Centaur on the Roof: Can a Neo-Sephardic Culture Emerge in Latin America?

Centaur on the Roof . CENTAUR ON THE ROOF: CAN A NEO-SEPHARDIC CULTURE EMERGE IN lATIN AMERICA?! by Judith Laikin Elkin Judith Laikin Elkin is the author of Jews of the Latin American Republics and co-editor (with Analya Sater) of Latin AmericanJewisb Studies: An Annotated Guide to the Literature. She is the founder of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association and a research associate of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. 1 I read the stories of Sholem A1eichem. I became acquainted with the picturesque characters in the Jewish villages of Russia. Tevia, the milkman, had a horse-but about centaurs, Sholem Aleichem said nothing at all. -Guedali the Jewish centaur in The Centaur in the Garden The re-encounter between Spanish and Jewish worlds that took place in South America in the late nineteenth century seemed to promise a renaissance of Sephardic culture. Evoking the memory ofthe lOOO-year-old Jewish communities of Sepharad (Iberia), some observers speculated that the re-entry of Jews into a SpanishlPortuguese milieu would spark an explosion of intellectual and artistic creativity comparable to that which had ennobled Spain seven centuries earlier. Latin America would see a Sephardic phoenix arising. 'The ideas set forth in this article were originally presented at the Eleventh World Congress of Jewish Studies held in June 1993 in Jerusalem. The author wishes to acknowledge the insightful critiques by Naomi Lindstrom, Victor Mirelman, Saul Sosnowski, and anonymous Shofar reviewers. 2 SHOFAR Winter 1995 Vol. 13, No.2 The exact nature of the anticipated renaissance was never spelled out. For some, it implied the preservation of Sephardic romanzas and cuisine, the retention of Ladino as the home language, and the dominance of Sephardic over Ashkenazic ritual in the synagogue. Others hoped that reunion with the Iberian tradition would elicit something more than a zeal to preserve, like an insect in amber, the glory of the Jewish Golden Age of Spain. Might not the New World, which held the promise of so many new beginnings, encourage the emergence of a qualitatively different culture, child of the reunion between Sephardim and Sepharad? Implicit in both concepts was the hope of revitalization, whether in the rebirth of an old culture or the birth of a new one whose content could not be foreseen precisely because it would evolve synergistically. It is easy to see why these hopes should have arisen. An affinity does exist between the two historical contexts, stemmingfrom a shared memory of Sepharad and the use of Spanish and Portuguese as the media of communication. Yet the emergence of a neo-Sephardic sensibility in the New World remains problematic, and no agreement exists as to what, if it were to emerge, its precise nature would be. In some respects, neoSephardism became not so much a cultural phenomenon as a political strategy, a useful myth conceived by an ingenious journalist to facilitate the entry of Ashkenazim into the Spanish/Portuguese-speaking world. As the myth of neo-Sephardism came to be internalized by thousands of Latin AmericanJews, it evolved further, into a psychological device for blending disparate heritages into a single unified identity. Viewed from this perspective , neo-Sephardism became a technique for grounding Jews within the central myths of their adoptive homelands. While variant interpretations of neo-Sephardism may be distinguished for the purpose of analysis, in reality they are all intertwined and influence one another reciprocally. As we shall see, the effort to preserve and safeguard Sephardic tradition was partly successful. Evolution of a neo-Sephardic culture has begun and is making its presence felt on the larger Latin American scene. As to whether the neo-Sephardic ideal assists or impedes the development of individual identity, the jury is still out. What can be safely said is that, viewed as a political strategy, neo-Sephardism failed. Centaur on the Roof The Centaur on the Roof 3 How did the idea of a neo-Sephardic renaissance arise in the first place? The phenomenon began and was most pronounced in Argentina, which received the largest number ofJewish immigrants of any country on the continent; eventually, it took hold throughout Latin America. NeoSephardism originated as a conscious literary...