Black Power and Pride: Sephardic Style

Black Power and Pride: Sephardic Style

In my last post, I spoke about Tommie Smith and John Carlos and their powerful Black Power salutes at the 1968 Olympic Games. Without the audacity of Smith and Carlos, there would probably be no "audacity of hope." There would be no Barack Obama. There would be no black US president in 2009. The Black Power and Pride of Smith and Carlos paved the way for President Obama. Obama, of course, did not cause the same fears in white America as Smith and Carlos, but those were different days in which black upward mobility in politics, academia, and the media were not yet acceptable in the mainstream.

Today I will write about another type of Black Power and Pride, namely, Sephardic Jews. You might be scratching your heads. Jews and Black Power and Pride? Well, I am a Sephardic Jew, a Jew that traces his family origins to the expulsion of Jews from Spain with the infamous Alhambra decree in 1492. My family found refuge in Africa: Morocco. Sephardic Jews took with them their Judeo-Spanish dialect, Ladino, to Morocco, Sarajevo, Istanbul, Salonika, and other locations in and around the Mediterranean basin. Many lived among Muslim Arab rulers for centuries in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya. While they were culturally Jews in a minority situation like their Ashkenazi European Jewish counterparts in Germany, Poland, Belarus, and Russia, they were deeply influenced by the cultural milieu of the Arabs and Berbers. Sephardic Jews often spoke Arabic (as well as Spanish or French), engaged in Arab-like hospitality, picked up Arab customs like saint worship and various superstitions such as the evil eye, and maintained a joie de vivre that is common in warm climates.

Like the Ashkenazi Jews that faced constant harassment from Christian authorities and second-class status in Russia, Poland, or Belarus, Sephardic Jews were at the mercy of Muslim rulers. In the Spanish Golden Age, when Spain was under Muslim control before the 1492 expulsion decree by Queen Isabella I and Ferdinand II (which also applied to Muslims), they were special political advisors, doctors, brilliant poets, scientists, and philosophical giants of their times. They were a tolerated minority, but when rulers changed they were sometimes subject to pogroms like their European counterparts.

When Israel was created in 1948, it was a project that was devised largely by European-based Ashkenazi Jews in the 1890s. This did not mean that the Sephardic Jewe were not Zionists before Zionism's birth in the 19th century. Through the poetry and philosophy of Halevy and Ibn-Gabirol, as well as their prayers, Sephardic Jews longed to go back to Jerusalem and shake off the yoke of Arabo-Islamic oppression. So my parents, like other Sephardic Jews from Morocco to Turkey, settled in Israel with great pride after the state's hopeful birth in 1948.

Yet, because Zionism as a political movement was largely pushed by Ashkenazi Jews (with Sephardic Jews naturally sympathetic), Sephardic Jews became the "black Jews" of Israel. Pierre Vallieres, the Quebecois nationalist of the 1960s, called francophones Quebecois the "white niggers of North America." Like francophone Quebecois until the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, Sephardic Jews were for years kept out of the political and cultural establishment controlled by an Ashkenazi European elite that thought they were superior because they came from supposedly civilized Europe. This racism, paternalism, and condescension was what my parents lived through in Israel. It made us change our name from the Moroccan Jewish Bitton to the more Ashkenazi Bar-On. If Arabs were suspect, Sephardic Jews were also suspect because they came from the Arab world. Moroccan Jews gained a sterotypical reputation in Israel for delinquency, theft, and low socio-economic status in Israel's early years. They rioted in 1959 in Haifa because they truly were the "Jewish blacks of Israel" with low educational opportunities, high rates of unemployment, and delinquency. Like blacks in the United States, Moroccan Jews in particular were stigmatized as a lost cause that resisted European cultural greatness.

I suspect that part of the reason we left for Canada was the stigma faced by Moroccan Jews in particular and Sephardic Jews in general in Israel. My parents remained fervent Zionists. My dad saw the best and the brightest killed in three wars he participated in for Israel's existence. Like the blacks of the United States, Sephardic Jews understood that Israel could do better. That whether you were Ashkenazi, Sephardic or none of these (Iranian Jews, Indian Jews, Georgian Jews, or those that remained in Palestine for centuries before Israel's creation, etc), your true worth is your character, intelligence, knowledge, spirit, determination, and willpower. That merit matters and can win the day above ethnic cliques or nepotism. The struggle was hard. Gains have been made, but like for black Americans, some of the old stigma and racism remains vis-a-vis Sephardic Jews.

Contrary to the history of anti-Moroccan and anti-Sephardic sentiments among Israel's Ashkenazi establishment, Sephardic Jews have a heritage of rich traditions and personnel that rivals its Ashkenazi counterparts. So in homage to a different Black Power and Pride, here is my list of famous Sephardic Jews that have influenced history in different domains of life:

Moses Maimonides, Yehudah Halevy, Baruch Spinoza, David Ricardo, Benjamin Disraeli, Emma Lazarus, Pierre Mendes-France, Jacques Derrida, Yossi Benayoun, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Albert Cohen, Helen Cixous, Salvador Luria, Amedeo Modigliani, Yitzhak Navon, Georges Moustaki, Francis Salvador, Norman Podhoretz, Haim Saban, Siegfrid Sassoon, and Emilio Segre.

In the next post, I will comment on these prominent Sephardic figures (see photo above) and others. These figures include Nobel prize winners, writers, philosophers, rabbis, business magnates, singers, politicians, economists, painters, and footballers. In addition, I will tell you where Sephardic Jews live today and why they are a fundamental ingredient in the elusive search for peace in the Middle East.

Tamir Bar-On