Sephardi Typologies: Hating Ourselves and Others

David Shasha

The fool does not understand, who complains of the sufferings that the world inflicts upon us [all].
He does not understand that such are the ways of the world: for vile men to be held in esteem,
And for honorable men to be warred against by it.  Lift your eyes and consider; you will see that upon the high seas
And upon their banks float [only] dead things, but in the depths precious stones lie buried.
Likewise, the scale similarly lowers the fuller plate and raises up the emptier one.
And among the stars of the sky – and He [alone] knows their number – none suffers eclipse except the sun and the moon. (ll. 89-109)

There is no man so cowardly as he who has done evil, nor hero so great as he who is in the right.
There is nothing so shameless as a just judge, who is indifferent to both harm and profit.
With utter lack of mercy he condemns to death both poor and rich; he considers the great and the lowly with an equal eye.
He flatters the lord no more than his servant; he does not favor a king over his functionaries.
But the evil judge is much too generous with justice; he awards it to him who is without justice, thus turning a bow into a straight stick.
In truth, the world subsists through three things: justice, truth, and peace, which comes from these.
Justice is the cornerstone; of all three it has the greatest worth.
For justice uncovers truth, and with truth comes peace and friendship. (ll. 1349-1377)

R. Shem Tob Ardutiel, Proverbios Morales, Soria, 14th Century (Translated by T.A. Perry)

The new religious outlook [in Christian Spain] affected the moral behavior of spiritual leaders and the community.  Bereft of their intellectual and spiritual legacy, the ethical life of the community dwindled.  Whereas in the rationalistic ethics of the old Sepharad had put special emphasis on morality and honorable behavior, the new religious outlook, in spiritual kinship with some pietistic circles in Germany, switched the emphasis to religious fervor.

Jose Faur, In the Shadow of History

Who Are the Sephardim?

The manner in which Judaism is presented in contemporary public discourse has been mediated through the modalities of the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition and its experiences.  The Jewish religion is filtered through the ways in which Ashkenazi rabbis understood the classical Biblical and rabbinical texts which is very often different from the ways in which these same texts were read and applied in the Sephardic community.

And while there are historical reasons for the differences in approach to Jewish tradition in the Sephardic and Ashkenazic traditions, there are very few people who are aware of the split that has marked this fact.

When my grandfather came to the United States from Syria in the early 20th century, he brought with him the mores and values of a Middle Eastern Jewish culture that has not been protected and secured for his descendants.  The literary texts as well as the documentary history of his world have been almost completely forgotten amidst a sea of adaptation to a very different way of seeing things.  My grandfather was heir to many traditions that were to him a very intimate and organic part of the world that he grew up in; a world that was increasingly collapsing and falling prey to new modes of identification.

We may understand the culture of the past in two ways: There is the study of history from books and documents and then there is the intimate engagement with the past through an almost intuitive knowledge that comes from personal experience. 

In our day, the Sephardic community lacks a firm academic foundation from which to learn and absorb the culture and values of its past.  Having made the transition to the history and culture of another community, that of the Ashkenazi, Sephardim today lack the most basic and rudimentary means to understand who they are and where they come from.

Increasingly, the elders of the community, those who grew in a world that was very different from the one that we as Sephardim now inhabit, are dying out.  But as if this were not enough, the evolution of the Sephardic community has developed in such a way as to make the necessity of understanding and processing this past an outmoded or an inconsequential matter.

Debates and intra-community struggles have taken place over the past half century or so that have marked an understanding of the past as not relevant to present concerns.  The transition to new Sephardi typologies, new forms of Sephardic identification based on alien models, has created a cynical stance towards the study of the past.  It is rather commonplace for Sephardim to have accepted the fact that the culture and moral values of the past were insubstantial and that there is little actual need to study them.  This cynicism has served to foreclose curiosity and interest in the matter while simultaneously allowing the emergence of new cultural value systems and alternative historical trajectories to enter into the Sephardi world.

The most basic elements of the Sephardi identity are therefore contested and often transformed.

The term “Sephardi,” as I have often remarked, has been the first casualty in this process.  It is a word that has been contested and must be continually explained.

“Sepharad” is the historical marker of this identity and it is the locus, Muslim Spain, where a clearly defined identity was made manifest.  The world of Mediterranean Jewry coalesced in the culture of Spain while it remained under Arab-Muslim rule.  The old Talmudic academies in Babylonia – present-day Iraq – had been transformed by the Arab conquests with the adoption of the Arabic language and its attendant cultural system that brought Levantine monotheism and Greco-Roman rationalism together.

Arab Jews took on the great load of translating classical Jewish culture into a new language and into a new system of cultural values.  The adoption of scientific principles and a new form of rational ethics led to the development of the conception that would remain at the very core of Sephardic civilization for centuries: that of Religious Humanism.

The tradition of Religious Humanism might be understood in the following passage from Moses Angel:

Then, charity, which in the doctrine of abstract faith, means love for universal mankind, shall cease to be what concrete religion made it, love only for self and self’s imitators.  Then, man shall acknowledge that true God-worship consists not in observance of any particular customs, but in the humble, zealous cultivation of those qualities by which the Eternal has made himself known to the world.  The members of one creed shall not arrogate to themselves peculiar morality and peculiar salvation, denying both to the members of other creeds; but they shall learn that morality and salvation are the cause and effect of all earnest endeavors to rise to the knowledge of revelation. 

We see here some of the basic tenets of Religious Humanism as understood within the Sephardic tradition.  At the very center of this tradition is the value of charity which is defined as love of humanity.  The value of loving-kindness is understood as being taught to us by God’s example.  The customs of mankind are seen as secondary to this moral sense that may rightly be called a universalism.  Having affirmed the primacy of universal love and charity, Angel then goes on to recognize the need for ancient custom to be maintained – but in a manner that allows for diversity of worship and a respect for the values of pluralism:

Men shall cease to attempt the substitution of one set of forms for another set of forms; they shall satisfy themselves with being honest and dignified exponents of their own mode of belief, and shall not seek to coerce what heaven has left unfettered – the rights of conscience.   

In these passages we can see what it was that my grandfather held so dearly when he left his native Aleppo in Syria to come to the United States.

The Sephardic ethical tradition had absorbed and transmitted the values of classical Judaism in a way that extended its hand to all the peoples of the earth.  These values would include: Honesty, Selflessness, Discipline, Loyalty, Graciousness, Humility, a reverence for Knowledge, an aversion to Sin and Immorality, and a deep and abiding Faith in God and in the traditions of Judaism.

This sense of morality is brilliantly defined in one of the central ethical texts of the Sephardic tradition, Bahye ibn Paquda’s Al Hidaya ila Fara’id al-Qulub, The Duties of the Heart:

Humility in all worldly affairs, open and secret, in words and actions, when moving or at rest.  In all these, a man’s conscience should be at one with his conduct, and his private behavior should not be different from his public behavior.  On the contrary, all one does should be equally measured and in due proportion, full of humility and submission to God and men, according to their various degrees and the benefit one gets from them in the world and in religion, as it is said: “Well is it with the man that dealeth graciously and lendeth, that ordereth his affairs rightly” (Psalms 112:5); “Be lowly in spirit before all men” (Mishnah Avot 4:9); “Be submissive to a superior, affable to a junior, and receive all men cheerfully.”  (Mishnah Avot 3:12)

Thus, the Sephardim who came to America brought with them a complex value-system that articulated and lived out the ideals of the Jewish faith, but never succumbed to the parochialism that would characterize Ashkenazi culture which had for many centuries been marked by its aversion to the principles of universal brotherhood and which had posited a Judaism that was hermetic and insular.

Central to the Sephardic culture that my grandfather lived and taught were the twin values of Suffeh and ‘Eib. 

Suffeh was the term that encompassed the world of Arab hospitality, good breeding and manners that exhibited a selflessness and sense of humility that was the foundational principle of all proper behavior.  Suffeh was not a specific ritual matter that could be found in the rabbinical legal literature; it was a meta-Halakhic principle upon which the entire system was built.  It was an ethical value without which the rest of the system would entirely collapse.

‘Eib was the negative side of this moral universe. ‘Eib is the Arabic term for what is haram, forbidden.  In English the word ‘Eib is often translated by the word “shame,” but the English word contains elements of Christian guilt that often miss the actual essence of what the concept of ‘Eib really means.  ‘Eib is a concept that, like Suffeh, is meant to regulate the orderly and dignified way that human beings are to live and interact with one another.  The sense of shame that the word signifies as a concept leads us to understand ourselves as creatures who must exhibit a character of self-effacement that encompasses a fierce demand for truth and integrity. 

The values of ‘Eib are most pronounced in the matter of personal morality.  The slandering of another person, the embarrassing of another person, are values that were seen as ‘Eib, as shameful, within the world that my grandfather lived in.  This did not mean, as the cynics often wish to point out, that this world was free of wrongdoing; to the contrary, the vigilance of ‘Eib as a cultural value saw to it that those who violated its prescriptions were made socially marginal or diminished in some way.  In the classic Sephardic culture the values of generosity, warmth and honesty were enforced by the lay leaders and rabbinical authorities alike.

The maintenance of the communal Bet Din, the Jewish court, a mainstay of all Sephardic communities for centuries, was not meant to deal with ritual matters, but to adjudicate civil issues that plagued the community.  The most famous of these adjudications was called the Hatarat Nedarim, a ceremony that was performed by the rabbinical court a number of times before Yom Kippur.  This ceremony was performed to settle outstanding disputes in a liturgical forum that brought together all members of the community in the Synagogue who agreed to suspend their legal claims against one another to allow for complete civil unity before the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.

Though the twin concepts of Suffeh and ‘Eib were not followed uniformly by every member of the community, they remained the gold standard of behavior by which people would be judged by their fellow community members.  Those who violated these principles were seen in some way as morally deficient.

Having maintained the values of mutual respect and a clear sense of moral decency, the community valued the principles of education first and foremost.  The Hakham, the esteemed spiritual leader, the rabbi, was viewed as paramount in the community because he had the deep knowledge of Torah that was at the very epicenter of community life.  The Hakham was responsible to maintain the values of the tradition which, as we have just remarked, was based on the concepts of Suffeh and ‘Eib; ethical principles without which the rote performance of Jewish ritual would be viewed as rank hypocrisy.

The pronounced rejection of hypocrisy was highly valued in the Sephardic community.  To pretend to be one thing while actually living in ways contrary to appearances was a cardinal violation of the moral code of the community and social mechanisms of conformity would make sure that hypocrites would be chastised and pressured to conform to principles of integrity.

These then were the cultural values of the Sephardim when they came to the United States and which were sadly rejected in the course of time when Sephardim began to adapt to new and different ways of life that were taken from Ashkenazi Jews.

Understanding PILPUL

At the very core of Ashkenazi Jewish tradition lays a very different vision of the rabbinical modality.  In Ashkenazi tradition there was never a sense of rational ethics which were uniform and trans-social.  The figure of the rabbi transcended the culture and privileged the rabbi as being different than others.

So it is therefore important to understand the ways in which Ashkenazi rabbinical culture understood Judaism.  Unlike the Sephardim who adopted the pedagogical system of the Arab Muslims with its emphasis on rationalism and science in the context of religion – what we have called Religious Humanism – the Ashkenazim developed a form of Judaism that attempted to mimic the exact values of the Talmudic past.  Eschewing a comparative understanding of religion, the sort of understanding that was taught in the works of Maimonides who sought to include in his “Jewish” writings all sorts of “non-Jewish” elements such as medicine, philosophy, comparative history, and a developed sense of ethical morality, the Ashkenazim, rejecting Maimonides almost completely, sought to make exact their replication of the socio-cultural world of the Talmud.

This Ashkenazi reconstruction of the Talmudic world took a dynamic literature, a literature that had been in constant development in the richness of its multiplicity and historical evolution, and made it a static literature.  The Talmud in Ashkenazi culture was a closed canon whose every pronouncement had to be followed to the letter.  Within the Sephardic rabbinical tradition a process of legal codification developed that was emphatically contested by the Ashkenazi authorities.  Maimonides’ Code, the Mishneh Torah, was the object of many attacks by Ashkenazi rabbis, most prominently that of Abraham b. David of Posquieres, the RABAD, whose glosses on the text drip with malice and resentment for the values of Maimonidean Judaism.  Far from being a simple clash of exegetical strategies, the split between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Talmudism was based on an existential clash that has ended today with the complete victory of Ashkenazi Judaism.

The Sephardi world-view, as we have said, was based on foundational ethical principles that were rational in orientation.  The proper ordering of society was the very basis of Sephardic Judaism.  Here we can find no clash between the demands of the Jewish law and its complex ritual system and the requirements of the moral standing of human beings in their search for dignity.

The Ashkenazim gave renewed life to the accusation often made by Christianity that Judaism embraced the ritual over the moral.  The term “Pharisee” as it appears in the Christian Gospels and in Church tradition has come to mean a person who would ignore or violate the norms of civil behavior in favor of a punctilious observance of ritual matters.  The “Pharisee” is seen as a hypocrite who would not offer to others the care and respect that he would demand for himself.

In Ashkenazi culture this was translated by a situational morality that we have identified as PILPUL.

I think that it is vital for all of us to understand what PILPUL really means because so much of what Judaism is today, and here I would emphasize the Ashkenazi basis of Zionism and its ideological system, is based on this casuistic form of understanding.

A basic definition of PILPUL is provided by Jose Faur in his indispensable article “The Legal Thinking of the Tosafot”:

The pilpul methodology of the Tosafot presupposes that there is no objective Halakha. In the final analysis, law is grounded on the discretionary judgment of the rabbi, and it is formulated through pilpul. The rabbi molds the law to fit the specifics of any situation. The pilpul reflects the specifics of the situation as seen by the rabbi, and projects to the community the pronouncement of the law made in a hallowed text – as interpreted and recast by the rabbi.

According to Faur, PILPUL is a situational ethics that determines normative behavior according to the relative values of the interpreter.  As we have already stated, Ashkenazi Judaism was predicated upon the absolute authority of the rabbi.  To view this contextually, we might raise the matter of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah which was rejected by most Ashkenazi rabbinical authorities because one of its main goals was to provide a convenient digest of Jewish law to the layperson and obviate the need for absolute rabbinical authorities.  Maimonides sought to provide all Jews with a comprehensive text to which they could refer to find the Jewish law in a simplified manner.  As the majority of Sephardic Jews were not conversant in the Talmudic literature, that literature being the almost exclusive provenance of the rabbinical class, there was a need for Jews to have complete access to the legal and ritual traditions that Judaism demanded they follow.

The Ashkenazim held that the law was the exclusive prerogative of the rabbi.  Similar to the situation in the Medieval Catholic Church, Ashkenazi Judaism gave to the rabbi a quasi-sacred role that provided him with a great deal of power which could be wielded in any manner that he saw fit.

PILPUL was the means that the Ashkenazi rabbinate used to affect this power.

It should be remembered that within the parameters of Talmudic tradition PILPUL was the interpretive means that the classical Sages used to conduct their discussions and arguments.  The Jewish legal tradition, as Faur has so brilliantly taught us, is one that is made up of the Oral transmissions that were codified and appropriated within the context of the rabbinical discussion.  This discussion is enshrined in the Talmudic sugya, pericope, which is a composite creation that strings together various literary elements using specific rhetorical terms as a means of identifying the nature of the discourse.  While it is too complicated to review these terms and the ways in which they were used, suffice it to say that Talmudic discourse is made up of certain technical terms which, similar to the use of authenticated technical language in the Muslim Shari’a and Hadith, marked the authority of a particular rabbinical statement and displayed the status of the statement in ways that those schooled in the legal aspects of this tradition were required to understand.

PILPUL in the Talmudic tradition was not a rhetorical free-for-all but was a system that permitted legal discourse to function as a series of paradigmatic statements that would, as we see in the great Sephardi commentators and codifiers like Isaac Alfasi, Se’adya Ga’on and Maimonides, signify the way in which the law was passed down.

But as we read in the citation from Faur’s article on the Ba’alei ha-Tosafot, the Talmudic glossators of the school of RASHI, the Ashkenazi understanding of PILPUL was in the nature of a substantive dialectic.  For the Tosafist School, PILPUL was a means not of clarifying and filtering tradition – a tradition to which they as Europeans did not truly belong – through a rational scientific analysis of the critical rhetorical terms and their meaning; PILPUL was a means by which the antecedent textual paradigms could be manipulated to assert the prerogative of the interpreter.

With this understanding of PILPUL it is easier for us to see why the attacks on Maimonides and his methodology were so pronounced in the Ashkenazi tradition.  Having rejected a critical analysis of the Talmudic corpus which would have allowed that corpus to remain open and dynamic, the Ashkenazim did two different things: First, they froze the Talmudic system in its place.  Behaviors would be replicated from the mores and cultural values of Sassanid Babylonia.  This trans-historicism would become complicated as time passed because the static patterning of behaviors would reject contemporary values in addition to the fact that its realities would become ever more dim and incomprehensible to those who were struggling to maintain such a form of antiquarian living.  Ashkenazi Talmudism often became anachronistic and more than somewhat atavistic.

But the second feature of this PILPUL was to take the static realities from the Talmudic past and integrate those realities with a radically different ethical sensibility which would then be able to absorb the classical model and refashion it along the lines of the desires of the interpreter.

PILPUL in essence allows the interpreter to mold the normative law according to his own whim and desire.  It turns reality into whatever the interpreter wishes that reality to be.

The most fascinating part of the way PILPUL functions is the manner in which it creates the illusion that the authority of the past has been maintained while in reality that model has been transformed through the PILPUL into something completely other than what it originally signified.

In this way the fiction of fidelity to the past could be maintained while wholly new ways of seeing morality and law could be developed.

In Faur’s landmark article “Anti-Maimonidean Demons” he analyzes PILPUL and remarks that its transformation marks a new sense of the religious.  This new sense of the religious, what we would call “Fundamentalism,” is infused with the spirit of violence:

A mark of the anti-Maimonidean ideology (whereby zeal displaces halakha) is the sanction of violence as a legitimate means for the implementation of ‘religion.’ A strategic decision –  with horrendous consequences as of yet not fully explored by historians – was to approach the ecclesiastical authorities to fight Jewish ‘heretics.’ The anti-Maimonideans argued that in their endeavor to stamp out heresy, the ecclesiastical authorities should also incinerate the works of Jewish heretics.

Violence became the earmark of ‘devotion,’ both religious and intellectual.  Jewish authorities saw nothing wrong with R. Jonah Gerondi’s brand of devotion. In appreciation, the community in Toledo awarded him the position of preacher, which he kept until his death.  A telling detail of the anti-Maimonidean brand of scholarship is the aggressive style characterizing their writings. It attained a level of invective unprecedented in Jewish literary history. The strictures are designated hasagot (singular hasaga) meaning to ‘seize’ a victim in hot pursuit (see Ex 15:9, Dt 28:45, Ps. 7:6).  A more benign nomenclature is haggaha ‘emendation’ – a term referring to a scroll of the Tora that is ‘ritually void’ (pasul); such a text may not be kept unless properly ‘emended.’  Thus, the strategy of faultfinding, disinformation, and intimidation accepted as standard norms of ‘rabbinic discourse’ (both past and present).

Rather than clearly delineate lines marked by the rational spirit of critical analysis, PILPUL loosens the chains of tradition – while pretending that it is faithful to tradition in overt terms – in order to set out less stringent moral rules.  The elision of moral absolutes permits the emergence of Violence; a mode of behavior that has led to many of the complex failures that are inherent to contemporary Jewish culture.

Among these inner-Ashkenazi failings we can mark ethical issues such as the Imputation of Sin and the concept of Vicarious Guilt and Punishment; both values that were absorbed not from classical Judaism, but from the Christian environment in which the Ashkenazim lived for many centuries.  The values of integrity and justice were then relativized using the new paradigms of PILPUL.  Integrity and Justice were not absolute values that transcended time and place, but were framed by the context of the situation thus creating what philosophers call “Situational Morality.”  Similar to the oft-noted hypocrisies in Western ethics, the Ashkenazim did not have an a priori system of ethics to which all must conform, but allowed for forms of casuistry that judged different people in different ways according to their place in the culture.  Man would not be judged by his actions, but by his place in society.

Sephardi Typologies

The interaction of Sephardim and Ashkenazim in America and the West brought low the integrity of Sephardic Judaism and the lofty values that it had carried inside it for many centuries.

Sephardim looked at themselves as deficient and began to take on different forms of Ashkenazi identification.

In the following sections, we will examine a number of different Sephardi typologies that show us the ways in which Sephardim have turned their backs on their own noble traditions and have adopted the mores and cultural values of the Ashkenazim; values which have remained deeply faulty and have compromised Judaism as it is now lived in the world.  Today’s Judaism represents not a system of moral absolutes where behavior is based on justice and universal fraternity, but is a religion of expediency and moral relativism where social status is more important than the moral substance of our character.  Human beings are thus viewed not as equals, but within the complex system of stratification where concepts of right and wrong have been replaced by the values of might makes right – the concept of might fitting into the conventional role of wealth, physical violence and social acceptability.

Typology 1: The Sephardi as Yeshiva Bochur

The desideratum in the Sephardic culture for piety and the veneration of tradition has led those drifting and aimless Sephardim into the world of the fundamentalist Yeshiva.  Sephardim here in the United States have affiliated themselves with institutions such as Mirrer Yeshiva in Brooklyn, the Beit Midrash Govoha in Lakewood, New Jersey and Ner Israel in Baltimore, Maryland. 

A number of things take place in this transition:

First, the Sephardim who have made the leap into the Yeshiva world have transformed their past and have recreated it in the image of the Ashkenazi rabbinical tradition.

So figures like Rabbi Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad, the Ben Ish Hai, and other Sephardic rabbinical figures are transformed into “Gedoilim,” rabbinical giants who share a pantheon of Jewish greatness with the Ashkenazim.

Next, these Sephardim must transform the teachings of these Sephardic rabbinical figures to comport with the Ashkenazi mores.  So in the case of the Ben Ish Hai it is important that his concern with the values of modernity and the world be occluded and removed from his record.  To do this, the Sephardi Yeshiva types will rewrite the past in order to federate the past more comfortably with their new realities as Ashkenazim.

The problem here is that in order to transform the past, a forced ignorance of that past must be effectuated.  An example of how this is done is the self-censoring of traditional texts.  Using the example of Bahye ibn Paquda’s book we cited earlier, the Yeshivas will not teach the introduction to the work which is loaded with Greco-Islamic philosophical influences; rather, they emphasize its fire and brimstone moral tenets.  In addition, the historical background of texts, such as the Judeo-Arabic provenance of Maimonides and Se’daya Ga’on and the Italian Renaissance background of Moses Hayyim Luzzato or the Enlightenment context of David Nieto will all be elided and blanked out of the teaching of their materials.

The Sephardi Yeshiva bochur is firmly committed to the behavioral codes and morality of the Ashkenazim, but by means of PILPUL finds that he can turn the Sephardic past, which is viewed uncritically through hagiography and myth, and resurrect the legions of Sephardic rabbis and turn them into Ashkenazim. 

A recent example of this phenomenon is the Artscroll publication of a book called Aleppo: City of Scholars by Rabbi David Sutton where the Syrian city is transformed into Slobodka.

Along with this, the lifestyle of the Yeshiva world is adopted in defiance of the mores and aesthetic values of the Sephardic past.  Innovations in dress and comportment serve to reject the ethics of Sephardic tradition while replacing them with a new set of values that institute Ashkenazi morality for the Sephardic kind.

New moral elements enter into the Sephardi community from this Yeshiva world.  Things that would have been anathema to my grandfather and his generation are now seen as perfectly normal in a Sephardi context.  Ways of doing business turn from the values of absolute integrity into a form of moral PILPUL where casuistic standards come to replace the absolute forms of business integrity that had once permeated the Sephardic community.  A degeneration of standards – much of it based on the Ashkenazi sense that moral standards only apply to dealings inside the Jewish community and do not apply to Gentiles – has thus taken place due to this transformation of values.

It is now not uncommon among religious Sephardic Jews to witness examples of lying, cheating, stealing and slander when those values are deployed in the service of the religious ideal.  Such values are not ‘Eib because they are PILPUL-istically transformed from negative values into positive values that enrich the religious life.

In addition, the values of Ashkenazi relativism have taken hold in the Sephardic world when it comes to the high standards of intellectualism that we have upheld for centuries.  The values of critical investigation are upended by the hermetic world of Ashkenazi Judaism whose tenets proscribe what they have considered “non-Jewish” learning often marked as “heretical.”

Thus, the Sephardi as Yeshiva Bochur has brought new forms of behavior and morality into what was once a simple system where integrity and humility reigned supreme.

Typology 2: The Sephardi as Modern Orthodox

As is known, Jewish Orthodoxy has two main streams: There is the world of the Ashkenazi Yeshivot which includes the world of Hasidic extremism, even as Ashkenazim have often fought amongst themselves as to which Orthodox denomination is the most authentic.  And then there is the world of the Liberal Orthodox which has been responsible for so much damage in the Sephardic community.

Here a bit of history is in order.

The Sephardic communities of the Middle East maintained a lively and energetic rabbinate that was to be decimated when the Arab Jews came to America.  Centered in the New York area, the most vigorous, organized and unified of all the Arab Jewish communities was the Syrian branch that settled finally in Brooklyn.  This Brooklyn Sephardic community remains the most important of all the Sephardic communities in the world, many of whom either dissolved, were prey to assimilation, or lacked the resolve to create institutions and networks affirming the centrality of Jewish life.

This Brooklyn community has had a unique history because its rabbinical leadership was compromised early on in their sojourn in America.

As I have stated many times, the most brilliant and skilled of the rabbis to come from Syria to the US was Hakham Matloub Abadi.  Rabbi Abadi was trained in the classical Sephardic traditions of the Middle East and Spain along the lines of the Maimonidean tradition.  He was conversant with the theological literature, a master of Halakha and Talmud, and was deeply committed to the poetry and occasional literature of the belles-lettrists of the Sephardic culture.  Hakham Matloub was uniquely able to draw together the many disparate elements of the Sephardic civilization and do so in a way that remained wedded to the Sephardi moral value system that we have earlier outlined.

But the United States was a new land for these Sephardim which did not have set in place the same social mechanisms that were indigenous to the Arab Middle East.  A freedom from authority had existed in this country which was to become the undoing of the traditionalists.  The American culture was open and pluralistic it is true, but within the culture it was possible to exert malevolent tendencies that could destroy the fragile dialectic of the traditional morality.

So much of the Sephardic ethical system had been based on self-abnegation and altruism that the American penchant for an aggressively relentless self-promotion understandably placed those whose moral code did not permit hypocritical dissimulation and self-reinvention at a tremendous disadvantage.

Positive Freedom has as its corollary the ability to abuse that freedom; to take freedom and manipulate it to achieve selfish ends not in keeping with traditional values of selflessness and altruism.

There were people in the Sephardic community who sought to take advantage of this new system in ways that saw them turn their backs on men of integrity like Matloub Abadi.

This was the case when the lay leadership of the Brooklyn community, led by Isaac Shalom, had Hakaham Matloub removed from his role as an educator and community rabbi and replaced by those who would, more in line with the American model – at least the way that these men saw that model, be more compliant.  The rabbinate was being transformed from men of character and integrity into men who would do as they were told.

Central to this strategy that was developed among the lay leaders, many of whom used their wealth in ways that would affirm their power and importance, was the institution of the emerging system of Modern Orthodoxy in the community.

Initially, this development took place as a means to eliminate the native rabbis who would soon be replaced by others who would not have their roots in the old Sephardi system.  Shalom had first used his wealth to create schools in North Africa called Ozar ha-Torah which would feed new rabbis into the school system that he had been developing.  Matloub Abadi had started an after-school Talmud Torah program that Shalom turned into a Yeshiva Day School along the lines of the emerging Day School system in the US.  The system did not promote the intellectual, cultural and ethical values of the Sephardic tradition and was itself a modest departure from the more fundamentalist Yeshivas like Lakewood and Ner Israel.

Modern Orthodoxy was seen by the new leadership as having all the modern cachet they felt the old system lacked.  In the hearts of the leadership, the old ways were dead and there were newer and greener pastures to sow.

What was not seen was that over the years Modern Orthodoxy would lose its battle with the Yeshivas and would remain in a defensive posture in the overall world of Jewish Orthodoxy.  A recent example of this is the dissolution of the Modern Orthodox group EDAH in the face of the fundamentalist onslaught.  EDAH’s Orthodox liberalism could not withstand the force of the Yeshivot and their tentacles that reached into the smallest crevices of the religious Jewish world.

Modern Orthodoxy, centered in institutions like Yeshiva University, the Yeshivah of Flatbush High School, RAMAZ High School and the Young Israel of Flatbush, was trapped in a conundrum that it has yet to be able to extricate itself from: It remained Orthodox at its core, but sought to lighten the stringencies of Orthodoxy – a kind of Orthodoxy-lite. 

So on the one hand Modern Orthodoxy’s central religious tenets were in accordance with those of the fundamentalist Yeshivas, and yet on the other hand there was a sense that the Yeshivas had taken things too far and were too strict.  Such a formula was not a winning one and Modern Orthodoxy found itself clinging to its most sacred principle, Zionism – more on which later, and generally deferring to the rigidity of the Yeshivas and turning to the Right.

Once Modern Orthodoxy with its more liberal attitude towards the outside world entered into the Sephardic community a new process took place that was desired by the lay leadership: A rejection of the past was effected which led to a transformation not merely of values, as we saw in the case of the Sephardic move to fundamentalism, but to an almost-complete annihilation of the history and culture of the past.

Modern Orthodoxy set out the idea that the Ashkenazim were superior to the Sephardim.  Unlike the fundamentalism that served to turn Sephardi rabbis into variants of Ashkenazi rabbis, the Modern Orthodoxy being more rational and worldly simply instilled in the Sephardim the idea that their culture was not up to the level of the Ashkenazim and dismissed it with extreme prejudice.

Thus was instituted an inferiority complex that continues to be perpetuated in the Sephardi Day Schools.  In these schools Jewish history is taught with no Sephardi component.  The intellectual and academic values of Sephardi rabbinism, the codes, the poetry, the philosophy, the science, have all been subsumed under an Ashkenazi hegemony that rejects the centrality and utility of Sephardic civilization not only as a means to perpetuate Sephardi continuity, but in absolute cognitive terms as well.

So Modern Orthodoxy has created a cadre of Ashkenazified Sephardim who are quite militant in their disdain and hatred for the Sephardic past.  While the extreme Orthodox at least try to pay a certain lip service to the Sephardic past – however misguided that might be – the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox Sephardim have been responsible for the almost complete decimation of the organic Sephardic past.

Typology 3: The Sephardi as Ashkenazi Zionist

Related to but not completely subsumed under the rubric of the Ashkenazified Modern Orthodox Sephardi is the Zionist Sephardi.

Zionism, as is not so well-known, was a modern movement that originated in the theoretical writings of two Sephardic rabbis – Yehuda Alkalai and Yehuda Bibas.  That this is not well-known these days is due to the Ashkenazification of Zionism and the almost complete elimination of the Arab ethnicity of the Sephardim.

Zionism in the Sephardic conception was not a negation of Jewish nativity in the Middle East, it was merely a concept developed to ensure the safety and the stability of all Jews.  With little thought as to the differences between Ashkenazim and Sephardim and how this might impact the emergence of a Jewish national movement, Bibas and Alkalai displayed their sense of humanism and universalism which, sadly, was never adopted by the Ashkenazim who hijacked the movement.

From a very early stage in the Zionism, Sephardim, those Jews who could claim an organic connection to the Middle East and to Palestine, were made marginal to the movement. 

In recent studies which clarify the role of the Sephardim in Palestine, the scholar Abigail Jacobson tells the story of the indigenous Sephardim of Palestine in the pre-State period. The view of these Sephardim of the situation on the ground lacked the blind utopianism of the Ashkenazim who thought that Palestine had no indigenous inhabitants:

… ha-Herut [Sephardi Palestinian newspaper] presented a unique approach for future life in Palestine. The writers of the newspaper tried to present the “new Yishuv” and the Zionist leadership with an alternative way of living with the Arabs in the country. The Arabs (in particular the Muslims) were perceived as potential partners for cooperation, with whom the Sephardim hoped to live in coexistence. Loyalty to the Ottoman Empire was of central importance to the Sephardim; they saw Ottoman citizenship as the “uniting component” for the people who lived in Palestine and essential for the country’s progress. 

This traditional native viewpoint spoke in the moral vocabulary of the Sephardic tradition which maintained respect for non-Jews and which promoted peaceful co-existence.  It understood the need for a multicultural system that would permit relations between Jews and Arabs.  It held to the principles of historical realism that were founded on rational ethics.  That Jews and Arabs lived together over many centuries meant that the mores and cultural values of the groups were not at all dissimilar and that there was a pressing need to create a shared sense of community in order to achieve desired goals in the future.

But as we now know, Zionism would remain firmly under the tight rein of Ashkenazim who brought their PILPUL culture to bear on the situation.  As we explained earlier, the PILPUL methodology allowed the interpreter to assert his own valuation of events rather than be forced to acquiesce to a rational understanding of those events.  In religious terms this meant a rejection of the chain of tradition and the institution of personal opinion based on whim and caprice, but in secular political terms this meant the ability of the Zionists to reframe and transfigure the actual physical and demographic realities of the country that they sought to take from its indigenous inhabitants.

The impact of Zionism on the Sephardic Modern Orthodox was not immediate.  It took many years of indoctrination on the part of Ashkenazi teachers and rabbis to impart the centrality of Zionism into the Sephardic students.  But in the 1960s an assimilation of Ashkenazi Zionist values took place that was clearly tied into the phenomenon of Modern Orthodoxy in the Sephardic world.

Leaving aside discussion of the fate of the Jews who left their homes in the Arab world and settled in Israel, a matter that I have analyzed most recently in my essay on the new book by Yehouda Shenhav, the Zionism that emerged in the Sephardic community was one that confirmed the centrality of the Ashkenazi interpretation of Jewish history as a seemingly endless series of pogroms and persecutions that were characteristic of Jewish anomie and alienation from the world.  Sephardim were taught that their history was the history of the Ashkenazim and that such was the history of all Jews.

The problem here is that Sephardim were not in reality Ashkenazim for they had a completely different historical trajectory – much of which had been radically transformed by Zionism.

So here we see that Sephardic Jews were swindled out of knowledge of their own history and, like many colonized peoples, had been taught to see the history of the “White” hegemon as their own.  Their Arab nativity was denied them and even more cruelly was identified as the identity of the “enemy”; thus making Sephardim into self-haters who when they looked in the mirror saw the Arab enemy while simultaneously seeing themselves as not-Arab, as being Ashkenazi.

Sephardim were thus denied access to their history, except to variously see that history as faulty, dangerous and irrelevant.

Many Sephardim had a vested interest in this system while others simply cowered under the weight of Ashkenazi Zionism’s most pernicious argument – “We are all One People.”

While the “One” meant Ashkenazi and the “People” meant Jews, the Sephardim found that for some reason unbeknownst to them they were seeing their past vanishing.  Amazingly, no one seemed to be able to put their finger on the problem and put two and two together.  Sephardic cultural history was evaporating because it was not in the interest of the Ashkenazim to allow it to be articulated in any manner – except in the Arab-bashing ways permitted by Zionist orthodoxy.

The end result was that anyone who sought to articulate the values and traditions of the Sephardic past were marked as being outside the consensus of the Sephardic community.  This tragic reality saw to it that the teachings of Hakham Matloub Abadi and his student Rabbi Jose Faur, both of whom were deeply committed to preserving the Sephardic past, became objects of derision in the Sephardic community.  Both men were vilified, slandered, trivialized and often treated with condescension as outlaws in a world that was now firmly in the grasp of the Ashkenazified Sephardim and their bitter contempt for the ways of the East.

Zionism became a central feature in a waning Modern Orthodoxy which was losing its battle to the fundamentalists.  The more the battle was being lost, the more extreme the attachment to Zionism would become.  Any critique of Zionism or any attempt to argue that Palestinian Arabs and Sephardic Jews might have a common foe in the Ashkenazim was deemed a crime of the first order.

The mechanisms of Ashkenazi PILPUL again took their place at the very center of communal life: It was not how smart or how moral you were as a person that now counted, the new values of PILPUL judged people on how closely they held to the values of the Ashkenazi ideality.  And in the Brooklyn community in the post-1967 universe, that meant an unquestioning allegiance to extremist Zionism.

Typology 4: The Sephardi as Marrano

Of all the typologies I have treated, this final one is perhaps the most complicated and maddening of all.

As is known, in Spain under the pressures of the Inquisition, Jews converted to Christianity in order to save their lives.  These Jews were called in Hebrew Anusim, the forced ones, or in the pejorative Spanish term Marranos, meaning little pigs.

Marranos often lived between two worlds: Some continued to hold on to Jewish rituals in the secrecy of their homes while remaining “good” Catholics in public.  We know that tragically the Inquisition persecuted these people sending them to be tortured and killed for “Judaizing.”

Inside this Marrano soul waged a primal conflict of values and identities.  They were neither Catholic nor Jewish.  And while they themselves struggled to juggle these conflicting identities, their conscience often betrayed them and they turned into skeptics and at times nihilists.

In the work of Jose Faur we see many examples of Spanish writers like Luis de Gongora, Francisco Sanches, the author of Lazarillo de Tormes, Fernando de Rojas and on to crucial figures like Uriel da Costa, Spinoza and Montaigne who all harbored to varying degrees the confusion of the Marranos.

The Marrano mentality might be more easily understood from a reading of the book The Prince by the Italian philosopher Machiavelli.  As is well-known Machiavelli raised the art of duplicity to a rarefied height.  He developed a way of living that would permit a person to achieve success while not permitting others to know what he truly thought.

If this sounds something like the Marrano mentality it is not so far off.

The Marrano held to Judaism in private while espousing another religious identity entirely in public which would allow him to prosper and thrive in a society where Judaism was made illicit. 

The trigger mechanism of Machiavellian thought is when the charade becomes real and stops being a charade.  When does the illusion turn real?

For Marranos like Spinoza Judaism never reasserted itself.  After many decades of dissimulation, there were Marranos who lost any sense of who they truly were.  They could be neither Jewish nor Catholic and were left to live out their lives on the margins of society in the pre-Modern period.  It would not be until the 19th century that the Marrano skepticism would take on a life of its own and lead to the creation of secular Modernity.

In the case of Sephardim at the present time, there are some who exhibit Marrano-like tendencies in the following manner: During the course of the Ashkenazi decimation of Sephardic civilization, there have been Sephardim who have had to bury their anti-Ashkenazi hate deep inside themselves.  In their inner, private worlds these Sephardim light their proverbial Shabbat candles out of sight of their persecutors.  In these basements of Sephardi dissimulation you will hear the most vicious anti-Ashkenazi vitriol articulated.  There is a cadre of Sephardim which loathes what has been done to them and have become more embittered about it than can possibly be imagined.

These Marrano-like Sephardim have maintained their underground world of Sephardi identity and yet they exhibit certain traits that try to maintain their “normalcy” vis-à-vis the Ashkenazi hegemon.  Any attempts at trying to fight against the Ashkenazim are rejected in ultra-cynical terms that reflect a nascent Machiavellianism.  There is no hope that the situation can be improved or that the Ashkenazim will ever be defeated, so the Sephardi Marranos stay inside their basements cringing in fear that they can never emerge and fight their enemy.

What I have seen in many such Sephardi Marranos is a deep affiliation with Zionism in its most malignant Arab-hating mode.  These Sephardi Marranos do not fight back at their Ashkenazi oppressors, but have become the most vociferous and outspoken Arab-haters around.  And while there might be a number of psychological reasons that could explain this process of displacement, in the end these Sephardi Marranos exemplify the typological conundrums that we have been examining in this essay.

The Arab-hater/Ashkenazi-hater Marrano is a person who knows that Sephardic identity is important and that it matters.  He remains paralyzed by his overwhelming anger and fear in a world where Ashkenazim rule everything and can exact an awful punishment – often in the socio-economic realm, affecting the ability of a person to support and sustain themselves and their families – as they see fit.

For anyone to break the Marrano pattern, the fear that grips Sephardim who really prefer to be who they are as opposed to pretending to be someone they are not, is to incur the wrath of the Marrano himself.  And this was a well-known pattern among the Marranos in Spain.  Perhaps the greatest danger facing Jews or those secretly practicing Judaism in Spain were the Marranos who also acted as informers.  It was these people, even as their own ambivalence towards Judaism was so pronounced, who “protected” themselves by acting more “Catholic” than the Catholics.

In this case, I have often seen those Sephardim who know what being Sephardic really is, acting in ways that provide the most support to our Ashkenazi enemies.  Most specifically many of these Sephardim have harbored the illusion that Settler Zionism is a place where they can truly be who they are.  And sadly, the extreme Kahanist Zionism to which such Sephardi Marranos subscribe, removes them from the actual Sephardi renewal that goes on in many of the books that we discuss in our newsletter.  Writers like Ammiel Alcalay, Yehouda Shenhav and Ella Shohat are marked by these Sephardi Marranos as “traitors” and a danger to Jews and Judaism.

In the end, these Sephardi Marranos have, whether they can see it or not, found as much common ground with the Ashkenazim, just as the Anusim found with the persecuting society of the Spanish Inquisition.  These fissures in the Sephardic community ensure that the dysfunction that has been implanted by Ashkenazi hegemony remains in force.

Conclusion

In this essay I have tried to argue that the organic Sephardic identity has been undermined by Ashkenazi culture and its ways of understanding and interpreting reality.

This complex dialectic is woven of a fabric that combines an inculcation of self-hatred in the Sephardic spirit with an assertion that only Ashkenazi means of articulation are permissible in a Jewish context.

The Sephardi typologies I have laid out seek to encompass the ways that Sephardim have lost their traditions and their organic identity, having relinquished that identity, an identity which houses within it the liberal values of a Religious Humanism currently missing from Jewish life, to an Ashkenazi culture based on a parochial intolerance that has used PILPUL to transform the verities of the past.

This PILPUL is at the core of all Jewish meaning as it exists in today’s world.  It is made manifest in Jewish institutions and it undergirds the whole of Zionist politics.  The interconnectedness of the Jewish world is based on this Ashkenazi principle of PILPUL which has transfigured reality into the prerogative of the privileged interpreter rather than along the lines of rationality and pragmatic realism.

The Sephardic voice has been occluded both by the Ashkenazim as well as by the Ashkenazified Sephardim themselves.  As can be seen in the examples of Sephardi typologies that I have presented, the mechanisms of repression and of forced incomprehension have been deeply embedded within the institutional mechanisms of Judaism to the point where any attempt at reversing the reality or at fighting against it has become perilously dangerous.

But in assessing the critical need for Judaism to once again return to the family of civilizations and not merely live in a closeted ghetto of PILPUL and fantasy, it has been my assertion that a forceful articulation of the Sephardic identity is both necessary and highly desirable even as the barriers set up by the Ashkenazi hegemony are both dangerous and off-putting. 

Without such Sephardic voices, the future of Jewish civilization, as we now see in the perpetual war that Ashkenazi Zionism has laid out in the Middle East, will be mortgaged to the folly of PILPUL and its frustratingly insane madness.