The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  As if that were not enough, she crowed: “I wear the crimson of nobility by right of that proud name [Brandon], and wear that peerless name as a diadem of stars upon my brow: When we were very young, I married Lyman da Fonseca Brandon!” She then proceeded to recite all her ex-husband’s genealogical credentials—the Duke of Suffolk, Mary, Queen of Scots, Kitty Mellish, and all the rest.

  Her pamphlet went on to quote a lengthy testimonial in her behalf from Lyman Brandon. “I know Frances Marion Brandon,” her former husband wrote somewhat elliptically. “She is an Ace … A phenomenon, a paragon among women; one in a thousand thousand, to know her is to love, respect, honor, and cherish all womanhood as epitomized in her. Cast in heroic mold, modest, self-sacrificing … of invincible courage … gladly go to the scaffold for principle, for THE TRUTH … inspiration to women … her great soul … glorious womanhood.…” Lyman Brandon’s prose sounded suspiciously like his former wife’s, and he was every bit as prolix.

  Finally, after a detailed recitation of Mr. Gillespie’s “foul deeds,” Mrs. Brandon’s paper terminated with these words:

  Duped? Humbugged? Hoaxed? I was. We all were! But CREDIT ME ALWAYS WITH THIS, THE HIGHEST FEATHER OF MY CAP: It was I, who called Gillespie’s bluff; smoked him out; treed him! I who rendered that supreme service to my fellow citizens. The Artful Dodger caught at last! Another prize captured by me; or rather, a prize capture. But those of you who do not yet know me may ask, have I any proofs? Have I? Have I? My turn to thunder now!

  What was it Crockett said? “Come on down, Gillespie; you’re a gone soon!”

  And as the date for the trial approached, these words turned out to be prophetic. Mr. Gillespie was indeed gone. He had vanished without a trace.

  And as for Frances Brandon, poor woman, her pompous and windy pamphlet had made her a laughingstock. While she attitudinized, New York giggled. While she fumed and ranted and exhumed fifteenth-century ancestors, readers of New York newspapers hugged their sides. She had made being related to the Grand Almoner of Ferdinand and Isabella seem—simply—funny.

  To the Sephardic community of New York, Mrs. Brandon’s behavior was a deep affront. She was, after all, using a Sephardic connection by marriage in order to establish her integrity; a pedigree she had merely married was being tossed around and advertised for all to see. Furthermore, Brandon was now no longer her husband but only her ex-husband. It was all just another reminder of how thin the fabric of Sephardic life had grown to be. As one of the Nathans wrote to a Philadelphia cousin: “In case it isn’t obvious by her behavior, this Brandon woman is not one of us.”

  But of course the feeling that there is some sort of mystical advantage in being a Sephardic Jew, or even in bearing the traces of Sephardic “blood,” has persisted, persists. In the opening paragraphs of his autobiography, the late Bernard Baruch, whose father had been a German immigrant, wrote: “My grandfather, Bernhard Baruch, whose name I bear, had an old family relic, a skull, on which was recorded the family genealogy. It appeared that the Baruchs were of a rabbinical family and of Portuguese-Spanish origin.… Grandfather also claimed descent from Baruch the Scribe, who edited the prophecies of Jeremiah and whose name is given to one of the books of the Apocrypha.”

  At the same time, the great financier admitted in a sheepish tone that was quite unlike him: “Somewhere along the line there must have been an admixture of Polish or Russian stock.”

  And John L. Loeb, the present head of the banking firm Loeb, Rhoades & Company, is more ancestrally proud of his mother, the former Adeline Moses, than of his father, who founded the giant banking house. The Moseses were an old Sephardic family from the South who, though somewhat depleted from the days when they had maintained a vast plantation with slaves and cotton fields, were nonetheless disapproving when their daughter married Mr. Loeb, “an ordinary German immigrant.”

  Both Messrs. Baruch and Loeb are dutifully listed in Dr. Stern’s registry of the Old Guard.

  21

  “AN ALTOGETHER DIFFERENT SORT”

  Tephardim in the New World might dream of titled ancestors in plumes and crests and jeweled swords, who had been the poets, philosophers, physicians, judges, astronomers, and courtiers during Spain’s most glorious moments. But there were hundreds of thousands of other Jews, also Sephardic but with less elaborate claims, who descended from Spain’s Jewish tailors, cobblers, blacksmiths, and knife grinders. At the time of the Expulsion Edict, these families had not been able to afford the enormous bribes demanded by Inquisitional officers that would get them sent, along with their property, to lucrative northern ports in Holland, Belgium, and England. Being poor, they could not afford to become Marranos, who had to live by paying bribes. Being poor, they also lacked the sophistication and poise it took to lead the Marrano’s double life. Finally, being poor and unsophisticated, they lacked the adaptability that would have allowed them to accept conversion.

  There was nothing for these Jews but to surrender their money and their houses and escape. Some had fled to northern Africa. Others went eastward, across the Mediterranean, to Turkey, where they accepted the sultan’s invitation, or to the islands of Rhodes and Marmara, or to Salonica and the Gallipoli Peninsula, areas where the Jews knew they would be well treated because these lands were still ruled by the Moslems.

  There, in backwaters of history, it was as though a giant door had swung closed on these Sephardim, leaving them frozen in time. They were poor, uneducated, living in tight little communities of their coreligionists, proud, mystical, working by day as farmers or fishermen or small trades-people, returning at night to their fires and their prayer books, and their evenings of singing cantos and romanzas, in the pure medieval tongue. As “guests” of the Moslems, they were considered a separate and autonomous people, permitted to preserve their religious and cultural habits, as well as their strange language. For they did not, as the upper-class Spanish Jews did, speak Castilian. They spoke Ladino, a Judeo-Spanish mixture which sounded like Spanish but contained many Hebrew words and expressions, and was written in Hebrew characters. In Spain, Ladino had helped them preserve the privacy of some of their business dealings. Now it simply served to isolate and insulate them further as the world passed them by.

  While Reform Judaism was remaking the pattern of Jewish life, threatening to topple the traditional orthodoxy, these Jews knew nothing of it. Word of the European pogroms never reached them, nor did any kind of anti-Semitism. At the same time, they remained fiercely and proudly Spanish, and were convinced that one day they would be asked to return to Spain again. When they left Spain, the heads of families had taken the keys to their houses with them. Now the key to la casa vieja—the old house—was passed on from father to son, while decades turned into generations, and generations into centuries. These Jews had developed a rationale to explain why they had been expelled from Spain. It was, they decided, the Lord’s punishment. Like the Jews in the Old Testament, they were being made to suffer because they had failed to cleave sufficiently to Judaic precepts. They had been insufficiently pious, and had failed to obey every letter of every Talmudic law. And so, while Jews elsewhere were modernizing and liberalizing their attitudes, practices, and rituals, these Sephardim were moving in the opposite direction, not only toward a greater piety and a more intense mysticism, but also becoming hyper-ritualistic, more orthodox than the Orthodox, their ways all but incomprehensible to others.

  In the synagogues, the women were not only seated separately from the men, but behind heavy curtains, so that they would not distract the men from their prayers. Sephardic home life in such outposts as Rhodes and Salonica became heavily centered around the dinner table, where the preparation and serving of food was a formalized adjunct of religion; indeed, the Meal, the Bath, and the Prayer were a kind of trinity of Old World Sephardic life. Much of a mother’s day was spent in her cochina, working at her stove preparing such traditional Spanish dishes as paella, pastelitos con carne, and spinata con arroz for her family. If callers dr
opped in, the woman of the house, no matter how poor she was, was required to urge food on them—wine and nut cookies, perhaps, or sesame seed pretzels, or eggs baked in their shells for days and days until the whites had turned honey-colored. And to refuse food when it was offered was regarded as the highest form of insult.

  In these Sephardic households, it was very much a man’s world. The man of the house was known as el rey, the king, and his sons were los hijos del rey, and were treated accordingly. In skullcaps and shawls, the men of the house were served their meals first, with the women waiting upon them, bringing them saucers of warm water and towels between courses so that the men and boys could wash and wipe their hands at the table. The woman might stuff the grape leaves—plucked from the inevitable grape arbor planted outside each door—but it was the man’s job to go into the market to shop for meat, to find the best eggplants, tomatoes, spinach, and rice. It was also considered proper for a husband to supervise his wife’s cooking procedure, to stand at her shoulder with suggestions and criticism, and periodically to sample and taste, perhaps even picking up the spoon himself to stir in a bit of grated clove or oregano if he felt it was needed. A wife would never resent this sort of treatment from a husband because every good Sephardic woman knew that the worst punishment a man could inflict upon a woman was to reject—by pushing aside his plate—food that she had prepared.

  Sabbath meals particularly were surrounded by rules and rituals. All generations of a family gathered about a patriarchal table on which was spread a stiff white cloth reserved specifically for Sabbath use, and the meal proceeded with strictest formality. Everything used at the Sabbath was kept in special storage. Even Sabbath clothing was stored separately from the clothes of every day. Each item of food must be cooked in its traditional pot, served on its appointed platter, and eaten from its assigned plate. Onion could not mix with garlic, nor could meat dishes be served with fish, milk, or eggs. Even threads of different origins—linen, cotton, and silk—could not be used in the same fabrics if these were to be brought forth, or worn, on the Sabbath. To carry anything on one’s person—so much as a handkerchief—was a violation of Sabbath rules.

  The Sephardic women were the custodians of the secrets of endurcos, the ancient folk magic the Jews had carried with them out of Spain. Endurcos was supposed to be white magic—used exclusively to cure the sick—and so it worked hand in hand, rather than at odds, with both orthodox medicine and orthodox religion. The ingredients of endurcos were, for the most part, herbs and spices—salt, garlic, clove, oregano, marjoram, honey, almonds, halvah—and its forms (chants, prayers, songs in Ladino, spells, and gestures) were traditionally in the hands of women past the age of menopause, called tias or “aunties.”

  In an old world Sephardic community, a tia is a woman of considerable importance. Sometimes she is summoned to help a doctor and to coordinate her work with his. Or she may be called in when the doctor has done all he can for his patient and ordinary medicine will no longer suffice. When this happens, the tia must be given complete authority, and often the first thing she will do is to shoo everyone else out of the house so that she can work single-mindedly with her patient. She may begin her treatment by brewing a stiff tea of mint or marjoram, according to recipes known only to her, and there will follow a strict regimen based on diet, regular bathings of the patient, and recitals of the tia’s ancient incantations. A cure may take days or even months before the assorted demons, devils, and evil spirits (or buena gente, “good people,” as they are guardedly called) are cast out of the patient’s body and the tia’s work is done. There is never a charge for the services of a tia, for hers is both an art and a gift, and she must therefore give it away.

  A tia also may be consulted on matters less crucial than life or death. For instance, Turkish candy may be prescribed by a tia for an infected finger. Sugar from the table of a Rosh Hashanah festival is considered a cure for sterility in childless women. Marjoram or oregano tea will cure, according to the tia, both insomnia and fright. Sugar in water is the simple remedy for “crying children.” For severe cases of insomnia, tea should be placed outside the window of the victim and left there for three days, during which the victim must not touch fire. After the three days, she should rise early in the morning and drink the tea quickly before breakfast. Old people in these Sephardic communities follow this routine regularly, once a month, and therefore have no trouble sleeping—as long as they are careful to remember that it must never be practiced when a baby who has not yet teethed is in the house. Otherwise, the evil eye will fall upon the baby. If it does, of course, it can often be dispelled by hurling cloves into the fire or tossing salt into the wind while chanting exhortations in the names of Jacob, Isaac, Abraham, and Moses.

  To ward off the evil eye, bedrooms of children are strung with garlands of garlic cloves, and young people are instructed to carry garlic with them for luck. Older women carry blue and amber beads from the Holy Land, strung together on silk threads, for the same reason. For a little boy’s first visit to a new household, it is important that he carry with him something sweet—an almond cookie, perhaps—along with something silver in his pocket, if the visit is to be a success. And so it has gone, for centuries, in an endlessly complex pattern of ritual, tradition, mystery, and magic. In the 1960’s, for example, the State of Israel inaugurated “Operation Magic Carpet,” which was designed to fly Sephardic Jews to Israel out of Yemen and North Africa. But the Jews refused to fly. The situation had reached an impasse until someone recalled the words from Isaiah: “I will bear you on the wings of eagles.” Thus reassured, the Jews consented to board the aircraft.

  At the same time, these Sephardic Jews were fiercely independent, proud to the point of crustiness, disdainful of Christians and the “fairy tales” of Christianity, filled with a sense of heightened religiosity and superior purpose.

  In the semifeudal world of the Ottoman Empire, this “lost” Sephardic life could continue uninterrupted, unchanged, its tribalistic injunctions and habits passed on from generation to generation. The home was a kind of shrine, and for a son to leave his parents and venture out into the world beyond was the worst sort of transgression. It was possible to believe that nothing could disrupt these changeless ways. In the early 1900’s a handful of adventurous youths from Greece and Turkey came to the United States, and wrote home to friends and relatives with tales that were scarcely to be credited—of Jewish millionaires with automobiles and yachts and mansions, who headed banks and corporations. A trickle of emigration began. With the outbreak of World War I, the trickle increased to a stream of considerable proportions. Then, at the end of the war, the revolution in Turkey marked the end of an era. Jews swarmed out of the Near East and the Levant by the tens of thousands, and these were presently joined by Jews from northern Africa. In New York, they looked for Sephardic synagogues and found elegant establishments that were the oldest synagogues in America, still controlled by an aristocratic if somewhat diminished Jewish Establishment. Because they felt entitled to, these Jews curled up on blankets and bedrolls in the corners of the synagogues until they could find shelter, and the effect upon the existing community was cataclysmic. It was a confrontation, some 450 years later, of two streams—two social classes, really—of Sephardim, and the two groups encountered each other with the impact of a collision. Here were these Greek- and Turkish-looking people (with skins darkened from generations in the Mediterranean sun, plus a certain amount of intermarriage) claiming to be cousins of the Lazaruses, Cardozos, Nathans, Seixases, and Levys. These were people who were poor, ignorant, superstitions, who practiced an exotic form of Judaism no one comprehended, who spoke a language that sounded “worse than Yiddish,” some of whom—the Jews of North Africa, for instance—had actually lived in caves.

  To the old American Sephardim—Boston Brahmin-like, entertaining their little circles of friends and relatives at tea parties, over teacups of fragile porcelain, with antique silver spoons, under darkening family portraits of
Revolutionary ancestors in powdered wigs and lacy collars—the newcomers were like primitives from another planet. No one knew what to make of them. They were, plainly and simply, an embarrassment to families grown accustomed to thinking of themselves as the grandest people in America.

  Vainly the rabbis of the community at large tried to explain these Oriental strangers to their congregations, as well as to explain the existing congregation—its mood and texture—to the strangers. It was no use. One sermon of the period even went so far as to point out that food cooked in oil is no less nourishing than food cooked in butter or vegetable shortening—for the newly arrived Sephardim continued to cook in olive oil, even to spread it on their bread, a practice which to other Jews seemed barbarous. The Sephardic communities were split even further as the old-timers pointed out—with certain accuracy—that they were descended from Spain’s Jewish gentry, while the newcomers descended from the riffraff.

  The Levantine emigration of the twentieth century also changed the traditional locations of Sephardic communities. Up to then, Sephardic congregations existed primarily in the older eastern cities—Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Savannah. Many of the new arrivals settled in New York, giving New York today the largest Sephardic population of any American city. But many others headed westward. Many Greek Jews were fishermen, and they were attracted to the fish markets of cities such as Portland and Seattle. Others headed for southern California. Today, the second-largest Sephardic congregation is in Los Angeles. Seattle, where the Jewish community of Rhodes has transplanted itself almost intact, is third.