Sephardim in the Americas: Studies in Culture and History
512
Sephardim in the Americas: Studies in Culture and History
512eBook
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| ISBN-13: | 9780817391263 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 08/30/2016 |
| Series: | Judaic Studies Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 512 |
| File size: | 13 MB |
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Sephardim in the Americas
Studies in Culture and History
By Martin A. Cohen, Abraham J. Peck
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1993 American Jewish ArchivesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9126-3
CHAPTER 1
The Sephardic Phenomenon: A Reappraisal
Martin A. Cohen
Preface
The story of the Sephardic Jews in the Americas is part of a saga that began in the Iberian Peninsula under the Roman Empire, if not earlier, and eventually intertwined with the experience of all Europe, Asia, Africa, North America and South America. The Sephardic Jews were instrumental in the transmission of ancient culture, the creation of medieval Iberian civilization, and the development of modern Europe, and from it the modern world. The role of the Sephardic Jews in the New World is understandable only through their prior history, and this history is best understood by following the unfolding of the Sephardic phenomenon from earliest times.
Introduction
The year 1992 marks the quincentenary of the Edict of Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. The edict was issued in the city of Granada on March 31, 1492 by King Fernando of Aragon and Queen Isabel of Castile, the Catholic Monarchs, as they were dubbed by Pope Sixtus IV. It ordered all Jews to leave the territories belonging to the royal couple within four months, precisely by the end of July. According to tradition and perhaps historical reality, the deadline was eventually extended from July 31 until August 2. In the Jewish religious calendar this date corresponded to the ninth day of the month of Ab, the anniversary of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans in the year 70 C.E.
In reality, the Jews were not expelled from any political entity known as Spain. The Catalans in particular liked to call Ferdinand the king of Spain, but the name Hispania remained a geographical designation, and the Portuguese at no time took kindly to its political adoption at the expense of their exclusion. The name Spain for non-Portuguese Iberia is hardly appropriate before 1512, when King Fernando added cys-Pyrenean Navarre to the dyarchy of Castile and Aragon. The edict of Ferdinand and Isabella consequently referred only to Castile, Aragon and their possessions. The independent Iberian kingdoms of Navarre and Portugal actually opened their doors to at least some Jewish refugees.
The number of Jews in Castile and Aragon at the time of the Edict could hardly have exceeded 100,000. Of these a minority of no more than 15,000 lived in Aragon, and the rest in Castile. At the time the Jewish population of Portugal could hardly have exceeded 30,000 and that of Navarre half that number. The numbers of Jews in Castile and Aragon had been greatly diminished in the previous century. The massacres of 1391 claimed anywhere from 15,000 to 20,000 Jewish lives, while conversions beginning at that time and continuing throughout the fifteenth century claimed several times that number. The number of Jews who left the Peninsula in the wake of the Edict may have exceeded 50,000, although it is possible that only a minority left. The remaining Jews converted to Christianity, as did many who returned in the years immediately following their departure. Of those leaving a considerable number went to Portugal, where they were almost all converted by force or fiat in 1497.
Nevertheless, the Expulsion of 1492 remains one of the watersheds of Jewish history. This is because of its impact upon the psyches of the affected Jews and their descendants, and the resonance of this experience ever since in the Jewish community at large.
The issuance of the decree of Expulsion was the centerpiece of the three major Iberian events in that fateful year. On January 2 the Catholic Monarchs had conquered the Kingdom of Granada, the last independent Muslim polity in the Peninsula. And at dawn on August 3, presumably on the heels of the last refugees, Christopher Columbus, a Christian of possible Iberian Jewish descent and a crew that included Christians of unquestionable Jewish descent, set sail for the Catholic Monarchs on their first and most momentous voyage. Together the three events bespeak a policy of unification and expansion that was to catapult the nation of Spain, once formed, into the vanguard of the modern world.
With rare exceptions, the refugees, like their ancestors, were natives of the Peninsula. Jews had been present in Iberia as far back as the days of imperial Rome. According to legend, they had come even earlier, during the Babylonian exile in the sixth century B.C.E. and even King Solomon's reign 400 years before. By 1492 the Jews, like the rest of the Iberian population, comprised a racially mixed but distinctively Iberian community. Their small numbers in Roman days had continuously swelled with people of indigenous stock and periodically with immigrants from Africa and Asia.
Their expulsion, therefore, weighed heavily upon these Jews. And although they left their beloved land behind, they long continued to live in it psychologically, clinging to its language, customs poetry, and melodies. In 1906, a Spanish senator, Angel Pulido y Fernández, coming across the descendants of these Jews while he was traveling in the Middle East, was so impressed by the retention of their Iberian identity, that he called them españoles sin patria, Spaniards without a country.
To the exiles the Hebrew term Sepharadi was now applied. The word Sepharadi and its generic plural, Sepharadim, are simultaneously nouns and adjectives, meaning "Iberian," or, in the later political sense, "Spanish." As such they were previously applied to all Iberians, non-Jews and Jews alike. Popular usage has typically contracted the words to Sephardi and Sephardim respectively and created the English adjective "Sephardic." These words are parallels to the terms "Ashkenazi," "Ashkenazim," and "Ashkenazic," referring to German and Eastern European Jews.
The word "Sephardi" derives from the noun Sepharad, a biblical place-name which by the eighth century was commonly used by Jews to designate the Iberian Peninsula. The name Sepharad appears only once in the Hebrew Bible, in the twentieth verse of the Book of Obadiah. There, we read: "And this host of the children of Israel in captivity shall possess Phoenician territories as far as Zarephath, while the exiles of the Jerusalem community who are in Sepharad shall take over the towns of the south."
It is not possible to determine the identity of Zarephath and Sepharad in Obadiah. They appear to be cities: Zarephath in southern Phoenicia and Sepharad in Asia Minor. But in the early centuries of the present era Zarephath and Sepharad came to be identified with two principal Jewish settlements in Western Europe: Zarephath with the French regions, the Roman Gallia, and Sepharad with Iberia, the Roman Hispania. By the eighth century the identification of Sepharad with Hispania, though apparently still not universal, appears to have been sufficiently common. By that time also the term Ashkenaz, in Genesis 10:3, Jeremiah 51:27, and I Chronicles 1:6, originally referring to a land bordering on the Euphrates and Armenia, had come to signify the Germanic areas.
From these original immigrants and their descendants the term Sepharadi was gradually extended to denote three other groups: expatriate Iberian Christians who declared themselves Jews; the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula prior to the Expulsion; and Iberian Christians under Spanish or Portuguese rule who were presumed to be secret Jews. From this the appellation "Sephardi" may be further extended to all Iberians of real or presumed Jewish descent who lived and died as non-Jews both in Sepharad and elsewhere. The justification for such extension lies in the fact that in large measure the fate of these people and therefore their options in life were linked to the reality or in some cases the presumption of their Jewish ancestry.
In modern times the term has been further broadened to include Jews of non-Iberian ethnic background who have become part of Sephardic communities, and further, in modern Israel, to many non-Iberians who identify as Sephardim on cultural grounds.
The Expulsion connects the two broad phases of the Sephardic phenomenon, the first transpiring in the Iberian Peninsula and the second in what has felicitiously been called the Sephardic Diaspora. The two phases overlap chronologically. The Sephardic Diaspora may be said to have begun in the wake of the Iberian persecutions of Jews in 1391, a full century before the Expulsion, while the Iberian phase continues long after the Expulsion in the experiences of its Jews who converted to Christianity and the descendants of these converts. The Iberian phase fashioned the distinctiveness of the Sephardic community. The Sephardic Diaspora carried this distinctiveness through much of Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In both Peninsula and Diaspora the Sephardim reflected the world of Europe, medieval and early modern: its products, of which they were creators; its pathology, of which they were victims; and its promise, of which they were paladins.
Until the beginning of the eighteenth century the Sephardim were more numerous than the Ashkenazim. Historical circumstances have since catapulted Ashkenazic Jewry to numerical superiority in the Jewish world. Today, of the nearly 15 million Jews in the world, no more than 10 percent by the ethnic definition can be called Sephardim.
The quincentenary of the fateful decree provides an appropriate juncture for the reassessment of the Sephardic phenomenon. In the past century and a half, dating back to Elias Hayyim Lindo's still useful History of the Jews of Spain and Portugal (London, 1849) and the studies on Spain by José Amador de los Rios, culminating in his Historia social, política y religiosa de los judíos de España y Portugal (3 vols., Madrid, 1875–1876), scholarship on the manifold facets of this complex phenomenon has incrementally proliferated. The sheer extraction and publication of archival material can aptly be described as breathtaking. No less importantly, the same period has witnessed the development of sophisticated social scientific techniques for the analysis and reconstruction of the world to which the raw data attest. Cecil Roth, one of the twentieth century's most eminent investigators of the Sephardic phenomenon in all its complexity, often counseled the younger scholars at his side to create new comprehensive visions of the Sephardim. In the process he explicitly urged them to undertake a trenchant critique of all older reconstructions, including that of his own epochal The History of the Marranos (Philadelphia, 1931), which he had completed when he was only thirty years old. Indeed, although the discovery of more data, particularly from archival research, in all areas of the Sephardic phenomenon, continues to be as necessary as it is welcome, the need for new reconstructions of their totality occupies an even more pressing priority.
All reconstructions depend upon the interpretation of the available data, and interpretation in turn is a function of the matrix of assumptions with which any phenomenon is approached.
When approached with an assumptive system that ensures a maximum possible detachment from the data and the assistance of current social scientific techniques for coherent and consistent reconstructions, the many facets of the Sephardic phenomenon weave a distinctive pattern. Such an approach helps to puncture three categories of pervasive misconceptions found among historians of Sephardic Jewry.
The first is a racial myth. The myth makes of Iberian Jews, and, indeed, all Jews, a race of Eastern Mediterranean origin. This myth depicts Jews as inherently different and readily distinguishable from all other Iberians. It therefore treats Jews as outsiders whose activities are at best tangential to authentic Iberian experience.
Implicit in this myth is the notion that Jews possess certain traits. Among these are a penchant for commerce and finance, an aversion to soldiering, an obsession for religion, a clannishness and even xenophobia.
Derivative from the myth is the implicit notion of a demonic power possessed by Jews. As a result of this power, Jews, the paucity of their numbers notwithstanding, can control powerful institutions and even entire kingdoms.
Connected to the myth is the conception of a "Jewish problem" nettling every government and requiring special attention. This egregious misconception even leads one author, in connection with the policy of King Egica toward Jews, to speak of it as an effort toward a "final solution."
Accompanying this myth all too often has been what may charitably be called a distanced understanding of Judaism on the part of writers who appear to have had inadequate personal contact with its textual past or its social realities past or present.
The second myth is a religious one. It is the myth of the strength and unity of Roman Christianity in Iberia. The reality was quite different. Roman Christianity in Iberia, as frequently elsewhere, was continually beset by internal conflicts, alternative forms of Christianity, and rooted pagan cults. Its strength, like that of all other forms of Christianity, derived from the towns; the more populous countryside could not be effectively converted prior to the feudal age. In Navarre, fiercely independent, this process was not completed until the twelfth century. If, as appears to be the case, the Roman Church had become the strongest institution in Iberian life by the fourth century, its strength was relative; by conservative estimates, its adherents could at no time prior to the Muslim conquest have exceeded 15 percent of the total Iberian population. These realities are essential for an understanding of the diverse relationships between Jews and Christians in Iberia.
The third category of misconceptions relates to general methodology. It includes:
(1) the tacit acceptance of documents without analysis of their biases. This results in the objectivization of such biases;
(2) the explanation of historical events by assumed insight into the psychology of the leaders involved. Such explanation is usually ad hoc and little more than a projection of the biases of the writer;
(3) the injection of filiopietism and ethnocentricity, in their various forms, into historical reconstructions, with the resultant distortions of apologetics and polemics:
(4) the confusion of authority and power. This results in the depiction of authority figures, popes and kings included, as
operating independently, capriciously, and even without accountability in their respective institutional settings;
(5) the equation of the promulgation of legislation with its enforcement. This results in the societal reconstructions based upon the false assumption that the behavior patterns demanded by constitutions and decrees constitute societal reality;
(6) the supposition that societal groups, including institutions, are structurally uniform and ideologically monolithic at a given time and even through time. This results in reductive presentations of sociopolitical and socioideological diversity as well as an inattention to variations, however subtle, resulting from differences in sociohistorical context;
(7) the assumption that societal structure is best understood as composed of broadly defined classes, which struggle with one another as solid blocs for primarily or exclusively economic ends. This results in a failure to discern the complexity of all societal spectra, where establishment and nonestablishment elements cut across the Marxist lines of class, and where ideological and political motivations are no less and often more important than the economic;
(8) the conviction that only documentary evidence is fundamental to successful reconstructions of historical situations. This results in a failure to recognize that, even where abundant, documentary evidence alone can never fully describe a historical situation. Documentary evidence regularly presents the position of victors and their successor establishments, and other positions only rarely, and then usually only in proportion to their strength. Wherever possible, the presentors have selected, packaged and promulgated the evidence in the documents through the biases of their assumptive systems. As a result, any effort at the comprehension of historical situations must rely on the restoration of the missing links of societal activity through a typological reconstruction consistent with the available documentary evidence and the evidence of the broader societal context. To be sure, such methodology is not without its own intrinsic biases, but these are theoretically neutral toward the presentor and equally available to public scrutiny and correction.
The removal of these impediments and the application of contemporary social scientific methodology pave the way for a more comprehensive analysis of the Sephardic phenomenon. From such analysis the Sephardic phenomenon emerges as the distillate of the progressive interaction betweeen individuals and groups we can retrospectively label as Sephardic with the total environments of which they formed an integral part. In this light every culture in which the Sephardim were active participants becomes indispensable for an understanding of the totality of Sephardic experience. So too every phase of this experience becomes indispensable to an understanding of its unfolding.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sephardim in the Americas by Martin A. Cohen, Abraham J. Peck. Copyright © 1993 American Jewish Archives. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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