March/April 2009

Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History
Ruth Behar

Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History By Aviva Ben-Ur NYU Press 2009, $35, pp. 321

Reading Aviva Ben-Ur’s Sephardic Jews in America, I felt joy and sorrow. Joy because in Ben-Ur we are fortunate to have a historian whose careful research and loving concern for the travails of the Sephardim returns their voices to the narrative of American Jewish history. Sorrow because it has taken much too long for this story to be told.

Ben-Ur, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, has no choice but to begin her book on a melancholy note, with a chapter entitled “The Jews Who Weren’t There.” How do you make a people visible when they have been rendered invisible? Even while succeeding beautifully in bringing Sephardic Jews to life in all their nuances and complexity, the whole of her book remains haunted by the wounding consequences of their erasure from the larger Jewish narrative. The irony is that this narrative is the handicraft of fellow Jews, Ashkenazim oblivious to the Sephardic presence.

The book’s introduction offers the most detailed and thoughtful discussion I have yet encountered on why Sephardic Jews have been excluded from mainstream Jewish life in the United States, and kept on the periphery of Jewish history by scholars who ought to know better. This marginalization is the result of factors that have as much to do with objective realities as with subjective attitudes. Certainly the miniature size of the community—Sephardic Jews have formed only three or four percent of the American Jewish population since colonial times—is a logical reason for their minority position. But even more important is the slipperiness of Sephardic ethnicity. Sephardic Jews have multiple ties to Jewish, Hispanic and Arab identities. They have connections to parts of the world that are non-European and non-Western and associated with a threatening sense of otherness.

Jews were considered “the Other” for much of the span of European history, culminating in the horror of the Holocaust. After the war, Ashkenazi Jews who were reinventing their identity in America and Israel sought to rewrite themselves into European history as a European people. Within this Europeanist paradigm, Sephardic Jews were an embarrassment. They were to be viewed with exotic curiosity at best and disdain at worst, their voices hushed, their stories obscured.

It is impossible for Ben-Ur to remedy this situation in her concise book. But she is able to accomplish something very important nevertheless. Balancing compelling true-life tales with sensitive historical analysis, she manages to inscribe Sephardic Jews into American history in ways that allow us to rethink the Jewish diaspora in terms of an entirely different cast of characters. She also documents in exquisite detail the bridges that Sephardic immigrants established with Spanish-speaking communities in the United States after being rejected by Yiddish-speaking Jews.

Her focus is on the first half of the 20th century and on Sephardic Jews who are of Iberian origin. She makes mention of the Mizrahim, Jews indigenous to North Africa and the Middle East, but she is mainly concerned with the segment of the Jewish community that spent centuries transplanted in the Balkans and the Anatolian Peninsula after the expulsion from Spain and Portugal. In the early 1900s, in the era of tumultuous change leading to the Ataturk reforms in Turkey and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, many of these Ladino-speaking Jews emigrated and made their way to New York, at a time when the city was newly crowded by Jews of Germanic and Eastern European background.

Here their troubles began. From the moment they set foot on American soil, Sephardic Jews found their Jewishness questioned, even denied, by established Ashkenazi Jews who were in a position to offer charitable assistance or at least rent them a room in a boarding house, but too often refused them such acts of kindness. As an informant tells Ben-Ur, “People who spoke something like Spanish instead of Yiddish and ate grape leaves instead of gefilte fish were simply not Jews!”

Sephardic Jews repeatedly experienced “coethnic recognition failure”—the only clunky term in an otherwise graceful book. But Ben-Ur might be forgiven for using it. The term evokes the terrible cognitive dissonance felt by Sephardic Jews, who were not seen as “real Jews” by their brethren. This situation, as an observer noted in 1910, left “many of our Turkinos with tears in their eyes.”

While lamenting their situation, Sephardic Jews also organized themselves, creating their own charitable networks and cultural organizations. These included the Sephardic Brotherhood of America, founded in 1915 to aid Sephardim of Salonikan origin. Their most significant achievement was the Ladino press, active between 1910 and 1948. Drawing on her vast knowledge of Ladino newspapers in this era, Ben-Ur shows how they became the crucial medium (in the age before the Internet) through which Judeo-Spanish speakers in the United States could be informed of the news and provide proof of their Jewish identity to Ashkenazi employers and neighbors. Moise Gadol, the founder of La America, first among the Ladino newspapers, proclaimed that “by showing our tabloid with [its] Hebrew letters… all Ashkenazim are now clear that you are Jews of the same blood and faith.”

Gadol, who was fluent in German, could speak and read Yiddish, and he used these exceptional skills to respond to articles about Sephardim in the Yiddish press. There were also Ashkenazi leaders, such as Bernard Drachman, who advocated the Sephardic cause. These Jewish intellectuals and activists built early connections between Ashkenazim and Sephardim that were eventually strengthened by intramarriage, which further broke down barriers between these communities (with the exception of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn who have continued to marry within their own group). Full acceptance of the Sephardim as Jews, every bit as “real” as the Ashkenazim, would later follow with the rise of multiculturalism and the growing awareness that Jews are a people of a diverse heritage.

And yet the distinctiveness of Sephardic identity did not vanish. The essence of that identity continues to be rooted in “the deep connections that many Sephardic Jews have felt to Spain through the ages, even centuries after their exile.” I can attest to this passionate tie to Spain from my own experience. A few years ago, I traveled to the town of Béjar in northwestern Spain with a group of fellow Sephardic Jews who share the “Behar/Bejar/Bejarano” last name. Even after being told in no uncertain terms by a professional genealogist that it was unlikely our ancestors actually lived in the town, no one could be dissuaded of the nostalgic desire to claim we had roots there. Unable to prove Spanish ancestry, my companions announced that they didn’t need evidence; they felt in their hearts that they came from Spain.

In what is one of the most exciting contributions in the book, Ben-Ur examines the reciprocal dimensions of this Spanish-Sephardic connection, what she terms “the Hispanic embrace.” She looks on the one hand at street level, exploring the confluence of Puerto Rican and Sephardic immigrants in Harlem through the 1930s, rife with mutual fascination as well as racial fear. And she gives us a glimpse into the developments that took place in the academic world, showing how the creation of the Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos (Institute of the Spains in the United States), later known as the Hispanic Institute, became a forum for academic alliances between Spanish and Sephardic thinkers. If many Ashkenazim, largely out of ignorance, denigrated their Sephardic coreligionists, the Hispanic ivory tower “embraced its distant cousins as part and parcel of the Spanish-speaking world, past and present.” Maimonides was as Spanish as Cervantes; the common bond was language. That the Sephardim had held on to their “sweet Castilian speech,” despite expulsion and exile, endeared them to Spaniards seeking redemption for a fallen empire that had bred intolerance and excised Jews (and Muslims) from Iberian soil.

Ultimately, as the 20th century unfolded, the embrace of Spaniards and Sephardim would grow ever weaker. Sephardic Jews in the United States would become integrated into an Ashkenazi-dominated Jewish world. And their Ladino, preserved so heroically through centuries of uprooting and waiting to return home to the beloved La Espanya, would give way finally to the conquering power of English.

Ruth Behar, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and visiting distinguished professor at the University of Miami, is the author of An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba.