New Article: Jonathan Sarna and the “Subversion” of Sephardic Religious Humanism in American Jewish History
David Shasha
Jonathan Sarna and the “Subversion” of Sephardic Religious Humanism in American Jewish History
Once upon a time it was quite easy to belittle and insult Sephardic Jews.
With the penultimate success of the Labor Zionist movement which was deeply rooted in the Bolshevism of Eastern Europe, the new State of Israel immediately went about identifying Sephardic Jews as “primitive” and “uncultured”; lacking the basic rudiments of civilization – and hygiene:
This tribe is in some ways more easily absorbed, both culturally and economically, than any other. It is hardworking, it is not attracted by city life, it has – or at least, the male part has – a good grounding in Hebrew and the Jewish heritage. Yet in other ways it may be the most problematic of all. It is two thousand years behind us, perhaps even more. It lacks the most basic and primary concepts of civilization (as distinct form culture). Its attitude toward women and children is primitive. Its physical condition poor. Its bodily strength is depleted and it does not have the minimal notions of hygiene. For thousands of years it lived in one of the most benighted and impoverished lands, under a rule even more backward than an ordinary feudal and theocratic regime. The passage from there to Israel has been a profound human revolution, not a superficial, political one. All its human need to be changed from the ground up. (quoted in Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis, pp. 186-187)
These words from the great Zionist icon David Ben-Gurion in 1950 speak in a deeply pejorative manner about the Yemenite Jews; the same Yemenite Jews who at that very time in the new country’s history saw their children being abducted by Ashkenazi functionaries in the Israeli hospital system; a tragic subject still left unresolved by the racist Israeli legal and political system, which I have been forced to address many times:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/yemenite/davidshasha/6XnX0LqC6cg/vqfF5zJwL2MJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/yemenite/davidshasha/daNOiNkJtLQ/Q99-HsgK8AMJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/yemenite/davidshasha/7XWsFNEejHE/IvSGZ2UV97EJ
There is here a direct correlation between Ben-Gurion’s odious characterization of the Yemenite Jewish immigrants and the cavalier manner in which their children were stolen from them. The government of Israel continues to maintain that there was no great theft and that the whole matter was simply a minor bureaucratic snafu:
http://jewishrefugees.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-yemenite-baby-conspiracy-lives-on.html
http://jewishrefugees.blogspot.com/2015/01/yemenite-babies-neglect-yes-plot-no.html
In these two articles we see the self-haters at the Point of No Return blog present the official Israeli version of things; clearly aiming to cover for their Ashkenazi masters. It is one of the most shameful acts of Anti-Sephardi racism in Israel’s history, which continues to exhibit Ben-Gurion’s contemptuous attitude towards our people.
And then there is the case of the notorious racist Aryeh Gelblum whose attack on Arab Jews in Haaretz back in 1949 has been cited many times.
In his classic 1990 book Discord in Zion: The Conflict Between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews in Israel, G.N. Giladi presents a number of the relevant passages:
… the immigrants belonged to a race previously unknown in Israel. It seems that there are differences between those who come from Tripoli (Libya), Morocco, and Algeria. But I cannot say that I have managed to study the essence of this difference, if there be one. They say, for example, that the Libyans and Tunisians are ‘better,’ and that the Algerians and the Moroccans are ‘worse,’ but it is the same problem. Generally stated … we are faced with people which is extremely primitive and whose education is that of complete ignorance. More dangerous than that is that they are incapable of taking in anything spiritual. On the whole, their level is only slightly better that the general level of Arabs, negroes, or Berbers in their native countries. Accordingly, their level is below what we were used to in the past with the Arabs of the land of Israel. In contrast to the Yemenites, they have no roots in Judaism. They are completely at the whim of their instinctive and savage natures. (pp. 213-214)
I trust that these citations provide the general gist of what Ashkenazi racists like Ben-Gurion and Gelblum felt about the Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants.
It is critical to note here that the nomenclature of “Sephardi” and “Arab” in describing the Middle Eastern Jews has been the subject of much ink-spilling; in spite of the fact that the basic facts of history are clear in the matter.
I have addressed the issue in a special edition of my Sephardic Heritage Update newsletter which contains an exchange of articles between me and a writer using the name Philologos:
The “Arab Jew” conundrum is really quite simple to resolve: Spanish Jewry from the time of the Arab conquest in the 8th century adopted the Arabic language and culture as its basic template. The use of Ladino as both a literary and vernacular language takes hold many centuries later; fully emerging after the 1492 Expulsion and used by the emigrants in their new homes in the Ottoman Empire.
There are thus “Arab Sephardim” and “Latin Sephardim”; both groups sharing a basic culture that is rooted in the rabbinical academies of the East and in the complex, polyglot Andalusian civilization whose development encompassed the Arab Golden Age, the European Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Sephardim permeated the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Middle East as well as Europe, reconnecting with their Mediterranean brothers and sisters in the wake of the Spanish catastrophe.
While the Eastern European Jews were cowering in their Shtetls, hoping to avoid being slaughtered by the Cossacks, the Sephardic Jews were producing a bright and enlightened Jewish civilization rooted in the values of Religious Humanism; another subject that I have discussed at great length and with great frequency:
Here is the introduction to my article “The Central Place of Religious Humanism in Judaism and American Civilization: Episodes and Figures in Cultural History”:
Central to the Sephardic Jewish tradition is the precious value of Religious Humanism. We are often fooled into thinking that religion is purely a matter of our relationship to God and the spirit. Where is the place of humanity in this religious scheme?
And, conversely, where can we find the voice of religion in the vast enterprise of Humanistic studies?
Rather than maintaining religion and humanism as two separate categories, the great thinkers of the Sephardic tradition have sought to articulate these critically important values as one.
Over the course of publishing the Sephardic Heritage Update newsletter I have attempted to present the genius of our civilization by highlighting the values of Religious Humanism from a number of different vantage points. We can see Religious Humanism in our literature as well as in other forms of art and expression.
Religious Humanism is a value system that exalts the wonder of life itself along with our love of God and His guidance and protection for His creatures. It is a system that demands justice and compassion. While we seek to explore and investigate the world around us through the tools of science and philosophy, we are duty-bound to care for our neighbor and protect the weak and helpless. It is through the values of Religious Humanism that we are most able to express our humanity fully.
That article on “Judaism and Culture” was submitted to Milin Havivin, the literary journal of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, and rejected for publication:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/yct/davidshasha/JPZFturnQkQ/FX8HLC0KgtoJ
We have seen in the very first years of the State of Israel that Sephardic Jews were characterized as something less than human, which is actually very interesting given the extremely low level of culture in Eastern European Jewry in the 19th and early 20th century; something that we can see clearly in the great writer Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye” stories and in the musical play “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Those same Yemenite Jews who were so viciously attacked by racist Zionist leaders like Ben-Gurion were devoted heirs to the intellectual traditions of Maimonides, a seminal figure in Sephardic history who was the paragon of Jewish Humanism. The adoption of philosophical and scientific values in Sephardic culture was part and parcel of the acculturation to the classical Arab model in its Golden Age.
But the Bolshevik Zionists believed that they were above the “Tevye” Shtetl culture, and somehow raised themselves to the level of Oxford Dons while the Sephardim were seen as “primitives”!
And it is in the culture of Zionism that we find the emergence of a White Supremacy among Ashkenazim that was brilliantly articulated by a professor at the Modern Orthodox Yeshiva University, who when asked by a Sephardic student from the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community why his introductory course in Modern Hebrew Literature had no Sephardic writers, said that they were “poor and uneducated”:
Earlier this semester
in a course at YU entitled "twentieth century hebrew literature" the
professor felt the need to tell the class that the "sephardim made no
contributions to modern hebrew literature because they were all poor and
uneducated" (the period in question is the twentieth century up until
1967)
I see here four claims:
1 all sephardim were uneducated
2 all sephardim were poor
3 sephardim made no contribution to modern hebrew lit
4 because they were poor and uneducated
What would you answer to an idiot like this guy?
This frank admission was forwarded to me in an e-mail written by that same YU student from the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community. The individual who forwarded the e-mail to me knew little if anything about the subject because Sephardic Literature is not taught in our schools, and wanted my advice on how to answer the question the young student was asking.
Here is my response that I called “The Idiot Sephardim”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/idiot/davidshasha/HWE675C8-No/VxmT4bkxZlcJ
I have since written a whole series of articles on “The Idiot Sephardim”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/idiot/davidshasha/6GsXKsqyyOE/DUcr1XA1BAAJ
Sadly, after compiling this special edition of my newsletter I have had to continue the series:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/idiot/davidshasha/RhLyZLJcYMU/DHwkXr7dAAAJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/idiot/davidshasha/P5qfH9K6410/DN2cV088AAAJ
Given the troubling state of current affairs, I would have to think that these articles will continue long into the future. There is indeed no peace for the wicked!
In examining the issue of Ashkenazi prejudice against Sephardim I have found an unfortunate dynamic of self-hatred in the Sephardic community as we have over time internalized this belief that Ashkenazim are better than us.
I have addressed the matter in my article “Sephardi Typologies”:
Many of the educational and religious institutions of the Sephardic community are strictly controlled by Modern Orthodoxy as embodied in the YU system whose central feature is Religious Zionism.
So when I began to look more closely at the writing of Modern Orthodox intellectuals like Jonathan Sarna and his good friend Rabbi Marc Angel, emeritus rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel, I saw that there was a pattern of Anti-Sephardi rhetoric that was far more subtle than that of David Ben-Gurion or Aryeh Gelblum; but still pretty damaging to the values of the classical Sephardic heritage and the tradition of Religious Humanism.
In my article “Entering ‘Pottersville’: Modalities of Destruction and Self-Hatred in the Sephardic Community,” I presented a fascinating debate between Rabbi Angel and Malcolm Stern conducted in at Shearith Israel in 1976:
The debate concerns the relations between Ashkenazim and Sephardim in New York, and the respective presentations are not what we might have expected from the two men.
Here is Dr. Stern’s basic premise:
The relations between Sephardim and Ashkenazim were far from cordial. The Sephardim, many of them refugees from the Inquisition, had lived side by side with Christians and were far more assimilated than the ghettoized Ashkenazim of Northern Europe. The Sephardim looked down on the Ashkenazim because of their lack of breeding; the Ashkenazim objected to the lack of orthodox Judaism among the Sephardim.
Rabbi Angel took great exception to this and responded in a very pointed manner:
It is fine to speculate, it is fine to say that it is possible, it is fine to say that there were Jews in other lands and Sephardim in other areas that had these kinds of tensions, but I don’t think that it was true in New York – and I don’t think that one prove that it was ever so. On the contrary, I think that you can adduce much evidence that is very plausible to show that the opposite was true.
At the end of his presentation he sums up the situation, making his position crystal clear:
The implication of this [the intermarriage of Sephardim and Ashkenazim] is that the Sephardim and Ashkenazim must have gotten along well enough – they didn’t make war – they made love – and this was the thing that protected them.
Rabbi Angel’s passionate attack on Dr. Stern, who rightly believed that there were endemic tensions between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, fits right into the “Sephardi Typologies” pattern.
What we have in the 1976 debate is something that we have seen in the many years since from Rabbi Angel, whose many books and articles share a common conceptual thread: to recalibrate the classical Sephardic heritage to fit the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox paradigm.
This cultural model is an interesting one when we look carefully at the work of Jonathan Sarna, who is currently acknowledged as the dean of American Jewish historians.
In a 2005 article on Colonel Mendes Cohen, a Jew of German origin with a very suspiciously Sephardic first name, Dr. Sarna allows us to see the way in which American Jewish history is now being read through Ashkenazi lenses in a way that serves to both minimize and undermine the Sephardic role in the development of American Judaism:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/sarna/davidshasha/EmYNqD4sZ1A/yuY34TnEQNcJ
Here is how I characterize Sarna’s position in my article:
While Sarna goes to great lengths to disparage Sephardic elitism in early American Jewish history, he does seem to refuse to address the seminal impact it had in organizing the community and the positive values it had inculcated in the immigrants. The breakdown of American Judaism only truly begins when Ashkenazim and their factionalism begins to take over the community and eviscerate traditional Judaism.
We have also seen Sarna’s prize student Rabbi Zev Eleff present early American Jewish history using this same monochromatic Ashkenazi filter:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/eleff/davidshasha/rY6tsM-gviU/Ev9p-Fui3wgJ
I have written an additional piece on the matter of Rabbi Eleff’s pronounced Ashkenazi bias:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/eleff/davidshasha/ZlBGVViJY1c/nfgKmMG5BQAJ
When read in this Ashkenazi-centric light, Sarna’s latest article on the Leonard Milberg Collection of Early Judaica exhibit, recently presented at Princeton, becomes that much more significant:
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/197758/subversive-jews-american-culture
In the article Sarna seeks to boldly present a model of American Judaism that is “subversive”:
Moving beyond [historian Jacob Rader] Marcus, it seems to me that where Jews did impact upon early American culture is where they cast themselves as critics, subversives and dissenters. As non-Christians, Jews at that time in the United States, however white and wealthy they may have been, were by their very existence cultural outsiders and religious non-conformists. If, following the Oxford English Dictionary, to be culturally subversive means to challenge and undermine “a conventional idea, form, genre, etc., especially by using or presenting it in a new or unorthodox way,” then Jews of that time were disproportionately subversive. Indeed, some of the most important works in the Milberg collection reflect precisely that kind of oppositional stance.
Ignoring the actual distinctions between Ashkenazim and Sephardim in early American Jewish history, Sarna looks to turn the historical figure of one Isaac Gomez Jr. into a “subversive”; just like his some of his Ashkenazi peers:
Isaac Gomez Jr., scion of one of the oldest and most distinguished Sephardic Jewish families in New York City (Stephen Birmingham once memorably dubbed them “the grandees”), went so far as to produce a memorandum of the trial which he preserved among his papers. His goal in doing so, he wrote, was to “to guard my children from permitting themselves from evilspeaking or evildoing as the consequences are serious.”
Gomez was himself a contributor to early American culture, but his outward public stance was completely the opposite of Judah’s. His Selections of a Father for the Use of His Children. In Prose and Verse (1820), an anthology “calculated to promote a taste for reading and to improve the mind in useful learning,” was the very model of propriety and, unlike Judah’s Odofried, was highly praised by John Adams (“deserve[s] a place in every family, there is not an impure or mean thought in the whole Book.”) Where Judah, like many young native-born writers of that time, pursued the goal of creating a new American literature, Gomez championed the classics. “As a young country,” he righteously declared in his preface, “we must not flatter ourselves with excelling in all the departments of literature; and, therefore, we must establish a true taste upon a firm foundation, we must select from the most approved authors, and thus gradually lead to perfection of our own.”
In private, however, Gomez was much more critical—at least of the religious world that surrounded him. His unpublished manuscript, “God is One and His Name One: Quotations from Scripture etc. to Prove God to be One And the Truth of the Jewish Faith,” lovingly handwritten for the benefit of his only son, Moses Emanuel (1804-1878), was explicitly designed to buttress the views of a small Jewish minority seeking to maintain its distinctive religious identity amid a sea of Protestants eager to convert them. Inwardly and within the protective bosom of his own family, Gomez revealed his true feelings about the merits of his neighbors’ beliefs. His purpose, he disclosed in his preface, was nothing less than “to shew, and to know that we are the chosen people of God … as well as that God is one without addition or subtraction … that there never was nor never will be but One God.” This was, of course, an utterly subversive idea in the face of overwhelming Christian trinitarianism, and Gomez, whose ancestors had been Crypto-Jews in Portugal, explicitly warned his son to keep the critique to himself: not “to be a religious disputant” and not to share the volume with anyone else, “never part with it, either by lending or otherwise.” At the same time, the whole point of producing the handwritten book was to arm his son with the necessary texts and arguments for “when it becomes necessary for you to defend your religion.” Gomez made clear that he “put no credence” in the New Testament, which he described as replete with “many alterations, false quotations and misrepresentations.” Nor did he respect Christianity as a whole, having determined that it “has grown out of Heathenism.” His conclusion after more than 460 pages of proof texts, was certainly not surprising for a Jew whose ancestors had been persecuted by the Holy Inquisition, but was nevertheless utterly countercultural in the 1820s world of New York City. Gomez firmly insisted that Judaism was right and Christianity wrong. “The idea of there being more Gods than One, either three in one or three distinct characters…,” he whispered to his son, “is inconsistent with reason or common sense.”
Sarna’s discussion of Gomez presents Jewish “subversion” where Gomez was simply articulating the basic principles of Sephardic Jewish Humanism in the new American context.
Sarna fails to properly note the basic distinction between Jewish particularism and universalist Humanism that was embodied in the principles of religious freedom embodied in Moses Seixas’ seminal letter to George Washington.
Here is the full text of the letter:
Sir,
Permit the children of the stock of Abraham to approach you with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits — and to join with our fellow citizens in welcoming you to NewPort.
With pleasure we reflect on those days — those days of difficulty, and danger, when the God of Israel, who delivered David from the peril of the sword, — shielded Your head in the day of battle: — and we rejoice to think, that the same Spirit, who rested in the Bosom of the greatly beloved Daniel enabling him to preside over the Provinces of the Babylonish Empire, rests and ever will rest, upon you, enabling you to discharge the arduous duties of Chief Magistrate in these States.
Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People — a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance — but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: — deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine: — This so ample and extensive Federal Union whose basis is Philanthropy, Mutual confidence and Public Virtue, we cannot but acknowledge to be the work of the Great God, who ruleth in the Armies of Heaven, and among the Inhabitants of the Earth, doing whatever seemeth him good.
For all these Blessings of civil and religious liberty which we enjoy under an equal benign administration, we desire to send up our thanks to the Ancient of Days, the great preserver of Men — beseeching him, that the Angel who conducted our forefathers through the wilderness into the promised Land, may graciously conduct you through all the difficulties and dangers of this mortal life: — And, when, like Joshua full of days and full of honour, you are gathered to your Fathers, may you be admitted into the Heavenly Paradise to partake of the water of life, and the tree of immortality.
Done and Signed by
order of the Hebrew Congregation in NewPort, Rhode Island
Moses Seixas, Warden
August 17th 1790
The letter promotes the values of religious freedom and liberty, and not the forced adoption of a particular creed, such as the Christian Trinity. This is an extremely important detail to note when trying to understand the words of Isaac Gomez Jr. who presents the standard understanding of Christianity that was part of the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish tradition.
We are free to be critical of other religions, but must continue to tolerate the members of those religions.
Gomez was in no way trying to destroy Christianity; he was simply presenting his views of that religion as processed in the Sephardic tradition which were protected by the Free Speech measures enshrined in our Constitution and formulated by George Washington in his response to Seixas:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/bigotry.html
The famous phrase penned by Washington “To Give Bigotry No Sanction” is indeed central to Gomez’s understanding of Christian supremacy and religious prejudice. There would likely have been no difference between Gomez’s position and that of Seixas. As traditional Sephardim they would have processed Judaism through the lens of Religious Humanism and denied the power of bigotry, exclusivism, and prejudice to control the American socio-political system.
In his discussion Sarna not only neglects the larger conceptual context of Gomez’s position, which is firmly rooted in freedom of expression and religious pluralism as enshrined in the American Constitution, but gravely misrepresents the Sephardic tradition. More than this, he frames the entire matter from the dysfunctional perspective of the Ashkenazi tradition and its faulty understanding of the “normative” and the “subversive.”
Sarna completely ignores the construct of Sephardic Jewish Humanism and presents Gomez as if was seeking to undermine American culture; as if he had a duplicitous cultural-religious agenda. Gomez is a traditional Jew who is attacking Christian supremacy, rather than demanding Jewish authoritarianism or religious supremacy in its behalf.
The article therefore represents Sarna’s Anti-Sephardi racism, and a profound misreading of early American Jewish history in a way that serves to enforce absolutist Ashkenazi ideas of subversion and compliance to authority.
It is a very troubling analysis that reflects the beleaguered fatalism of the Eastern European Ghetto Jew in its cynical attitude towards religious pluralism and democracy.
The true “subversive” here is Sarna and not Gomez.
We are currently living in a time when the Sephardic tradition has either been ignored or misrepresented in the public discourse. The model of Religious Humanism is alien to an Ashkenazi tradition which sees Torah and General Civilization as completely different constructs. This is the very premise of the Modern Orthodox system which is called in Hebrew “Torah u-Madda”; the two Hebrew terms reflecting a division between Torah and “Secular” culture that is not present in the model of Sephardic Religious Humanism.
I have addressed this issue in my article “Authentic and Inauthentic Jews”:
At the conclusion of the article I present a capsule review of the split between Torah and general culture:
The “Either/Or” of contemporary Judaism has done serious damage to our continuity as a people. A shrinking minority of Jews has arrogated for itself sole ownership of the Torah and, as in the case of Maimonidean Controversy, denied “authenticity” to those Jews who embrace the larger world and universal ideas and values within the parochial framework of Torah.
The Modern Orthodox Sarna’s “subversion” of the classical Sephardic culture and its value system is something that has become common at a time when Ashkenazim dominate the Jewish discourse.
The Sephardic tradition functioned for many centuries as the basic template for “Enlightened” Jewish discourse in America and Europe, but today we are seeing the contentiousness and dysfunction of the Ashkenazi tradition become the basic default in the Jewish community and in the larger perception of Judaism in Gentile society.
David Shasha