[Lecture given at the Sephardic Studies Conference, SUNY-Binghamton, April 21, 1991.]
I wish to start with several anecdotes. I shall point out their moral later.
Some years ago, I was in Fez, Morocco. One weekday morning I attended services at the synagogue, and a man whom I had previously met invited me to breakfast. I accepted. After the service, he took me to a bar which was fairly well-filled with the early morning crowd. I would judge we were the only Jewish patrons. We sat down on stools, and he ordered rolls, butter and coffee for both. He then donned a skull-cap, and took me to a place where we could wash our hands. We returned to the counter, he recited the hamotsi blessing aloud, and when we were finished, he similarly recited birkat hamazon. As you would probably guess, no one paid the least attention.
Observation two. I was in a small Sephardi yeshiba near the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem talking to the Rabbi. A man dressed in working man's clothes came in, and told the Rabbi that his friend was outside, and they wished to ask the Rabbi's advice about a certain matter, but his friend did not have a hat. The Rabbi took off his skull-cap and put on his hat, and handed his skull-cap to the man. The man smiled and said: "I'm sure the Rabbi's cap will have a beneficial effect on him." He then went outside, and got his friend who came in wearing the Rabbi's cap. They took their consult with the Rabbi, and in due course the Rabbi got his cap back.
Observation three. In the German Colony section of Jerusalem there is a grocery store owned by a Jew originally from Lebanon. In the morning, when he opens his store, he covers his head with his sleeve, and kisses the mezuza before entering.
Observation four. I attended the Sephardic synagogue in Nice on a Shabbat morning. Several old ladies who found the steep stairs difficult were sitting in the men's section.
Observation five. My brother-in-law is a reserve officer in the Gibraltar regiment. One of his responsibilities is to see that when some dignitary visits the Rock, the appropriate salute is sounded from the guns on top of the Rock, perhaps the last roar of the British lion. A few years ago, for the first time, a dignitary was arriving on Saturday. My brother-in-law was troubled by this, and went to the Rabbi to seek his counsel. The latter reassured him that since he was under orders, it was permissible for him to give the command to fire. However, he should not go up to the top of the Rock by conveyance, as was usual, but he should walk. This is a substantial, uphill climb. My brother-in-law therefore gathered the detail charged with firing the guns, and told them that on account of his desire to observe the sabbath, he would be going up the Rock on foot, and would meet the men at the top. The next day, one of the men came to see him. This man told him that the rest of the men had sent him to say that since he was walking, they would like to march with him, instead of going by truck. And so it was, that unknown to the visiting dignitary, the salute he received was delivered by a band of men observing so far as possible the Jewish sabbath, Jew and non-Jew alike. A rather touching display of loyalty and respect.
I should like to suggest that all of these incidents have a specifically Sephardic flavor, and probably would not have occurred in an Ashkenazic context. It will be seen that I am fishing for some generalizations about Sephardic culture or character, and this is admittedly a task difficult to assess in any empirical or even vaguely scientific fashion. Human beings are highly sensitive to differences in behavior which are hard to quantify, and we often sense things which defy specific definition, and in some cases our sense may be incorrect. Some years ago I published a comparative Ashkenazic/Sephardic lexicon [in J.M. Sola-Solé et al., Hispania Judaica – Studies on the History, Language, and Literature of the Jews in the Hispanic World. Barcelona, 1983] and this may be a relatively easy area in which to search for differences and similarities. Yet even here the more subtle issues are often matters of judgment rather than fact. For instance, Rabbi Moses Isserlis, the great decisor of Ashkenazic Jewry, who had great influence on Ashkenazic religious practice, is traditionally called by them Rama a simple acronym for R. Moses Isserlis. But the acronym suggests the Hebrew word for "high" or "superior", and as one individual said "'anahnu yots'im beyad rama" a phrase which means on its face "we go out boldly" like the Children of Israel at the Exodus, but punningly means "we fulfil our obligations through R. Moses Isserlis." On the other hand, the Sephardic acronym for the same individual is the polite Moram which means "Our master and teacher Rabbi Moses" but at the same time implies their teacher i.e. he guides the conduct of the Ashkenazim, but not our conduct. Are the subtle implications that I am suggesting really there, or are they just the result of my imagination? I really do not know, but I would bet that most of us in the last week heard or read some statement that we knew perfectly well had an underlying meaning different from what was on its face. A few days ago I read an advertisement from an automobile dealership which read simply: We've got the sharpest pencil around. Much knowledge of local culture is needed to understand that sentence aright, since it evokes a picture of a car salesman licking his sharp pencil and working out a really good deal for us. With such difficulties in the linguistic area, where we are dealing with discrete sound units, how much more difficult it is to assess broad areas.
Abraham Joshua Heschel made an attempt to compare and contrast the "two great traditions" in the third chapter of his book The Earth is the Lord's. It would be a compliment to call this chapter tendentious, since many of the statements in it are little short of outrageous. He brushes aside the achievements of Germanic and Slavic scholarship, including, I suppose, a Slav like Copernicus to whom, perhaps, we owe our modern world mor than to anyone else, with his statement that the Ashkenazic Jews were intellectually more advanced than their average Germanic or Slavic neighbors, and he comes up with other truly astounding statements, such as the fact that there are but few languages which lend themselves with such difficulty to falseness as Yiddish. One would love to know the basis for the assertion that it is more difficult to lie in Yiddish than in English or any other language. Despite my problems with Heschel, I must say that some of his observations have the ring of truth. He points our that the intellectual life of the Jews of Spain was deeply influenced by the surrounding world, and being under challenge and attack by non-Jews, they had to debate and defend their faith. He judges this negatively, because Ashkenazic Jewry was able per contra to grow out of its own ancient roots, and develop independent of the surrounding world. If one looks at Saul Levi Mortera's Tratado da Verdade da Lei de Moises published in a beautiful, accurate edition by H.P. Salomon, one can see the positive side for Sephardic Jewry of this assertion. Mortera's work is an astonishing tour-de-force with a detailed knowledge of contemporary current secular learning which would have been unthinkable in Eastern Europe. And with this he combines a distinguished style, capable at times of cutting irony. Needless to say, the kind of background that could produce a Mortera or a Menasseh ben Israel could also produce a Spinoza. That is the chance you take when you let the outside light shine in. Cultural and spiritual isolation undoubtedly has its advantages, but like most things, it exacts its price.
Typically this contact with the outside led to more tolerance of deviation, despite the rough treatment handed out to Spinoza, leading to his expulsion from the community. The anecdote I related of the Lebanese shopkeeper indicates how it was possible for a Sephardi to stay in contact with traditional culture and religion in small ways. There was, I believe, not term for what we call orthodox in the Sephardi tradition. The Hebrew word hasid had a variable scale. One could be more or less hasid, suggesting a greater or less adherence to traditional mores. But even when the measure approached zero, there was no sharp break. There was always a way back, or almost always. Spinoza probably would not have had to work too hard to get his ban removed, but for him it was a badge of independence, like his refusal to accept a professorship, or dedicate works to famous persons. The Ashkenazic attitude reflects itself in current Israeli society, with its polarity between religious and non-religious elements. it is true that the socialist orientation of many earlier settlers supported their total break with religion, but it was aided too by an attitude that condemned anything less than total adherence to traditional mores. I reel that this is shared by the anecdotes that I related at the beginning. The Ashkenazi either would not eat at all in a rabbinically unsupervised bar, or would not manifest signs of Jewishness in so doing. He would not put himself in the position to order the discharge of cannon on the sabbath, or, if he did, would not worry about how he got there.
Much of this kind of Sephardi world has all but disappeared, it seems to me. Whether you regret it or not is a matter of judgment. Year by year, languages and cultures disappear as our planet shrinks and behavior is homogenized. Yet certain elements survive. In an interesting article by Shlomo Deshen in Studies on the Culture of the Jews of North Africa edited by Issachar Ben-Ami, he details the growth of the habit of visting the tombs of Jews in their former places of residence, as well as the celebrations known as hilula connected with such sites. He points also to the growing habit of giving donations for the purpose of reprinting out-of-print rabbinic books by Sephardic worthies on the part of individuals who are unlikely to read them, but who derive satisfaction from the merit of causing the lips of those who are at rest to speak. Yet, in most respects, Ashkenazic mores are winning out. He quotes a Moroccan student at one of the most elitist yeshivot in Israel who declared in an acrimonious interchange in the synagogue of the folks back home: "The least student in our yeshiva knows how to learn (in the technical Yiddish sense of the word, i.e. to engage in the Talmudic dialectic) better than the greatest rabbis in Morocco knew." Incidentally he quotes a story in connexion with R. Rafael Moshe Elbaz, who flourished in the latter part of the nineteenth century in Sefrou. The Muslim leaders would ask him to pray in time of drought, and he would arrange prayers to be said in the cemetary. Moreover, when the Muslims would call to prayer from their minarets, the rabbi would lean out of his window and recite petitions in Arabic, and the Muslims would interrupt their call to listen to his voice of prayer. I can shed light on this benign story with one from a European traveler in North Africa which I found in the library of the American Geographical Society housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. According to this, when there was drought, the Muslims would chase the Jews out of town. The purpose of this was, so to speak, to encourage them to pray really hard, because they would not be allowed back until the rains came, which they invariably did, and soon. How did the Muslims explain the seemingly superior praying capabilities of the Jews? Not because God loves the Jews, came the answer. The Jews wail and are importunate, and their feet stink. A less pretty picture, but one that nonetheless sheds light on the strangely ambivalent relations between Muslim and Jew which so colored the Jew's cultural development and involved him with his neightbors even in an interreligious context which would have been unthinkable in Eastern Europe. Both stories clearly belong to a common fund of folklore in this area.
The culture of the Sephardic Jew, however defined, is clearly changing significantly under the impact of the turbulence which the Jewish world has seen in this century. Moses Gaster, an Ashkenazi who edited a distinguished Sephardi prayer book, expresses in his final preface written almost a century ago on the anniversary of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the hope that the prayer book will remain a source of strength, faith and indomitable hope. Perhaps we can express the same for the broader culture of which his effort formed a small part, and which is explored and explicated in meetings such as this.