New Article: The Deleterious Transformation of Sephardic Identity: Vanessa Paloma and the End of Convivencia
David Shasha
The Deleterious Transformation of Sephardic Identity: Vanessa Paloma and the End of Convivencia
The current discourse on Sephardic Judaism has been controlled by Ashkenazim and, more specifically, by the parochial values of Zionism as a form of alienated Jewish nationalism.
The issue of acculturation that is central to the classical notion of Sephardic Convivencia, the ways in which Sephardim assimilated their Jewish religious values into the larger cultural sphere in the countries in which they lived, has taken a huge hit in the process.
I have recently discussed an important example of this Ashkenazi-Zionist process in an article on Rabbi Marc Angel and his enthusiastic praise for a new book attacking Convivencia by a Spanish Catholic scholar named Dario Fernandez-Morera:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/_nrcdGWekO0
Professor Fernandez-Morera is effectively an apologist for the criminal and genocidal Catholic regime of Medieval Spain which caused so much harm to the Jewish people and to those unfortunates who were forced to convert to Catholicism.
We are now seeing a new union between Zionist Jews and Christian ethnocentrists that has caused a great shift in our understanding of Sephardic history and the process of acculturation in the Convivencia model.
So it was with some interest that I read the following post in the Point of No Return blog on the young Sephardic scholar Vanessa Paloma:
Paloma comes from the world of Sephardic music; a logical place given that Ashkenazim continue to drain our community of its intellectual and religious leaders in an attempt to limit Sephardic representation to “Bourekas and Haminados” ephemera.
The younger generation of Sephardim has been dealing with a process controlled by Ashkenazim that has in Israel created a sense of “Mizrahi,” Oriental, identity which is currently associated with the Radical Right and a pronounced anti-Arab and anti-Muslim slant:
In my articles on Roy Hasan, the Ars Poetica group, and the Biton Committee I have traced a process that reflects an Arab Jewish identity that is tied to religious extremism, messianic Settler Zionism, and a very pronounced anti-Convivencia mentality. Israeli Mizrahim are proudly articulating their resentment for the depredations of official Israel in the 1950s and 60s, but with a distinctly Zionist bias.
Mizrahi Jews in Israel are solidly part of the Right Wing political bloc and, as we have seen in the case of Beitar Jerusalem soccer hooliganism, are implacably hostile to the Arabs. This has created a vicious paradox in their sense of themselves and their historical identity as Arab Jews.
The connection of Sephardim to the current government of Morocco thus provides a very interesting case study of what Convivencia might look like at the present moment.
The Point of No Return blog presents the matter with its usual anti-Arab bias:
The first Jewish film festival of Casablanca, which was organized in the Moroccan city by a Sephardic Jewish woman from Atlanta, The Times of Israel - received a mixed reception. However, as with much Moroccan 'coexistence PR', the government shows itself to be out of step with social forces, which are anti-'normalisation' with Israel and even anti-Semitic.
The current situation is controlled by the clashing ethno-religious Jewish and Muslim nationalisms; a point made clear in the JTA article on the festival:
Here is how JTA characterized some of the negative reaction to the event:
But the event also provoked negative reactions in Morocco, which despite being one of the Muslim world’s few countries where Jewish heritage is celebrated openly, nonetheless has a vociferous anti-Israel lobby that at times resorts to anti-Semitic rhetoric.
Jaouad Benaissi, an author and former member of the Socialist Union of Popular Forces party, complained on Facebook about the festival’s theme, writing that “man-made artworks have nothing to do with religion,” and therefore the Jewish theme was inappropriate – a message similar to that of Abdelilah Jouhari, a journalist who accused Paloma of “trying to make business with religion,” as reported by the news site Le 360.
This was Paloma’s response:
“My response was that Jewish is not necessarily religious but also cultural, and that in the tradition of Jewish film festivals which exist around the world, we want to start this dialogue around Moroccan history, culture and traditions of Jews as presented on the silver screen,” Paloma told JTA.
The dynamic here is based on the reality of Israel in the deterioration of Jewish life in the Arab-Muslim world. We are now at a stage in the process where an older tradition rooted in the Sephardic experience of Convivencia has largely been erased; replaced by the stark realities of those clashing nationalisms.
It is interesting that at the very time that we read of the Jewish film festival in Morocco we also saw Paloma publish a review of the new book on Sephardic Literature by University of Oregon Professor David Wacks:
http://www.sephardichorizons.org/Volume6/Issue2/Elbaz.html
It is quite instructive to bring the two articles together as we seek to better understand what is now happening in the world of Sephardic Studies and the ongoing attempt to destroy the Convivencia model.
Paloma opens her review this way:
This book addresses the question “What constitutes Sephardic literature?” While answering this question, Wacks delineates the continuum of how a Sephardic literary voice developed in pre- and post-expulsion communities. Addressing the thematic axes of theology, language and nation-building, David Wacks centers his study on the Sephardic longing for varying homelands (Zion - Iberia) as a hinge marker for the development of this literature.
Without beating around the bush, we immediately see the Zionist lens through which Wacks’ study will be filtered.
Shifting the center of Sephardic gravity from the values of acculturation as understood in the Convivencia process, the idea here is to see how Sephardic Jewish writers processed their parochial national identity in the Iberian world; a process that marks the alienated Ashkenazi character of the analysis.
Wacks goes out of his way in the book to stigmatize the Convivencia model as we see in his presentation of the great polymath Don Santob de Carrion, Rabbi Shem Tob Ardutiel:
The discomfort of
homeland/hostland in a literary voice is represented in the chapter on
Ardutiel’s work. Wacks states “Ardutiel is clear of his position, of the
difficulty of the living member of a marginalized religious minority proposing
to speak (or write) authoritatively on moral matters.” (108) His style of
writing the Proverbios is referred to as a textual performative
performance, because it was written in the vernacular, and not in a ‘written’
language par excellence like Hebrew. The Debate engages in a parody of the
medieval Arabic and Hebrew literary debate between the pen and the sword. Wacks
puts forth an interesting approach of interplay between
the Proverbios and the Debate: it is as if this interplay
represents the debate between Hebrew and Romance which embodied Ardutiel’s
anxiety due to the “increasingly unstable environment” which eventually led to
the expulsion of the Jews from Castile-León, Navarre and Portugal (126).
Wacks’ reductive reading of Don Santob’s richly evocative texts Proverbios Morales and The Debate of Pen and Scissors is mediated by the nationalist theme in a way that seeks to eliminate the acculturation process that has tied Sephardim to the complex cultural world(s) that flowered in the Iberian Peninsula from the time of the Muslim Conquest.
It is this complex civilization, replete with its synthesis of Arabic and Romance elements, that was so masterfully analyzed by the late Maria Rosa Menocal in her many books and articles.
I have presented that seminal work in a special tribute newsletter:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/menocal/davidshasha/L1jCWtW7umY/BecIXo_fBgAJ
Back in 2002 Menocal published an Op-Ed in The New York Times called “A Golden Reign of Tolerance”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/28/opinion/a-golden-reign-of-tolerance.html
In her memorable words:
What strikes us today about Al Andalus is that it was a chapter of European history during which Jews, Christians and Muslims lived side by side and, despite intractable differences and enduring hostilities, nourished a culture of tolerance.
She concludes the article in a way that would seem to be impossible in today’s highly-charged political environment:
But in the end, much of Europe far beyond the Andalusian world was shaped by the vision of complex and contradictory identities that was first made into an art form by the Andalusians. The enemies of this kind of cultural openness have always existed within each of our monotheistic religions, and often enough their visions of those faiths have triumphed. But at this time of year, and at this point in history, we should remember those moments when it was tolerance that won the day.
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks there was a sense among some that the old Andalusian-Sephardic model would be helpful in bringing the values of Convivencia to a tense world which had lost its cultural equilibrium.
We have now seen that this attempt to promote the values of Andalusian Convivencia has been stymied by the militant nationalistic values embodied in what the Ashkenazi scholar Bernard Lewis called the “Clash of Civilizations”; a matter I discuss in my Huffington Post article on the “Levantine Option”:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-shasha/a-jewish-voice-left-silen_b_487586.html
In Lewis’ words:
The conflict, coexistence, or combination of these two traditions [i.e. the Judeo-Christian and the Judeo-Islamic] within a single small state, with a shared religion and a common citizenship and allegiance, should prove illuminating. For Israel, this issue may have an existential significance, since the survival of the state, surrounded, outnumbered, and outgunned by neighbors who reject its very right to exist, may depend on its largely Western-derived qualitative edge.
I forcefully argued in the article against Lewis’ odious anti-Sephardic and anti-Convivencia biases:
What if the future of the Middle East lay in the amicable interaction of the three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in a symbiotic formation that lays out the commonalities rather than the deep-seated differences that are rooted in the Ashkenazi experience?
If such a symbiosis were desirable, the memory of Moorish Spain where the three religions were able to coexist and produce a civilization of great worth, would take prominence. The Sephardic voice would be central in articulating what was termed Convivencia, the creative cultural dynamic that fired medieval Spanish civilization, until its collapse in 1492.
“The Levantine Option” would help collapse the alienating cult of persecution harbored in classical Zionist thought and omnipresent in the rituals of the state of Israel, replacing it with a more positive view of the past. The nihilistic “realism” of the current Israeli approach, centered on the institutionalized perpetuation of the twin legacies of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, would be countered by memories of an indigenous Jewish past that had a constructive relationship with its surrounding environment. “The Levantine Option” would create a shared cultural space for Jews and Arabs to bring down the walls and barriers between the peoples.
As we have seen in the larger framework of Jewish-Arab relations in the intervening years, the Convivencia model – viciously attacked by racist Ashkenazi ethnocentrists like Bernard Lewis and younger scholars like Jonathan Ray and David Wacks – has not taken root. Menocal’s vision is in the process of being dismantled and the nationalist model has almost fully taken its place.
So there is the positive work that Paloma is doing with the Jewish film festival in Morocco, but then there is the very complex affiliation with a counter-Convivencia narrative rooted in Ashkenazi anomie and Zionist racism which informs the discourse on both sides of the divide.
We have seen the many limitations placed by Ashkenazim on the manner of Sephardi self-representation, as we have also seen the emergence of atavistic religious militants among both the Jews as well as the Muslims.
The current model of inter-cultural engagement is plagued by these prejudices, and by the haunting specter of an alienated Jewish identity that has sought to suppress the old Sephardic-Andalusian model of acculturation as processed in the Convivencia framework.
Once again the Ashkenazi Jewish consciousness has sought to subsume Sephardic identity and control its sense of memory and lived experience as a very human value.
In her review of the Wacks book Paloma makes reference to the presentation of Sephardic Humanism which is a direct attack on traditional Sephardic values as I have repeatedly presented them:
His fresh view of Sephardic humanism as “an obscure counter history of an emergent Spanish national state” (183), links Sephardim continuously with Spanish cultural and political development. Especially because of the vacuum left in Spain by the Jewish departure and the vacuum of Spain within the exiled Sephardim themselves, both communities continued to interact with each other, directly or indirectly, in the century following 1492.
In Wacks’ view, consistent with the resurgence of a racialist Eurocentric scholarship in Judaic Studies, Sephardic Humanism is rooted not in the acculturation process of Convivencia, but in the ethno-religious nationalism of the Hegelian tradition. This Sephardic Humanism is not inclusive, but ethnocentric, alienated, and divisive.
In other words, Wacks’ presentation of Sephardic Humanism is not open, cosmopolitan, tolerant, and pluralistic, but closed, intolerant, parochial, and defensive.
This image of the Sephardic heritage is a precise mirror of the Ashkenazi Jewish identity, and has thus served to suppress the one Jewish model that might allow what is now a dying Jewish community – fatally plagued by the depredations of Zionist national exclusivity and rigid Orthodox intolerance – to remake its culture in a dynamic world that has indeed adopted multiculturalism and an open tolerance of the Other.
The new Jewish consensus is one that has become closed off from the cultural vibrancy of classical Sephardic Religious Humanism. It has become the province of Ashkenazi ethnocentrism; a system that sees Jews as separated from the larger world and which has refuted the possibility of acculturation along the lines of the Andalusian model of Convivencia.
It is a tremendous loss not only to the Jewish community, but to a world that is struggling with a way out of the parochial hatreds rooted in the very atavism of the nationalisms being promoted by the Ashkenazim.
The loss of the Sephardic model has been calamitous, and as we have seen in the case of Vanessa Paloma the confusion over what Convivencia means has become problematic for Sephardim themselves.
In order for the Sephardic heritage to reclaim its proper place in the Jewish discourse it will be necessary to reject the alienation of the Ashkenazi vision and restore the true meaning of Jewish Humanism as understood in the larger process of Convivencia.
David Shasha