“Oriental,” Not Sephardi

Born in Istanbul, Joseph Gedalecia immigrated to New York in 1889 after some years touring Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. In New York, he married Sarah Levy, an Ashkenazic Jewish woman from the Russian Empire with whom he cofounded the Oriental Progressive Society. Gedalecia became a prominent social worker, working with New York City’s Kehillah’s Bureau of Employment, and later as the manager for the Communal Employment Bureau for the Handicapped. In 1912, with Albert Amateu, Gedalecia cofounded the Federation of Oriental Jews, an organization devoted to supporting Sephardic immigrants and mutual aid societies. Gedalecia established the Federation of Cooperative Societies of America in 1918, which included the Workingmen Cooperative Vegetarian Society and a cooperative butcher store. He was an active contributor to the English-language Jewish and Yiddish presses. Although Gedalecia portrayed his choice to identify as “Oriental” and Ottoman rather than Sephardic in ideological terms, this may well have been personal as well as ideological: having been born in Istanbul of mixed Sephardic-Ashkenazic heritage, he had attended a German school in his youth and does not appear to have spoken Ladino.