On the occasion of Bent Blüdnikow's new book "Borderless Jews", we invite you to a lecture about the borderless Jew, Samuel Sumbel
Bent writes about his book and his lecture:
"From the middle of the 1700th century, when Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah opened up to Europe, Denmark became Morocco's closest trade and peace partner. The Sultan used Moroccan Jews as diplomats and advisers. Samuel Sumbel was thus from 1750 the sultan's closest adviser and responsible for all relations with European nations. Denmark sent frigates, consuls and captains to Morocco and in the National Archives there are piles of reports and letters about the relationship between the two countries and fantastic descriptions of Sultan Abdallah and, among other things, Samuel Sumbel.
When a crisis arose between the two countries, Samuel Sumbel traveled to Copenhagen and stopped on the way in the Danish city of Altona, where he became involved in the most talked about religious dispute of the time between Kabbalists and traditionalists, the so-called Eybeschütz-Emden ballad. In Copenhagen he got an audience with Frederik 5 and resolved the dispute.
But it was dangerous to work for the sultan, who several times threatened Sumbel with being burned alive. He therefore secretly invested his huge fortune in royal Danish securities. Samuel Sumbel died in 1782, but his son Joseph came to Copenhagen in 1785 and got all his father's money and became a prophet with a new religion of tolerance, where he renounced his visits to brothels and now wanted to live chaste and tolerant. He was chased out of town by the Jews of the congregation. Off he went to London, where he married the hottest Shakespearean actress of the time in the debt prison where they were both inmates.
No more is to be revealed here about the fantastic fates that befell the Moroccan Jews. I have followed them across the globe's 3 continents using archives and literature from England, Israel, Germany, Holland, France, Spain, Portugal and of course Denmark.
It is a boundary-breaking book that tells about fantastic and dramatic destinies and tries to place Danish-Jewish history in an international perspective and emphasizes that Danish-Jewish history was an important part of general Jewish history.”
