New Article: Keeping Up-to-Date on “Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardischkeit: Ty Alhadeff’s Hanukkah Post
David Shasha
Keeping Up-to-Date on “Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardischkeit: Ty Alhadeff’s Hanukkah Post
We have learned through bitter experience that Sephardim are being forcibly kept off the Adult Jewish Table, which is now strictly limited to the White Jews.
It thus comes as no surprise that Sephardic representation and expression is limited to what I have called “Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardischkeit; a very superficial and circumscribed form of exotica connected to social customs and folksy cuteness.
It is important that Sephardischkeit not rock the White Jewish boat of Ashkenazi hegemony.
The general public is not being given real substance when it comes to the richness of the classical Sephardic heritage and its many intellectual accomplishments.
The general public is sadly not aware of the work of seminal historical figures from the Sephardic and Converso tradition like Shemtob Ardutiel, Abraham Zacuto, Fernando de Rojas, Luis de Gongora, Solomon ibn Verga, Samuel Usque, Isaac Cardoso, David Nieto, Menasseh ben Israel, Gershom Mendes Seixas, Sabato Morais, Henry Pereira Mendes, Haim Nahum Effendi, and Moise Ventura to name but a few of the most prominent. Even important Ashkenazi figures like Leone Modena and Saul Morteira have not been widely understood in the Sephardic context.
We are equally unaware of those diligent Sephardim who toiled so mightily to preserve our heritage. We can mention here recent scholars and activists like David de Sola Pool, Elie Eliachar, Ya’akov Yehoshua, Kalmi Baruh, and Mair Jose Benardete, whose seminal efforts now languish in the used-book section of Amazon.
The heritage of Sephardic Humanism is one that is sorely needed in a Jewish world that has become unmoored from its most resplendent cultural resources. The absence of the Sephardic intellectual heritage is a loss of great magnitude.
In contrast, Sephardischkeit is all about superficiality and ephemera, presenting Sephardim and Sephardic culture as completely amenable to the Ashkenazi system in a way that is unthreatening and which acts in a subservient rather than an actively interventionist manner.
We have seen how Professor Devin Naar, director of the University of Washington’s Sephardic Studies program, has played his Sephardischkeit role to perfection:
As part of its e-mail newsletter the American Sephardi Federation provided the following post from Naar’s UW program:
The very intricate, and passionately intense, article by Ty Alhadeff presents the matter of Megillat Antiochus and the legend of Judith as they found their way into the Ladino tradition.
As the article indicates, the stories are non-canonical “faked” legends of the Hasmonean period. Megillat Antiochus is based on the Book of Maccabees, which was not included in the Hebrew Bible, but is included in the extra-canonical books. The Book of Judith is also found in the Apocrypha.
The texts are quite colorful and entertaining.
And not unexpectedly, the article ends with a big Zionist flourish:
But the Ladino translations of Megillat Antiochus and Ma’ase Ha Yehudit also found their way into prayer books, where they took on an added layer of political meaning in the early twentieth century. The most recent versions of the tales are found in Kehilat Ya’akov edited in Belgrade (now the capital of Serbia), in 1904, by Rabbi Ya’akov Moshe Hai Altarats. In this prayer book, Altarats included Ladino commentaries on the liturgy and on Jewish life in general [UW #723, courtesy of Al Maimon]. Notably, scholar Matthias Lehmann has described Altarats as one the first Zionists to write in Ladino, and the way that Altarats explains the significance of Megillat Antiochus and Ma’ase de la Yehudit demonstrate these nationalist aspirations.
…
In other words, Altarats concludes with a hope that the “righteous kingdoms” of his own era—the British, the French, other European powers, and the Ottoman sultan—would step forward and make the Jewish national homeland in Palestine a reality. In short, Sephardic Jewish leaders like Altarats helped turned Hanukkah into a Zionist holiday by referring to these non-canonical tales preserved in Ladino.
There is no discussion of the larger issue of Balkan Sephardic Zionism and its leaders Yehuda Hai Alcalay and Yehuda Bibas, as there is no reckoning with the history of Ashkenazi prejudice against Sephardim in the State of Israel.
It is all very positive and breezy and non-confrontational.
Alhadeff neglects to mention the close ties between Sephardim and the Ottoman Empire, something that I presented in the following special newsletter which highlights the important work of Michelle Campos and Abigail Jacobson on the Ottoman-Sephardic connection:
We will recall that Naar has written quite negatively about Jewish-Muslim relations in a Sephardic context:
http://jewishstudies.washington.edu/jewish-history-and-thought/tolerance-roundtable/
As we continue to see Ashkenazi Jews work to promote a form of ecumenical tolerance with the Islamic world, here we have a Sephardi who provides a sour note in the discussion.
It is a shame to see how the Ottoman past has been forgotten by a new generation of Sephardim who are more tied to the Ashkenazim than to our cultural heritage.
The Alhadeff Hanukkah article is surely of a piece with Naar’s pointedly lachrymose views of Sephardic Jewish history.
As I have previously written, Hanukkah is a fairly minor Jewish holiday. The Zionist connection is rather pronounced these days, and Alhadeff’s article gives us yet another tired piece of “Bourekas and Haminados” ephemera which brings the local Seattle Sephardic community together with the UW Judaic Studies department in a way that does precious little to give us any real sense of the genius of the classical Sephardic civilization.
Instead, we have a very animated presentation of some minor matters in our historical culture.
Indeed, to reinforce the point the article makes prominent mention of the Me’am Lo’ez, a massive Ladino Jewish compendium of encyclopedic length, begun by Rabbi Jacob Culi back in 1731. The work is today best-known in its English translation by the Ashkenazi icon Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan and has been adopted by many Orthodox communities as a standard reference work.
The encyclopedia was written for the unlettered in the community as it provides an extremely simplistic digest of Midrashic and Kabbalistic texts on the Bible.
But in the world of “Bourekas and Hamanidos” Sephardischkeit the Me’am Lo’ez is what passes for our cultural achievement.
Rather than presenting to the public the many sophisticated literary achievements of the Sephardic tradition, once again we see that our heritage is reduced to caricature in a way that is certain to keep us off of the Adult Jewish Table and left to wallow in exotica.
David Shasha