The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Mr. Piza Mendes credits his father with helping to found New York’s Montefiore Hospital; he was also influential in the establishment of the New York Guild for the Jewish Blind, whose annual fund-raising ball has become the most fashionable event in the city’s upper-crust Jewish life. Perhaps his most significant deed was choosing his successor, the beloved Dr. David de Sola Pool, who was also Shearith Israel’s rabbi for almost half a century. Rabbi Mendes spotted the young scholar, who happened also to be a relative, when he was a student at Heidelberg.

  Dr. Pool, who is now rabbi emeritus, has himself been deeply interested in the Sephardic past, and he is the author of two massive volumes: An Old Faith in the New World, a history of the American Sephardim, and Portraits Etched in Stone, a series of biographical sketches of the Sephardic Jews who repose in America’s oldest Jewish cemetery, in New York’s Chatham Square. Dr. Pool, now in his eighties, has an oval, high-foreheaded, serenely contemplative face and a white beard. It has been said that when he passes through the synagogue he looks like the figure of God Himself.

  “Dr. Pool wouldn’t like me to say this, but he is a Christ-like figure,” says Lloyd Peixotto Phillips, a member of Shearith Israel, with a twinkle in his eye. Mr. Phillips is a bustling, vigorous, outgoing man who is a trader on the New York Stock Exchange. Today he has a few outside customers, but he busies himself primarily with his own portfolio—on the telephone all day, buying and selling stocks in considerable quantity and, one gathers, with considerable success; the Phillipses have an East Side apartment, a country home in New Jersey, and a winter place in Palm Beach. One would not expect a man like Lloyd Phillips—who gives the impression of being all business—of caring much about his Sephardic family past. But he does. He has shelf after shelf of old books, family papers, and family trees, showing how the Phillips family started out in eighteenth-century Newport, and how his mother’s family, the Peixottos, trace themselves back to Portugal, and an escape into Holland and the Dutch West Indies. In the process of their evolution, both the Phillips and Peixotto families became variously connected by marriage to the other old families, and the names Gomez, Hendricks, Seixas, Nathan, Hays, and Hart all turn up in a multitiered Peixotto-Phillips family tree. Mr. Phillips likes nothing better of an evening than, over a glass of Scotch, perusing the old family documents, diaries, newspaper clippings yellowed with age, letters, scraps and bits of family history.

  All this leaves his pretty, non-Sephardic wife, Bernice, whom he calls Timmie, somewhat at a loss. “I never realized any of this,” she said with a little laugh not long ago. “When we were married, and I was having informal cards printed up, I was at Tiffany’s and realized I didn’t even know how to spell Peixotto. I couldn’t understand how that could get to be a Jewish name.” Mrs. Phillips shrugged a little self-effacingly, smiled again, and said, “We were French Jews, you see, and they—well, the French Jews never amounted to all that much.”

  3

  “NOT JEWELS, BUT JEWS …”

  The Spanish-Portuguese part of their collective past is of enduring importance to the Sephardim of America. It is what gives these old families their feeling of relevance, of significance, of knowing where they “fit into the scheme of things,” as Emily Nathan puts it. This is because, in both Spain and Portugal in the years before they were forced to flee, the Jews—as a people, a race—had been able to reach heights of achievement unlike anything that had happened elsewhere in their long history. Their position was unique in the world. Who, after all, were the passengers of the Mayflower? “Ragtag and bobtail,” Aunt Ellie used to say with a sniff. On the other hand, the first Jews who arrived in America, in 1654, were members of ancient noble families, people of consequence, men and women of property and learning who, for reasons over which they had no control, found themselves on the opposite side of the Atlantic from where they had intended to be. It is also true that, had it not been for their Spanish heritage and experience, the Sephardim would never have found themselves in America at all. And it is interesting to speculate why—considering the vast disparities of time, of place, of culture—the Jews can be said to have found their greatest successes and their fullest freedoms within the context of the two civilizations of modern America and medieval Spain.

  The word Sephardim stems from Sepharad, the land where the Hebrew wanderers are said to have settled after Jerusalem was captured by the Babylonians and their Temple was destroyed. Generally—though the truth is lost in myth and mystery—the Sepharad is thought to have been a region in Asia Minor. The Book of Obadiah is tantalizingly vague: “And the captivity of this host of the children of Israel shall possess that of the Canaanites, even unto Zarephath; and the captivity of Jerusalem, which is in Sepharad, shall possess the cities of the south.” Over the centuries, however, Jewish tradition—a relentless and often illogical force of its own—has associated the Sepharad with another peninsula, thousands of miles to the west, the Iberian. It has even been suggested that the Spanish and Portuguese Jews, who have for so long considered themselves the grandest of the grand, simply appropriated the Sepharad for their own. They said it was Spain and Portugal, and therefore it was.

  Spanish-sounding names do not necessarily indicate Sephardic Jews, though they sometimes do. (The singer Eydie Gorme is a Sephardic Jew, though not of a “first cabin” family.) Spanish and Portuguese Jewish ancestors can often be spied under various disguises of nomenclature. The name Alport, for instance, was in some cases formerly Alporto, meaning “from Portugal,” and the same is also true of such names as Alpert, Rappaport (which itself is spelled a variety of ways), and even Portnoy.

  The Seixas family, who do have a Spanish-sounding name, offer an example of what can happen to Jewish names. After escaping from Spain during the Inquisition, some of the Seixases made their way to what is now Germany, where the name became Germanized to Sachs, Saks, and even made its royal way into the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha complex. Meanwhile, some Seixases remained in Spain as secret Jews, while others became honest converts—or so we are to suppose, since there is no way now of testing their sincerity—to Catholicism, and actually aided the Inquisitional courts against their own kin and former brethren. Today, Jewish Seixases and Catholic Seixases may be excused, when they come in contact, for eyeing each other a trifle warily. (Vic Seixas, the tennis player, has resisted efforts from New York’s Seixas and Nathan families to draw a connection with him; he has not answered their letters. The Seixases slyly point out that Dr. Stern’s book lists a certain Victor Montefiore Seixas in the nineteenth century—so the name Victor was in the family even then.) “Not all Seixases are real Seixases,” Aunt Ellie used to say. On the other hand, she was not above mentioning certain prominent Catholic families—in both the United States and Europe—and reminding the children, “We are connected with them also.”

  José Fernández Amador de los Rios, the Spanish historian, would have agreed with Aunt Ellie’s appraisal of her family. He has said: “It would be impossible to open the history of the Iberian Peninsula, whether civil, political, scientific or literary, without meeting on every page with some memorable fact or name relating to the Hebraic nation.” Even that is an understatement. For six hundred years—from roughly the eighth through the thirteenth centuries—the Jews were Spanish history.

  There had been Jews on the Iberian Peninsula since pre-Christian times. There is a tradition that Jews founded the city of Toledo, the name of which, scholars say, derives from the Hebrew toledot, meaning “generations.” During the Dark Ages following the fall of the Roman Empire, Spain consisted of a shifting collection of primitive Visigothic city-states, governed by a multitude of undistinguished kings, each of whom had his tiny region which he tried to control, and was usually battling for power against local nobles and bishops of the Church, sometimes winning bloodily, sometimes being overthrown. The condition of the Jew depended on the whim of the king, who either persecuted the Jew or used him in the tradition of the “court Jew”—as a financial middleman through wh
om money passed in its endless journey from the pockets of the peasant class into the vaults of the royal exchequer. Taxes on Jews were quaint, arbitrary, and capricious rather than confiscatory. In Portugal under Sancho II, for example, Jews were required for a while to pay a “fleet tax,” and had by law to “furnish an anchor and a new cable for every ship fitted out by the Crown.” In one of the many Spanish kingdoms, the Jews were taxed on such basic foods as meat, bread, and water. In another, there was a Jewish “hearth tax,” and in another there was a “coronation tax” plus a regular yearly tax “to pay for the king’s dinner.”

  This was nothing like the heavy pressure of taxation Jews faced elsewhere in Europe, where the Jew had, it must have seemed, to pay for every act of his life from the first to the last. Jews were taxed for passing through certain gates, for crossing certain bridges, for using certain roads, for entering certain public buildings. They were taxed for crossing the borders of the tiny Rhineland states, for buying or selling goods, for marrying. Jewish babies were taxed at birth, and no Jew could be buried until his burial tax was paid. Jewish houses were taxed according to the number and size of their rooms, which encouraged families to crowd together in as small a space as possible. In peacetime, soldiers were billeted in Jewish quarters, and houses of prostitution were placed there, in an attempt to break down Jewish family life. To rape or kill a Jewish child was considered no crime.

  By contrast, the Jewish quarters of such Spanish cities as Seville, Córdoba, and Granada were the best neighborhoods of their cities, occupied by the most beautiful houses—gracefully built around airy courtyards—and Christians vied with each other to buy houses there. It was a far cry from the ghettos of the Rhineland, where streets were too narrow for a wagon to turn around, where open sewers ran, where the Jew paid a tax to leave his quarter and another to return, and in which he was locked at night. Jews in the rest of Europe, who had heard of the life their brothers lived in Spain and Portugal, looked longingly and enviously at what lay across the Pyrenees.

  Then, at the beginning of the eighth century, came the Moors.

  It is popular in Spain today to speak of “the years of Arab occupation,” leaving the implication that these Arabs were no different from the nomadic illiterates who wander the African desert on camels and wear burnooses. It is hard, even today, for a Spaniard to accept the fact that the Moorish conquest of the Iberian Peninsula was the first conquest since Roman times of an inferior land by a superior people. Other invaders of Europe—the Huns, the Turks, the Normans—were barbarians. But the men who, in 711, overcame the scattered city-states of Spain were the bearers of the great Islamic culture which had flourished in such sophisticated cities as Damascus and Alexandria. They brought with them the flow of knowledge from northern Africa to southern Europe—sciences Spain had never been exposed to before, including algebra, chemistry (or alchemy), architecture—and even introduced such unheard of amenities as indoor plumbing.

  The Moors, during their half millennium of rule, turned the city of Córdoba—one of several Spanish cities that responded strongly to the Moorish impact—into one of the most glittering and exciting in the world, with its great mosque, its libraries, gardens, palaces, university buildings, and what were then the most opulent private houses in Europe. Muslim historians claim that at one point under Moorish rule the city had a population of over a million; now it has shrunk to 190,000. There are said to have been more than 3,000 palaces, public baths, and mosques, plus over 80,000 shops. The main library had a collection of over 400,000 volumes. In Granada, the Moors created the incomparable Alhambra, that shimmering complex of towers, pavilions, courtyards, pools, fountains, and gardens, each arched window of each great hall designed to frame a particular picture of exquisite beauty. The Alhambra is a triumph of Moorish aesthetics, and its fountains, an engineering miracle—their graduated upward thrust dependent on gravity, with a water source located high on a mountainside above—operate with the same precision today as they did seven hundred years ago. In a room off the Courtyard of the Lions, a mosaic Star of David is prominently displayed on one wall, a reminder that the Jews and the Moors were both Semitic peoples, with ancient shared pasts.

  Until recent times, in fact, when opposing nationalistic aims turned the two peoples apart, the followers of Judaism and Islam had deep interrelationships. Never in their history did Jews have a longer and more meaningful encounter with another religion than in Spain. As the Moors surged forward and upward in Spain, achieving power and grandeur, they bore the Jews upward with them. As the Moorish occupation moved northward—at its height, in 719, the Moors held nearly the entire peninsula—the Jews helped the invaders by opening towns and fortresses to them, enabling them to go on to further victories, and for this the Jews were rewarded with high positions. The role of the Jews in the Arab conquest would be remembered, of course, later on when the tide began to turn the other way.

  Immediately, the Jewish and the Moorish respect for education and culture recognized each other and went hand in hand. The Jewish and the Moorish skills in politics and the arts were kindred, and instantly in sympathy. Under Moorish rule, the Jews of Spain were no longer restricted to the narrow roles of moneylenders or tax collectors. In the list of popular Jewish occupations we see “bullion merchant” drop to twelfth place, well behind such humdrum trades as “lion tamer,” “juggler,” and “mule seller.” Leading the list, by contrast, is “physician,” followed by “public official,” and “clerk of the treasury.” Moorish sophistication and breadth of mind encouraged Jews to become inventors, artisans, soldiers, lovers, mystics, scholars—out of the darkness and solitude an “outsider” always feels, into the shining circles of magic and poetry.

  By the eleventh century, the Jewish stamp was firmly on the land, and the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries in Spain and Portugal represent a kind of golden age for Jews. From 1200 on, Jews virtually monopolized the medical profession, a fact that was to cause serious trouble for both Jews and Christians later on, and in the kingdom of Aragon it was said: “There was not a noble or prelate in the land who did not keep a Jewish physician.” Jews adorned the other professions, and Jewish advocates, judges, architects, scientists, and writers were heavily relied upon by the courts of both Aragon and Castile. Jews were equally important in their financial service to the kings of Spain, where, in one report, we find them “in key positions as ministers, royal counsellors, farmers of state revenue, financiers of military enterprises and as major domos of the estates of the Crown and of the higher nobility.” In addition, Jews provided the country’s apothecaries, astronomers, map makers, navigators, and designers of navigational and other scientific instruments. Jews were also prominent as merchants dealing in silver, spices, wine, fur, timber, and slaves.

  There were isolated outbreaks of anti-Semitism from time to time. The Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries frequently provided excuses for local pogroms, the rationale being: “Let us purify our own home as well as the land of the infidel,” and the number of these occurrences increased as Christian Spain began its long push southward again, dividing the land more equally between Christianity and Islam, and as the Moorish influence began to wane. But in general, through these centuries—1100 to 1390—fresh breezes of tolerance and intersectarian understanding seemed to blow across Iberia.

  This was partly because Christian kings tended to follow the enlightened examples of their Moorish predecessors. Having seen what the Jews had done for the Moors, the Christian kings were eager for Jewish favor. A number of kings considered themselves the protectors of the Jews, and in many places the Jews literally belonged to the Crown. Two of the greatest kings, James I of Aragon and Ferdinand III of Castile, were decidedly pro-Semitic. Ferdinand III was fiercely possessive of what he called “my Jews,” and was quick to put down any attempt to persecute them. He often described himself as a “king of three religions” and, in proud reply, a Castilian rabbi declared to his congregation: “The kings and lor
ds of Castile have had this advantage, that their Jewish subjects, reflecting the magnificence of their lords, have been the most learned, the most distinguished Jews that there have been in all the realms of the dispersion; they are distinguished in four ways: in lineage, in wealth, in virtues, in science.” When Ferdinand III died, his son, Alfonso X, erected a monumental mausoleum for his father, and ordered the dead king’s eulogy inscribed upon it in Castilian, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew. After death, Ferdinand became known as Ferdinand the Saintly.

  His son, known as Alfonso the Wise and Alfonso the Learned, was in many ways more remarkable than his father. He patterned his rule after that of the Moorish king Abdulrahman III, whose reign had been majestic, broad-minded, and tolerant, and Alfonso’s may have surpassed Abdulrahman’s in its magnanimity and influence. In his researches, Alfonso always turned to Jewish scholars, “the best,” and he founded the celebrated center of astronomic learning at Toledo. Part of the scientific output of this institution, the Alphonsine Tables, were to figure importantly in the navigational thinking of the young Christopher Columbus.

  Up to Alfonso’s time, the official language of the royal court, of diplomacy, and of the universities had been Latin. Since it was the language of the Church, of their persecutors, it was a tongue that the Jews instinctively regarded with aversion. The upper-class Jews preferred Castilian, and the lower classes spoke Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, written in Hebrew characters, among themselves. Alfonso and his Jewish scholars codified Castilian, abolished Latin, and declared Castilian the official language of Christian Spain, to the great rejoicing of the Jewish community.*