The table is the place where parents convey their priorities, mores and values to their children. We ask them what they did in school that day, what they learned, and what excited them. In exchange we share with them our stories, our history. It really doesn't matter if the story is about the first time we swam the river or rode a bike, or if it's the story of how Abraham destroyed his father's idols and blamed it on the largest of them all. We connect them to the traditions that formed us, and will define their future selves.
Genealogy is the active study of our roots, our beginnings. Though, today, this process is dependant more and more on a trail of documents, its was bone in the story telling tradition of our ancestral past. We keep the tradition going be retelling the story at our own table.
Our story, the Horesh story, was born around the year 1683 at a critical moment in history and the juncture of two empires
The Holy Roman Emperor faced the difficulties of governing a Hungary which was split into three: its ally Royal Hungary in the west, Ottoman Hungary in the centre and nationalist, but Ottoman controlled Transylvania in the east. Leopold I, a devout Catholic and supporter of the Counterreformation was charged driving the infidels out and united Hungary under the banner of the Holy Roman Empire. He took one of his steps in 1670, when under the guidance of the Church, he ordered all Jews to move out of Vienna; His next step was to drive the Turks out of Europe. His first success came at the battle of Saint Gotthard, where he retook Transylvania. In 1673, he suspended Transylvania's constitution and placed West and East Hungary under the direct control of his own director. In reaction to this, Hungarian noblemen led a revolt against the emperor in 1681 which succeeded in reinstating the constitution and removing the more severe restrictions on Hungary imposed by the emperor.
In 1683, the Ottoman Sultan, either encourage or invited by the succesful revolution, declared war on the Emperor laid siege to Vienna (Habsburg-Ottoman War 1683-1699). Vienna withstood a two month siege, which was lifted by relief armies from various regions of Germany and Poland. In the subsequent wars, the Imperial troops, allied with Poland and Venice in the Holy League,and supported by the Pope, defeated the Ottoman Empire, culminating with the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, which saw the Ottoman Empire cede the great majority of Ottoman Hungary to the Habsburg dynasty's Austrian line.
With the territorial battles concluded, the The Counterreformation turned its attention to issue of religious hegemeny within the Empire. The Holy Roman Empire initiated a policy which pressured the subjects of the Empire, including the Jews of "old" Vienna, as well as those of "liberated" Hungary to convert or migrate. This policy was initiated in 1700, with a pogrom against the Jews of Vienna. These policies were ironic, as many of the regional populations had often sympathized with the Austrian side through the war years and up until the proselytizing activity of the Jesuit priests. In the case of the Viennies pogrom, it was aimed primarily at the House of Samuel Oppenheimer, a former Finance Minister, who had helped supply the Imperial army for the initial defense of Vienna.
In the midst of all this war, a Sephardic Jew named Yosef Horesh was born. Oral tradition says it was in Vienna. If so, it may be possible that he left as part of the 1670 expulsion of lower and middle class Jews. However, archives from the Jewish community show no family with that surname in Vienna during that time.
It is more likely that the Vienna brought down in our aggadah, is the Empire of Vienna. Perhaps he and his family left as a result of the pogroms in Vienna, though again, a search of surnames from 1700 shows no Horesh or related Soundex name. My theory, based on the discovery of a number of Horeshes (Catholics and Protestants) in Hungary and other former Ottoman Turkish territories, is that, in response to economic and religious pressures, Yosef Horesh and his family left the region along with their Ottoman hosts and made their way to the Jewish heart of the Ottoman Empire, Salonika, Greece.
An excellent source for the Sephardic history of the Jews in Hungary, Czech, Romania, and other regions of Transylvania can be found at the Yivo
webite.
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