Book Review : ‘Other’: Look at Sephardic Myth, Reality

The Other Jews: The Sephardim Today by Daniel J. Elazar (Basic Books: $21.95, 224 pages)

If you think Jewish cuisine consists of bagels and lox and cream cheese--or if you conceive of the Jewish vernacular as a collection of Yiddishisms (“Oy Vey!”)--then you’re in danger of overlooking an ancient, glorious and increasingly influential element of the Jewish people and their civilization: the Sephardim.

As Daniel J. Elazar points out in “The Other Jews,” about 97% of the Jews in America are Ashkenazim--that is, descendants of the generally Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities of Germany, Eastern Europe and Russia. By contrast, the Sephardim descend from the Jews of medieval Spain who, after the expulsions of the 15th Century, settled throughout the Balkans, the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East. Until very recently, the Ashkenazim have dominated the culture and politics of the Jewish communities in Israel and the United States--but, today, it is the Sephardim who are the majority in the Jewish state.

In “The Other Jews,” Elazar seeks to acquaint an American readership with the glories of the Sephardic tradition, the struggles of Sephardic Jews in today’s world--both in Israel and throughout the Diaspora--and the prospect of a future in which the Sephardim will come to play an ever more important role in Israel and the Jewish world. Elazar, a political scientist of Sephardic descent with academic appointments in both Israel and the United States, brings both a burning passion and a sense of celebration to his scholarship.

‘A Semantic Barbarism’

“The Other Jews” is a healthy corrective to the myths and misperceptions that have attached themselves to the Sephardim, at least in the eyes of the former Ashkenazic majority in Israel. The Sephardim, especially in the overheated politics of the Jewish state, are often portrayed as politically conservative, religiously observant, “and, to some extent, chauvinistic, militaristic and xenophobic.” They are sometimes called edot hamizrah --”Oriental” or “Eastern” Jews--with the implication that they are poor and primitive. (“A semantic barbarism,” Elazar comments, “and a national disgrace.”) And, despite their growing numbers in the Israeli electorate, the Sephardim were largely absent from positions of prominence in Israeli government and society until the recent political sea-change that ended the dominance of the Labor party and put the Likud bloc in power.

Elazar condemns these old slanders of the Sephardim as “false myths” and attributes them to the work of “intellectuals of the Labor camp” and “members of the old establishment who are fearful of losing their hegemony in Israeli society.” Indeed, Elazar is an ardent and even zealous advocate of Sephardic history, culture and destiny--”The Other Jews” is essentially a work of social and political science, but Elazar has also written a paean to the beauty of the Sephardic civilization, and a manifesto of Sephardic cultural and political self-assertion.

“Within Jewish civilization, for 1,000 years, Sephardic Jewry has been the embodiment of the classical tradition,” Elazar insists. The Ashkenazim, he argues, have expressed themselves “on the right, in religious orthodoxy that rejects compromise with the outside world, and on the left, a romantic embrace of revolutionary moments.” By contrast, Elazar continues, the Sephardim place an emphasis on restraint, elegance, harmony, simplicity--and their classical tradition finds distinctive expression in Sephardic ritual and liturgy, history and literature, philosophy and politics.

Celebrating Color, Beauty

“The Sephardic aesthetic is one that celebrates color and visible beauty, hereby adding a highly sensual dimension to their very traditional Jewish life,” Elazar declares. “As a Mediterranean people, their lives were oriented to the green and golden outdoors for much of the year.” And Elazar even makes pointed comparison between the two styles of cooking: “Ashkenazic food tends to partake of a certain plain heaviness . . . that is characteristic of Eastern and Central Europe, strongly influenced by Slavic cooking,” he writes. “Sephardic food, however, is light and sophisticated in the manner of the fine cuisines of Spain, Italy and Greece.”

I was fascinated to read about Jewish history and politics from the Sephardic perspective, but I was sometimes discomforted by Elazar’s intense rhetorical style. For example, the heroic pioneers of Zionism are usually depicted as Ashkenazim from the shtetls of Eastern Europe--and Elazar is especially enlightening in explaining the crucial but largely forgotten role of the Sephardim in the Zionist movement and the building of the Jewish state. But he is also intentionally provocative and even inflammatory in his interpretation of history and especially in his choice of words:

“Sephardim came to Israel of their own free will because they saw the state as the beginning of Jewish redemption,” he writes, “not as refugees from a Europe soaked with the blood of the Holocaust.”

Despite the sometimes strident tone of his book--and his unmistakable bitterness toward what he perceives as the racism and arrogance of the old Ashkenazic majority--Elazar urges a synthesis of the two traditions. “Both cultures are gone forever,” he writes of the ancient distinctions between Sephardim and the Ashkenazim in their golden ages. “Today, the problem for the Jewish people is to effectively manage the transition through whatever new distinctions are emerging,” he suggests. “We are not speaking of assimilation with honor into a Russian, Ashkenazic Israel, but the creation of a new culture in which Sephardic ways play a major--even a decisive--role.”