American Jewish History

Nearly seventy years ago, in 1954, a landmark American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) conference commemorated the tricentennial of Jewish presence in North America. In his opening address, "The Writing of American Jewish History," Salo Wittmayer Baron, who was the first professor of Jewish history at a US university (Columbia) and was then serving as AJHS's president, advanced a new vision for the field. Scholars, argued Baron, must move beyond apologetics and filiopietism to professionalize American Jewish history. To achieve this goal, Baron urged "thorough investigation" of sources in the main American Jewish languages among which he included not only Hebrew, Yiddish, and German, but also Spanish—a language of those colonial-era Jews whose arrival in 1654 the conference celebrated—and Ladino, the language of the majority of the Jews from the Ottoman Empire who arrived in the United States in the early twentieth century. Only through engagement with primary sources, he argued, would "wiping out the memory of entire segments of American Jews" be averted.¹

By invoking both Spanish and Ladino, Baron alluded to a seeming paradox at the center of the field of Jewish history, including American Jewish history. Certain groups identified today as "Sephardic Jews"—medieval Spanish Jews as well as Spanish and Portuguese Jews and their descendants who migrated to Western Europe and the Americas in the early modern period (Western Sephardim)—have resided at the center of Jewish studies. In contrast, others often identified today as "Sephardic Jews"—Jews from the Ottoman Empire who spoke Ladino (Eastern [End Page 519] Sephardim), as well as other Jews from Muslim societies and other non-Ashkenazi Jews sometimes classified as Sephardim—have resided at the margins.² Sarah Abrevaya Stein refers to this dynamic as one that pits the "Sephardic mystique" against the "Sephardic mistake," the latter imagining Jewish life since the seventeenth century in the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim societies as "monolithic, static, tangential to the larger Jewish world, and of little interest to the scholar of Jewish history."³

A vast literature has developed around the allure and mystique of the first group of Sephardim that traces back to the founding of Jewish studies as an organized discipline during the nineteenth century in German-speaking lands.⁴ To prove their worthiness, to combat antisemitism and claims that Jews were not European but merely the continent's internal "Oriental," and to justify Jews' claims for civil and political rights, practitioners of Wissenschaft des Judentums elevated the Jews of medieval Spain—figures like Maimonides—and the Western Sephardic diaspora—figures like Spinoza—as models whom German Jews ought to emulate for their legendary abilities to blend their Jewishness and participation in general society.⁵ That mystique transferred to the North American setting; the story of American Jewish history begins with Western Sephardim, whether those Spanish and Portuguese Jews who, as conversos, accompanied Columbus on his voyages to the Americas in 1492, or those who arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654—the group that Baron and his colleagues celebrated in 1954. American Jewish leaders believed that the longstanding roots of Jews in the United States justified their belonging in the present.

Wissenschaft scholars did not completely reject the accusations made against them by antisemites but internalized and projected denigrating tropes onto those Jews further to the east (and the south), to their own internal Others, in a process described by Aziza Khazzoom as the "great [End Page 520] chain of orientalism."⁶ Wissenschaft scholars viewed those descendants of Iberian Jews expelled in 1492 who settled in the Islamic world to be a liability for a narrative that sought to justify Jews' Europeanness, and so largely cast them out of the story. The great nineteenth-century Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz emphasized the "decline" of Ottoman Jews that drew on Orientalist imagery of the era. The descendants of "Spanish Jews" became "Turkish Jews" and later "Asiatic Jews" in the Ottoman Empire, stripped of the noble title "Sephardim," for they "did not produce a single great genius who originated ideas to stimulate future ages, nor mark out a new thought for men of average intelligence...