan) on the 15th of Iyar to confound the spies of the Inquisition.
Stubbornness seems to be a Netanyahu family trait and I hope very much the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks next month will see the fruit falling a bit further from the proverbial tree than it has so far from Benjamin Netanyahu, son of the scholar.
While nobody knows the real number of Crypto-Jews in the Portuguese border towns, because the families keep their religious views secret not only from their neighbors, but also from folks from other towns, there is a definite movement by some younger Crypto-Jews to formally rejoin Judaism. Thanks to the efforts of Spanish and Portuguese Sephardic synagogues in the USA and Britain, the Belmonte and Corvilha Jews were not required to formally convert. They were treated as having been Jews all along. Similar flexibility is shown to crypto-Jews from the Balearics in Israel and the Azores (part of Portugal) in the USA.
Such liberalism did not greet Russian emigrants coming to Israel, many of them of mixed religious background, forced to meet the demands of the Orthodox rabbinate to get classified as Jewish, at which many failed. PM Netanyahu has left it to the Israeli Ashkenazic rabbis in this case.
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