Sephardic Journeys: Literature, Memory, and Jewish Culture

Rethinking Jewish Diversity: Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Ashkenazi Identities

This module contributes to a growing understanding of the diversity of Jewish experience, history, and culture. While in no way heterogeneous—in fact, a Jew descended from the community of Aleppo, Syria would traditionally see herself even as culturally distinct from a Jew descended from the community in Damascus, Syria—these groups are broadly “Sephardic,” a term that translates to “Spanish” (i.e., descended from Iberia) but is also inclusive of those who practice similar liturgical and religious traditions. On the whole, Sephardic Jews had a different trajectory from “Ashkenazim,” the Jews of Eastern and Central Europe. Less present in their stories are the trauma of pogroms and the Holocaust, for example, or the loss of the Yiddish language, which play large roles in many Jewish communities today. Moreover, the relationship between Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, deemed “Mizrahim” (literally “Easterners”), and Zionism and the State of Israel has been fraught. This module examines both intercultural and intracultural differences between Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews.  

Beginning with nineteenth-century Sephardic pioneering thinkers, the module will progress chronologically, touching on historical and cultural milestones along the way. The rich, wide-ranging resources—short stories, novel excerpts, essays, paintings, life writing, photography, musical lyrics, and recipes—enable learners to be immersed in the multifaceted modern history, literature, and culture of Sephardic Jews.

How the Sephardic Jewish Past Shaped American Culture, Identity, and Imagination

Seared into the memory of American schoolchildren, immigrants, and those who seek a better life are the words on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, the symbol of freedom for well over a century:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
 

Was it a coincidence that the woman who wrote these words in 1883—Emma Lazarus, a poet who mingled with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Robert Browning but also devoted her time and energy to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society—was a descendant of Portuguese Jews who fled the Inquisition? Or did that family memory become instrumental in her writing, as it did in that of Lazarus’s British counterpart, Grace Aguilar? Aguilar, after all, imagined the lives of Portuguese Jews in the shadow of the Inquisition in her historical fiction, using a distant time and place to demonstrate to a broad nineteenth century readership the natural allyship of Jews and Christians, and to advocate for Jewish immigration to Britain.

From Exile to Expression: Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in Modern Literature, Music, and Food

How did the Jews who experienced a second exodus—the departure not only from Egypt but also other Muslim and Arab lands (1948–1967)—alter existing ideas about exile, belonging, and Jewishness itself? How have the meals we consume, the music we enjoy, the stories we share been shaped by Jews whose communities originated and evolved in the Iberian Peninsula and the Middle East and North Africa?

Using a global, feminist perspective, this module explores the modern literature and culture of Sephardic Jews. Examining novels, poetry, essays, songs, recipes, paintings, and photographs, we see how they have imagined, portrayed, and constructed their histories and their lives, their place among Jewry, and their role in the world over the course of the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries.

The influence of these cultural interventions is everywhere present. Men and women in these communities from the Ottoman Empire to Britain and the Americas engaged in significant debates about human rights, created new forms of music, and revolutionized the food industry, changing the way their contemporaries thought, felt, and ate. Not only are the words of Emma Lazarus at the core of American values, but the music of Yemenite Jewish pop star and folklorist Ofra Haza has burst from millions of radios and television screens in shows from Eurovision to The Prince of Egypt. The intricate, flavorful meals and personal stories of Middle Eastern and North African Jews have landed on the kitchen tables of many thousands thanks to the work of Egyptian Jewish food writer, Claudia Roden.