Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2010
A Broken Frame: Sephardi Occlusion and the Repairing of Jewish Dysfunction
by David Shasha
At present, Jewish life is marked by a serious difficulty in dealing with the outside, non-Jewish world and by an equally difficult internal series of intractable conflicts waged within the Jewish community. These conflicts, internal and external, bespeak a particular and insular vision of Judaism that judges the external as problematic. Too often, other approaches to Jewish life are ignored, even though they evolved from the same biblical and rabbinic antecedents.
In the centuries following the production of the Babylonian Talmud, an acculturation took place in the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Jewish world, a world that was linked by a dynamic and creative rabbinical culture with its roots in the old Levant. This acculturation eventually led to what scholars have called "Arabization." As rabbis and Jewish laypeople of the Mediterranean basin and Near East adopted the Arabic language in the wake of the Islamic conquests, tumultuous changes took place that culminated in the achievements of Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), a figure who traveled from Spain in the West across North Africa to Egypt.
Historians have distorted Maimonides's historical influence in a desperate attempt to misread the immediate developments in the European Jewish world relating to his teachings and value system.
Religious Humanism
Today the supremacy of Maimonides is often taken for granted, whereas his actual teaching has been occluded. Maimonides developed a Judaism typified by the Religious Humanism that had been articulated by Middle Eastern thinkers in a polyglot form of Arabic culture. This Humanism infused the various sacred texts and traditions of the region's monotheistic religions with Greco-Roman science and rationalism.
Religious Humanism is a critically important category that is rarely articulated in its precise sense and is even less understood as a basis for Jewish self-understanding. These ideas integrate the parochial values of religion with the universal aspects of human civilization.
A fairly representative example of what this concept signifies can be found in the following two passages, the first of which comes from Maimonides himself and the second from Moses Angel:
It was not the object of the Prophets and our Sages in these utterances to close the gate of investigation entirely, and to prevent the mind from comprehending what is within its reach, as is imagined by simple and idle people, whom it suits better to put forth their ignorance and incapacity as wisdom and perfection, and to regard the distinction and wisdom of others as irreligion and imperfection, thus taking darkness for light and light for darkness. The whole object of the Prophets and the Sages was to declare that a limit is set to human reason where it must halt (Guide of the Perplexed 1:32).
Then, charity, which in the doctrine of abstract faith, means love for universal mankind, shall cease to be what concrete religion made it, love only for self and self's imitators. Then, man shall acknowledge that true God-worship consists not in observance of any particular customs, but in the humble, zealous cultivation of those qualities by which the Eternal has made himself known to the world. The members of one creed shall not arrogate to themselves peculiar morality and peculiar salvation, denying both to the members of other creeds; but they shall learn that morality and salvation are the cause and effect of all earnest endeavors to rise to the knowledge of revelation. Men shall cease to attempt the substitution of one set of forms for another set of forms; they shall satisfy themselves with being honest and dignified exponents of their own mode of belief, and shall not seek to coerce what heaven has left unfettered—the rights of conscience. They shall strive to remove all obstacles to the spread of God-worship, by showing how superior the happiness, the intellectuality, the virtue of its professors; but they shall stop there, not even for the sake of securing their object preferring their own faith for that of another. This was the original combination under which Christianity was called into existence; this was the power which enabled it to survive the shock which had destroyed all else, and to this must it return before its mission can be perfectly accomplished. What the teachings of Sinai were to the children of Abraham, the teachings of the other mount were to be to the rest of the world; one was not to supersede the other, but to render it accessible (The Law of Sinai and its Appointed Times, 288-289).
Religious Humanism is the place where our traditional religious tenets meet with the universal aspects of science and rational culture. The teachings of Maimonides represent for Judaism a significant efflorescence of Religious Humanism, and the struggle against Maimonides was a major attempt to suppress it.
The Maimonidean Controversy
At the outset of any discussion of Religious Humanism, we have what has become known as "The Maimonidean Controversy," which, though accepted as axiomatic, is also murkier to us today than it was when it first emerged.
What was at the root of this controversy, and what transpired in its wake?
Central to the problem were the clashing Jewish visions of the two different rabbinical traditions that emerged fully in the wake of the various bans and counter-bans that rose up after the Maimonidean oeuvre was published.
In the century before Maimonides's ministry, an Ashkenazi rabbinical school was founded by Rashi (1040-1145) and built up by Rabbi Jacob Tam (circa 1100-1171) and the members of his Tosafist group. The following basic principles were central to the teachings of the school: a fierce sense of talmudic essentialism, which sought to replicate behaviors, concepts, and beliefs of the ancient talmudic society; an interpretive methodology known as pilpul, which adapted this talmudism to the socio-cultural needs of the community; and a hermetic system that sealed rabbinical study off from outside influences and marked talmudic interpretation as an exclusive system that eschewed the modalities of non-Jewish concepts or philosophies.
The emergence and acceptance of the new Maimonidean system in the Sephardic world reverberated in Ashkenazi communities and led to dramatic responses. A cross-cultural penetration of Ashkenazi thinking into Christian Spain in the thirteenth century led to fierce battles on the front lines of the new Maimonidean culture. While rabbis in the Rhineland and Northern France were by and large immersed in their own religious world, the Jewish communities of Spain were deeply impacted by the new learning of Maimonides and his school—a school whose illustrious progenitors included Se'adya Ga'on (882-942), Bahya ibn Paquda (circa eleventh century), Samuel ibn Naghrela (993-1056), and Solomon ibn Gabirol (circa 1021-1057).
Within the new learning was a proclivity to seek wisdom from many different sources. Sephardic learning was not insular like its Ashkenazi counterpart, but took what it needed from any source that could contribute to a better understanding of God's creation.
We must not follow the current practice of minimizing the impact of the Maimonidean Controversy on subsequent Jewish life. The Maimonidean Controversy led to developments in Jewish law and Jewish thought with which we continue to struggle.
Pre-Modern Ashkenazi Insularity vs. Sephardic Pluralism
The binary template of the early Middle Ages set out two variant forms of rabbinical Judaism. One was based on an open-ended form of Religious Humanism, while the other laid the seeds for a fundamentalist Judaism.
This binarism lay dormant in Jewish history for many centuries. While Ashkenazi talmudism remained relatively static, as it was exclusively tied to ritual matters and legal theory, Sephardic literary production remained consistently pluralistic and dynamic. Ashkenazi writers worked on talmudic novellae and works of Responsa that often acted as intellectual exercises rather than practical case studies and court rulings. In contrast, Sephardic writers produced works of literature (religious and secular), philosophy, science, ethics, biblical interpretation, history, Hebrew grammar, and many other diverse intellectual studies that spoke to the fundamental centrality of Religious Humanism in the culture.
Religious Humanism sought to link the parochial concerns of the Jewish ritual and liturgical tradition (the element that made Judaism unique among other cultures and faiths) with a concern for what could best be described as the old Greek paidea: that form of humanistic learning characteristic of an educated person in the ancient world.
This form of paidea, in Arabic called adab, became a central part of Jewish learning in the early medieval period and reached its high point in Maimonides's seminal achievements. The various bans and attacks on Maimonides had to do with his Religious Humanism. In the most famous—and egregious—case of this, we see a rabbinical ban on the first book of the Mishneh Torah—Sefer ha-Madda'—which incorporates humanistic concepts and learning into a discussion of ethical and intellectual principles in Jewish thought and practice. The anti-Maimonidean reaction to this Religious Humanism was swift and decisive. It would forever stigmatize the "humanist" side of Religious Humanism and try to beat back what its detractors saw as alien influences in Jewish life.
Orthodox Insularity vs. Reform Pluralism among Modern Ashkenazim
As the modern era unfolded, European Judaism struggled with the problems that such rejectionism placed on its ability to adapt to the ways of the world. So long as European Judaism remained locked into ghettoes, the matter of acculturation was not seen as a decisive issue. But once Europe began to change and provide to Jews the ability to integrate into their societies, deep conflicts arose in the Jewish world.
Some very basic trends began to emerge in the European Jewish world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: stirrings of a movement for Reform clashed with the old talmudic schools in Eastern Europe. Moses Mendelssohn (circa 1727-1786), a seminal figure and an observant Jew, was initially seen as a possible danger to the pristine hermetic faith, much as Azariah de Rossi (circa 1513-1578) was seen by an earlier generation. Mendelssohn provided his own take on Religious Humanism by reading some of the new European learning into the Jewish sources.
The confusion created by Mendelssohn's teaching led to a renewed effort in rabbinical circles to refuse any connection with the outside culture. In the long run, Mendelssohn became an icon to the reformers and rejected by what would become known as Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy, a movement created in reaction to the establishment of Reform Judaism, soon closed ranks against the attempt by rabbis to incorporate humanist culture into Judaism.
Such was a repetition of the Maimonidean Controversy that led to new fissures and conflicts in Ashkenazi Jewish culture.
The Balance Shifts
The continuation of Maimonidean thinking among the Sephardic elite in the early Modern age found brilliant rabbinical figures such as Saul Morteira (circa 1596-1660), Menassseh ben Israel (1604-1657), Isaac Abendana (circa 1640-1710), David Nieto (1654-1728), and others articulating a Judaism that was comfortable engaging with the new European learning and consistent with the old Maimonidean school and its adherence to the pluralistic values of Religious Humanism.
Massive upheavals shook the early modern Jewish world as many in the Sephardic world embraced the mystical frenzy of Sabbatianism and its anti-rational mystic tendencies. Nevertheless, many Sephardic sages continued to study and promote the old curriculum in places such as Amsterdam, London, Venice, Salonica, and Fez.
During this same time period, a demographic imbalance began to develop between the Sephardic and Ashkenazi worlds. Socio-cultural changes weakened the old Sephardic world and empowered the Ashkenazim. Europe emerged as a major global force, and the power of the Ottoman and Arab worlds waned in the wake of colonialism and the international power politics that crested in World War I. The process culminated in the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the occupation of the Levant and North Africa by the European powers. Thus would the Jews of Europe rise in the context of Jewish life the world over.
To take but a single example of this phenomenon, we have the figure of Adolphe Cremieux (1796-1880) in France, who reached out to his "less fortunate" brethren in North Africa and drew up a decree to provide Algerian Jews with special protections afforded by the French government. This example shows us the complicated ways in which Europe's Jews took the lead in world Jewish affairs. And with this change came the emergence of new and often perplexing developments in Judaism and Jewish life.
At the very dawn of the twentieth century, new developments were taking place in the Jewish world that would have a decisive impact on future events.
The Ascendancy of the Ashkenazim, and their Denominational Schisms
A massive wave of immigration brought Eastern European Jews to the United States, where they eventually overwhelmed the previous Jewish immigrants, many of whom were Sephardim. A gradual transition took place in American Jewry, from a cosmopolitan Atlantic Judaism (a community that stretched from London to Livorno to Gibraltar to Jamaica to Charleston, Newport, Manhattan and Philadelphia, led by seminal figures such as Isaac Leeser, Sabato Morais, and Henry Pereira-Mendes) to a more complex amalgamation of the diffuse and often warring Ashkenazi Jewish groups that brought to America the conflicts that had been waged in the old country.
It should be remembered that a crucial American figure such as Isaac Leeser (1806-1868), himself an Ashkenazi, acculturated to the Sephardic model in order to work as a rabbi in this country. Just as Rabbi Saul Morteira, an Ashkenazi by birth as well, had adapted to the Sephardic Jewish society of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, so too did the nineteenth-century Jewish Americans adopt the old Sephardic model.
In America, the European immigrant Reformers and the Orthodox were joined by those who sought to remove themselves from the Jewish fold and start a new life in a new world. Jewish unity was not the watchword of the Eastern European immigrants. Replicating the models of the old world, the immigrants broke off into separate factions that reproduced the acrimony of the shtetl world and its tense relationship to the modern age.
A glance at the biography of Sabato Morais (1823-1897) reveals the difficulty in the conferral of names, identities, categories, and concepts on American Jewry. Morais was a major presence in American Jewish life in the second half of the nineteenth century. But today his name is barely known, and those who do mention him often seek to identify him in denominational terms. Both Orthodox and Conservative writers have sought in vain to identify Morais as one of their own.
And yet Morais himself, as was consistently the case among the Sephardic rabbis, refused the Eastern European nomenclature. Preferring instead to mark Judaism as a single construct that was inclusive of many ideas and values, a true Religious Humanism, Morais and Pereira-Mendes founded their Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City as a repository of traditional Sephardic values that were grounded in the ancient paidea. After Morais's death, his seminary would sadly fall victim to the denominational maladies of the Ashkenazi world.
As the twentieth century dawned, fewer and fewer Sephardic rabbis and leaders could count themselves as part of the American Jewish elite. Indeed, Morais's own Philadelphia community was populated by many individuals of Ashkenazi origin who supplanted the old Sephardic leadership.
Nevertheless, those Ashkenazi students, peers and colleagues of Morais, people like Marcus Jastrow (1829-1903), Cyrus Adler (1863-1940), Isaac Husik (1876-1939), and many others who would become great Jewish scholars and teachers, continued to set American Jewish scholarship on a resolutely Sephardic course. At the Dropsie College, founded by the Philadelphia Sephardi Moses Aaron Dropsie (1821-1905), we could see this Sephardi-centrism well into the 1950s. In Landmarks and Goals, a volume of collected addresses and essays published in 1953, Dropsie College president Abraham Neuman (1890-1970) concentrated on the Spanish Jewish experience as determinative in Jewish history. Such a philo-Sephardic attitude would lamentably become rarer as the years passed.
Indeed, the very elementary Jewish categories, the way in which we are currently able to process Judaism, are exclusively Ashkenazi.
Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Hasidic and the rest are all products of the schisms inherent to the Ashkenazi Jewish experience and are most definitely alien to the Sephardic tradition.
Going back to the Maimonidean tradition, we can see that the Ashkenazi schismatic groups marked their distinctiveness by picking apart and separating the disparate elements of Sephardic Religious Humanism.
This fixation on categorization has balkanized Judaism; rather than strengthening Jewish life today, it has served to tear it apart.
It is thus critical for us to mark Jewish trends and developments in precise terms so that we can better appreciate the problems that we now face.
The adoption of the term "Orthodoxy" and the attempt to make use of it in a "modern" context is just one of many hazards that we now face. As we have seen in religious movements all over the world, the trend toward exclusion and fundamentalism is quite pronounced and gaining strength.
The Orthodox trend in Judaism was a reaction to nineteenth-century Jewish Reform and Enlightenment. Orthodox Misnagdim and the Hasidim dropped their prior internal Eastern European battle in order to combat the new ideas and groups. Today, a resurgent Hasidic messianism that looked as if it might once again separate Orthodox and Hasidic groups is being suppressed in Israel, where elements of the religious Orthodox community seem to have made common cause with Lubavitch messianists in order to support an extremist form of Zionist identification.
The Erosion of Sephardic Religious Humanism
For a long time Sephardic Judaism remained outside the frame of this internecine Ashkenazi battle. It continued well into the twentieth century to articulate its own traditional Religious Humanism, despite the pressures inflicted by demography and socio-cultural exclusion. From Moses Angel, the headmaster of the Jews' Free School in London as well as a brilliant educator and author of the Religious Humanist classic The Law of Sinai and its Appointed Times, from which we quoted earlier, to the Italians Sabato Morais and Elijah Benamozegh, to the last Hakham Bashi of the Ottoman Empire Haim Nahum Effendi, to the Alexandrian Chief Rabbi Bekhor Eliyyahu Hazzan, to Palestinian Chief Rabbi Ben-Zion Uzziel, and on to more contemporary figures such as Hayyim David Halevi, Yitzhak Dayyan, Matloub Abadi, and the contemporary academic Jose Faur, we find the leading lights of the most recent epoch of Sephardic rabbinical humanism now almost completely lost to us.
Given the occlusion of the Sephardim and their Religious Humanism within the majority Ashkenazi culture, these names are now more or less unknown—not just to Ashkenazi Jews but also to Sephardim themselves. A critical part of the Sephardi acculturation to the new Jewish world has been a process of de-Sephardification and the adoption of the new insular models and frames of reference.
In my own Brooklyn Sephardic community we can clearly see—after some fifty years of profound cultural erosion—the complete absence of the old ways and the adoption of the new ways.
We now have Modern Orthodox Ashkenazi rabbis in the community who have expressed a profound antipathy to the Sephardic tradition, while at the same time, we have seen an explosion of Lithuanian-style Yeshivas that have paradoxically claimed the mantle of the old Sephardic traditions.
It is equally clear in Israel, given the emergence of the SHAS party and a full-fledged Haredization of important sectors of the community there, that the post-Sabbatian rejection of Religious Humanism in the name of a more pronounced mystical bend has done a great deal of damage to the organic values of Sephardic Religious Humanism, whose roots, as we have seen, extend back many centuries.
Ultra-Orthodox Insularity and Intolerance Today
Given that the Sephardic option has been made unavailable even in the Sephardic communities, the Ashkenazi schisms that affect the wider Jewish world have continued apace. Attempts to integrate non-Jewish learning into an Orthodox context have been met with hostility and outright rejection by an ever-expanding Ultra-Orthodox world with massive global tentacles.
Pronouncements by less extreme Orthodox rabbis are met with derision by what has become known as "Da'as Torah," which stems from a robust and all-powerful rabbinical leadership connecting Borough Park, Monsey, Bnei Brak, Gateshead, and various other places. It now seems clear that this rabbinic power base has consumed Orthodoxy.
But in the Sephardic terms that I have examined in this essay, it is the very nomenclature that is the problem. Any attempt at moderating Orthodoxy is profoundly antithetical to the original construct and vision of the movement.
Orthodoxy itself, as its Greek roots indicate, is primed to express a single, unwavering truth determined by its rabbinical leadership. All previous attempts at having Orthodox leadership take into account the non-Jewish world have been met with rejection and failure.
There is no reason to think that as Orthodoxy continues to garner more power and influence in the Jewish world—at least in that part of the Jewish world that continues to use the talmudic law as its foundation—it will compromise its rigid stance and its almost complete rejection of the outside world. Orthodoxy builds its rejection into the very linguistic foundation of the nomenclature. As its name indicates, what we are dealing with is a form of Jewish monolingualism eerily reminiscent of an exclusionary Hellenism that did not tolerate aliens.
To cite a relevant example of the inherent complexities of this problem, we can point to the acknowledged leader of Modern Orthodoxy, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and the continued difficulty he had with the matter of defining the movement in pluralistic terms.
In his seminal 1965 essay "Confrontation," Rabbi Soloveitchik asserted that the outside world—here represented by Christianity—is off-limits in terms of religious discussion and dialogue. Such a stance is consistent with the Orthodox belief that the outside world has nothing to offer us in terms of Jewish self-understanding or in terms of asserting ourselves as a community in the world.
Indeed, since the death of Rabbi Soloveitchik, there has been an ongoing tug-of-war between moderate Orthodox forces and the more extreme elements to claim his legacy as their own. His very biography has been combed for definitive proof of his ideological predilections and leanings. But in the end, it is all of little matter as the struggle exemplifies the larger battle for the soul of Orthodoxy—a battle that the extremists will inevitably win. I say "inevitably" because Ultra-Orthodoxy is the most perfect manifestation of Orthodox thinking and its proclivity for exclusion and intolerance. Again, exclusion and intolerance are built into its very nomenclature.
Restoring the Model of Sephardic Religious Humanism
So it is now more than worthwhile for those who continue to do battle with Ultra-Orthodox forces, as well as the schisms of the reformers and assimilationists, to take seriously the nomenclature of Sephardic Religious Humanism and the manner in which it has been passed over in contemporary Jewish life.
Eschewing the many problems inherent in the Ashkenazi construction of Judaism as different denominations, it is time that we paid respect to the Sephardic tradition of pluralism, tolerance, and inclusion. The existence of different denominations is not necessarily a mark of strength and good health, but can just as equally indicate a profoundly troubling dysfunctionalism.
Attempts to appropriate the Sephardic model without naming it will not effectively transform Judaism and address the current situation we face. Names have meaning, and behind those names are some difficult histories that we must face if we are to move forward.
In truth, the Maimonidean Controversy continues to seethe, and the anathemas against foreign ideas and learning remain a central part of the tension in contemporary Jewish life. Exclusionary visions of Jewish identity have now extended to the state of Israel itself, where the rejection of the model of Levantine Religious Humanism, what I have called "The Levantine Option," has made of Israel a Middle Eastern ghetto, which has turned the old shtetl mentality into a national matter.
A siege mentality now pervades many parts of the Jewish world. In religious, socio-cultural, and political terms, Jews continue to suffer from an inability to make peace internally and with the outside world. Where people stand on these issues depends on the Jewish group with which they are affiliated.
The old model of Sephardic Religious Humanism brings together a seriously committed yet moderate form of halachic observance with a liberal attitude toward an outside world that is definitely not deemed treyf (unlawful) and that will not lead to the rejection of talmudic standards.
Maimonides stood firm in his belief that Judaism must not be an insular culture and for this was anathematized by those rabbis who stand as the model for today's Ultra-Orthodox. He counseled Jews to live in the world as equal and proud members of the human family. It was this Jewish pride that resonated in the Sephardic world throughout the centuries and that has now been lost to the Jewish community.
Such a broken frame calls out for repair and rearticulation.
To repair it, we need to identify the forces that rejected such Religious Humanism and that have suppressed it as a force within Judaism. We cannot bring the Jewish body to proper health unless we can correctly identify the illness from which it suffers. Attempts to sidestep this part of the process will inevitably lead us to failure because of the continued confusion over the conceptual framework and the proper understanding of the categories in which we are functioning.
But the identification of the problem is only half the process.
We must restore the vision of Sephardic Religious Humanism and, with it, the standing of the Sephardim in the larger Jewish world. The grave historical injustices that have been inflicted on the Jews of the Mediterranean and the Middle East in recent times are deeply complex, yet brutally obvious to all who calmly investigate the matter. We must identify and expunge the Ashkenazi Jewish ethnocentrism that is a critical part of the current problematic from our communities. Such an exclusionary racism is not limited to Ashkenazi Jews per se, as many Jews of Sephardic origin have themselves taken on such a viewpoint, thereby generating a self-loathing that is just as dangerous a problem as that of Ashkenazi prejudice.
Once we look to restore the model of Sephardic Religious Humanism to the Jewish community, we will see the formation of exciting new possibilities for the promulgation of a healthy and robust Jewish identity. Rather than breaking Jews off into separate groups, the Sephardic model of Religious Humanism would enable Jews of all ethnic origins to unite under the rubric of an inclusive and tolerant culture that seeks entente and rapprochement with the world at large, while holding the primacy of Jewish shalom bayit as its ultimate aim.
David Shasha is the director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, New York. The center publishes a weekly e-mail newsletter, Sephardic Heritage Update (http://groups.google.com/group/DSource Citation
Shasha, David. 2010. A Broken Frame:Sephardi Occlusion and the Repairing of Jewish Dysfunction. Tikkun 25(1): 56.
