Boundaries of Jewish Identity

9. Conversos, Marranos, and Crypto-Latinos - The Jewish Question in the American Southwest (and What It Can Tell Us about Race and Ethnicity)

188 9 Conversos,Marranos,and Crypto-Latinos the Jewish Question in the american southwest (and What it Can tell Us about race and ethnicity) Jonathan freeDMan A few years ago I found myself with a seat at the table where most of the real intellectual work gets done at the contemporary university: on a hiring committee.This committee faced a more interesting challenge than most; we were charged with hiring a junior person, in any department, who specialized in any aspect of Jewish cultural or social life in America. Needless to say, the jockeying among representatives of the various fields was intense (I am happy to say that we literature folks prevailed). But the meta-jockeying was equally intense, or so I discovered to my doubtless naive shock when I proposed that we consider hiring someone whose specialization was Jews in the Americas of Sephardic descent, that is, peoples who traced their descent to the Diaspora from Spain in the wake of the political and social persecution spearheaded by the Inquisition and consummated by the Expulsion of 1492. Such an appointment, it seemed to me, might profitably widen the field of Jewish American Studies itself. For it promised to open up the kind of dialogue I was interested in fostering and have tried to continue to foster in my book Klezmer America: a dialogue between work in Jewish Studies and that done under the heading of “Latino” or “Ethnic” or even “Atlantic” Studies. But my suggestion, I found, was not met with universal applause; indeed, I was the only person who supported it. As an older, very distinguished colleague informed me, “The Sephardim are of no importance, in the United States. None. At best—they’re a footnote.”1 Despite his salty language, my colleague may have had a point: although the first Jews in the United States were Sephardic, they were rapidly supplanted in numbers and influence by Ashkenazi Jews from Conversos, Marranos, and Crypto-Latinos 189 Germany in the mid-nineteenth century and then by a second, larger influx of Ashkenazim from the collapsing Russian Empire in the later years of that century. But nevertheless, I persisted in thinking that the experience of the Sephardim might give us an opportunity to ask a new set of questions about some very familiar issues. For one thing, integrating the Sephardic experience would complicate a number of the narratives commonly ascribed to the Jewish experience—rapid assimilation to Americanness, upward mobility, even the accession to whiteness. In the 1880–1925 period, those Sephardim who emigrated to the United States (largely from Greece, Turkey, Rhodes, and the Balkans) were by and large neglected, marginalized, frequently more impoverished, and less mobile than their Ashkenazi peers—and tensions between Sephardim and Jews within the dominant Ashkenazic culture sometimes took on a racially or ethnically tinged spin. “They used to call us black Jews,” said Morris Calderon, an eighty-two-yearold volunteer at the Brooklyn Sephardic Home for the Aged. “They called us Zigazuk, which is howYiddish sounded to us.”2 Indeed, considered in the context of the American experience at large, the Sephardic experience has even greater consequence, for it offers a different genealogy for the very ideas of race and ethnicity that so powerfully define the contours of our experience than the ones we are used to invoking do. The notion of race in the United States, for example, is (commonsensically enough) painted in hues of black and white: grounded in the experience of slavery, the continuing oppression of African Americans in the post-Reconstruction era, the maintenance of the color line, and, more recently, the recognition (articulated in brilliant writing by W. E. B. DuBois and James Baldwin, given further expression by Toni Morrison, explored by a host of scholars such as Eric Lott, Michael Rogin, and Matthew Frye Jacobson) that whiteness is itself a distinct racial category.The increasingly influential and consequential ideology of race—intersecting with and buttressing the brute facts of white racial supremacy—is usually traced to the eighteenth-century European enlightenment, which shaped the discourses of anthropology, phrenology, and genetics.3 Sometimes lost in our focus on the Enlightenment as an originary site of modern racism is a different history, one that can be traced back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Spain, where the persecu- 190 Jonathan freeDMan tion and expulsion of Jews from Iberia was justified on racial grounds. The persecution and...