The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  In the United States, the Near Eastern Sephardim made a determined effort to keep to their old cloistered ways, to cling to the comforts of ritual and the mysteries of endurcos, and the tight family structures they had enjoyed for centuries. But their removal from New York’s Lower East Side soon after their arrival, the prevailing laws of compulsory education, and their children’s association in schools and on playgrounds not only with other Jews but with people of other ethnic backgrounds had an inevitable effect, and a familiar process of Americanization began rather rapidly. The edges of old distinctions began to fade and blur. The Sephardim have staunchly retained their special ritual, songs, and prayers, but old world embellishments have been steadily disappearing. Only a few old people understand the rites of endurcos now, and even the treasured key to la casa vieja has become a charming anachronism. These Jews no longer seriously consider returning to a golden age of Spain.

  Probably the greatest loss has been the Ladino. It was always an amorphous, uncodified tongue, written—like Hebrew—from right to left, and in characters similar to (but not exactly like) Hebrew, and learning to speak it was always like learning to play a musical instrument by ear. Spoken Ladino ignores all rules of grammar and of spelling, and written Ladino simply overlooks them. A writer in Ladino can employ the grammatical rules, or conventions, of any Western language he chooses—French, Spanish, Italian, or even English. Ladino words even pop up oddly in Hebrew texts, as happened when an American professor of Hebrew at the University of California found the word empanada, written in Hebrew characters, when reading the Shulhan Aruk of Karo. He could find empanada in no Hebrew dictionary. He eventually discovered that an empanada is a dish prepared by the Sephardic Jews of Salonica, a casserole of chopped meat and fish baked with a layer of pie crust on the top. In Spanish dictionaries, empanada is defined as a meat pie.

  The new settlers from the Near East quickly began introducing English words and American expressions into the Ladino, thus making the language even harder to decode. One of the strangest examples of this sort of thing is the Ladino verb abetchar, meaning “to bet,” which came directly from the Americanism “I betcha.” Expressions came into being such as Quieres abetchar? meaning “You want to bet?” and Yo te abetcho, meaning “I bet you.” The verb “to park” became, in new Ladino, parkear, and the verb “to drive” was drivear. Therefore, Esta driveandro el caro translated as “He is driving the car,” and “He is parking the car” was Esta parkeando el caro.

  Thus undermined by grotesque intrusions from the prevailing language, and gradually forgotten by children when they entered English-speaking schools, Ladino, lacking any newspapers or even a dictionary, has become an exotic language as rare as the whooping crane, preserved only in the memories of a few rabbis and teachers. No doubt in a few more generations it will all but have disappeared.

  The Levantine Sephardim who came to America in important numbers in the 1920’s and 1930’s may have been poor and uneducated and believers in the evil eye. But, like other immigrants of other eras, they have largely succeeded in pulling themselves out of poverty and educating themselves out of ignorance and parochialism, and on the whole they can claim as good a record in the United States as any other group. In Los Angeles, several dark-skinned Sephardim became shoeshine men. In a few years, a shoeshine man had a shoe repair shop and, a few years later, he had a chain. In Seattle, a fisherman from Greece became a canner of fish, and by the second generation his cannery became a large factory. By the time these Sephardim had begun sending their sons and daughters to American colleges and universities, whole new sets of American middle-class values had been accepted. Although it was still considered anathema to marry a Christian, it was no longer a disgrace for one’s daughter to marry a tedesco—a German—particularly if he was rich. When this happened not long ago a Sephardic mother commented tellingly, “Well, at least he’s an American, and at least he’s not black.”

  The impact on the old congregations in the older cities—Shearith Israel in New York, Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia—was, in the meantime, lasting. The two Sephardic strains enjoyed a truce that was, at best, uneasy. Annie Nathan Meyer was somewhat ruffled when a New York society woman suddenly said to her, “You speak such beautiful English! How long is it since your parents came to America?” She immediately brought out miniature portraits of the Colonial ancestors on both sides of the family. Of one lace-capped great-grandmother, Mrs. Meyer said impishly, “She looks rather like Martha Washington, doesn’t she?” When her visitor, confused, said, “Oh, but I thought you were Jewish,” Mrs. Meyer waved her hand and said, “These people are an altogether different sort.”

  And when Shearith Israel’s great rabbi David de Sola Pool approached a lady of his congregation and asked her why, when for years he had seen her at Friday evening services, he now saw her no more than twice a year, at the high holy days, the woman looked wistful and said, “It isn’t the same. I look around in the synagogue now, and I see nothing but strangers.”

  22

  SMALL GESTURES … AND A HUSH AT CHATHAM SQUARE

  On December 17, 1968, readers of the New York Times may have encountered a small item which could have struck them as ironic, or mystifying. The story was datelined Madrid, and began:

  Four hundred and seventy-six years after King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella ordered the Jews expelled from Spain, the Spanish Government declared tonight that the order was void.

  In other words, that fateful edict beginning with the words “It seems that much harm is done to Christians by the community or conversation they have held and hold with Jews …” which bad had such a shattering effect on Spanish Jewry, and on the history of Spain itself, was at last nullified. Judaism was legal in Spain once more. In practice, the Spanish Constitution of 1869, which had proclaimed religions tolerance in general terms, was considered to have superseded the Catholic monarchs’ order. But Spain’s Jewish community, numbering about eight thousand people, had long been seeking an explicit revocation of the Expulsion Edict itself. It had taken the government of Generalissimo Francisco Franco to bring this about.

  Generalissimo Franco himself has always been friendly in his treatment of Spain’s Jews. In the 1930’s, he issued an “invitation” to Jews, advertising in the Jewish press, asking the Jews to return to Spain. A few families actually did come back. During World War II, Franco embarked on an emphatic campaign to rescue Jews from Hitler’s pogroms, and he has been personally credited with saving as many as sixty thousand Jewish lives. One little-known incident of that war is that on January 8, 1944, Franco made a personal telephone call to Adolf Hitler concerning the fate of Jewish prisoners at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Franco demanded that the prisoners, many of whom were Sephardim from Greece, be released. Hitler complied, and 1,242 Jews were sent to safety in Spain. Franco went to the Spanish border personally to meet and escort these refugees into his country. When informed that the Germans had confiscated all the Jews’ money and possessions, Franco placed a second call to Hitler. The result was that the Jews’ property was sent after them.

  Why was the Spanish leader—in so many other ways sympathetic to Nazi policies—so opposed to Hitler in the matter of anti-Semitism? Historians of the war have never been sure, and Franco has, typically, never explained. But it may have had something to do with the strong possibility that Franco himself is of Marrano descent, as so many other Spaniards are. Franco is a common Sephardic name, particularly among Sephardim from the island of Rhodes, and it all may mean that El Caudillo is a distant connection of the beautiful Tory Franks sisters of Philadelphia. It may also explain Franco’s refusal to accede to Hitler’s attempts to come into Spain: perhaps he feared that he himself could become a victim of the Führer’s policies.

  During the years of Arab-Israeli warfare, Franco’s government has continued to help Jews in Arab countries to escape persecution. It has taken such steps as to issue them Spanish passports, thereby making them honorary Sephardic Jews, as it wer
e.

  When the announcement that the Expulsion Edict was at last void was made to the Jewish congregation of Madrid, the Times report continued, it caused “a profound stir,” and it came simultaneously with another event of vast symbolic importance—the opening of the first synagogue to be built in Spain in six hundred years. Ever since Inquisitional days, Jews had been meeting for worship in the secrecy of apartments and private houses, behind closed shutters and drawn curtains. Even under the relatively benevolent Franco regime, Jews had been too unsure of their position to risk erecting a permanent public building. At the opening ceremonies, nineteen men in top hats and prayer shawls filed into the new synagogue bearing velvet-encased sacred scrolls topped by silver bells. Dr. Solomon Gaon, grand rabbi of the Sephardic communities of Great Britain, who is considered the world’s leading Sephardic figure, flew to Madrid for the occasion; he stood in the white marble and wood hall and declared: “We witness a historic moment, when past and present meet. The most brilliant history of our people in the Diaspora was written in Spain. May this mean the beginning of a new time of moral and spiritual progress for all the people of this land.”

  In the United States, where some 100,000 Spanish and Portuguese Jews have now settled like so many birds after a long flight, the news of a new synagogue in Madrid was of less significance. Though the occasion was officially celebrated with prayers of thanksgiving, word that Ferdinand and Isabella’s Expulsion Edict had finally been invalidated met privately with a kind of grim amusement. The reaction was: “It’s about time.”

  In New York’s Shearith Israel congregation, a strong feeling continues that here is something precious that must, at all costs, be preserved. Though the congregation is splintered and factionalized, split down the middle between the Old Guard and Levantine newcomers, and further cast into disagreement over the choice of an Ashkenazy (of all things), Dr. Louis C. Gerstein, as head rabbi (a tradition-minded faction wanted London’s Dr. Gaon, a Spaniard), and what is felt to be a continuing Germanization of American Jewish life,* today’s members of the Jewish First Families see themselves as keepers of a flame, preservers of something that was once of great importance—to history and to the human spirit—and is still worth remembering.

  Most members of the Old Guard families today are not particularly pious, and make merely token observances of the Sabbath and the other holy days. Hendrickses, Lazaruses, Cardozos, and Nathans of the 1970’s do not, for the most part, keep kosher households, nor have they for several generations. What they have undergone, over the long centuries, has been a peculiarly American phenomenon. In an aura of religious tolerance and, in the case of the Old Guard, social acceptance, their early need for their religion seems to have diminished considerably. Perhaps religion flourishes strongest, and its forms have more fierce importance, when it is prohibited or proscribed. One effect of the Inquisition was the opposite of its intent: it made Spain’s Jews more determined to be Jews. In the new world, with pressures against Jews gradually diminishing, this determination has diminished also.

  What has happened is that reverence for the past has replaced religious conviction. The old Sephardic families today often appear to worship history more than a Judaic God. The old portraits and the lacy family trees, the escutcheons and coats of arms, have become their testaments and prayer books. The lists of great-grandparents’ birthdays in the frontispiece of the family Bible seem to have more meaning than the text within. Even the insistence of the Sephardim on retaining the orthodox form of worship—against the trend toward modernization and Americanization that has been marked among Jewry all over the country—seems a gesture of nostalgic sentiment, a gesture in deference to the past, more than one of pure religiosity. After all, the past has placed these “few of us”—now all so thoroughly interrelated—in a position in America that is particular, peculiar, unique.

  In 1897, when Shearith Israel finally got around to moving its congregation uptown into a handsome new building, there was no possibility that the move would be hailed as an attempt “to become one with progress.” Instead, the building was an attempt to become one with the past. Within the walls of the larger synagogue there stands a second, much smaller synagogue—an exact replica of the first synagogue in America as it stood on New York’s Mill Street three hundred and more years ago. Step into the “little synagogue,” and you step not only into old New York but further back, into medieval Spain. On the wall, an old Spanish calendar marks off the hour, day, and week with the letters H, D, and S—for hora, dia, semana. The heavy brass candlesticks may have come from Spain also. The Sabbath lamp was the gift of the family of Haym Salomon. The tin bells were made by the colonists around 1694, before they had silver. The scrolls within the Ark are tattered and stained from water and blood. During the Revolution, a drunken British soldier fired on the reader in the synagogue; they are his bloodstains. Later, a second drunken soldier threw the scrolls in the mud. (Both offenders, it is recorded, were court-martialed by the British.)

  Outside, in the synagogue proper, the seating is of course segregated. The beautiful music of the Sephardic service—another strong emotional bulwark of the congregation—traces back to old Spanish folk songs. Only a few changes have occurred over the centuries. Three hundred years ago, the official language of the synagogue was Portuguese. In 1728, however, the congregation revised its “wholesome Rules and Restrictions,” and resolved that “the Parnaz shall be obliged twice a year to cause these articles to be read in the Sinagog both in Portugues [sic] and English.”

  A prayer for the government, then part of the ritual, also had to undergo revision, for obvious reasons. The original prayer blessed:

  Sua Real Magestade nosso Senhor Rey Jorge o Segundo, as suas Reales Atezas Jorge Principe de Veles, a Princesa Douger de Veles, o Duque & as Princesas & toda a Real Familha, a sua Excellencia o Honrado Senhor Governor y todos os Senhores de sea Concelbo, o Magistrado desta Cidade de New York e todos os seos Deredores …

  Blessings are no longer offered to “His Royal Majesty, our Sovereign George the Second, their Royal Highnesses George Prince of Wales, the Dowager Princess of Wales, the Duke and Princesses and all the Royal Family, his Excellency the Governor and all the gentlemen of his Council, the Mayor of the City of New York and all its environs.” Otherwise, nothing has changed.

  Shearith Israel stands sedately at the corner of Seventieth Street and Central Park West. Rather pointedly, Shearith Israel appears to have chosen an address on the older, homier West Side, rather than on grander, flashier Fifth Avenue. Shearith Israel faces almost directly across the park toward the new Temple Emanu-El in an attitude of reproach.

  Once a year, on Memorial Day, members of Shearith Israel meet at the synagogue for breakfast, and then proceed downtown to pay commemorative visits to the graves of early American ancestors in the oldest Jewish cemeteries in America. In all, three cemeteries are visited: the tiny one at Chatham Square, the even tinier triangular cemetery on West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village, and the somewhat larger one on West Twenty-third Street, not far from the site of Benjamin Nathan’s murder. All are Spanish and Portuguese cemeteries, through the Twenty-first Street enclosure contains the grave of one of New York’s Presbyterian Cadwaladers, who must have done something very scandalous indeed to have been placed there in alien corn.

  The most important of the three is the Chatham Square Cemetery, for it is the oldest. The earliest grave there dates 1683, just one year after the land was purchased. Chatham Square Cemetery is a hushed and peaceful place, just a bit removed from the dither of Chinatown nearby, and the ground is covered with sturdy green ivy, graveled walks between the old stones, shaded by the lacy branches of three ailanthus trees. Not all the inscriptions are legible now. The cemetery was once six times as large, but the city has intruded upon it, pressed in on it, squeezed it and narrowed it to such an extent that the distinct impression is left that here remain only the doughtiest of that early, doughty breed. There are Gomezes, Lopezes, Seixases,
de Lucenas, Harts, Peixottos, Lazaruses—a number of them slain Revolutionary soldiers—and a young doctor who had worked during one of New York’s periodic yellow fever epidemics, and whose inscription reads:

  IN MEMORY OF WALTER J. JUDAH,

  STUDENT OF PHYSIC, WHO WORN DOWN

  BY HIS EXERTIONS TO ALLEVIATE THE SUFFERINGS

  OF HIS FELLOW CITIZENS, IN THAT DREADFUL CONTAGION

  THAT VISITED THE CITY OF NEW YORK IN 1798 FELL

  A VICTIM IN THE CAUSE OF HUMANITY …

  THE 15TH OF SEPT. 1798 AT 20 YEARS 5 MONTHS AND 11 DAYS

  At the Memorial Day ceremonies, a brief tribute is read over each grave, and then a small American flag is placed on it by one of the deceased’s living descendants. For all the simplicity of this service, a distinct understanding is generated of the Jews’ belief that a cemetery is a beth hayyim, a house of the living, that these Americans are not dead but with us still, that a man’s ancestors are arrayed behind him in the past, each generation looking over the shoulders of the generation that follows, in endless continuity.

  At a recent service, thirty-four persons were counted.

  The Jewish First Families honor the past in other ways, large and small. Several years ago, the family of Harold L. Lewis, who are collateral descendants of Commodore Uriah Phillips Levy, became concerned about the way their ancestor and his relationship with Monticello were being represented in history books. The “official” text, for instance, which is on sale at the gift shop at Monticello, makes this typical reference to Uriah: “Within the year [of Jefferson’s death] Monticello was sold to liquidate the debts of the estate. Later the property was purchased by Uriah Levy for $2,500! … Almost one hundred years has passed since the death of Thomas Jefferson, and the mansion has suffered from the neglect of the many occupants who had neither the funds nor the interest to preserve the historic building.” No mention is made of the extensive restorations that Uriah Levy made during the many years when he was the mansion’s only occupant. Another text, “Monticello,” by Gene and Clare Gurney, contains the following reference: