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>> 183 6 Sex, Race, and Consumption Southern Sephardim and the Politics of Benevolence In New York City’s population of some 1,500,000 Jews, there are 40,000 souls who are almost as alien to their kinsmen as are the negroes to the average white Southerner. —Louis M. Hacker, 1926 Race is not just a conception; it is also a perception. —Matthew Frye Jacobson, 1998 In the summer of 1929 the struggle of an immigrant agunah caught the attention of Atlanta’s benevolent leaders. It appeared that the woman’s husband had fled to Los Angeles one month prior, leaving her alone with five children, and their situation was becoming dire. But upon closer investigation, it became clear that the husband, Victor Ferrera, had left temporarily to pursue a business lead and, falling ill, had been hospitalized in California. Despite Rachel Ferrera’s claims that her family was starving in the absence of a steady means of support, the social worker found her and her children immaculate and well dressed, the home neatly furnished and kept spotless by an African American maid. Further complicating the case was the family’s status as foreign-born Sephardim, whose perceived cultural and religious difference contributed to their Ashkenazic social worker’s suspicions about their worthiness and capacity for full belonging. Victor’s “Oriental habits,” Rachel’s “extravagance,” and what she learned about the couple’s sexual incompatibilities caught the social worker’s attention and were recorded in ways that further illuminate the boundaries of cultural citizenship in the Jewish South. Southern taxonomies of race placed some immigrant 184 > 185 his analogy comparing the cultural alienation between New York’s Sephardim and Ashkenazim to that between “negroes” and “the average white Southerner” derived its coherence from prevailing understandings of the South as the location of an unequivocal system of racial bifurcation. It was to the South that Hacker looked for a racial epistemology to frame his assertions of Jewish authenticity. While comparing Sephardic particularity to visible race difference, he associated New York’s Ashkenazim with the privileges of whiteness and at least the potential to access the rights and protections of citizenship. He concluded that New York’s Sephardim, like southern blacks, were “alien” to the values of American independence and that their path to acculturation would be significantly more difficult than that pursued by Ashkenazic immigrants. For Hacker, and for many other acculturated, U.S.-born Jews, Sephardim were alien subjects, whose tenuous legibility as Jews complicated the uplift efforts of even the most devoted adherents of gemilut hasadim. Although ideals of charity and loving kindness commanded Jews to “take care of their own,” Hacker’s comments evince the challenges of invoking a united and culturally homogenous “Jewish community” and the prevalence of what historian Aviva Ben-Ur describes as “coethnic recognition failure” among Jewish Americans in the early twentieth century. According to Ben-Ur, Ashkenazim often disparagingly identified their Sephardic coreligionists as “Turks” and denied any commonality with those newcomers who arrived speaking Spanish, Greek, or Turkish, in addition to Ladino—a hybrid language comprised of Hebrew and medieval Spanish—instead of Yiddish, and practicing Judaism in ways that appeared alien.6 As Hacker’s words suggest, acculturated Jews faced a quandary in classifying Sephardic newcomers as Jewish when they appeared at best unfamiliar, at worst culturally “Oriental ” and “alien” to the values of American citizenship.7 Yet established Jewish benevolent agencies still reached out to these newcomers, for to do otherwise was to leave their acculturation to chance and to threaten the civic entitlement of all Jews. Leaders in gemilut hasadim internalized the prevailing logic that placed all, regardless of linguistic, cultural, and religious differences, into the totalizing category of “Jew,” and they recognized that their shared peoplehood bound their fates together. They saw that their own successful performance of 186 > 187 greater economic opportunities. The history of Atlanta’s Sephardic congregation , Or V’Shalom (Light and Peace), describes how Montgomery supplied the city’s first Sephardic citizens, Victor Avzaradel and Ezra Tourial, in 1906.10 Tourial soon became a successful businessman, overseeing both the Majestic Shoe Company and a laundry business. He also achieved prominence as a leader of the Sephardic community , serving as president of Or V’Shalom and establishing a free loan society. He quickly earned the respect of the city’s elite Ashkenazim, which enabled him to serve on the boards of the Hebrew Orphans Home, the Montefiore Relief Association, and the Federation of Jewish Charities...

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