Journeys: From Exile to Homecoming
Yom Kippur Evening
October 8, 2008 / 9 Tishri 5769
Rabbi Dennis C. Sasso
This past summer I had the opportunity to relive the journeys of my ancestors – the
odyssey of the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. At the same time that Columbus sailed the
ocean blue, waves of Iberian Jews spilled onto the shores of the Mediterranean, settling in North
Africa and the Ottoman Empire; they joined Jewish communities in France, Italy and Holland;
they sought refuge in neighboring Portugal even as others participated in the expeditions of
discovery to the New World.
Despite intermittent waves of persecution and oppression Jews had prospered in Spain,
living and sharing in the larger society and reaching a pinnacle of social and cultural prosperity
during the period of the so-called Golden Age, from the 10th to the 13th centuries. As a result of
the Christian efforts to reconquer the peninsula from the Muslims, the fortunes of Spanish Jews
began to wane. In 1391, widespread riots starting in Seville spread throughout the peninsula.
They resulted in the conversion of tens of thousands to Catholicism. Some of the new Christians
continued to live secret Jewish lives; others lived by their oaths, whether out of conviction, out of
accommodation or out of fear of an oppressive Inquisition that brought intimidation, trials and
autos de fe – executions intent upon saving souls.
The Jews who left Spain in 1492 and settled in the Ottoman Empire were welcomed by
Sultans who mocked the Catholic Spanish monarchs for allowing their most valuable subjects to
leave. The Ottoman world benefited from the Jews’ international commercial connections and
their learning in the sciences, letters and medicine. The Jews who crossed into Portugal enjoyed
a respite for a few years – until 1497 when an edict of expulsion was issued under pressure from
Spain as a condition for the marriage of Princess Isabella of Castille to King Manuel of Portugal.
However, fearful of losing his valued subjects, upon seeing the Jews gathered in the Port of
Lisbon ready to join their brothers and sisters in exile, the Portuguese monarch forcefully
baptized them and banned their departure.
In the course of time, many of these Cristaos novos or New Christians, would manage to
leave Portugal and join other Jews in Amsterdam, in other European cities and in the Americas.
In the new world, Jews who settled in territories under Dutch and British control could live their
faith openly. Thus began the earliest official Jewish settlements in the Americas, including New
Amsterdam – today’s New York – in 1654. But Jews living in Spanish and Portuguese colonies
remained under the scrutiny of the Inquisition.
The history of Sephardic Judaism, of conversos, New Christians and marranos (the
derogatory term, meaning “swine”, given to them by the Spaniards), is complex and diverse. It
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is filled with heroes and adventurers, with idealists and with hypocrites, with pathos and with
pride.
Those of us who traveled with the Jewish Federation of Greater Indianapolis mission to
Spain this summer, and those who had earlier gone to Turkey with the Holy Dove Foundation ( a
Turkish Muslim Interfaith organization), were able to marvel and to weep, to ponder and to
wonder, to understand and to question what enabled our people to endure oppression and
survive; to be submerged in antagonism and not disappear; to be denigrated and denied, and yet
to affirm their faith in secret and then to return to it with defiance and nobility.
Lest we overidealize the Sephardic experience, it is important to recognize that among
the Spanish Jews who converted there were some who eventually grew into the ranks of Spanish
church and nobility, often to become tormentors and persecutors of the Jews.
And lest we oversimplify the Sephardic experience and believe that all who remained
Jews or returned to Judaism became pious believers and faithful practitioners, it is important to
understand that the Inquisition and the Expulsion yielded many responses to Judaism: from
Talmudic orthodoxy to ecstatic mysticism; from messianic fanaticism and other worldliness to
the rationalism and skepticism that led to the birth of modern philosophy and secularism.
How would we who live in tolerant and pluralistic liberal democracies measure up?
What does the Sephardic experience teach us who live free of persecution, blessed with
opportunity and open to the unbridled expression of our heritage and faith? Let me share with
you some lessons learned from our travels this summer, from our journeys into the Sephardic
experience.
On the first day after our arrival in Istanbul we had lunch with Ishak Alaton. Mr. Alaton
is the best known and most respected Jewish businessman and civic leader in Istanbul. His
daughter, Leyla, also joined us for lunch and conversation. During that very week, her photo had
appeared on the cover of a leading business journal as one of the most prominent young business
women in Turkey. The Alatons spoke candidly with us about Jewish life, about Turkish politics,
about civic and business affairs, and about interfaith relations.
Ishak Alaton describes himself as a descendent of a Jewish family that settled in the
Ottoman Empire following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. In his office he
proudly displays a photo with Juan Carlos, the king of Spain, by whom he was decorated as a
distinguished Spanish Jew. There was a sense of nobility about Mr. Alaton. After all, Spanish
Jews considered themselves descendants of the tribe of Judah, the royal family of David.
Alaton regards himself an Orthodox Jew, but he has a most liberal view of religion.
“Times have changed,” he said. “We do not have to live as strictly by the laws of the past.” He
believes in interfaith cooperation. Some years ago he convinced a resistant Chief Rabbi to allow
one of his younger associates to teach a course in Torah interpretation to Muslim religious
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leaders. “Do we have anything to be ashamed, embarrassed about the Torah?” he asked the
Rabbi. “Then, let’s teach it proudly.”
When asked how it is for Jews in Turkey, our hosts acknowledged that there are antisemitic extremists. The main synagogue in Istanbul has been terrorized on two occasions in
recent decades. Turkey is a secular democracy, but one where 99% of the population is Muslim
and where there is a growing religious rebirth that is worrying the secular leadership. Jews are
“tolerated” in Turkey. But there is a constant awareness of their minority status. The attitude
seems to be: Be Jewish, but you don’t have to be too public about it – similar to the attitude of
Western European Jews during the 18th C. Enlightenment – “Be a Jew at home and a human
being in the streets.”
The grandeur of Spain, especially during the Golden Age, was that Judaism was
cultivated outwardly and inwardly, privately and publicly, in piety and in politics, in religious
poetry and in secular poetry, in the synagogue, the marketplace, and at home.
In America we are proud to wear our Judaism outwardly, to display it publicly, to
proclaim it loudly. However, it often happens that many are more Jewish in the public sphere
than in the privacy of their home and the inwardness of their hearts. Some seem to have reversed
the Enlightenment motto, we are “Jews in the streets,” but live quite indistinguishably from
others at home. Our hearts do not regularly beat to the rhythms of the Jewish calendar. Our
souls leap but episodically to the joys of Jewish celebration. We are the “People of the Book”,
but our minds are more attuned to general culture and literature than to the cultivation of our own
legacy of learning.
From Istanbul we flew to the city of Izmir. Formerly known as Smyrna, it had been a
bustling center of Jewish life during the Ottoman period. There are some of the most interesting
and beautiful synagogues remaining in Turkey. One of them is the Giveret or Seniora synagogue
built in honor of Dona Gracia Nasi, who along with her nephew Don Joseph Nasi, were patrons
and internationally recognized leaders of Ottoman Jewry during the 16th century.
Izmir was also the birthplace and main center of activity of the 17th C. messianic
pretender Shabetai Tzvi, one of the most charismatic and enigmatic figures in Jewish history.
The disappointment created by his failed claims to being the awaited redeemer of Israel
contributed to the eventual weakening of Ottoman Jewry and, in direct and indirect ways,
scholars claim, to the birth of Hasidism, Reform Judaism and even Zionism.
I had especially looked forward to our visit to Izmir. Above my desk in my study there is
a portrait of Ya’acov Pauly, my maternal great-grandfather, who was a rabbi in Izmir. My
grandfather, Santos (Shem-Tov) Pauly, was born in Izmir and immigrated to France and then to
Costa Rica where he married my grandmother Florry (Leah Florence) Sasso ( See, I am Sasso on
both my father’s and mother’s sides – that explains a lot!).
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In Izmir we were received by Sarah Pardo, a dynamic and charming woman in her sixties
who has virtually single-handedly attended to the restoration of the gorgeous synagogues in
Izmir. I was overcome with inexplicable emotion when I was able to find names of family
members in the wall inscriptions of the synagogues.
I carried with me a picture of my great-grandparent’s tombs, the Haham (that’s how
Rabbis are addressed in the Sephardic tradition) Yaacov Pauly and Catalina (Behora) Kadona
Simsolo. Sarah Pardo, our guide, directed me to the old cemetery of Izmir. So much had
changed and in certain of the older sections the shrubs were so overgrown that despite a diligent
search with the help of members of our group, I was unable to locate them. But there I stood
among the graves of my ancestors and I said Kaddish. I wept. A rush of historic consciousness
overwhelmed me.
Carlos Fuentes, the renowned Mexican novelist, writes (Buried Mirror, Reflections on
Spain and the New World, pp. 81-83) that the expulsion of the Jews from Spain was “Perhaps
the worst blunder of the unified [Spanish] kingdom….” “The Catholic monarchs…sacrifice(d)
Spain’s greatest cultural asset…the Jews.” “Religious considerations alone did not guide the
policy of Ferdinand and Isabella. They were also interested in filling the royal coffers with the
expropriated wealth of the most industrious castes in Spain.”
While touring though Spain later in the summer we were able to see in city after city,
from Toledo, to Seville, to Cordoba, in the gold of the Spanish churches, the wealth of its Jewish
subjects smelted not in the service of the people, but cast into opulent altars and relics venerated
in the defense of piety and justification of faith.
We visited Cordoba, the birth city of Maimonides, the most famous Spanish Jew of the
Middle Ages. There is a statue to his memory in a small plaza of the town. There also are the
remains of a lovely medieval, moorish style synagogue. Like many other such holy sites,
following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the synagogue was turned into a Christian
institution, even as the Great Mosque of Cordoba became the city’s cathedral.
But Judaism is beginning to breathe again in Cordoba. There is yet no Jewish
community to speak of, but there is Casa Sepharad, a small Jewish museum and activity center
dedicated to Sephardic history and culture. On the week we were there, a music and heritage
festival was taking place. One of the artists was Jaime Casas, a 27 year-old young man who
described himself as half gypsy-half Jewish. Jaime was born in Cordoba and as a teenager began
to suspect his own ancestral Jewish roots. Bright, handsome and talented, Jaime is on an identity
journey and in the process he is helping to bring the wisdom, the arts, the memories of Sephardic
Judaism to a hitherto forgetful Spanish population. His audience consists often of tourists, but
there are also Spaniards, young and old, who are showing a renewed curiosity and interest in
Spain’s Sephardic heritage. The suppressed memories of a nation that fanatically oppressed,
murdered and exiled part of its people are emerging to a new level of consciousness, even, if for
now, primarily in museums.
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Our journeys this summer reminded Sandy and me that our families, like most Jewish
families, have been wanderers. From Spain, to Turkey, to the Caribbean, to Panama; from
central Europe to White Russia to the United States, where our children and grandchildren were
born and raised.
The biblical narrative of our people begins with Abraham and Sarah’s journey to a land
and future of promise. Later the biblical story speaks of Jacob, Joseph and his brothers “settling”
in Egypt. The classical biblical commentators tell us that when ever the word “settled” appears,
trouble will follow. Perhaps there is a lesson that being “settled”, becoming too comfortable in
our ways, is dangerous.
It is not that being expelled and exiled is a good thing. It is not that being forced to make
an unwanted physical journey is a blessing. But perhaps it is a reminder that we always need to
be on a spiritual journey, that becoming too settled with the way things are, with what we have,
with who we are, leads to complacency and misplacement of values and priorities.
In Spain, Jews and Muslims reached a pinnacle of culture during a period of several
centuries, which, in near Olympic language, we call the “Golden Age”. Generations later, Jews
who opted to remain, who settled for Spain, were lost to our people and faded from the horizon
of Jewish history. Jews who left continued to enjoy a creative renewal, a short one in the East,
where eventually Judaism languished in the slumber that overtook Islamic culture, until the birth
of the modern State of Israel. In the west, however, there was a continuous process of
adjustment and renewal as Spanish Portuguese Sephardic Jews, not only shared in, but, along
with their Ashkenazi coreligionists, helped to fashion the movements of modernity and
democracy that swept and shaped Europe and the Americas.
As we ponder the history of our people’s past journeys, let us who are often too settled
and comfortable, also renew the journey, not by force now, but in freedom; not a journey of
physical dislocation but a journey of spiritual renewal. Let us not remain stuck in old habits, let
us not give in to indifference, let us not be complacent. Such is the meaning of the High Holy
Days, to journey inward that we may move forward.
As we enter a New Year, we look into the mirror of our own lives, we look to our nation
and to the world, we look to the itineraries of our people and to the adventures and journeys yet
to come. Let us gather our memories, remember the signposts, revisit the bypaths. Let us collect
the baggage of our past, the beauty and richness of family and friendships, the strength and joy
of synagogue and community, the assets that cannot be taken away from us and the challenges
and opportunities yet ahead. Let us journey hopefully into a new year of possibility and renewal,
of healing, of happiness and peace.
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