Sephardic Jews

“ But to the pious immigrants from the Peninsula this custom, though promoting decorum and devotion, appeared illegal, anti-Talmudic, if not heretical, and they zealously set to work to abolish it. Terrible sufferings had hardened the hearts of the Sephardic Jews, and they were but too ready to exercise the utmost severity in religious matters, and slavishly to follow the letter. The rabbi, David Ibn-Abi Zimra, was their leader. ”

“ When a boy, Akrish was banished from Spain, and at Naples he underwent all the sufferings which seem to have conspired against the exiles. Thus he limped from nation to nation, "whose languages he did not understand, and who spared neither old men nor children," until in Egypt, in the house of an exile, he found a few years' rest. Who can follow all the wandering exiles, with sore feet, and still sorer hearts, until they somewhere found rest, or the peace of the grave?
But the very enormity of the misery they endured387 raised the dignity of the Sephardic Jews to a height bordering on pride. ”

“ But as soon as they crossed the Alps into Germany they breathed raw air, politically as well as atmospherically. Few Sephardic fugitives visited this inhospitable land. The German population was as hostile to Jews as the Spanish. True, the Germans had no occasion to envy Jews on account of the position and influence of Jewish magnates at royal courts, but they grudged them even their miserable existence in the Jews' lanes in which they were penned up. They had been banished from some German districts, from Cologne, Mayence and Augsburg, and not a Jew was to be found in all Suabia. ”

“ These Jews, true to their religious instincts, built synagogues wherever they settled and were called Sephardic Congregations. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, they were the dominating religious and cultural type, and while yet retaining certain racial characteristics, they blended into the national life, having no small share in its development. ”

“ Many of the Sephardím are shopkeepers, trading chiefly in stuffs and hardwares. There are many minor differences between them and the Ashkenazím, such as the contents and the arrangement of their ritual, the constitution of their meetings, the mode of reading the service, their music, and even their cursive form of the square Hebrew character. The Maghrabis, or Western Jews, chiefly living in North‐western Africa, rank elsewhere as Sephardím; at Jerusalem, however, they are considered a separate sect, and have their own chief doctor. ”

“ TRADITION has long divided the Jewish people into two distinct branches: the Sephardim, or southern, and the Ashkenazim or north, European. Mediæval legend among the Jews themselves traced the descent of the first from the tribe of Judah; the second, from that of Benjamin. The Sephardim are mainly the remnants of the former Spanish and Portuguese Jews. They constitute in their own eyes an aristocracy of the nation. They are found primarily to-day in Africa ”

“ They increased rapidly in numbers, and gradually spread over the United Kingdom, establishing small congregations in most of the principal towns. Time has now so readjusted things that, in these days, the German-descended Jews of England rival in wealth and in culture, and in numbers far exceed, those who claim ancestry from among the Sephardim. Intermarriage between Sephardim and Ashkenazim is a frequent and welcome occurrence, and all the old feelings of separateness have disappeared with the causes for it. ”

“ The German Jews affect the quaint long coat and low wide-awake of the land of their origin. None of the Ashkenazim are permitted by their Rabbis to learn Arabic. Their domestic life is that of the Western Judenstadt. But they all cultivate the long ringlets which the Levitic law prescribes. Not less marked is their difference in character, “The Sephardim,” a recent traveller attests, “are tolerant, easy-going, and sociable. They earn their living largely by manual labour, are fishers at Tiberias, porters at Jerusalem and Jaffa. ”

“ The vicissitudes in the life of the nations, as well as the changes in the life of the Jewish people, especially since their cruel expulsion from Spain and Portugal, and the heartless persecution of the Marranos, at length brought some clear-seeing Jews to the conviction that history is not ruled by chance, but that a higher hand guides it, bringing to pass destined events by bloodshed and tears. ”

“ In the conformation of the Judean hills the secret of the immense vitality of the Jewish nationality is probably to be found. Had the capital of Judea been placed at Cæsarea, on the high-road from Greece to Egypt—had it even been permanently fixed at Shechem, accessible through the open valley of Samaria, it cannot be doubted that Greek or Egyptian influence would have affected far more the manners and religion of the Jews. Remote and inaccessible in its rugged mountains, Jerusalem was removed from the highway by which the hosts of the Pharaohs advanced on Assyria. ”

“ In the eyes of the anti-Semite it is not only a question whether Jews, like other men, are sinners, or are greater sinners than others, but the Jew himself, from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, his very existence is an un- pardonable crime. ”

“ The people? What did the people care about the yellow hat? When the Fire burned down London, sparing not even the great Cathedral, to say nothing of the Synagogue, this second Temple arose, equal in splendor to the first. At that time all the Jews in London were Sephardim of Spain and Portugal and Italy. Even now there are many of the people here who speak nothing among themselves but Spanish, just as there are Askenazim who speak nothing among themselves but Yiddish. ”

“ Anti-Semitism is then exclusively a question of European politics, and its origin is to be found, not in the long struggle between Europe and Asia, or between the Church and the Synagogue, which filled so much of ancient and medieval history, but in the social conditions resulting from the emancipation of the Jews in the middle of the 19th century. ”

“ Each community of immigrants, bound together by the ties of language, habit, and particular home associations, will live in a separate quarter. They will instinctively cling to their mother tongue and bring up their children in it. The British Jews will despise their Polish and Roumanian brethren as ignorant, and will, in their turn, be despised by them as spurious Jews. The Spanish-speaking Sephardim will scorn and be scorned by the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim. All the differences, social and national, which underlie the religious unity of Israel will emerge to the surface. ”

“ We have been naturalized French since 1550; we possess all kinds of properties, and we enjoy the unlimited right to acquire estates. We have neither laws, tribunals, nor officers of our own626
In adopting this attitude the Sephardim created a precedent which, if it had been followed henceforth consistently by their co-religionists, might have gone far to allay prejudice against the Jewish race. It was the solidarity generally presented by the Jews towards the rest of the community which excited alarm in the minds of French citizens. ”

“ They looked on with scornful indifference while the Israelites plied their busy trade, aware though they might be that the wealth they accumulated was in a great measure drawn from their own coffers. They would spit in contempt as they passed a Jewish synagogue, but they would not raise a finger to cause its demolition or prevent any number of worshippers from crowding into it. All over Turkey, Arabia, and Persia, some Jews were to be found in every town, where they were allowed to live [Pg 309] and thrive, unless they broke some law or offended some faithful Islamite. ”

“ This tedious summary forces us inevitably to the conclusion that, while a long-headed type of Sephardim Jews may exist, the law is very far from being satisfactorily established.
Thus, from a study of our primary characteristic—the proportions of the head—we find our modern Jews endowed with a relatively much broader head than that of the average Englishman, for example: while the best living representative of the Semitic race, the Arab, has a head which is even longer and narrower than onr own type. It is, in short, one of the longest known, being in every way distinctly African. ”

“ But the bulk of the race still is a people of wanderers; and their hope of restoration little more than a beautiful, melancholy dream. There are at the present hour upwards of ten million Jews, scattered to the four corners of the earth. Nine of these millions live in Europe: two-thirds of them in Russia, Roumania and Poland. In the Middle Ages persecution in the West had driven them Eastwards. Lately persecution in the East has turned the tide Westwards. There is no rest for Israel. ”

“ In the light, however, of the oldest records it is clear that the revival of the Judean community in Palestine was gradual and at first far from glorious. The Jews were a broken-hearted, poverty-stricken, persecuted people, still crushed by the great calamity that had overtaken their nation. The general return of the exiles was only a dream of the future, and, despite the general permission of Cyrus, the temple at Jerusalem still lay in ruins. ”

“ From the time when Jerusalem fell, till the beginning of the sixth century, the troubles of the Jews who were settled on the banks of the Tigris and of the Euphrates had been but slight; occasionally irritating, but very rarely serious. In Mesopotamia, for a very long period, Jews as citizens were undistinguishable from other citizens, and they on their side, as a certain Rabbi Samuel expressed it, ‘respected the law of the land no less than the law of Moses.’ Their Judaism was absolutely uninterfered with, and they had leisure for little scholarly quarrels among themselves. ”

“ The pilgrims who filled this court were Ashkenazim, and in their more European clothes they were by no means so picturesque a crowd. It is a singular fact that the Sephardim should be confined to one court and the Ashkenazim to another. There is, indeed, very little sympathy between the two great branches of the Jewish race in Palestine. They live for the most part in different cities, and have but little intercourse with each other. Thus, nearly all the Jews in Tiberias are Sephardim, while those at Safed are Ashkenazim. ”

“ The only hope for them is to accept Christianity. At present they are the greatest danger that Christian civilization has to face."
The recognition of all these facts does not of course imply the belief that all Jews are destructive. Undoubtedly there are good and loyal Jews--particularly in France, where the Sephardim predominate--who have absolutely identified themselves with the country of their adoption, and are sincerely opposed to Bolshevism. But these isolated individuals carry little weight compared to the massed forces of subversive Jewry. ”

“ This discouraged our hopes of proving the existence of a Jewish cephalic type as the result of purity of descent. It may indeed be affirmed with certainty that the Jews are by hereditary descent from early times no purer than most of their European neighbors. Then we discovered evidence that in this head form the Jews were often closely akin to the people among whom they lived. In long-headed Africa they were dolichocephalic. In brachycephalic Piedmont, though supposedly of Sephardim descent, they were quite like the Italians of Turin. ”

“ The native Jewish families in Jerusalem, as well as those in other parts of Palestine, present a marked difference to the Jews of Europe and America. They possess the same physical characteristics — the dark, oblong eye, the prominent nose, the strongly-marked cheek and jaw — but in the latter, these traits have become harsh and coarse. Centuries devoted to the lowest and most debasing forms of traffic, with the endurance of persecution and contumely, have greatly changed and vulgarized the appearance of the race. ”

“ Before resuming the story of Judea under the procurators, let us take another survey of Jews and Judaism in lands outside of Palestine. The voluntary dispersion still went on. The Jews were now scattered over all the Roman Empire, which included Asiatic and European lands from Syria to Spain. We also find our ancestors, at the beginning of the Christian era, in Arabia and in Parthia, an Asiatic kingdom south of the Caspian Sea. But, however widely scattered, religion was the bond of union and Jerusalem the spiritual centre. ”

“ From the Royalist spies and the diplomatists the news was quickly conveyed to the anti-Semites in the City. Although the dangers of a Jewish immigration en masse and the scandal of a public synagogue had been averted, the enemies of the Jews—especially their competitors in trade—were not inclined to acquiesce without a struggle in the tacit toleration of even a small community of Hebrew merchants. ”

“ The Jew is returning to his own land—Palestine.
“Only a year or two ago the world was electrified by hearing of the formation of that wonderful Zionist movement. How it has spread and grown! And how, ever since, the increasing thousands have been flocking back to Palestine! There are now nearly three times the number of Jews in and around Jerusalem, that there [129] were after the return from the Babylonish captivity. Agricultural settlements are extending all over the land. Vineyards and olive-grounds are springing up everywhere.
“Now note a remarkable fulfillment of prophecy. ”