Back-to-School Special: Building Your Sephardic Jewish Library

[David Shasha]

Friends,

 

            Once again we are approaching a new fall season and with it the Back-to-School rush.

 

            Each year at this time I have been sending out the special newsletter on how to build your Sephardic Jewish library in the hope that we will try to take reading and purchasing books more seriously.

 

            Since I began my own study of the Sephardic Jewish heritage more than 30 years ago, I have not been able to avoid the disconcerting fact that things are continuing to get worse for education, and more specifically for Sephardic education. 

 

There is, of course, the general dumbing-down of our culture and with the profusion of new technologies that have begun to make the process of reading books passé.  Information is all around us, yet it is also the case that our students have never been more ignorant of basic information and historical facts.  Perhaps, with the advent of Wikipedia and other Internet-based information sites, young students think that information does not need to actually be studied since it is available at our fingertips with one click of a computer mouse.

 

            But knowledge – especially in the Jewish tradition – is a complex process of diligence and creativity.  Without giving education the proper attention and time, we run the risk of losing our cultural heritage.

 

            Nowhere has this been more of a problem that in the area of Sephardic Jewish studies.

 

            When I began my own study of this tradition I was privileged to have books like Rabbi Jose Faur’s Golden Doves with Silver Dots and In the Shadow of History, Ammiel Alcalay’s After Jews and Arabs, Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor and his intellectual biography of Isaac Cardoso, as well as important works by Susan Handelman, Ross Brann, James Kugel, and many others whose books appear on the reading lists included in this special edition of the SHU.

 

            Over time it has become increasingly clear to me that Judaic Studies has been deteriorating with fewer and fewer books of general interest being published.  As we become less and less interested in reading academic books, the academics are less and less interested in writing for the general public. 

 

Aside from most academic books today being very expensive and out of the price range of the average reader, the subject matter and form of expression in the books mark them as internal discussions limited to experts in the field.  And while Orthodox Judaism has progressed by huge leaps in creating a library of Jewish studies for the general Jewish reader, scholarship written by college professors has largely ignored the general reader.  

 

            Therefore these reading lists take on an added importance: They are populated with books that can be read by the general reader without undue intellectual anxiety.  Many of the books represent an older generation of scholarship when there was still the idea that the Jewish community needed to connect with what scholars were saying.  That is not the case anymore.  As we have seen in the recent flap over the “Jewish Jesus” scholars like Daniel Boyarin have thrown all caution to the wind and have embarked on anti-Jewish attacks that are unprecedented in our history as a people.

 

            Sephardic Jews face the additional problem of seeing their culture and history vanish.  The Syrian Jewish community here in America has been dealing with the Modern Orthodox battle with Ultra-Orthodoxy for many years, with the Modern Orthodox faction rapidly losing ground.  In spite of this loss, a loss predicated on the adoption of the Ashkenazi tradition in our communities, there has been an extraordinary doubling-down on the failed strategy, as the Ashkenazified Sephardim intensify their efforts to demean the classical Sephardic tradition of Religious Humanism. 

 

The current attack on the tradition of Hakham Matloub Abadi is a perfect example of this: Rather than accept the ways in which Rabbi Abadi’s teachings have been removed from our pedagogy, there has been an attempt by the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox faction of the community to insist that this was Rabbi Abadi’s primary intent as an educator.  He was not at all concerned with restoring the Sephardic heritage, but on the contrary was not interested in participating in the community’s educational system, looking to a career in commercial business instead.  It is yet another example of how the Sephardic community has turned its back on its heritage while insisting that only Ashkenazi Modern Orthodoxy is appropriate for our students.

 

With the onslaught of Right Wing Ultra-Orthodoxy and its tangible successes this approach is curious to say the least.  Without a knowledge of the classical Sephardic tradition, which is today not taught anywhere in the Sephardic Jewish world, neither Sephardim or Ashkenazim will be able to make use of Religious Humanism as a possible alternative to the denominational dysfunction that we are now suffering from.

 

Beyond this, the malignant impact of anti-Arab animus that has been transmitted in Zionist thinking has strongly impacted Sephardic education.

 

To take one recent example of this trend, a new book on Turkish Jewry in the current century by Marcy Brink-Danan highlights the “lachrymose” approach of the Sephardi-hater Bernard Lewis: 

 

http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=783754

 

The book’s bibliography amazingly lists the polemical propaganda of Bat Ye’or as a source of its scholarship.  It appears that the Neo-Conservative worldview has infested Sephardic studies and with it the principle of Sephardic education without Sephardi educators, or Sephardi educators with some sympathy for the Sephardic tradition. 

 

It is now quite common for academic specialists and graduate student training to ignore larger historical trends and focus exclusively on decontextualized histories which lack the proper background and cultural understanding.  This approach has been popularized in American Jewish studies by Jonathan Sarna whose popular books and work as a primary advisor on the new Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia presents a historically-neutered Judaism which lacks the temporal sweep necessary to make sense of the more contemporary history.

 

            So in the end what we read and how we read it becomes critically important to our self-perception as Sephardic Jews.

 

            I present two annotated reading lists in this newsletter, one for general Jewish studies, and the other more specifically on Sephardic history and culture.  In addition, I have included by essay “A Broken Frame” which discusses Sephardic historical culture and the way it has shamefully been removed from the current Jewish discourse by the hegemonic biases of the Ashkenazi Jewish majority.

 

 

 

David Shasha    

 

 

 

 

Building Your Jewish Library: The Basics

 

Building Your Sephardic Library

 

Important Book Resources for Sephardic Studies

 

La Celestina and Soledades: Two Important Works of Converso Literature

 

A Broken Frame: Sephardi Occlusion and the Repairing of Jewish Dysfunction

 

The Idiot Sephardim: A Confrontation between a Sephardic Student and a Yeshiva University Professor