I grew up in a world that was unaware of just how Ashkenazic it really was. Though my mother spoke Ladino and my father understood Yiddish, English was the language of conversation in our home. We attended a Conservative Synagogue and I worked my way up from Religious School to Camp Ramah and then to USY and finally to the Jewish Theological Seminary becoming more observant and more committed to living a Jewish life along the way. I spent three years studying in an Orthodox Yeshiva in High School. I didn’t realize that there was more than one way to be an observant Jew. Sephardic Jewry had more to do with the food we ate and my grandparents' country of origin than it did with my identity. Yet I found myself returning to my Sephardic roots again and again over the years. I was proud to be half Sephardic though I didn’t quite know what it meant.
After serving as a Conservative Rabbi for forty years in Knoxville, Tennessee, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Oceanside, New York, I found my way back to my Sephardic roots. Life took us across the country to Seattle, Washington to be close to our grandchildren. We began attending a Sephardic synagogue founded by people from Turkey - from a town called Tekirdag. I discovered that Tekirdag was less than a days’ walk from Corlu, the town from which my grandmother came.
I was pleased to find a warm and welcoming congregation but one rooted in a different world from the one I had known most of my life. I had explored Orthodoxy and I was a committed Conservative Jew but this was not the same. While Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation did not define itself as “Orthodox,” it is clearly a traditionalist congregation. “Orthodox,” “Conservative,” “Reform” or “Reconstructionist” are terms rooted in Eurocentric history and ideology. The Enlightenment And the Emancipation came late to Ottoman Jews and when they did arrive in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it did so without the political or ideological implications that we associated with these movements.
So I joined a Sephardic synagogue. But I find myself wondering if there is more to being Sephardic than just nostalgia and ethnicity. What does it mean to be Sephardic? What does Sephardic Jewry have to teach the rest of us about being Jewish in today's world? If Sephardic Jewry is not Orthodox what exactly is it?
These poems are my first exploration of my identity as a Sephardic Jew. It is filled with a lot of nostalgia but it is just the beginning of my exploration of this beautiful way of life. And if Sephardic Jewry is to survive then we must ask does it still have meaning today or is it simply a visage of the past. My involvement is too new to answer these questions but I have begun a journey in search of the beauty of this unique way of life.
Poem - These are the Names
These are the names we carried
With us over land and sea
Through a rising sun and dark nights:
Almosnino, Abolafia, and Altchek
Barocas, Babani and Behar
Calderon, Calvo and Condiotty.
These are the names
We wore as a badge of honor
A key to a home
We were forced to flee,
A reminder we are descendents
Of princes and poets:
De Jaen, De Funes, Enriques
Gaon, Gomez, Gonzales
Haleva, Halfon, and Habib.
If you meet a Maimon or an Alkabetz
Ask if they are related to a distant sage
Who carried the name first
They’ll smile and modestly say “Maybe;”
History flows through these names.
These too are our names:
Cordoba, Tarragano, Mitrani
Toledano, Soriano, and Valensi
Our names are a map home
We carry with us
Even if we can never return.
These are the names
Mezistrano, Morhaime, Moscatel
Sabbatai, Shaloum, Sharhon
From Abarbanel to Zaccuto
Read them slowly and hear them sing.
Alas, I carry a name from Ashkenaz.
Its roots forgotten, its meaning murky.
It’s only a name, a way to identify myself.
Written on a ship manifest that brought
My grandparents across a sea of anonymity.
I wonder where my name came from
Untethered as it is from land or people.
Adopted out of convenience?
Was it changed to sound
More American?
In kahl the faraway is familiar
A name is a pedigree of one’s past
Names sing their legacy.
When I first came to kal people asked, “Greenspan? Greenspan? What are you doing here with a name like that?” The question isn’t malicious or inhospitable; it is said out of curiosity. “Why would someone whose name pointed to Ashkenaz join a Levantine congregation?” “My grandparents were from Turkey,” I tell them. “What was their name?” they ask. “Levy,” I answer sheepishly. Carrying the name of Jacob’s third son isn’t the same as the names that came from Andalus. Here a name is a passport to a lost world.
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