In 1553, a community of exiled Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had found refuge and patronage in the northern Italian city of Ferrara did something that would have been unthinkable, and very possibly fatal, in their former homelands.

They printed their own Hebrew bible in Spanish.

The Ferrara bible, as the volume came to be known, was needed for reasons both practical and symbolic. A large number of the Sephardic Jews living in Ferrara had ostensibly converted to Roman Catholicism in an attempt to avoid expulsion by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. But many of the converts, or conversos, had tried to keep their ancestral faith alive by practising it in secret. Despite their best efforts, however, time, displacement and the prohibition on Judaism soon eroded their knowledge.

“The Ferrara community was formed not so much by those expelled in 1492, but primarily by Portuguese and Spanish converts who had remained crypto-Jews, that is, they had secretly maintained Jewish religious practice and preservation within their families in Spain or Portugal, passing it down from parents to children,” said Paloma Díaz-Mas, a Spanish writer and scholar who has written an introduction to a new edition of the Ferrara bible.

“But of course, they didn’t have synagogues, they didn’t have rabbis, they didn’t have Hebrew books because they were persecuted. And possessing a book in Hebrew could lead to an inquisitorial trial.”

But once under the protection of Ercole II d’Este, the duke of Ferrara – the son of Lucrezia Borgia and the grandson of Pope Alexander VI – the community could set about relearning its lost rituals. The only problem was that few of the Jews in Ferrara could speak or read Hebrew, which is how the Ferrara bible came to be the first complete, printed edition of the entire Hebrew bible in their common language: Spanish.

Others in the Sephardic Jewish diaspora were also trying to reclaim their faith, said Díaz-Mas. “They wanted to preserve Judaism, but they knew less and less about it. When these people were able to found Jewish communities in other countries – in Italy or in Amsterdam – the problem was that they didn’t know enough about Judaism and they didn’t have access to Hebrew texts because they didn’t know Hebrew. Communities like the one in Amsterdam, for example, imported rabbis from the Ottoman empire or from north Africa to serve as their spiritual guides.”

Although the creators of the Ferrara bible prided themselves on producing “a bible in the Spanish language translated, word-for-word, from the true Hebrew by excellent scholars”, they also acknowledged that the literal translation, which follows Hebrew syntax, “may seem rough and strange and very different to the polished words we employ these days”.

Regardless of its linguistic eccentricities, however, the Ferrara bible has earned its place in history as the first complete, printed edition of the Hebrew bible in Spanish to be produced at a time when the Council of Trent had just reaffirmed the Latin Vulgate as the canonical text of the Roman Catholic bible.

The Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, comprises the Torah (the Five Books of Moses), Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). The Roman Catholic bible, meanwhile, is made up of an Old Testament of 46 books and a New Testament of 27 books.

Díaz-Mas believes the new edition of the bible – published by José Antonio de Castro Foundation, which works to safeguard Spain’s literary heritage – will help consolidate the book’s “enduring relevance and its cultural importance”.

But, as its cover engraving of a storm-tossed, broken-masted ship alone and at the mercy of the seas shows, the Ferrara bible is much more than a mere translation: it is also a document of survival and resilience.

“The ship, despite everything, keeps moving forward, and there’s a dolphin in the water,” said Díaz-Mas. “And the dolphin is a benevolent, protective symbol because it was believed that dolphins guided ships to safe harbour. So, this has been interpreted – and I think quite accurately – as a kind of symbol of the life trajectory of many of these Jewish converts, like those who founded the community of Ferrara.”

The engraving reflects both the mercantile background of many of the Sephardic Jews whom the Duke of Ferrara was keen to welcome to his lands and the fact of their exile.

The ship, added the academic, speaks for itself: “‘We’ve been battered by storms – the storm of the expedition, of the Inquisition, of the forced conversions in Portugal. We’ve had to leave our lands; we’ve had to find our way of life elsewhere, but we keep going and we keep sailing’ … that’s a portrait of their life, of their lives, and of their future as a community.”

Gary Shteyngart is the observational standup of American letters, a puckish, playful Russian-born author who views the US through the eyes of an inquisitive tourist. The immigrant melting pot of New York is his stage; the intricate English language his prop. Shteyngart’s characters, typically lightly veiled alter egos, are always getting lost, tripping up and mangling basic social interactions. It’s the missed connections and short circuits that give his fictions their spark.

Shteyngart’s sixth novel is a lively, skittish Bildungsroman, shading towards darkness as it tracks the journey – literal, educational, emotional – of 10-year-old Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, an overanxious, over-watchful academic high achiever whose run of straight As has just been blighted by a B. “Being smart is one of the few things I have to be proud of,” laments Vera, who diligently maintains a “Things I Still Need to Know Diary” in which she makes note of difficult words and intriguing figures of speech. The girl is articulate and precocious, bent on self-improvement, and never mind the fact that she confuses “facile” with “futile” and “hollowed” with “hallowed” and is wont to wax lyrical about the “she-she” districts of Manhattan. Her vocabulary is almost – but crucially not quite – sufficient to give us the whole story and explain what it means.

Always happy to show his workings, Shteyngart cites Henry James’s 1897 novel What Maisie Knew as the prompt for Vera, or Faith’s child’s-eye account of complicated adult affairs, although his gauche heroine bears a passing resemblance to the author himself as portrayed in his 2014 memoir, Little Failure. Friendless Vera lives with her rackety Russian-Jewish father, Igor (Shteyngart’s name at birth), who edits a floundering liberal arts magazine, her harried Wasp stepmother, Anne (who added the “e” in tribute to Anne Frank), and a boisterous younger half-brother, Dylan, who likes exposing himself to houseguests. But she also has (or possibly had) a Korean-born mother, long since vanished from the scene. Invisible Iris Choi plays the tale’s white whale or MacGuffin; the elusive hidden figure that Vera is determined to locate.

The eccentric Bradford-Shmulkins are lurching towards crisis, but they seem a model of stability when compared with the rest of the country, which reveals itself in unflattering flashes in the corners of the narrative. Shteyngart’s novel, we come to realise, plays out a decade from now, in a “post-democracy” USA where red state officials monitor menstrual cycles, self-driving cars shop their owners to the feds and the news platforms are abuzz with Russian disinformation. Desperate to redeem herself at school, Vera prepares to debate in support of the proposed “Five-Three Amendment”, a piece of racist legislation that would grant added voting weight to those “exceptional Americans” whose ancestors arrived before the revolutionary war, “but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains”. In so doing, of course, she’s arguing against her own interests. Blond, blue-eyed Dylan would count as an “exceptional American”. Dark‑haired, brown-eyed Vera would not.

Henry James provides the prompt but his involvement begins and ends there, because Vera, or Faith isn’t Jamesian at all. The prose is simple, breezy and conversational, even when it’s stumbling artfully over its words. If Shteyngart’s novel possesses anything so fixed as a north star or a patron saint, it’s surely not James but Vladimir Nabokov. The title references Ada, or Ardor, while its protagonist comes styled in the manner of a pint-sized Timofey Pnin: a dogged innocent caught between cultures and half-lost in translation. In the course of her adventures, Vera learns that she was named after Nabokov’s wife, “a woman who was a genius herself but in the olden days she had to serve her husband”. Vera Nabokov’s 21st-century namesake – driven and decent and at the top of her class – similarly risks being dismissed as a second-class citizen.

The novel is busy and ingratiating, almost to a fault, which is to say that it feels distracted, unsettled; a cultural code-switcher itself. Vera, or Faith was reputedly drafted at speed in a little under two months, incorporating elements from a spy novel that the author had recently abandoned. That accounts for its messy vitality and its frequent, perturbing shifts of gear. Shteyngart’s ode to a good American in a bad America conspires to be, by turns, a rueful human comedy and a coming-of-age caper, a dystopian chiller and an espionage yarn. The colourful tale never satisfyingly hangs together; its component pieces tend to jar more than gel. But Shteyngart sets about his material with abundant energy and charm. He sketches a convincing caricature of a near-future USA and provides a stoical heroine that we can uncomplicatedly root for. Even in a degraded, compromised, up-is-down social climate, that has to be deserving of a solid B grade at least.

Leila Aboulela has won this year’s PEN Pinter prize for her writing on migration, faith and the lives of women.

The prize is awarded to a writer who, in the words of the late British playwright Harold Pinter, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze on the world, and shows a “fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies”.

Aboulela grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and has lived in Aberdeen since 1990. Her six novels and two short story collections include The Translator, Elsewhere, Home and, most recently, 2023’s River Spirit.

“This comes as a complete and utter surprise,” said the writer on hearing the news. “For someone like me, a Muslim Sudanese immigrant who writes from a religious perspective probing the limits of secular tolerance, this recognition feels truly significant. It brings expansion and depth to the meaning of freedom of expression and whose stories get heard.”

Aboulela was announced winner at English PEN’s summer party on Wednesday evening, where actors Khalid Abdalla and Amira Ghazalla read from her work. She will receive the award on 10 October at the British Library in London, where she will announce her choice of winner for the PEN Pinter Writer of Courage award, given to an author “active in defence of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty”.

Aboulela’s work “is marked by a commitment to make the lives and decisions of Muslim women central to her fiction, and to examine their struggles and pleasures with dignity,” said novelist Nadifa Mohamed, who judged this year’s prize alongside the poet and author Mona Arshi and the chair of English PEN, Ruth Borthwick. “In a world seemingly on fire, and with immense suffering unmarked and little mourned in Sudan, Gaza, and beyond, her writing is a balm, a shelter, and an inspiration.”

Aboulela “offers us nuanced and rich perspectives on themes that are vital in our contemporary world: faith, migration, and displacement,” said Arshi.

“She is not the first to write about the experience of migration, but Leila is a writer for this moment, and my hope is that with this prize her gorgeous books find new readers, and open our minds to other possibilities,” added Borthwick.

Last year, Arundhati Roy won the prize, and selected the imprisoned British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah as Writer of Courage.

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The prize is awarded annually to writers resident in the UK, Ireland, the Commonwealth or the former Commonwealth. Previous winners include Michael Rosen, Malorie Blackman, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi.

Faith leaders denounce US book burning as hate-fuelled intimidation

May 15 2025

A group of faith leaders in Ohio denounced a recent alleged hate crime in the state, in which a man burned books belonging to a public library. The destroyed books were on Jewish, African American and LGBTQ+ history.

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