New Article: Giving Sephardic Women an Ashkenazi Voice: The New Jewish Social Science and its Danger to Sephardic Studies
David Shasha
Giving Sephardic Women an Ashkenazi Voice: The New Jewish Social Science and its Danger to Sephardic Studies
It has been a while since we checked in with our friend Rabbi Shalom Morris at Bevis Marks:
He loves monuments and dead things, but is not much on the intellectual-religious history of the Sephardim:
As he so proudly admits, he is very YU:
https://shalommorris.com/about/
Our future is indeed in excellent hands!
I received the following program announcement in the London Synagogue’s e-mail newsletter:
https://www.sephardi.org.uk/event/join-rabbi-morris-in-conversation-with-laura-arnold-leibman/
Here is the description of the event from the e-mail:
Join Rabbi Morris in conversation with Laura Arnold
Leibman talking about “Giving Sephardic Women a Voice”
Tuesday 19th March at 6pm UK time
Laura Arnold Leibman is Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1995.
In her new book, The Art of the Jewish Family, Dr Laura Arnold Leibman, of Reed University, Oregon, examines five objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who all lived in New York in the years between 1750 and 1850. Four of the women were members of early Sephardic congregations, and two lived part of their lives in London. Each chapter creates a biography of a single woman through an object in order to further understand early Jewish women’s lives and restore their agency as creators of Jewish identity. While much of the available history was written by men, the objects that Leibman studies were made for and by Jewish women. The Art of the Jewish Family sheds new light on the lives and values of these women, while also revealing the reasons Jewish women were erased from historical archives.
I had not heard of Professor Leibman before, so I did the obligatory Google search:
https://www.lauraleibman.com/#!research/caov
I was particularly struck by the way she presented her intellectual background:
https://www.lauraleibman.com/about
She came to Judaic Studies from watching her parents do Biology!
My work as a humanist is indebted in many ways to the time spent helping my parents with biological fieldwork as a child, and my prior work in Animal Health Care and Conservation Biology.
My parents and stepparents are all biologists, and I spent many hours as a child helping collect snakes, lizards, and salamanders both in the tropics and at my father's field sites at Eagle Lake and Prairie Creek. These early experiences not only taught me about research methods but also trained me to pay attention to details. Noticing and responding quickly to a sudden, small shift in light often meant the difference between catching an animal or ending up empty handed. My stepfather's research in the tropics also exposed me to other cultures and gave me a love of travel. Haunted by places I did not understand, many years later I would find myself returning to some of these locations such as Panama and the Dutch West Indies to do my own historical work.
As the child of biologists, I assumed I would someday work on animals as well, and indeed before I turned my gaze to culture, I worked with small animals and zoo animals, and worked briefly as a research assistant in conservation biology. Working hands-on with animals taught me to watch closely for non-verbal communications, since ignoring a non-domesticated animal's body language could mean unnecessary stress for the animals and painful bites and scratches for me. I remain fascinated by the importance of non-verbal language.
“Collecting snakes, lizards, and salamanders.”
Sephardim in zoo cages!
“The importance of non-verbal language.”
No words for her!
Her previous book on early American Jewish History was on, of all things, Messianism and Secrecy, because that is the first thing you think about when you think about early American Jewish History:
https://www.amazon.com/Messianism-Secrecy-Mysticism-Interpretation-American/dp/0853039577
Here is how she describes it on her website:
My second book, Messianism, Secrecy, & Mystictism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life (2012) focuses on the objects of everyday life used and created by Jews, such as ritual baths, food, gravestones, portraits, furniture, as well as the synagogue. By uncovering these objects and exposing the common culture of the Jewish Atlantic world, the book provides a fresh understanding of a crucial era in Jewish and American history. Through these objects I expose how the Judaism of the Diaspora was one enacted by and through the bodies and spaces of children, women and Judeo-Africans, as much as through the elite bodies, practices and writings of men.
Jonathan Sarna has called this book, “The most innovative, ambitious and important study of Early American Jewry to appear in the last forty years” and it recently won the 2012 National Jewish Book Award in Jewish American Studies and the 2012 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Cultural Studies and Media Studies.
I sure hope that Rabbi Meir Soloveichik has a copy!
It is right up his Michael Wyschogrod voodoo alley:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ytYVvsu-He-LACFKWcSsYGguR5uX33u9/view?ths=true
It is critical to point out that Leibman’s work represents a very important trend in contemporary Judaic Studies that abandons formal intellectual-literary history and instead adopts the Social Sciences as the exclusive means for understanding the Jewish past.
It is very much in line with the Darwinist trend in academia, bringing with it a contempt for ideas and values learned from books. The prime directive is to come to the past with Anthropology and Sociology as your weapons of choice.
In thinking about the trend as it applies to Sephardim, I would raise the trenchant criticism of the great African-American writer and public intellectual Ralph Ellison:
As we see in the following citation, Ellison saw the domination of Social Science scholarship as a means of control by a White Supremacist regime:
Ellison saw modern social science as a way of rationalizing and justifying the methods of economic and social control of the South. Myrdal’s social science left little room for blacks to be seen as anything more than objects, never more than the sum of their oppression. He found that both troubling and oppressive. He observed, “Men have made a way of life in caves and upon cliffs; why cannot Negroes have made a way upon the horns of the white man’s dilemma?” Ellison thought that the “solution to the problem of the American Negro and democracy” rested only in part on white action. The solution also required “the creation of a democracy in which the Negro will be free to define himself for what he is and, within the larger framework of that democracy, for what he desires to be.”
Indeed, although the socio-cultural and historical frameworks are not the same, Sephardim too need to be agents in their own representation, and must demand that our intellectual-literary and philosophical-religious categories be a part of how we are represented.
We cannot allow others to represent us in ways that can serve to undermine our self-perception, or to use scholarship as a weapon to bludgeon us with, as if we lacked agency.
Social Science academic scholarship provides a means of dismissing the classical Sephardic heritage, with its poetry, belle-lettres, and ethico-religious philosophy, all firmly rooted in verbal language.
While at the same time neglecting the problem of representation and reifying the analytical categories that allow research on our history to proceed.
A major problem, of course, is the sense that Social Science investigation is perceived as “value-free” and provides a purely “objective” understanding of historical phenomena:
https://revisesociology.com/2016/05/29/sociology-value-freedom/
We have seen the Social Science trend permeate the current group of scholars who deal with our history, such as Devin Naar, Julia Phillips Cohen, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Marina Rustow, and Daniel Schroeter; all of whom have spearheaded a more Conservative and reactionary understanding of the Sephardic heritage, which is directly connected to the Ashkenazi-dominated institutional Jewish world and its media outlets.
I learned about this academic hegemony the hard way, when speaking with then-Center for Jewish History director David Myers, who listed these names, among others, as people I should consider when planning a lecture series on the Sephardic heritage.
Needless to say, I ignored his list and the lectures I proposed never happened.
Myers was then serendipitously ousted from the CJH by members of the Ashkenazi-run American Sephardi Federation, and Sephardim found themselves again on the outside of things.
One of the prominent names on his list, Daniel Schroeter, helped to pioneer the current field with his often-cited 2002 book The Sultan’s Jew:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v2oZfd9akexSEWdfgydCc52SEvy46AucaYAf-MBZYCw/edit
In my article on the book, “A Portrait of the Sephardi Jew as Swindler,” I noted how it hearkened back to the racism of Bernard Lewis in a way that sought to bypass the critique of Sephardi activists like Ammiel Alcalay:
The nature of this manipulation, as Daniel Schroeter points out in his troubling but very important new book, has been the development of two differing schools of thought regarding this contested history: On the one hand we have a group led by Bernard Lewis and Norman Stillman that has sought to present Sephardic Jewry as a community that was left to be persecuted by cruel and zealous Muslim fanatics. While Lewis and Stillman have at times conceded the point that during the High Middle Ages the Sephardim, from Spain to Baghdad, were capable of great cultural achievement based on the efflorescence of Arabic civilization from the 7th to the 13th centuries, with the establishment of the European Enlightenment and cultural dominance of the modern period, this school has sought to occlude in toto the cultural and political viability of the Sephardim.
Such a viewpoint has sought to lay bare a brutal political rationale for the emergence of a Western-oriented Zionism that has served to ignore the culture and history of the Eastern Sephardim: Arabs have always hated and abused the Jews.
In his most recent work What Went Wrong? Lewis continues his vicious assault on the Jews of the East that began with his book The Jews of Islam some years ago. Stillman, in his own writings, has also jumped on this anti-Sephardi bandwagon by affirming the paradigm of a static culture in decline and under threat of Muslim fanaticism.
In counter-distinction to this school of thought, the work of Ammiel Alcalay has served to draw a vastly differing methodological paradigm in order to interpret Sephardic history. In Alcalay’s After Jews and Arabs the world of the Sephardim is seen from within its very own cultural parameters. Rather than permitting the Sephardi voice to be co-opted by European Orientalism, as Stillman does in his translation of Samuel Romanelli’s travelogue in Morocco, Alcalay uses the literary, historical and philosophical texts of Sephardim in a post-modern mélange that attempts to articulate the lost voices of the Sephardim themselves, voices that are then set in counterpoint to the other native voices of the Levant.
Alcalay has since then been fully excised from the Sephardic Studies discourse, as it is presented by someone like David Myers, who is one of the current gatekeepers in the study of Jewish History.
The institutional move is connected to the Social Science approach, as it ignores the Convivencia tradition of the classical Sephardic heritage, and places our history within a framework more conducive to the Islamophobia and HASBARAH of Lewis and his student Norman Stillman:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nSdrjtm-qKwYxEkewoX5ZNQpx28lJZs1no8hOmZrVKY/edit
Schroeter is now central to the field, while Alcalay and his traditional understanding of Sephardic History and culture, rooted in the Arab heritage of Andalusia, is off-limits.
The following collection of papers on Jewish Studies and Anthropology co-edited by Marina Rustow reinforces the new Sephardic Studies hegemony and how it is integrated into the White Jewish Supremacy:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B084YQP1ZH/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2
Devin Naar’s University of Washington Stroum Center had a book event that brings all the elements in a very illuminating way:
The following exchange between interviewer Hannah Pressman, Phillips Cohen and Abrevaya Stein provides important insights into how things stand in academic Sephardic Studies at present:
SAS: “The field has expanded vigorously, and it is a pleasure to see so much fine scholarship emerging in a field that was very small, and which has been perceived as marginal for too long. We are thrilled by the award, of course, but feel that the real success of the book depends on it being read and used in the classroom—hopefully not only to supplement classes on modern Jewish history and culture, but to invite teachers to rethink the overall arc, geography, and texture of Jewish society.”
JPC: “It’s hard to imagine that this book would have been possible ten years ago. We’re at a very exciting point in the burgeoning field of Sephardic Studies: the hard work of scholars around the globe continues to bring new material to light. In addition to the existing studies dealing with culture and politics, new projects exploring modern Sephardic diasporas, communal organization, and the everyday lives of women and children are pushing the field in exciting new directions. While preparing this volume we were able to reach out to colleagues laboring in such areas, including those pursuing particularly neglected aspects of modern Sephardic Studies such as gender and poverty. Such breadth simply didn’t exist a decade ago.”
SAS: “At times, while writing this book, we wondered if we were stretching the frame ‘Sephardi’ too thin. Could this organizing motif, we asked ourselves, truly encompass all the voices arrayed in the volume? The conclusion we reached, which we hope readers will take away from the book, is that ‘Sephardi’ is a wonderfully expansive category, reaching not only into Jewish or Middle Eastern history, but also into the history of gender, thought, families, religion, violence, empires and nation-states, and political movements, as well as into the many places we touch upon: not only the main Sephardi regional centers of Istanbul, Salonica, Edirne, and Izmir, but Palestine and North Africa, Latin America and southern Africa, Los Angeles and Seattle, with many stops in between.”
HP: Is Sephardi Lives representative of a local or global version of Sephardic history?
SAS: “The book offers insights on both a local and global level, allowing us to appreciate not only the nuances of individual experiences or places or events, but also how the fabric of a global Sephardi diaspora was knit together—and frayed—over time and space.”
JPC: “Creating the book was a very international affair. We got permissions from archives and private collections all over the world, some of which were difficult to access in places like the Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Bosnia. That’s another thing that’s very exciting about the book—we didn’t only rely on public collections. We wanted to think outside the box as we created this canon and to include pieces that had never been seen before. The vast majority of the pieces in the book had never been published in English. A number also arrived to us from dusty boxes in family collections: in many cases, the original texts (often written in the soletreo handwriting style of Ladino) were no longer accessible to descendants who don’t read Ladino. The process of identifying and translating these sources was thus one of discovery both for us and for their owners.”
As Phillips Cohen clearly states, the idea is to “think outside the box” and create a “new” canon; which means essentially wiping the traditional slate clean and imposing a new epistemological regime on Sephardic history.
The new focus is apparent when we look at the content posted on Professor Leibman’s Academia page:
https://reed.academia.edu/LauraLeibman
Her work fits comfortably in the current field of Sephardic Studies, as it has attached itself to HASBARAH concerns and the White Jewish Supremacy of Tikvah Fund Judaism, as we have seen in Tikvah Fund Matti Friedman’s New York Times review of the recent book by Sarah Abrevaya Stein:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/books/review/family-papers-sarah-abrevaya-stein.html
Friedman’s racist paternalism has been an important driving force in the Right Wing co-optation of Mizrahi Jewish identity in Israel that was officially formulated in Naftali Bennett’s Biton Committee initiative:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wMx-oym3rT1kUCphAbxYT0DK2SodTA1ufn2fC6dnNJo/edit
The new construct may thus be seen as a frontal assault on the work of scholars like Alcalay and the late Maria Rosa Menocal:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1e9Bi7Y12B3li38_PHne_JThpC67yhH1kJrSK48XXAX0/edit
It is a resolute move from the Liberal values of Religious Humanism to the Jewish ethnocentrism and racism of the Tikvah Fund Right Wing reactionaries.
As noted in Morris’ Bevis Marks announcement, Leibman will soon be publishing a book on Jewish women in New York from 1750-1850 which fits the regnant model:
The hook she uses is to take a single material object and discuss one woman’s life:
In The Art of the Jewish Family, Laura Arnold
Leibman examines five objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who all
lived in New York in the years between 1750 and 1850: a letter from
impoverished Hannah Louzada seeking assistance; a set of silver cups owned by
Reyna Levy Moses; an ivory miniature owned by Sarah Brandon Moses, who was born
enslaved and became one of the wealthiest Jewish women in New York; a book
created by Sarah Ann Hays Mordecai; and a family silhouette owned by Rebbetzin
Jane Symons Isaacs. These objects offer intimate and tangible views into the lives
of Jewish American women from a range of statuses, beliefs, and lifestyles—both
rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, slaves and slaveowners.
Each chapter creates a biography of a single woman through an object, offering
a new methodology that looks past texts alone to material culture in order to
further understand early Jewish American women’s lives and restore their agency
as creators of Jewish identity. While much of the available history was written
by men, the objects that Leibman studies were made for and by Jewish women.
Speaking to American Jewish life, women’s studies, and American history, The
Art of the Jewish Family sheds new light on the lives and values of these women,
while also revealing the social and religious structures that led to Jewish
women being erased from historical archives.
Again, the idea is to move away from a text-centered view of the past, and use a materialist, object-oriented Social Science investigation to re-frame and re-orient our understanding of early American Jewish History, and in so doing paint a brand new picture that will serve as a corrective to what we think we know about the subject.
The re-framing will produce an image of that history less in line with the classical Sephardic heritage and the values of Jewish Humanism, and more in line with academic White Jewish Supremacy in its category-valorization and Eurocentric ideological orientation.
Naturally, our dear friend Jonathan Sarna and The Tikvah Fund are big fans of Leibman’s work:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo50382443.html
Here are the plaudits:
Jewish Review of Books
"Complementing and enlivening the narrative, not just accompanying it, the volume’s 96 images encompass painting, portraiture, and maps—a bonanza of visual information. Just when we’ve come to believe we know all there is to know about the early experiences of colonial and federal-era American Jews, Leibman reminds us how much more could be known if only we would deploy a different set of sources and ask a different set of questions. Through five sharply focused case studies, she takes her readers beyond the usual places—New York and Charleston, say—and sets them down in Barbados and Suriname of the 18th and early 19th centuries, whose robust Jewish life rendered that of the American colonies a poor cousin. . . . A harvest of ideas, The Art of the Jewish Family yields a rich ensemble profile of Jewish women of the 18th and 19th centuries, an invigorating consideration of history as a process, and a compelling argument for integrating material culture as a matter of course into any and all historical projects."
Jonathan Sarna, author of American Judaism: A History
“This is a pathbreaking volume by a master scholar.”
Indeed, as we continue to see, nothing can be done in American Jewish History without Sarna’s Tikvah-mandated approval!
Leibman’s study thus presents a striking contrast with Rabbi David De Sola Pool’s classic Portraits Etched in Stone, which provides the usual text-based socio-cultural history, as opposed to the new Social History of the current generation of scholars:
It is always a good thing to have more and diverse voices added to the Jewish historical discourse. And it is certainly a good thing to have women being fully represented in that discourse.
Indeed, I have sought to provide such diversity in my articles on Moses and Judith Montefiore:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/moses-montefiore-the-most_b_610879
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/finding-jewish-feminism-i_b_572978
And in my work on Grace Aguilar:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dO1IkxZvU4jw6QCFcbMyubaCbFB59RrGIY9Cf-IszY4/edit
But what we are now seeing is a massive paradigm shift, which moves the study of American Jewish History away from the cultural, religious, and intellectual values of the community to a more experiential analytic mode that uses the Social Science tools to understand a world that was firmly rooted in the values of Sephardic Jewish Humanism.
The paradigm shift allows Ashkenazi Social Historians like Leibman to re-draw the map of American Jewish History, as Sarna and his student Zev Eleff have done, in a way that obscures what those people understood about themselves; preferring instead to objectify them in the ways of Social Science and its static Darwinian categories.
Leibman’s work is thus a perfect fit for the YU-trained Morris, as it minimizes the concern for our literary-intellectual heritage by presenting Social History in a way that leaves out the larger cultural framework that was once the driving factor – as can be seen in the De Sola Pool book – of academic research.
It is therefore important to note how the current academic orthodoxy feeds into the debased institutional models that now exist in the Sephardic world.
We have Lyn Julius, publisher of the Point of No Return blog and funder of HARIF, and a perfect example of the Islamophobic Self-Hating Sephardi:
Allied to Mrs. Julius is Rachel Wahba of the Ashkenazi-run group JIMENA:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/we-arabic-jews/
The following article on JIMENA by Tom Pessah allows us to see how White Jewish Supremacy has sought to manipulate and undermine our identity:
One of the pioneers of this form of HASRABAH-oriented self-hatred has been Carole Basri, who has been a very active part in the World Jewish Congress’s Justice for Jews from Arab Countries initiative:
http://www.jewishpost.com/archives/news/justice-for-jews-from-arab-countries-b.html
She has been a board member of the American Sephardi Federation for many years:
http://americansephardi.org/about/board-of-trustees/
As we move closer to The Tikvah Fund, it is also worth mentioning Princeton Professor Lital Levy, who received her doctorate under the tutelage of Robert Alter at UC Berkeley:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y5_qZRLaE3uCbQHew66ekpAPh5fCm9UkFMRO9mRbiyE/edit
Alter is one of the biggest names in academic Judaic Studies, and for Sephardim he is noteworthy for attacking the work of Jose Faur in the larger context of Jewish Post-Modernism:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXeFJDdkdrYmVVQUk/edit
Levy had her name added to the Anti-Convivencia forces, as we saw when her book was reviewed in the Electronic Intifada:
She currently works in the Princeton Judaic Studies department of Leora Batnitzky, which makes her Tikvah connection complete:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/C8jIR1oPhmc/QHo3hCf1BgAJ
It is indeed critical to understand how inclusion and exclusion works in academia, and how Sephardim have been excised from the club, and placed in a position of weakness and subservient accommodation. Only those who deny their cultural identity are allowed entry into that very exclusive club.
The new academic scholarship in Judaic Studies is thus designed to help erase the classical Sephardic heritage by re-drawing the map of Jewish History and its inherited value system as we have previously understood it, replacing it with a resolutely Social Scientific approach that will ultimately serve to strengthen the hold of White Jewish Supremacy in the institutional Jewish world.
David Shasha