Sunset And Super Moon At Arcadia Lake.Jef Bourgeau

Sunset and Super Moon at Arcadia Lake. Jef Bourgeau

Antique Jewish Hamsa amulets and other Jewish talismans from Morocco, Kurdistan and Israel. 🪬 (png)

If no one else got me, lecha dodi got me

A piece of Jewish history I stumbled across the other day… Jewish dancers at the World’s Fair (Columbian Exposition) of 1893.

1. Rosa (last name unknown), a Sephardi Jewish dancer from Salonica (today Thessaloniki), Greece.

2. Rahlo Jammele, a Sephardi Jewish dancer from Jerusalem.

3. Nazha Kassik, a Syrian Jewish dancer from Beirut.

Rosa was billed as “The Famous Dancer of Constantinople” in the Chicago World Fair of 1893, which was one of the first large-scale public performances of Middle Eastern dance in the United States, and credited with popularizing what became modern “belly dance.” Some observers, though, were shocked to discover that many of the dancers and performers in the “Turkish Village” (80 percent, according to Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett) were actually Ottoman Jews from Greece, the Balkans, and the Levant. 

Rosa performed along at least two other Jewish dancers: Rahlo Jammele (from Jerusalem), who showed “remarkable cleverness in handling the sword” and Nazha Kassik (from Beirut), whose dancing “had something which was peculiarly Jewish in its rhythmic grace and sinuous swaying”. 

Rosa’s hands and Rahlo’s nails are clearly hennaed; I wonder they brought henna with them too? So interesting! For more about Jewish henna in the Ottoman Empire, see here and here.