Sephardic Jews in America

A Diasporic History

Aviva Ben-Ur

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780814786321
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia ebraica

A significant number of Sephardic Jews, tracing their remote origins to Spain and Portugal, immigrated to the United States from Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans from 1880 through the 1920s, joined by a smaller number of Mizrahi Jews arriving from Arab lands. Most Sephardim settled in New York, establishing the leading Judeo-Spanish community outside the Ottoman Empire. With their distinct languages, cultures, and rituals, Sephardim and Arab-speaking Mizrahim were not readily recognized as Jews by their Ashkenazic coreligionists. At the same time, they forged alliances outside Jewish circles with Hispanics and Arabs, with whom they shared significant cultural and linguistic ties.

The failure among Ashkenazic Jews to recognize Sephardim and Mizrahim as fellow Jews continues today. More often than not, these Jewish communities are simply absent from portrayals of American Jewry. Drawing on primary sources such as the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) press, archival documents, and oral histories, Sephardic Jews in America offers the first book-length academic treatment of their history in the United States, from 1654 to the present, focusing on the age of mass immigration.

1

Immigration, Ethnicity, and Identity

America Is Mine!

In the spring of 1915, twenty-four-year-old Isaac Azriel, a native of Salonika, arrived at Ellis Island aboard the SS Vasilefs Constantinos. The owner of a carpet business, Azriel was conversant in Hebrew, French, German, and Turkish. Unexpectedly, Azriel was detained after a medical official diagnosed him with a deformity of the spine.¹ Immigration officials then promised to release him on condition that he procure a sponsor closely related to him. After ten days in limbo, he was informed that he would be deported, though no one could tell him the precise reason. An Ashkenazic official from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) had taken down his name and tried to hearten him with daily visits, but the decision to deport Azriel had already been made, and not much was formally done on his behalf.

Then, Azriel noticed in a trash can a copy of the Ladino newspaper La America. He wrote a letter to the journal appealing for help, and within two days Aharón Pardo, a young man dispatched by the editorial office, came to his aid. Only then did HIAS take Azriel’s case seriously and successfully petitioned Washington. Had Pardo not intervened, Azriel would have been returned to his native city depleted of all his savings, which he described as “a sizeable fortune.”²

The case of Sarah Baruh Kamhi also illustrates the ongoing indispensability of Eastern Sephardic mediators in deportation cases. Kamhi, a native of Monastir (the present-day city of Bitola in the Republic of Macedonia), who had had most recently resided in Skopje (Serbia), arrived at Ellis Island aboard the SS Majestic in January 1923. Although she presented the address of her guarantor in Rochester, New York, her brother-in-law Ya’akov Alva, Kamhi was also slated for deportation. This time the reason was illiteracy.³ Alva contacted the Sephardic Brotherhood of America, a mutual-aid society, for assistance and was able to enlist the efforts of its president, Albert J. Amateau, as well as a prominent Ashkenazic lawyer who successfully petitioned Washington. The “rescue” scene, as described in the Ladino periodical La Vara, evoked the melodrama of a serialized novel. Just before the ship embarked for Europe, a weeping Kamhi was delivered, with her “eyes fixed toward heaven and her hands spread outwards,” as if to say, “America is mine!”⁴

“Saved from deportation just as the ship was about to leave,” La Vara (January 19, 1923): 5. From right to left: Sarah Baruh Kamhi, Alberto Amateau, Ovadiah Farash, Shlomo Reuben.

These anecdotes provide a hint of some of the challenges that Eastern Sephardim faced in the initial years during which they arrived in large numbers and initiated a long process of community formation and adaptation to the United States. As these vignettes suggest, the difficulties emblematic of later struggles were already evident at Ellis Island. Ladino speakers who arrived in the New York port of entry often likened Ellis Island to a prison cell or torture chamber. One kolonia leader, addressing his cohorts at a public lecture in the 1960s, remembered the ordeal at Ellis Island as an incarceration.⁵ In the Ladino lingo of the Lower East Side a common nickname for that immigration station was “the island of suffering” (la izla de las sufriensas) or “the scourge” (el kastigar).⁶ Insufficient funds, lack of a personal guarantor, and disease were among the most common reasons for detention and deportation.⁷ But the more formidable barrier that Eastern Sephardic travelers encountered was linguistic.⁸ As both Azriel and Kamhi learned, if the necessary interpreters were not present at Ellis Island and difficulties arose, there were few chances for redemption.

The detention of Levantine and Eastern Sephardic Jews was a distinct possibility because their arrival in significant numbers coincided with the rise of the restrictive immigration era. Beginning in the 1890s, about 20 percent of immigrants processed at Ellis Island—the majority of them of Southern and Eastern European origin—were confined to custody either for medical reasons or for further questioning.⁹ The first law to regulate immigration had been passed in 1875, but not until 1907 did legislation begin to seriously menace the Jewish immigrant masses.¹⁰ That year, Congress established the Joint Commission on Immigration, informally known as the Dillingham Commission. Its officers based their anti-immigration sentiment on the conviction, backed by contemporary science, that Southern and Eastern European immigrants were innately inferior to those of Northern and Western Europe, who had constituted the majority of newcomers until the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

The Quota Law of 1921 was the first to establish numerical limits to immigration. This law limited annual immigration to approximately 350,000 people. More importantly, the influx from any one nation was reduced to 3 “percent of the number of foreign-born persons from that country living in America in 1910.”¹¹ The Reed-Johnson Act of 1924, finally implemented under Herbert Hoover on March 22, 1929, further limited immigration to 2 percent of the number of foreign born who, according to the 1890 census, were living in America.¹² The attempt to reduce the number of “innately inferior” immigrants was cleverly disguised behind seemingly arbitrary years. In reality, 1910 and 1890 reflect deliberate calculations to favor the influx of Northern and Western Europeans, who dominated America’s population in precisely those years. The 1921 quota permitted Southern and Eastern European immigrants to constitute at most 45 percent of all newcomers; that ratio was reduced to less than 14 percent under the 1924 law.¹³ For non-Ashkenazic Jews this meant that in 1924 the quota from the principal lands of Eastern Sephardi and Mizrahi immigration was reduced to between about one hundred and three hundred individuals per country.¹⁴

Established in 1892 as the country’s leading immigration station, Ellis Island received over twelve million immigrants until its doors closed in 1954.¹⁵ Detainees were housed in what one journalist described in 1912 as “iron-barred rooms, hallways, and endless corridors” leading to “the labyrinth of madness, of hopelessness, despair, and suicide.”¹⁶ HIAS—which had attempted to intercede for Isaac Azriel in 1915—was founded in 1902 to assist Jewish newcomers, most of whom at that time were streaming in from Eastern Europe. This immigration aid society was founded as a result of the dissatisfaction of Jews of Eastern European origin with the United Hebrew Charities (UHC), whose leadership was dominated by Germanic Jews. Eastern European Jewish leaders had complained that the UHC was denigrating and insensitive to the needs of its largely Yiddish-speaking immigrant constituents. Moreover, they claimed, the representative stationed at Ellis Island was ignorant of Yiddish, and deportation decisions were rarely appealed.¹⁷ By the next year, HIAS had installed its own Yiddish-speaking representative. This official worked with the organization to appeal deportation cases, provide translators, monitor conditions aboard ships, and help unite newcomers with relatives.¹⁸

Ironically, HIAS was soon reprimanded for the same behavior that its officials had protested in 1902, this time in relation to non-Ashkenazic Jews. In the early 1910s, as immigration from the Balkans and Middle East became noticeable, Levantine Jews began to complain that HIAS was not linguistically and culturally equipped to handle these newcomers. Officials were unable to communicate with Eastern Sephardim and Mizrahim and sometimes did not recognize them as Jews because of their last names. Ailing immigrants, if fortunate enough to be admitted as patients by local Jewish hospitals, were often not considered Jews because of their languages.¹⁹ Prodded by kolonia leaders, HIAS officials agreed to found the Oriental Bureau (sometimes also called the Committee on Oriental Hebrews) in December 1911. The bureau, staffed largely by Eastern Sephardi and Mizrahi volunteers, proved crucial. Joshua Cohen, director of the Oriental Bureau, reported in 1917 that many Mizrahim and Eastern Sephardim were so grateful to both HIAS and its Oriental committee that they contributed “their last savings in order to enable us to continue our noble work.”²⁰

The unpaid labor that Eastern Sephardic volunteers offered their immigrating cohorts was all the more admirable considering the financial straits the community experienced as a whole. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, economic hardship was widespread among New York’s Sephardic community. In 1910, La America reported that the majority of Sephardim in the United States were living in poverty.²¹ Consequently, many leaders actively encouraged Sephardim to remain in their native lands. These exhortations continued through the 1920s and ’30s, when many upwardly mobile Eastern Sephardim of the Lower East Side had migrated to Harlem. In 1924 the Ladino newspaper La Vara, addressing those contemplating immigration from Turkey and Greece, cautioned that there were no jobs in the United States, the cost of living was high, and there were no factories to which one could “rent out one’s arms.” One could observe “young men wandering around looking for work to earn a bite of bread and immigrant families with children and no money.”²² Moise Soulam, an editor of that newspaper who had fled Salonika in 1913, admitted that he once dreamed that trees in America sprouted money. In rhymed Ladino prose, Soulam reflected, “Now I see you labor night and day and the first of the month comes all too soon, the landlord demanding rent. Immigrants arrive and after years find themselves in the same economic position. Jews in Turkey think that money grows on trees here, but the truth is that this country yields not only dollars (dolares) but also pain (dolores).”²³

Alongside these exhortations appeared useful advice on how to immigrate to the United States and procure ship tickets, a paradox suggesting that living in dire poverty in the United States was seen as preferable to remaining in the Old Country.²⁴ The year 1917 proved especially trying for prospective Eastern Sephardic immigrants of the Anatolian Peninsula and Greece who were fleeing “famine and unspeakable catastrophes” in the midst of World War I.²⁵ The Oriental Bureau’s director, Joshua Cohen, reported having assisted 357 immigrants that year, most of them prospective immigrants from Greece. The majority arrived without funds and stricken with physical disabilities, which almost automatically slated them for deportation. The bureau, in cooperation with HIAS, provided bonds guaranteeing that the new arrivals would not become public charges. In cases of contagious diseases, the bureau often successfully appealed to Washington to procure medical treatment in local Jewish hospitals. Once the immigrants’ entry was secured, the bureau provided clothing and helped secure employment and lodging, often dispatching an interpreter to hospitals and the place of employment.²⁶

Many cases processed by the Oriental Bureau were at once redemptive and tragic. Representative is the story of Isaac Nachmi, a twenty-three-year-old immigrant who arrived with his wife, Sultana, and child in January 1917. Nachmi was detained at Ellis Island with valvular disease of the heart and dispatched to a hospital, where he was also diagnosed with trachoma, the most common disease detected among detainees. The family was ordered deported, but HIAS successfully appealed to Washington, citing the dangers of submarine bombings.²⁷ HIAS then arranged to have Isaac transferred to Beth Israel Hospital, while his wife and child remained in the society’s care. Sadly, during Nachmi’s eight-month convalescence, his child became seriously ill. The Oriental Bureau’s representative contacted a physician and arranged for the child’s transportation to a local hospital, but two weeks later the child succumbed to scarlet fever.²⁸

Not all Sephardim, of course, were so impoverished that they had to rely on the charitable endeavors of HIAS. At the other extreme are the success stories of immigrants who arrived in the late 1890s and early 1900s. The Schinasi or Schinazi brothers (their name is derived from “Eskenazi”) came to New York in 1891 from Manisa in western Turkey via Alexandria, Egypt, with no means of employment. By 1911, they owned two cigar factories and were millionaires.²⁹ The home of one of the Schinasi brothers, as richly described by a kolonia member who knew them well, reflects a harmonious mélange of Middle Eastern elegance and American sophistication. The large den was furnished with “heavy ornately carved furniture and thick wall...