The Jewish Animal Janaury 2002 1 | 2 | 3 | NEXT Happy New Year! If you are a collector of Judaica philately (or have any kind of stamp collection), I hope the new year will bring you the pleasures of philately that go beyond just adding to your collection. One of these added pleasures is doing research on the subject matter of the stamps. Another is simply to rearrange your stamps to form mini-exhibitions -- or actually developing an exhibit for a stamp show. The idea for one possible mini-exhibit stems from a set of stamps issued by Belize on January 1, 1974, which includes a stamp depicting a Jewfish (Scott #328). The same fish had appeared on an overprint of a British Honduras stamp (#312 for the overprint and #214 for the original stamp from British Honduras). The Jewfish is a large sea bass or grouper which can weigh several hundred pounds and is usually found in deep warm waters. One of the earliest explanations for the name came from Dampier who wrote in Links You Might Find Useful Birds of the World on Postage Stamps, Chris Gibbins Philatelists Get Hooked Fish Stamps, Florida Sea Grant College Program The Jewfish, Fishing-Boating Online   1729 that he believed the name came from the fact that "it hath scales and fins, therefore a clean fish, according to Levitical law." Stamps depicting Jewfish can be part of an exhibit depicting other "Jewisth" fish. For example, a large number of fish relate to Marcus Eliezer Bloch, an ichthyologist who lived from 1723 to 1799. He developed a systematic classification of fish and described more than 1,500 species. Some of these include Bloch's own name in the fish's scientific name. Several of these have appeared on stamps, including Thailand #464, issued on January 1, 1967; other include Mozambique #332, 340, 344, and 350 and China #2538e and h. Some Judaica collectors include all of the fish classified by Bloch in their collection. Another "school" of "Jewish" fish are those named after Dr. Herbert Axelrod, another prominent ichthyologist; these include several tropical fish depicted on stamps -- for example, Cuba #C287 and East Germany #836. Philatelic Flora and Fauna 1 | 2 | 3 | NEXT © 2002, J-Stamps/Murray Frost. All Rights Reserved. froststamps@yahoo.com