Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in America

Saba Soomekh

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781626711341, 9781557537287
• eBook ISBN: 9781612494258
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: Social Sciences

Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews in America includes academics, artists, writers, and civic and religious leaders who contributed chapters focusing on the Sephardi and Mizrahi experience in America. Topics will address language, literature, art, diaspora identity, and civic and political engagement.

When discussing identity in America, one contributor will review and explore the distinct philosophy and culture of classic Sephardic Judaism, and how that philosophy and culture represents a viable option for American Jews who seek a rich and meaningful medium through which to balance Jewish tradition and modernity. Another chapter will provide a historical perspective of Sephardi/Ashkenazi Diasporic tensions. Additionally, contributors will address the term "Sephardi" as a self-imposed, collective, "ethnic" designation that had to be learned and naturalized-and its parameters defined and negotiated-in the new context of the United States and in conversation with discussions about Sephardic identity across the globe.

This volume also will look at the theme of literature, focusing on Egyptian and Iranian writers in the United States. Continuing with the Iranian Jewish community, contributors will discuss the historical and social genesis of Iranian-American Jewish participation and leadership in American civic, political, and Jewish affairs. Another chapter reviews how art is used to express Iranian Diaspora identity and nostalgia.

The significance of language among Sephardi and Mizrahi communities is discussed. One chapter looks at the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jewish population of Seattle, while another confronts the experience of Judeo-Spanish speakers in the United States and how they negotiate identity via the use of language. In addition, scholars will explore how Judeo-Spanish speakers engage in dialogue with one another from a century ago, and furthermore, how they use and modify their language when they find themselves in Spanish-speaking areas today.

“Sephardim since Birth”:
Reconfiguring Jewish
Identity in America*

by Devin E. Naar

We are but Jews

and our title is Sephardim.

Never were we, nor did we think of being

anything but Sephardim since our birth.¹

Appealing to these lines, the final stanza of a poem published a century ago in the New York Ladino newspaper El Progresso, scholars have bolstered an argument that Jews from the Ottoman Empire arrived in the United States in the early twentieth century with an unequivocal and entrenched sense of themselves as “Sephardim.” In his Sephardim in Twentieth Century America, Joseph Papo, a Palestinian-born Jewish teacher and social worker who served as the executive director of the Central Sephardic Jewish Community of America (1944–47), asserted: “The 20th Century Sephardi immigrants arrived in New York from Turkey and the Balkans, conscious and proud of being Sepharadim Tehorim (Pure Sephardim)” (52). Other scholars have reinforced the notion that Ladino-speaking Jews retained “deep connections” to Spain through the ages and take for granted their self-identification with the term “Sephardim” in New York (Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews in America 10). But if we examine the excerpted poem in its entirety—and not just the final stanza—it becomes immediately clear that, a century ago, Ladino-speaking Jews in the United States did not automatically describe themselves as “Sephardim.” Rather, the term “Sephardi,” as a self-imposed, collective, “ethnic” designation had to be learned and naturalized, and its parameters defined and negotiated in the new context of the United States and in conversation with discussions about Sephardic identity across the globe.² The definition of the concept of “Sephardi” remains an on-going process that, as evidenced in the recent discussions in Spain and Portugal over the prospect of granting citizenship to Sephardic Jews with ancestry in Spain or Portugal, continues today.

The poem in question begins by describing an encounter between “a Jewish youth” from the Ottoman Empire and a Yiddish-speaking Jew on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The youth, wearing “peasant clothes” from the Ottoman Empire, attempts to explain who he is to the Yiddish speaker: “Oriental Jew,” “Spanish Jew,” “a Jew from Turkey,” and, in final desperation, “Jewish Oriental.” The Yiddish-speaker, however, rejects all of these descriptors as either historically implausible or undesirable. “Spanish” Jewry ceased to exist with the expulsion of 1492. In the context of intense anti-Asian sentiment in American public discourse, did the “Orient” refer to the Far East or the Near East? Moreover, “Turkey” evoked an image of the “Terrible Turk, scimitar-wielding, mustachioed, and befezzed” (Bali 25). The author of the poem, Salonican-born Joseph Saltiel, finally interjects: “Man, don’t you know that the Americans do not get along with the Orientals/seeing that they think we are Chinese/ or from Japan or that we wear fezzes?” The poem’s didactic conclusion, about being “Sephardim since birth,” then follows.

The poem demonstrates precisely that it was not self-evident for Jewish immigrants from the Ottoman Empire to conceive of themselves exclusively—or even necessarily—as Sephardim; the youth in the poem could not even come up with this term in his list of self-descriptors. The assertions that “we don’t wear fezzes” and that we “have never been anything but Sephardim since our birth” reflected aspirations rather than an underlying social reality. The poem encapsulated the aims of a new campaign launched in the Ladino press in New York in 1915 that sought to naturalize the term “Sephardi” in the vocabulary of Ladino-speaking Jews—of all classes and geographic origins—in order to privilege it over other available self-designations. This “Sephardi campaign”—as the Ladino press called it—sought to provide readers with the idiom and intellectual tools necessary to present themselves to the American (Jewish) public and to themselves explicitly as “Sephardim,” authentic Jews and legitimate heirs of the legacy and grandeur of medieval Spanish Jewry. The campaign sought to make Jews “Sephardi” in the United States—to compel them both to perceive of and represent themselves as Sephardim “since birth.” This chapter is thus concerned with elaborating central threads of (and opposition to) this Sephardi campaign, which aimed to reconfigure the components of what it had meant to be a “Jew” in the Ottoman Empire in a way that would effectively and favorably resonate with “mainstream” American Jewry.

MAINSTREAM AMERICAN JEWRY

The Ladino press in the Ottoman Empire during the late nineteenth century associated the term “Jew” with speaking Ladino, being Ottoman, Oriental, and, for the middle and upper classes, imbued with French culture that they acquired through the education they received from institutions such as the Paris-based Alliance Israélite Universelle (Stein, “The Permeable Boundaries of Ottoman Jewry”; Making Jews Modern; Borovaya). “Sephardiness” may have been implied by the term “Jew,” but the term “Sephardi” itself was seldom employed in everyday discourse. Djidyo, djudyo, judio, and israelita appeared much more frequently in the Ladino press in the Ottoman Empire. Those Jews who departed the Ottoman Empire and arrived in the United States quickly realized that none of the primary concepts that underpinned their sense of “Jewishness” were built into the definition of “Jew” in the new world. Especially in places like New York, “Jews” referred largely to those of Eastern European provenance who spoke Yiddish and evinced Yiddishkeit. Yiddish-speaking Jewry symbolically stood for all American Jewry at this time (e. g., Howe xix).

Part of the issue was demographic. Between the turn of the century and 1924, when the United States Immigration Restriction Act came into effect, as many as sixty thousand Jews from the Ottoman Empire and its successor states immigrated to the United States (Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews in America 193–96). While most spoke Ladino, some spoke Arabic or Greek.³ In any case, they constituted a small minority in comparison to the more than two million predominantly Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe who came to represent “mainstream” American Jewry.⁴ The American Ladino press frequently referred to “mainstream” American Jews as Ashkenazim or as Yiddishim, the latter a recognition of the primacy of their language in shaping their collective identity.

Within this context, Jewish immigrants from Ottoman territories expressed serious anxieties about those whom they perceived to be “mainstream” American Jews, who often called into question the new-comers’ Jewish identity due to differing geographic origins, culture, appearance, names, and perhaps most significantly, language. As one satirist recalled, “How could you be a Jew when you looked like an Italian, spoke Spanish, and never saw a matzoh ball in your life?” (Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews in America 108). Jews from the Ottoman Empire went to great lengths to “prove” that they were Jews to potential Ashkenazi employers or landlords by reading from Hebrew prayer books, showing the Hebrew fonts of the Ladino newspapers, displaying their prayer shawls and phylacteries, or even revealing their circumcisions (108–49). Even when the Yiddish paper Der Fihrer carried an article on the newcomers from the Eastern Mediterranean in 1915 and recognized them as Jews, the newspaper portrayed them as peculiar, backward, disunited, dishonest, uneducated, impoverished, miserable, and oriental (“El artikulo puvlikado”). Other sensationalist journalistic accounts depicted bearded “Turkish Jews” wearing fezzes and ready to shine shoes for two cents (“In New York Is a City Set Apart”). These kinds of journalistic accounts appeared throughout the 1910s and 1920s and provoked controversy each time. Even Judah Magnes, the president of the New York Jewish Community (Kehillah), expressed little interest in the affairs of the “Oriental Jews.” While he hoped that “some way may be found of bringing about greater harmony and more united activity on behalf of the Jewish cause” (“Nuestro movimiento komunal”), he did not offer any suggestions as to how to accomplish this goal. Although it soon became clear to Ladino-speaking Jews in the United States that terms such as “Ottoman,” “Turkish,” “Oriental,” and “Levantine” carried with them negative connotations, they had begun to develop their own cultural and institutional life with these categories in mind. Within this context, their most immediate frame of reference was not Spain, but rather the Ottoman Empire.

BECOMING OTTOMAN JEWS

While Jews in the Ottoman Empire did not always recall ancestral or cultural links to Spain, they increasingly conceived of themselves as part and parcel of the Ottoman Empire, especially over the course of the nineteenth century. The absence of an undisputed awareness of their ostensible links to Spain becomes clear through the ways in which Jews in the Ottoman Empire described themselves and their language. In one of the most important works of Ladino literature, Guerta de Oro (1778), the Sarajevo-born merchant residing in Livorno, David Attias, referred to his intended Jewish readers in the Ottoman Empire primarily as levantinos (“Levantines,” i.e., “Easterners”). At the same time, he sought to convince them to consider themselves “Spanish” because “originally our forefathers came from Spain or Portugal” (Bunis, “The Changing Faces of Sephardic Identity”). The fact that Attias had to make this point demonstrates the extent to which his readers may not have been aware of this “fact” and obviously did not think of themselves as “Spanish” even if they may have identified their liturgical customs as constituting the “Sephardic rite.”

Furthermore, Jews in the Ottoman Empire primarily understood their spoken language to be a marker of “Jewish” rather than “Spanish” identity. They frequently referred to their vernacular as judezmo or djudyo. Both terms signify the “Jewish” character of the language, just as Yiddish means “Jewish” in Yiddish (Bunis, “Native Designations of Judezmo”). The fact that Jews in the Ottoman Empire continued to speak a Spanish-based language did not result from a sense of cultural allegiance to Spain, but rather, to the contrary, due to the structure of the Ottoman Empire. The sultan granted non-Muslims populations (namely Jews and Christians) communal autonomy and did not compel them to adopt any particular language, but rather permitted them to use that which each community pleased, so long as they paid their taxes and did not revolt (Rodrigue, interview; Barkey). Within this framework, the Ottoman state referred to the Jews’ spoken language as Yahudice (“Jewish”), not Spanish (Ortayli). The perception of the language as distinctly “Jewish” even emerged in humorous contexts. When Argentine cinema arrived in Balkans in the early twentieth century, those Jews who flocked to the theater believed that they were viewing “Jewish” films because all of the actors appeared to speak “Jewish,” a term they used to identify Argentine Spanish (Bunis, Voices from Jewish Salonica 66–67).

Rather than encourage the Jewish masses in the Ottoman Empire to consider themselves as being indelibly connected to Spain, Ottoman Jewish leaders in the nineteenth century undertook an extensive and delicate project to transform their community members into loyal Ottoman patriots. From 1839 to 1876, the Ottoman government instituted a series of reforms, known as the Tanzimat, which sought to turn Ottoman “subjects” into “citizens” by guaranteeing equality with regard to property rights, education, government appointments and the administration of justice for all Ottomans regardless of communal affiliation (Jewish, Christian or Muslim) (Davison; Hanioğlu 72–108; Campos; Deringil; Cohen, Becoming Ottomans). Benefitting from these new opportunities, Ottoman Jewish elite sought to solidify their position within the Ottoman realm, opposed Zionism or any other political ideology that threatened to undermine the territorial integrity of the empire, and soon became recognized as en sadik millet (“the most loyal community”) from the perspective of the Ottoman authorities (Avigdor Levy; Rodrigue; Cohen, Becoming Ottomans).

Celebrations organized in the major communities of Istanbul, Salonica, and Izmir in 1892 to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of 1492 significantly contributed to Ottoman Jews’ sense of connection and loyalty to the Ottoman Empire. This was the first occasion that Jews in the Ottoman Empire marked the anniversary of 1492, and they did so in a fascinating manner. Rather than lament the expulsion of their ancestors from Spain, Ottoman Jewish leaders celebrated their arrival in the Ottoman realm and the warm welcome and refuge provided by the sultan (Cohen, Becoming Ottomans 45–73). Promoting the incorporation of Jews into the Ottoman polity, those Jewish leaders who orchestrated the 1892 celebrations invoked Spain not to convince the empire’s Jews to consider themselves “Spanish” or “Sephardic,” but rather to fashion them into loyal Ottoman patriots. The increasingly imbedded status of Jews in their Ottoman environment also emerged clearly in several late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century illuminated Jewish wedding contracts (ketubboth) that integrated distinctly Ottoman imagery, such as the tughra (the seal of the sultan) and the star and crescent—ostensibly Islamic symbols—into otherwise Jewish motifs (Ketubboth from Tekirdağ).

A sense that Jews from the Ottoman Empire identified closely with their empire of origin also became apparent for those who travelled to the United States. Some of the first Ottoman Jews came to the United States as merchants representing the sultan at the major worlds fairs in Chicago (1893), St. Louis (1904), and Portland (1905) where they showcased “Oriental” goods, such as rugs, tobacco products, or delicacies such as Turkish delights (Bali 69–89). At the Chicago fair, in particular, Jews accounted for four-fifths of the Ottoman entourage and helped install a mosque as part of the “Turkish village” where they exhibited their wares (69–89). It was also in this mosque where the Jewish representatives of the Ottoman Empire held Yom Kippur services (Cohen, “Oriental by Design”).

While some of the first Ottoman Jews who arrived in the United States at the close of the nineteenth century served as representatives of the sultan, the increasing numbers of Jews from the Eastern Mediterranean who migrated to America during the early twentieth century also continued to link themselves to their empire of origin. The early New York Ladino newspapers, first established in 1910, initially favored the designation Turkino to refer to their readers. The term Turkino explicitly evoked connections to the Ottoman Empire (or “Turkey,” as the empire was colloquially called). The term Turkino had entered public discourse in the context of the nineteenth century Ottoman imperial reforms. The 1860 translation of the Ottoman Imperial Penal Code rendered the Ottoman Turkish phrase teba-yı devlet-ı âliyye (“subjects of the Sublime State”) into Ladino as suditos Turkinos: “Ottoman subjects” or “citizens” regardless of religion (Naar, “Turkinos beyond the Empire”). In the context of the United States, the term Turkino acquired a more specific resonance and referred specifically to Jews from Ottoman and former Ottoman ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Editorial Introduction
• The Maurice Amado Foundation: Promoting Sephardic and Jewish Cultural Heritage in America: An Interview with Elaine Lindheim and Sam Tarica
• Language Mixing in Seattle Ladino: Influence or Interference?
• Diglossic Distribution among Judeo-Spanish-Speaking Sephardim in the United States
• “And she loved brown people”: Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff’s Affirmation of Arab Jewish Identity in Jacob’s Ladder
• “Sephardim since Birth”: Reconfiguring Jewish Identity in America
• Diasporic Reunions: Sephardi/Ashkenazi Tensions in Historical Perspective
• Negotiating Exile: An Arab Jew in America
• Becoming American
• Iranian Jewish Art Today: What Cultural Legacy Are We Handing Down?
• The Classic Sephardic Spirit
• About the Contributors
• The USC Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life