Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Introduction: A Mosaic of Diverse Identities

xiii Introduction A Mosaic of Diverse Identities Margalit Bejarano and Edna Aizenberg The Sephardic population in the Americas is formed by a large number of small groups, divided according to communities of origin in the Iberian Peninsula , the Middle East, and North Africa, and dispersed among English-, Spanish-, Portuguese-, and French-speaking societies. From a local perspective, the presence of the Sephardim in each Jewish community is overshadowed by that of the dominant groups of Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe, creating the Sephardic image as “a minority within a minority.” Seen from a global perspective, however, we may view the Sephardic diaspora as a mosaic of identities that together form the largest concentration of Sephardim outside the State of Israel (DellaPergola 2002).1 The collection of articles in this volume offers a comparative dimension for the study of each Sephardic piece as part of a transnational diaspora. The idea for the book emerged in a colloquium held at the Hebrew University in July 2005 that analyzed the situation of Sephardic studies in the Americas and presented an agenda for future research. The colloquium was organized by the Division of Latin America, Spain, and Portugal of the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry. It demonstrated the imbalance that exists 1. The Sephardic dispersion is divided among North America (with 546,000), the European Union (with 411,000), and Latin America (with 105,000). DellaPergola’s figures for Latin America are considerably lower than the 180,000 suggested by FESELA (the Sephardic Federation of Latin America). xiv  Introduction in the field of Sephardic studies: there is an abundance of works focusing on Spain in the Middle Ages, Crypto-Jews in Latin America, Jews in the Englishspeaking colonies, and Jews under Ottoman rule, as compared with the paucity of publications on the Sephardic experience in the American continent—North and South—during the last one hundred years. Studies on Latin American Sephardim are generally limited to monographs on a specific community; they are often written in Spanish or Portuguese and are not accessible to the Englishreading public. An attempt to break the regional boundaries of Jewish history was made by Haim Avni in a comprehensive study that analyzes the Jewish presence in the Americas from the discovery of the New World until 1950 in a comparative context of countries speaking English, Spanish, and Portuguese (1992, 148–49). Following a similar comparative approach, the present collection focuses on the Sephardic communities that have been founded in Latin America, the United States, and Canada during the last one hundred years. The Young Turks revolution in 1908 marks the beginning of a large wave of emigration from the Ottoman Empire to the American continent. The decree of compulsory military service for non-Muslim minorities (who until 1909 were able to redeem themselves from conscription) was the main cause of migration of the young men who became the pioneers who founded most of the presentday communities. Recent studies on Arabs and Jews in Latin America show similar patterns of immigration and economic integration between Sephardic Jews from Muslim countries and Syrian-Lebanese immigrants (Klich and Lesser 1998; Kabchi 1997; Klich 2006; Rein 2008). Arabs and Jews spoke Arabic and shared the tastes of food and music; they had similar customs and traditions, as well as social norms. Immigrants from the Middle East tended to settle in urban centers, and the majority started their trajectory as peddlers, moving gradually into commerce. A few returned to their homelands in search of brides or to retire as rich men; their success motivated chains of migration from their villages or hometowns to specific destinations in the New World. The young men who escaped conscription and tried to improve their miserable economic situations became the pioneers of many of the present-day Sephardic communities in the Americas. Introduction  xv  The use of the term “Sephardim” as a comprehensive definition to all the groups that are not Ashkenazim is subject to scholarly debates. In an essay on the historical roots of the Kol Shearith Israel Congregation in Panama, which was founded by Caribbean Jews of Portuguese descent, Ralph de Lima Valencia argues that the term Sephardim is limited to the descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal who maintained the Hispanic tradition. He argues that “it is erroneous to catalogue as Sephardim the Jews that lived in Persia and other Jewish communities in the Middle East . . . who had not had...