Rabbi David De Sola Pool Sephardic Resources Sheet
David Shasha
More Rabbi Marc Angel CHUTZPAH: Keeping the Books of Rabbi David De Sola Pool Out-of-Print While Paying Tribute to Him!
Veteran SHU readers know well my obsessive concern with recommending books to learn about the Sephardic heritage, and contextualizing those resources in a reader-friendly way.
Too many academics these days care little about educating the average person, the lay reader who wants to increase their knowledge without the onerous commitment to a university program – and the huge tuition fees.
Not that Judaic Studies cares much for the Sephardic heritage these days!
Along with this resource sheet on Rabbi David De Sola Pool, I will be re-posting my basic Sephardic reading list:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bKBTQSn0dytn4AefatM1wTgG22DTMaz3sVCuYIxiJEY/edit
That reading list focuses pointedly on what is commonly called “Western” Sephardic History and culture, with a particular emphasis on the ties between Andalusian-Iberian Judaism and the Anglo-American experience.
Missing from the list are the seminal books on the Cairo Geniza by the German-Jewish scholar S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society:
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520221581/a-mediterranean-society-volume-i
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520221598/a-mediterranean-society-volume-ii
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520221604/a-mediterranean-society-volume-iii
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520221611/a-mediterranean-society-volume-iv
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520221628/a-mediterranean-society-volume-v
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520221642/a-mediterranean-society-volume-vi
As you can see, the complete set of Goitein’s extraordinary studies remains in print.
What is, and is not, in print remains an important element in Sephardic Studies.
I thought about this when our dear friend, Washington Heights Soloveitchik macher Rabbi Marc Angel, posted his tribute to his Congregation Shearith Israel predecessor Rabbi David De Sola Pool:
https://www.jewishideas.org/article/remembering-rabbi-dr-david-de-sola-pool
It reminds us once again that while Rabbi Angel has continued to promote his family interests, the Conversation must stay in the MISHPOCHEH, stewardship of SI is in the hands of Tikvah Fund leader and proud Anti-Maimonidean Trumpscum Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1inwIdB46odydf4p-7ahzdzqmiBcJz4KT9wNMiY-TJWw/edit
The Sephardic heritage has indeed been erased at the oldest American Jewish Congregation, now fully in the hands of our enemies.
As is usual with Rabbi Angel, the tribute is hollow and vacuous, not really letting the reader know how crucial De Sola Pool’s scholarship was to the promulgation of the Sephardic heritage in American history.
Indeed, the titles of De Sola Pool’s books are never mentioned!
Angel has published his own “Sephardic” books, which act as a convenient Washington Heights crutch to the Ashkenazi racists, who can say that they have their very “own” Sephardi, who dutifully serves their White Jewish Supremacy, as they keep the rest of us off the Adult Jewish Table.
While the De Sola Pool canon remains out-of-print and largely unread.
It must be said in all fairness that De Sola Pool, like so many Sephardic leaders in the 20th century, when our heritage was in the process of being erased, did not do his full diligence in creating a robust institutional framework for the global Sephardi community.
Most pointedly, he ignored the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community and its most important scholar-educator Hakham Matloub Abadi.
But De Sola Pool published three books on Sephardic Judaism that remain essential to the study of American Judaism and our place in that history.
There is his 1953 masterpiece Portraits Etched in Stone, a history of the SI cemetery, the first Jewish burial ground in this country:
https://www.amazon.com/Portraits-Etched-Stone-Jewish-Settlers/dp/B0000CIFA0
And his 1955 book on the history of SI, An Old Faith in a New World:
https://www.amazon.com/World-Portrait-Shearith-Israel-1654-1954/dp/B000OPUID0
While Old Faith provides a rudimentary Synagogue history in a prosaic manner, Portraits is a revelatory history that not only does the history of the cemetery, but in its second part provides capsule biographies of all those buried in it.
There is no other book like it.
To these two out-of-print classics, I would emphatically add the following collection of De Sola Pool’s sermons and essays, presenting a fully-rounded iteration of his Sephardic Jewish Humanism:
The first two books were published in handsome editions by Columbia University Press, the latter book was a private publication of the Union of Sephardic Congregations.
As I said, all the books remain out-of-print.
And that makes the Angel tribute kind of beside the point.
The De Sola Pool books can be contextualized with the excellent “The Jews in New York” articles by Richard Wheatley from the magazine The American Century, published in 1892:
http://unz.org/Pub/Century-1892jan-00323
http://unz.org/Pub/Century-1892feb-00512
Such articles could never be written today.
I have also posted a resource sheet on the work of Arthur Kiron on Sabato Morais which provides even more important details on Sephardic Judaism in America:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oJ6PrGWTGHnTnfPkBhPao3oSucPPg-k4sEKZDgCGOZc/edit
Morais and his partner Henry Pereira Mendes, founders of the Jewish Theological Seminary, are featured in the following SHU special newsletter:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EydsEHKKe2c_vFjjokHGfo2eCZ0x51kr32klUf4iV2A/edit
It must be admitted that both Mendes and Pool were involved with Yeshiva University and the Modern Orthodoxy which has been so detrimental to the Sephardim and to the Sephardic heritage.
That does not mean that we cannot learn from them – even though their work remains largely inaccessible to most Jews and to the world at large.
I would also like to mention here Mair Jose Benardete’s classic book Hispanic Culture and Character of the Sephardic Jews, which was first published in 1953 by the Hispanic Institute of the United States:
https://www.amazon.com/Hispanic-Culture-Character-Sephardic-Jews/dp/B000TTKGKQ
The book was republished in 1982 by Sepher-Hermon Press and is now out-of-print:
https://www.amazon.com/Hispanic-Culture-Character-Sephardic-Jews/dp/0872031004
Here is some background on the author:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%C3%ADr_Jos%C3%A9_Benardete
The Spanish version is more extensive:
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma%C3%ADr_Jos%C3%A9_Bernadete
While you can see that there are extensive book resources on the Sephardic heritage available in theory, getting them in physical form is not so simple.
Getting Angel’s work is easy, if you are ensconced in the Ashkenazi Jewish world, as we recently saw at a double-book event with his son Hayyim at the Lincoln Square Synagogue:
https://www.jewishideas.org/double-book-reception
But as far as the classic writings of David De Sola Pool and other important Sephardic resources, the matter is not as salutary.
And Marc Angel’s role in helping keep those vital resources out-of-print is another mark of his lack of Sephardic commitment.
Paying “tribute” to an esteemed figure means showing respect for them and for their legacy, rather than keeping all the resources for yourself and leaving the object of the “tribute” out in the proverbial cold.
The current status of Rabbi De Sola Pool is not very different from so many other Sephardim, whose teachings have been lost to history, and whose names are unknown to a Jewish world that is subsumed by a malignant White Jewish Supremacy led by institutions like Yeshiva University.
David Shasha