Sephardi Ideas Monthly is a continuing series of essays from the rich, multi-dimensional world of Sephardi thought that is delivered to your inbox on the second Monday of every month.
Beginning in February, 2018, Sephardi Ideas Monthly has been engaged in an extended exploration of Crypto-Jewish identity in the American Southwest. This month’s featured piece, “The ‘Secret Jews’ of San Luis Valley,” by Jeff Wheelwright (Smithsonian Magazine, October 2008), concludes our series with an essay that shines a genetic light on the ambiguous legacy of the descendants of those Sephardi Jews who were compelled or coerced into converting to Christianity.
Wheelwright’s story begins in Southern Colorado with a group of Hispanic Catholic women suffering from a form of breast cancer that is linked to a genetic mutation historically found amongst Jews. The genetic counselors who had been treating the women decided to publish a scientific paper on the common genetic mutation they found in “non-Jewish Americans of Spanish ancestry.” Notes Wheelwright:
The researchers were cautious about some of the implications because the breast cancer patients themselves, as the paper put it, ‘denied Jewish ancestry.’
A University of Denver geneticist who expanded the DNA analysis then confirmed what the counselors had suspected: the mutation in question exactly matched a mutation previously found in Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. What’s more, the mutation’s roots go back 2,000 years to Jews in the Land of Israel:
More than 2,000 years ago, among the Hebrew tribes… someone’s DNA dropped the AG letters at the 185 site. The glitch spread and multiplied in succeeding generations.
But even when confronted with genetic evidence of Jewish ancestry, responses among descendants of the anusim remained ambivalent. One of the Colorado women suffering from breast cancer, Beatrice Wright, was moved by the discovery of her genetic history to investigate the Jewish dimension of her identity. She travelled to New Mexico, tracked down sixty first cousins, and asked them, “Did you know about your Jewish heritage?” Their response?
‘It wasn’t a big deal to some of them, but others kind of raised an eyebrow like I didn’t know what I was talking about.’
Or consider the Valdez family of New Mexico. The twenty-nine adult children included fifteen females. How many of them had breast or ovarian cancer? Five. The local genetic counselor decided to raise awareness amongst the family members by organizing “counselling sessions.” While the purpose of the sessions was to encourage DNA testing, the implications of the genetic information extended beyond health issues to questions of identity. Still, the implications remained ambiguous. Writes Wheelwright:
The revelation that the Valdezes were related to Spanish Jews prompted quizzical looks. But, later, Elsie Valdez Vigil, at 68 the oldest family member there, said she wasn’t bothered by the information. ‘Jesus was Jewish,’ she said.
Elsie Valdez Vigil’s response is charming in its own way. After all, the Valdezes are Christians today, and Elise was trying her best, within the horizon within which she lives, to embrace a new, unsettling discovery about her family’s historical identity.
But Elsie’s response also points to what is perhaps the most massive and tragic fact of the Inquisition’s lingering legacy among the descendants of the anusim. While some descendants of Crypto-Jews are searching for a path, conventional or unconventional, to connect to Jewish identity, the numbers of those who will never return is far greater. These descendants of Sephardim have been cut off from the Jewish People, forever.
The sage for the month of September, 2018, is Hacham Yaakov Moshe Toledano
(1879-1960).
R’Yaakov Moshe Toledano was born in the city of Tiberias on the shore of Israel’s Kinneret (The Sea of Galilee). Ordained for the rabbinate in Tiberias at the age of 17, R’Yaakov spent most of the next thirty years in the city teaching Torah, establishing a cultural center, and buying land outside the Old City walls. R’ Yaakov also collected ancient manuscripts, even discovering a copy of the Rambam’s (Maimonides') commentary on the Mishna in the original Arabic. This devotion to scholarship, education, and public life would exemplify his entire career.
In 1926, R’ Yaakov accepted a judicial position in Tunisia. He used his office to teach love of the Hebrew language and the Land of Israel. Beginning in 1928, he served as the head of the rabbinic courts in Cairo and Alexandria, until, in 1942, he returned to the Land of Israel to serve as the Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv-Yaffo. He was appointed Israel’s Minister of Religious Affairs in 1958, holding the position until his passing two years later.
R’Yaakov’s published work includes rabbinic responsa, scholarly research into halakhic questions, and a collection of essays entitled, Tiberias and its Surroundings. In the following passage from Yam HaGdola, one of his works of responsa, R’ Yaakov treats how Jews should behave in Christian houses of worship. His broad-minded approach to a potentially thorny question reflects the openness and seriousness that distinguishes so much of the classic Sephardic tradition:
This question was sent from the famous city of New York, where many of our Jewish brethren purchase houses of prayer from non-Jews and make them into synagogues and study houses - asking whether this [is] permitted and is the correct thing to do.
Non-Jews in our day do not engage in idol worship… There was a time, when priests controlled the Christian people and led them according to their own spirit, when they would fabricate images and order the masses to bow down before them. But in our time, it is certain and known by all that such images serve only for commemoration. Even if they place them in their houses of prayer, they are only ornaments, and in their mind the building in which they are placed is but an ornament, or an ornamental article, so it is not forbidden by law to enjoy it or sit within it.
Festival Passes and VIP Festival Passes are available.
VIP Tickets and VIP Passes include access to the Closing Night After party
Sophisticated Sephardi sounds will be heard at the second edition of the American Sephardi Music Festival. Featuring world-class artists who reflect the rich mosaic culture of Greater Sephardic communities, the ASMF is a proud partner of the renowned Festival des Andalousies Atlantiques in Essaouira, Morocco.
Professor Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis will present new research on the remarkable courtyard houses of the Farhi and other important Sephardic families in late 18th/early 19th century Damascus.
Her analysis of architecture and décor offers a lens into the Damascene Jewish community and its interaction with Ottoman culture.
Professor Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis, an active archaeologist and architectural historian, is the author of Bayt Farhi and the Sephardic Palaces of Ottoman Damascus in the Late 18th and 19th Centuries (American Schools of Oriental Research, 2018). She currently teaches at The Graduate Center, The City University of New York (CUNY), where she also serves as the Acting Executive Officer in M.A. in Liberal Studies and directs the M.A. in Liberal Studies concentration in Archaeology of the Classical, Late Antique, and Islamic Worlds. She is the Deputy Director of Manar al-Athar, an open-access digital humanities resource for the study of the Middle East, co-director of the Upper Egypt Mosque Project, serves on the governing board of the Archaeological Institute of America, and is both Smarthistory’s Governing Board Chairperson and Contributing Editor for Art of the Islamic World. Professor Macaulay-Lewis has a DPhil in Classical Archaeology from Oxford University.
We look forward to seeing you!
Image Credit: "Old Damascus, Jew's Quarter" by Frederick Leighton, 1874 (Photo courtesy of Museum Syndicate)
The Jewish Genealogical Society and The American Sephardi Federation Present:
Branching out from Sepharad: Solving a Converso Mystery with Sarina Roffé
Sunday, 21 October, at 2:00PM Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street
New York City
Ticket Info:
For non-members: $5 at the door
Free for JGS, ASF, NYG&B members
Sarina Roffé, professional genealogist, founder of the Sephardic Heritage Project, and author of Branching Out from Sepharad: A Global Journey of Selected Rabbinic Families with Biographies and Genealogies (Forward by Professor Walter P. Zenner, Sephardic Heritage Project, 2017), outlines the history and expulsion of Jews in Spain, their history in Syria, and immigration to the Americas.
She discusses the Kassin rabbinic dynasty from the 12th century through the 50-year leadership of Rabbi Jacob S. Kassin in Brooklyn, and solves a Converso mystery.
Professor Mohammad Gharipour will discuss his research and recently published book, Synagogues of the Islamic World: Architecture, Design, and Identity (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), which explores how the architecture of synagogues in Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain responded to contextual issues and traditions, as well as how these contexts influenced the design and evolution of synagogues. The book considers patterns of the development of synagogues in urban contexts in connection with urban elements and monuments, while revealing how synagogues reflect the culture of the Jewish minority at macro and micro scales.
This presentation is being made possible by the generous support of The Cahnman Foundation.
Mohammad Gharipour is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning at Morgan State University at Baltimore, Maryland. He obtained his Masters in Architecture from the University of Tehran and a Ph.D. in Architecture and Landscape History from Georgia Institute of Technology. He has received several awards, including the Hamad Bin Khalifa Fellowship in Islamic Art, the Spiro Kostof Fellowship Award from the Society of Architectural Historians, the National Endowment in Humanities Faculty Award, and was recognized as "one of the twelve minority scholars in the US who are making their mark in academia" in 2016 by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education Magazine. Professor Gharipour's books include Bazaar in the Islamic City (American University of Cairo Press, 2012), Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in Poetry, Arts, and History (I.B. Tauris, 2013), Calligraphy and Architecture in the Muslim World (co-edited with Irvin Schick, Edinburgh University Press, 2013), The City in the Muslim Word: Depictions by Western Travelers (co-edited with Nilay Ozlu, Routledge, 2014), and Sacred Precincts: The Religious Architecture of Non-Muslim Communities across the Islamic World (Brill, 2014). He is the director and founding editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture (www.intellectbooks.com/ijia)
We look forward to seeing you!
Yemenite Faces and Scenes & Episodes in Yemenite History
The Teimani Experience, which closed on 5 June, continues in part with a photographic exhibit in our Leon Levy Gallery and an art exhibit in the Myron Habib, A"H, Memorial Display.
On view until October
Center for Jewish History
15 West 16th Street
New York City
Yemenite Faces and Scenes: Photographs by Naftali Hilger
Intrepid photographer and photo-journalist Naftali Hilger traveled extensively in Yemen in the late 1980s and early 1990s photographing structures, street scenes, and the last remnants of Jewish life. These images—including of Yemenite children learning to read Torah upside-down in their father’s shop and a family relaxing in their diwan (salon)—depict an existence that has faded into history as the ever-shrinking community has found refuge in a government compound at Sana’a.
Episodes in Yemenite History: Paintings by Tiya Nachum
A series of eight paintings by the artist and sculptor Tiya Nachum of Encino, CA. The paintings reflect the tragedies and triumphs of Yemenite Jewish history, from the Mawza exile to the founding of the Inbal Dance Troupe by Sara Levy. Each painting tells a story and each story is a history onto itself.
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The American Sephardi Federation is a proud partner of the Center for Jewish History (15 West 16th St., New York, NY, 10011).
