New Article: “Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardischkeit has Found a Very Comfortable and Unthreatening Home at Seattle’s University of Washington
David Shasha
“Bourekas and Haminados” Sephardischkeit has Found a Very Comfortable and Unthreatening Home at Seattle’s University of Washington
Back in 2014 Tablet magazine published the following article on the Seattle Sephardic Jewish community written by Emily Alhadeff:
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/179790/seattle-ladino-revival
As we continue to watch helplessly as Sephardim are erased from the larger Ashkenazi-dominated Jewish discourse it has become clear that our role is limited to that of a minor curiosity.
Quaint, but ultimately not very important, the Sephardim add exotic spice and color to a Jewish world where all the heavy lifting on serious issues is handled by Ashkenazim.
Around the time of the Jewish Holidays we get articles on the quaint Sephardic food by writers like Joan Nathan:
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/213795/moroccan-carrot-salad
Moroccan Jews have carrot salad, but not much to say on the pressing issues facing the Jewish community. We will not find Sephardic Jews speaking out when it comes to the matters being discussed at the adult Jewish table.
Prominent in the current Sephardic “Bourekas and Haminados” revival is Professor Devin Naar who has partnered with the local Seattle community to promote a version of Sephardic history and culture that has been designed not to threaten Ashkenazim, or to insist that Sephardim should indeed be represented at the adult Jewish table where the important issues are being discussed.
Sephardim must know their place and remain in it!
Naar’s recent article in Tablet magazine on a meeting of the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America to celebrate its centennial at the Cedarhurst Synagogue on Long Island is an excellent case in point:
The article begins in typical “Bourekas and Haminados” fashion:
This Sunday, 350 guests will gather at the Sephardic Temple in Cedarhurst, Long Island, to enjoy live music and feast on traditional Jewish cuisine from Greece and Turkey—tarama (fish roe salad), fasolia (green beans in tomato), bamyas (stewed okra), and raki and lokum (Turkish delights) for dessert—and celebrate the centennial of a pillar of New York’s Sephardic community: the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America. While the celebration will be an opportunity to honor the organization’s past and present, there is also a sense of uncertainly about its future: engaging the next generation of the Brotherhood is integral to its success.
In 1915, a group of 40 young Jewish men and women from Salonica—a city in today’s northern Greece (now called Thessaloniki) that was once home to the largest and most dynamic Ladino-speaking population in the world—convened at a café on the Lower East Side of New York City. There, they established the Salonican Brotherhood of America, or La Ermandad as it’s known in Ladino, which they incorporated in 1916. My family joined after arriving to America from Salonica in 1924; my great-grandfather served as a rabbi for the Brotherhood’s synagogues in Harlem and later New Brunswick, New Jersey, where, in the Brotherhood cemetery, five generations of my family are buried.
Later in the article Naar reinforces the “Bourekas and Haminados” theme and adds a good dollop of longing and nostalgia for a “lost” culture:
In 1947, a dozen other organizations established by Jews from Turkey and Greece merged with the Brotherhood to create the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America. For Bernard Ouziel, an attorney with family roots in Tekirdağ, Turkey, who has been SJBA’s president for 35 years, the organization is about the joy of community, getting together in a non-religious setting to chat over “social soul food” like borekas (savory pastries) and kezo blanko (feta cheese). But he sees the Brotherhood facing another crossroads: The younger generations is fully Americanized and don’t have the same sense of nostalgia. The future, he said, is uncertain—a membership of 2,500 families in the 1970s, now hovers around 1,500—so he’s looking to the organization’s new executive director, Rabbi Nissim Elnecavé, to set a vision for the future.
As we have learned all too well, the Ashkenazim have colonized the Sephardim and it is the various Ashkenazi Orthodox religious ideologies, and the Zionism of Eastern European Jews, that now permeate the Sephardic community, and caused many intractable controversies and divisions in our ranks.
The wallowing in nostalgia obscures the much wider historical framework of Ottoman Jewish civilization and its contributions to the Jewish cultures of the Middle East and Europe.
A resplendent figure like the grand rabbi Haim Nahum Effendi, the last Hakham Bashi of the Ottoman Empire, later Chief Rabbi of Egypt, is indeed representative of a tradition whose finest exemplar is the brilliant polymath Moses Almosnino:
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/1294-almosnino
Alisa Meyuhas Ginio has written an excellent paper on Almosnino’s historical work Cronicas de los Reyes Otomanos:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXOHRTbS1RREtLdXM/view?ths=true
In the article we see the unique Sephardic perspective on history and politics that is contained in the thinking of Almosnino and the significant ways in which it departs from the Shtetl Judaism of the Ashkenazim. Sephardic Jewish Humanism is indeed a worldly and cosmopolitan culture that looks outward to the larger world rather than internally.
The late Victor Sanua wrote an excellent article on Nahum’s illustrious career which embodied the values of Sephardic Jewish Humanism and the cosmopolitan worldliness of Almosnino and the rich Ottoman Jewish tradition:
http://www.sephardicstudies.org/haim.html
I have provided a comprehensive review of this intellectual history and its implications for Jewish Studies in the following bibliographic essay:
Classic studies like Mair Jose Benardete’s Hispanic Culture and Character of the Sephardic Jews and David de Sola Pool’s two books on the history of Congregation Shearith Israel listed in my bibliography remain out of print and unread, not only by the Sephardim, but by the Jewish community as a whole. These books are unavailable and unknown at this time.
But we do have an outpouring of the “Bourekas and Haminados” ephemera all over the Jewish media.
The Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Washington has been presenting the Sephardi ephemera under Naar’s ambitious leadership:
http://jewishstudies.washington.edu/sephardic-studies/rhodes-boreka-recipe-saved/
Ty Alhadeff’s articles bask in the glow of the ephemeral, as we can see from the very first paragraph of this puff piece on Bourekas:
If there’s one thing people know about Sephardic Jews, it’s borekas, those indulgent turnovers stuffed with cheese and potato or other types of gomo (filling; gomu as pronounced among the Rhodeslis) baked in dough ranging from fine phyllo to flaky yeast to pie crust. Known as börek in Turkish, the cuisine is part of a shared culinary tradition from the former Ottoman Empire, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean basin. Sephardic Jews enjoyed this and other savory pastries filled with a variety of vegetables known in Ladino as dezayuno (breakfast) and often eaten with guevos (en) haminados (brown hard boiled eggs).
Alhadeff, a graduate of the University of Washington and a member of the Seattle Sephardic Jewish community, now works under Naar at the UW Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and writes regularly for their website:
http://jewishstudies.washington.edu/author/ty-alhadeff/
Looking at the list of his articles we can see the perspective that he and Naar bring to the study of the Sephardic heritage. It is indeed very quaint and exotic and unthreatening. It presents superficial content on food, customs, folklore, and the Ladino language of the Sephardic immigrants. There is even a smattering of a very bland and generic Jewish culture which never truly uncovers the brilliance of Sephardic Religious Humanism and its place in the history of Jewish Civilization.
We will recall the excellent, and very revealing, book by the Sephardic community leader and activist Joseph Papo, Sephardim in 20th Century America, which provides some very excruciating and agonizing detail on the many failures of institutional life in the Sephardic community here in the United States:
Papo’s book contains a seemingly endless litany of initiatives that never got off the ground because of internal dissension and financial woes. His historical analysis provides us with a very accurate explanation as to why the Sephardim find themselves in a subservient position to the Ashkenazim.
After dominating the intellectual culture of American Judaism for more than two centuries, under the leadership of figures like Gershom Mendes Seixas, Sabato Morais, and Henry Pereira Mendes, the Sephardim of the late 20th century found themselves bereft of capable leadership and cut out of what has now become an Ashkenazi-run Jewish institutional world.
We have been given a glimpse of what this old American Jewish world looked like in the brilliant work of Arthur Kiron, who has presented Sabato Morais’ career and its ideological colorations:
I have organized a special newsletter on the old culture of Sephardic Jewish Humanism featuring my article on Kiron’s dissertation on Morais:
We can contrast Kiron’s scholarship with the exclusionary views of Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, currently the leader of Congregation Shearith Israel:
In his recent Wall Street Journal article “The Jews of the American Revolution” he manages to completely ignore the Sephardic foundations of American Jewish history, and adds insult to injury by making exclusive use of the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox leader Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik to process this history. We never get to see the true history of American Jews and the essential role played by the old Andalusian tradition in the formation of American Judaism.
This militant form of Ashkenazi-centrism can also be seen in the work of Rabbi Zev Eleff who, like Soloveichik, presents an American Judaism rooted in Eastern European Jewish values, as discussed by Daniel Harari in the following article:
While the Ashkenazim continue to write us out of Jewish history, the Sephardic community remains inert and incapable of defending its interests.
It is wonderful to see the nostalgic memories of the older Sephardim and the way that they prize their food and folklore. But the Sephardic heritage is about far more than “Bourekas and Haminados.”
We have a rich tradition of literature, religious studies, and engagement with the intellectual challenges presented by the host cultures in the countries we once lived in. This heritage has much to contribute to the current Jewish discourse and might in fact be able to ameliorate many of the vexing problems that have been created by Ashkenazi factionalism and the oppressive dysfunction it has generated.
As we scan the Jewish media today we can see how it is that only Ashkenazim have raised their voices on the most pressing issues of the day. Sephardim on the other hand are limited to their recipes and nostalgic memories of a culture that does not exist anymore and which has been erased from the contemporary Jewish consciousness.
I have recently written a number of articles on the current attack on Sephardic culture and the tradition of Convivencia that is reflected in the work of institutional Judaic Studies scholars like David Nirenberg and Steven Wasserstrom. These academics have painted a very bleak picture of Jewish life in the Muslim world under the dominating influence of the toxic ideas of Bernard Lewis and his loyal disciples Norman Stillman and Jane Gerber.
Sadly, the Sephardim themselves have adopted this benighted perspective on their own heritage:
It is Ashkenazi Jewish scholars who have so vigorously promoted the “Clash of Civilizations” thesis which has done so much damage to relations with the Muslim world that once nurtured the Sephardim.
The landmark scholarship of Ammiel Alcalay and Maria Rosa Menocal promoting Convivencia has been shunted aside in academic Judaic Studies in order to make room for the nihilistic approach which promotes a view of discord and division in Sephardic Jewish history, reflecting the tendentious values of Sephardi-haters like Yitzhak Baer and Ben-Zion Netanyahu and their Ashkenazi elitism.
Relegating ourselves to food and folklore traditions will not resolve the problem of Sephardic representation in the Jewish community at the present time. It will only serve to reinforce Ashkenazi hegemony and the continued disintegration of our culture and history.
David Shasha