But the processes of Germanization and Christianization have by no means been complete. The old Sephardic families continue to compose a tight-knit, proud, and aristocratic elite who know who is “one of us” and who is not; who see each other at weddings, coming-out parties, and funerals; and who worship, with their own particular variations in the orthodox Jewish service, at the Spanish and Portuguese synagogues such as New York’s Shearith Israel, the oldest in the United States. They lead lives of wealth, exclusivity, privacy, a privacy so deep and so complete that few people remember that they still exist—which is just what the Sephardim prefer, for the Sephardim have by nature been shy, reticent, the opposite of showy.
2
WHO ARE THEY?
How much each person knows and understands about the past is one of the great preoccupations of the Sephardim everywhere. With some, it is a hobby; with others, an obsession. This is very Jewish. After all, the concept of zekhut avot, or ancestral merit, is said to provide the spiritual capital of the Jewish people. In this is embodied the idea that the past must be correctly interpreted in order that it can be passed on to enrich future generations. But there are also strong overtones here of a belief in predestination—that meritorious ancestors offer a kind of guarantee that their descendants will be meritorious also.
When one is dealing with hundreds of years of family history, and when family history relates to political and religious history, confusions and contradictions are bound to arise. And when family histories interconnect and tangle in such a variety of ways as they do within the Sephardic community, and as they have done for centuries, there are bound to be jealousies and rivalries and no small amount of bickering. This makes the Sephardic community a lively place. Where everyone professes to be an expert on the past, and where everyone wants to claim the best ancestors—and where there are many claimants for the same people—everyone must be on his toes.
Take New York’s Nathan family. The Nathans are indirectly descended from Abraham de Lucena, one of the first Jews to set foot on American soil in 1655, and, in the process of their long history in this country, the Nathans are now “connected,” if not directly related, to all the other old families—the Seixases, the Gomezes, the Hendrickses, the de Silvas, the Solises, and Philadelphia’s distinguished Solis-Cohens. Like Massachusetts Adamses, Nathans have managed to produce men of stature in almost every generation. These have included such figures as the late New York State Justice Edgar J. Nathan, Jr., who was also Manhattan borough president under Mayor La Guardia, and United States Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, and—looking further back—Rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas, called “the patriot rabbi,” who was the spiritual leader of Shearith Israel during the American Revolution. During the war, he closed his synagogue in New York and moved the congregation to Philadelphia rather than ask his flock to pray for George III. Later, he assisted at George Washington’s inauguration. His niece, Sarah, married a cousin, Mendes Seixas Nathan, a banker who was one of the little group who gathered one day under a buttonwood tree in lower Manhattan to draw up the constitution of the New York Stock Exchange. Annie Nathan Meyer, the founder of Barnard College, who was a granddaughter of Isaac Mendes Seixas Nathan, once wrote: “Looking back on it, it seems to me that this intense pride, accompanied by a strong sense of noblesse oblige among the Sephardim was the nearest approach to royalty in the United States. The Nathan family possessed this distinguishing trait to a high degree.” As a child, she recalled, the subject of cheating at school came up. She never forgot her mother’s clipped comment: “Nathans don’t cheat.”
Nathans are also proud to assert that “Nathans have never been poor.” The first Nathan arrived in New York with a comfortable amount of money given him by his father, a prosperous merchant in England. So it has been for as far back as Nathans can trace their lineage, which, according to some members of the family, is a long way indeed. Once a Nathan was asked: “Is it true that your family traces itself to King Solomon?” The reply was: “At the time of the Crucifixion, it was said so.”
Today, nearly two thousand years later, there are still prominent and active Nathans. Emily de Silva Solis Nathan is an attractive, Spanish-looking woman with an oval face and olive skin, and an air of quiet cultivation and scholarly efficiency. She heads a New York public relations firm which represents such distinguished clients as Washington’s Smithsonian Institution. Her brother was Justice Nathan, a cousin was Justice Cardozo (the family law firm was Cardozo & Nathan), and another cousin was Emma Lazarus, who wrote, among others, the poem (“Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses …”) that is engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty. A nephew, Frederic Solis Nathan, also a well-known New York lawyer, is first assistant corporation counsel to Mayor Lindsay. Nathan men, quite clearly, favor the law. Emily Nathan lives in a large, airy apartment filled with antiques and the quiet feel of “old money,” overlooking Central Park. A few blocks to the north, she can see the handsome colonnaded façade of Shearith Israel, which her ancestors helped found.
Emily Nathan’s growing-up years were properly private schooled, governessed, servant tended. The Nathans were a large and—rather typically of the Sephardim, who tend to feel most comfortable when in each other’s company—extremely close family. With the Nathan children and their parents in the big old brownstone in West Seventy-fifth Street lived not only a grandmother, Mrs. David Hays Solis (whose maiden name had also been Nathan), but also a maiden aunt, Miss Elvira Nathan Solis. Aunt Ellie, as she was called, was a sweet-faced, blue-eyed, fragile-looking lady who dressed with spinsterly restraint and always smelled of sachet. The children loved the smell of Aunt Ellie’s closets and played hide-and-seek there among the neatly hung rows of dresses. Aunt Ellie was of indeterminate age, either older or younger than her sister, the children’s mother—they never knew. Age was a taboo subject in the Nathan household; the children were told it was bad form to ask people how old they were and, as Emily Nathan says, “There were no drivers’ licenses in those days.” (Not even Dr. Stern was able to uncover Aunt Ellie’s birth date for his book.)
Aunt Ellie was a great favorite of the children. In the evenings, while the children were being given early supper, she would often leave the adult company in the drawing room to join the children in the dining room and tell them stories. They were tales of Revolutionary heroes and heroines—of brave soldiers who plotted to blow up British ships in New York Harbor, of a woman who slipped through enemy lines to carry food to Revolutionary troops, of a sailor imprisoned at Dartmoor during the War of 1812 who later rose to occupy the highest rank in the United States Navy, though he started as a cabin boy sleeping on a folded sail. Aunt Ellie’s stories were rich with the smell of gunsmoke, the slash of cutlasses, colored red with blood spilled in patriotism’s great cause.
In those days, the Nathan family portraits were arrayed in the paneled dining room of the Nathan brownstone, where the children ate, and only gradually did Emily Nathan begin to relate Aunt Ellie’s stories—“which at first seemed to me to be nothing more than wonderful eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fairy tales”—to the faces on the dining room walls.
“Was that a relative?” Emily Nathan would ask in the middle of one of the stories.
“Yes, we are connected,” Aunt Ellie would reply.
The sense of history, and the sense of a certain long continuity between family past and family present, gradually began to give the little girl a sense of pride and a sense of security. “Later on,” Emily Nathan says today, “when certain things happened to me as a Jew that might have upset some people—when I encountered prejudice, for instance, or heard of acts of bias and anti-Semitism—I was able to view them with a certain understanding. Things that would bother other people didn’t bother me because I knew, thanks to Aunt Ellie’s stories, where I fit into the scheme of things. I was able to rise to occasions.”
Gradually, as Emily Nathan grew up, the dining room portraits seemed to grow until they loo
med not only over the big room but over the entire Nathan family. Implacable, with, for the most part, stern and unsmiling faces, the old pictures seemed to dominate the Nathans’ lives, reminding them daily of what it was to be a Nathan. Some of the ancestors, Aunt Ellie reminded the children, had not always been on the best of terms with one another. One of Aunt Ellie’s whimsical little jokes was to say, at breakfast, looking up at the portraits: “I see your great-great-grandfather has a black eye this morning. He’s been quarreling again with your cousin Seixas.”
For years the Nathan children, and eventually the grandchildren, clamored for more of Aunt Ellie’s stories. She seemed to have an endless supply, and could hold them spellbound for hours. Backward and backward she went, back into the Middle Ages, back into Moorish courtyards that dripped with bougainvillea and the splash of stone fountains. For now she was telling of Nathans who had flourished in Spain and Portugal during the centuries of Moorish rule, and of Nathans who had struggled to survive after the Catholic Reconquest. There were Nathans who had seen their synagogues desecrated, who had stood trial for “Judaizing” before Inquisitional courts in the plazas mayores of Seville and Toledo during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who had gone to the stake proudly rather than relinquish their faith. There were other Nathans who had pretended to accept Christianity, continuing to worship as Jews in secret places, and there were others who had escaped—some to Holland, some to England, whence the earliest American Nathan emigrated in 1773.
The children liked Aunt Ellie’s Spanish stories best, for they were more colorful, peopled as they were with beautiful ladies wearing tall combs and mantillas, royal courts with armored knights in swords, horse-drawn chariots pulled through the night on desperate missions, dukes and princes sighing for maidens’ hands. She also told of doubloons being buried by moonlight in a garden, of men thrown into dungeons to be forgotten for years, only to make brilliant escapes; of a man warned by cryptic messages from his king that the Inquisition was at hand; of another whose servants were able to smuggle him to the safety of his ship by hiding him in a sack of laundry. On and on Aunt Ellie’s stories went, weaving a vast, rich tapestry of gold and royal purple threads, heroic in size and wonder, spanning more than a thousand years of time, filling the minds of the little Nathans with visions of, quite literally, castles in Spain.
“Yes, we are connected,” Aunt Ellie would assure them. “We are connected.”
When Emily Nathan’s parents died, the family portraits were divided between Emily and her sister, Rosalie. Today half the collection (many of which are very old and precious) hangs in Emily’s apartment, and half is in that of Rosalie, who is now Mrs. Henry S. Hendricks. Like her sister’s, Mrs. Hendricks’ apartment overlooks the park (it is in one of New York’s “great” apartment buildings, on Central Park West), and it is similarly filled with antiques and family treasures in porcelain, old books, and heavy antique silver. Mrs. Hendricks is very much a grande dame in New York’s Sephardic community. There are even some who would insist that she is the grande dame. Rosalie Nathan Hendricks not only has her Nathan heritage working for her, but she is also a Hendricks—by marriage as well as by virtue of the fact that several of her own cousins are Hendrickses—and the Hendrickses are every bit as grand a family, if not even grander, than the Nathans. The Hendricks family—in Spain the name was Henriques—founded the first metal concern in America, a copper-rolling mill in New Jersey which processed copper that was mined around Newark. The Hendrickses sold copper to both Paul Revere and Robert Fulton, and became America’s earliest millionaires, in fact, before there was such a word.
Not long ago, Mrs. Hendricks (who has two daughters), realized that the name, with her husband’s death, has died out in the male line. In order that the Hendrickses and their works on this earth should not be forgotten entirely, Mrs. Hendricks gathered together a collection of Hendricks family account books, ledgers, business and personal letters, many written in the Spanish cursive script, and other memorabilia that had been collected for over two hundred years, and presented everything to the New-York Historical Society. The Hendricks Collection is an astonishing one, consisting of more than 17,000 manuscripts and dating as far back as 1758, and at the time of her gift there was considerable comment in the press. Who were the Hendrickses? everyone wanted to know. The name didn’t seem to ring any sort of bell. Reporters rushed to the New York Public Library. No Hendrickses are listed in the central file, and they are in neither the Dictionary of American Biography nor its predecessors, the National Cyclopaedia of American Biography and Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography.
This, it turns out, is exactly how the Hendrickses have preferred it to be. “The Hendrickses never liked personal publicity,” says Mrs. Hendricks, a compact lady in her seventies. “Some people just say they don’t like publicity. We meant it. We considered publicity a preoccupation of commonplace people. We were quiet people who did what had to be done in a quiet way. We left publicity to the lightweights.”
When Mrs. Hendricks was gathering together her vast gift—it occupies two dozen file boxes—a number of her relatives, and other members of the Sephardic community, expressed the opinion that the papers should rightly go to the American Jewish Historical Society. But Mrs. Hendricks, a determined woman who, one suspects, does not spend much time on opinions that run counter to her own (when she enters receptions or synagogue functions, the way parts before her like the waters of the Red Sea), was adamant. The recipient should be the New-York Historical Society. “I thought they belonged here, in the general community, since we are an old New York family,” Mrs. Hendricks says.
Mr. Piza Mendes, a smooth-faced man past seventy who looks at least twenty years younger (he has not a trace of gray hair), does not think Mrs. Hendricks knows much about Sephardic history, and does not hesitate to say so. Mrs. Hendricks, meanwhile, thinks little of Mr. Piza Mendes’ historical theories. Though the two are distantly connected (via the pre-Revolutionary Rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas), grew up together, and see each other often at the same parties and committee meetings, they are nearly always politely but firmly at loggerheads. Anyone about to discuss the Sephardic past is warned by Mrs. Hendricks to “Watch out for Piza!” Mr. Mendes, meanwhile, says airily, “Rosalie doesn’t usually know what she’s talking about.” It has been this way for years. Mr. Mendes, comfortably off, keeps a midtown office where he manages the affairs of his estate, and spends his spare time studying Sephardica.
People like Mrs. Henry Hendricks feel that Mr. Piza Mendes spends entirely too much time trying to elevate the memory of his father, the late Reverend Henry Pereira Mendes, who for nearly half a century, from 1877 to 1920, was rabbi of the Shearith Israel congregation. Mr. Mendes, the feeling is, is trying to raise his father to a kind of sainthood, a position inappropriate to a religion that does not have saints. Certainly no man reveres his father more and, in this regard, Mr. Mendes offers an elaborately illuminated chart of his father’s ancestry. This family tree, less dispassionate than those of Dr. Stern, concentrates mostly on ancestors who achieved positions of merit or heroism. One grandfather, for example, David Aaron de Sola of Amsterdam, is noted to have been a “voluminous scholar.” But a closer scrutiny of the Mendes family tree reveals—in a kind of capsule history, as it were—the story of the Sephardim, where they came from, and what they endured. The earliest Mendes ancestor uncovered was Baruch ben Isaac Ibn Daud de Sola, who lived in the ninth century in the Spanish kingdom of Navarre, then a desolate region whose rise to prominence and power was still more than a hundred years away. In the next generation, however, we find Michael Ibn Daud de Sola, who has moved to the southern city of Seville, a great Moorish capital, where he has achieved the title of “physician.” From here on, in Mr. Piza Mendes’ family tree, we can watch the de Sola ancestors rise to positions of prominence in Moorish Spain. One ancestor was a “scholarly Hebrew author,” and another was a “rabbi and Hebrew poet.” At last, in the late thirteenth century, we s
ee a de Sola given the ennobling “Don.” He was Don Bartolomé de Sola, and was given his title by Alexander IV of Aragon.
For several generations, all goes well with the de Solas. (One was “Rabbi of Spain.”) Then, in Granada, in 1492, we see that Isaac de Sola was “banished,” and “fled to Portugal.” Through the long Inquisitional years, the de Solas vanish from record, and we imagine them wandering across the face of Europe, from city to city, trying to find a place to put down roots. In the sixteenth century, a de Sola turns up in Amsterdam. But, in the meantime, some de Solas must have remained in Portugal, somehow able—helped by pretending to convert to Christianity—to escape the Inquisitors, because, as late as 1749, we see Aaron de Sola, born in Portugal, escaping to London, where he “threw off his Marrano name,” the Christian alias he had used to keep his pursuers at bay. That same year his son also fled from Lisbon, but he chose to go to Amsterdam. From here on, in both Amsterdam and London, and eventually New York, we see the de Sola family regathering its strength down to Eliza de Sola, who married Abraham Pereira Mendes II, father of the rabbi whom Mr. Piza Mendes reveres so much.
Meanwhile, on the Mendes side of the family tree, there were equally colorful figures. There was Dona Gracia Mendes, for example, a great beauty who was known in Portugal by her Christian alias, Lady Beatrice de Luna. When her wealthy husband died, she went—still as Lady Beatrice—to Antwerp, where, with her looks and money, she became a great social figure. She lived in a palace and gave great balls to which all the titles of Belgium including the king vied for invitations. She also proved herself to be a shrewd businesswoman and, trading her husband’s fortune on the Antwerp bourse, she vastly increased it. At a masked ball a hooded stranger in a black cape whispered to her, “Are you a secret Jewess?”—an unpopular thing to be in Belgium at that time. It was warning enough to Lady Beatrice, who withdrew her money the next morning from her Antwerp banks and went to Amsterdam, where an enclave of well-placed Sephardim was rapidly gathering. Here it was safe to resume her real name of Dona Gracia Mendes, and she did so—and prospered in the Dutch stock market.
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