Will the Old Sephardim Welcome the New?

London-born David de Sola Pool was a rabbi, civic leader, and scholar who came from a distinguished Sephardic family. He pursued both secular and rabbinic studies, first in London and then in Heidelberg and Berlin. In 1907, he moved to New York to serve as assistant rabbi at Congregation Shearith Israel (known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue), eventually becoming senior rabbi and working there until his retirement in 1956. In addition to his synagogue activities, de Sola Pool did much to support Sephardic communities in the United States and to serve American Jewry more broadly, leading the Synagogue Council of America from 1938 to 1940. Although he called for their inclusion into his congregation, de Sola Pool’s relationship with Ottoman Sephardim was mixed. He had initially held that the term Sephardic should be reserved only for Western Sephardic Jews (descendants of those Jews from the Iberian Peninsula who settled in Western Europe and the Caribbean, such as himself, rather than those who settled in the Mediterranean world) and should not be extended to their Levantine coreligionists. He also later removed all the “Oriental” aspects of Sephardic liturgy from the Sephardic prayer books he prepared in the 1930s, a choice that produced considerable resentment among Ottoman Sephardim.