The Jews in America Trilogy (112 page)

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.

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.”