Sephardic Sounds

At the height of its powers, the empire’s mighty reach extended from Sudan in the south to Herzegovina and Budapest in the north. The Turks introduced an enormous number of culinary techniques and recipes to their lands. In Palestine, Turks taught Arab bakers to make flat, layered pastries like baklava. In Hungary, which the Ottomans ruled between 1541 and 1699, Turks instructed the Hungarians on how to make layers of paper-thin pastries, while the Hungarians shared their custom of twisting them into rolls like strudel. A sweet roll made with yogurt in Turkey became a buttery delicacy called pogaca in Hungary. Jews, too, picked up these techniques in the latter part of the reign. Under Ottoman tutelage, Turkish, Balkan, and Greek Jews prepared burekas, boyos, baklava, eggplant dishes, and some kinds of yogurt. It is difficult to pinpoint where these recipes originated but they evolved and moved throughout the Balkans and Turkey.

According to Edward Luttwak, a historian and the author of The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman army was the first to spread recipes and cooking techniques. The elite Janissary corps, which Luttwak calls “the first modern force since Roman times,” made a big soup called chorba an integral part of its soldiers’ diet. “Only by eating this thick halal meat soup with vegetables and beans were they able to avoid dysentery, which was responsible for most deaths,” Luttwak says.

The soldiers also ate basturma as a part of their rations, a halal meat that is sliced, wind-dried, and pickled with dried spices before being pressed together again. “This technique was invented by the Byzantines, adopted by the Ottomans, and circulated everywhere,” says Luttwak. He points out that pastrami has its roots in basturma. Romania and Transylvania, which were part of the Turkish Empire from the mid-16th to the 18th century, “had the highest fertility rates … and the lowest population density,” Luttwak says. “With lots of animals there was lots of meat. This technique of curing was important for the Jews, who were a mobile community.” Jewish peddlers in Romania and elsewhere quickly learned how the Turks cured their meat and began curing kosher meat in the same way, no doubt adding more garlic, black pepper, and lots of paprika. It served them well on their long journeys away from their kosher homes.

Jews who lived on the coasts of the Turkish Empire in places such as Izmir, Salonika, and Istanbul, had different ingredients available to them; they could rely on the abundance the Mediterranean had to offer.

After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal in 1492, merchants fanned out across the Mediterranean. “With Istanbul, Izmir, and Salonika as centers of Judeo-Spanish culture, the dishes brought from Spain were adopted in many Muslim countries, including Egypt,” says Claudia Roden, the author of The Book of Jewish Food and a scholar-in-residence at Yale University this year. The Jews played an essential role as merchants. “In Aleppo”—in Northern Syria—“they were in the caravan of camels,” Roden says. “Theirs was a sort of symbiotic relationship. Jews and Armenians were the merchants and traders.”

As Jewish Sephardic merchants settled in these cities they adapted their own dishes to the local provisions and the dietary laws. Roden cites distinctly Jewish Sephardic dishes, like calzone, a ravioli stuffed with cheese, and her famous gâteau à l’orange, a Jewish orange cake that she learned about from a relative in Salonika, Greece, whose ancestors came from Livorno and, before that, Portugal. These recipes wound their way through the Ottoman Empire. “No Muslim makes an orange cake,” says Roden, whose family carried their own recipes from Spain to Egypt to England. “Only Jews make an orange cake.”

During the Turkish Empire, from the late 16th to early 18th centuries, Jews played an important part in spreading tomatoes, potatoes, and peppers from the New World to the Old. Jewish and Arab doctors knew that tomatoes were edible despite fears among many Jews that this member of the nightshade family was poisonous. Between the doctors and the merchants, these foods were slowly accepted, and people began eating them, first cooked and eventually raw.

A few months ago, when I was testing a stuffed vegetable recipe with meat for an article I was writing, I invited some friends over. The guests loved the stuffed tomatoes, peppers, squash, and onions, infused with fragrant spices. Stuffed vegetables, often called medias, is a Spanish dish of likely Jewish Catalonian origins that journeyed throughout the Turkish Empire, possibly beginning with Sephardic Jews who left Spain during the Inquisition. One of my guests, a Jewish woman who grew up in Egypt, had remained quiet during the dinner conversation. I feared her silence meant she didn’t like the dish. I called her the next day, and she reassured me this wasn’t the case. As a young girl in Alexandria, the daughter of a Syrian mother and an Egyptian father, she ate a stuffed vegetable that was similar to the one I had made. Similar and yet different; the stuffed vegetable of her childhood had a lighter meat mix.

Even one recipe, like stuffed vegetables, can vary tremendously. Depending on the route each family took, the filling of meat might be mixed with eggs, matzo meal, or nuts and condiments like cinnamon, allspice, and mint. The casing itself might be artichokes, carrots, or even beets covered in a sauce made from the spices of the filling and tomatoes. Each ingredient can speak volumes of a family’s history.

Recently I learned of a 90-year-old woman with the wonderful name of Violette Corcos Abulafia Tapiero Budestchu. Born in Mogador, on the Moroccan coast, Madame “Granny” Budestchu, who now splits her time between Israel and France, is a fabulous cook. According to her granddaughter Dafne Tapiero, Granny is a descendant of Kabbalists, prominent merchants, and royal counselors to the sultans and kings of Morocco.

When Granny cooks her spice-scented lentils or her fried artichokes, the subtle flavors bring back memories of the Morocco of her childhood. But her grandchildren or great-grandchildren have different associations; when they prepare these same dishes, the smells recall memories of afternoon and evening visits to Granny’s apartments in Jerusalem and near Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. Granny’s recipes can be traced back to 12th-century Spain, when her Abulafia forebears served as traders throughout the Ottoman Empire, traveling from Turkey to Palestine’s Tiberias. The slight variations in recipes, tasted over and over again, create meaningful food memories, so salient for all of us and so entangled in the historical wanderings of Jews.

FRIED ARTICHOKES, JEWISH STYLE
Adapted from Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France
12 small artichokes, or 4 10-ounce boxes of frozen artichoke hearts or artichoke quarters
Coarse salt to taste
Olive oil for frying
The juice of 1 lemon
6 cloves of garlic, crushed
3 tablespoons chopped fresh chives
3 tablespoons chopped cilantro
3 tablespoons chopped parsley
Coarsely ground pepper to taste

1. If using fresh artichokes, snap off the outer leaves, leaving only the pale inner leaves. Trim the stems and cut off the thorny tops about ¾ of an inch down. Take a sharp knife and smash the artichokes so that the leaves look as if they are blooming like a flower.

2. Put the trimmed artichokes in a bowl and cover with cold water and the lemon juice (the juice keeps them from turning brown). If using frozen artichokes, defrost them in the refrigerator the night before. The next morning, sprinkle with salt and let sit for an hour or so.

3. Line 2 cookie sheets with parchment paper. Heat the olive oil in a deep fryer, heavy pan, or a wok until it reaches 375 degrees. Pat the artichokes dry and lower a few at a time into the hot oil. Fry until golden brown, crispy, and puffed up.

4. Using a wire strainer, transfer the artichokes to the paper towel or parchment-lined pans to soak up all the excess oil. Gently press out any excess oil, but don’t crush the artichokes! Continue frying the rest of the artichokes in batches.

5. Toss while still warm with lemon juice, crushed garlic, and fresh chives, cilantro, and parsley. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve at room temperature.
Yield: About 8 servings

GÂTEAU A L’ORANGE
Adapted from The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey From Samarkand to New York, by Claudia Roden

2 oranges
6 eggs
1 ¼ cups sugar
2 tablespoons orange-blossom water
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 ½ cups blanched almonds, coarsely ground

1. Wash the oranges and boil them whole for 1 ½ hours, or until they are very soft.

2. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Oil a 9-inch cake pan, preferably nonstick and with a removable base, and dust with matzo meal or flour.

3. Beat the eggs with the sugar. Add the orange-blossom water, baking powder and almonds and mix well. Cut open the oranges, remove the seeds, and puree in a food processor. Mix thoroughly with the egg-and-almond mixture and pour into cake pan. Bake for one hour. Let cake cool before turning out.

Joan Nathan’s new book, Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France, will be published next month.

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How could I pick something else? As a Syrian Jew, I am named after my mother’s mother. Unlike Ashkenazi Jews, Syrians name their children after their parents, living or dead. Bolisa is an Arabic name that goes back generations in our family, as is Shefia, my mother’s name.

Had the preschool incident been an isolated one, I probably would have forgotten it by now, but as I’ve grown into adulthood, I’ve found it indicative of the general state of Judaism in America, which is overwhelmingly dominated by Ashkenazi tradition. My Ashkenazi in-laws have a collection of Jewish books on their coffee table, books on Jewish humor, cooking, and tradition. I peruse them and find no trace of my culture. Recently, my mother-in-law added a book titled The Sephardim to the pile. While I appreciate her intention, it saddens me that Sephardic Jews (and here I use the term loosely, describing all Jews who lived under Muslim rule) need their own book—that we have to exist outside of the norm rather than as part of the whole.

It’s not enough to define myself as not being Ashkenazi; defining oneself against something means, really, being defined by it. The definition must lie in the presence: I am Mizrahi, literally a Jew from the East, a product of Arabic culture, and I must find a way to know and own my story and preserve it for my children.

Even today, in New York City, some people are shocked when I say I am both Syrian and Jewish. They imagine intermarriage, an illicit love affair, elopement perhaps. I find myself explaining my past and having social conversations that turn into history lessons, especially when I relay all the details: My mother’s grandparents emigrated from Syria in the 1910s. My paternal grandfather escaped to pre-1948 Palestine from Aden, Yemen. There, he met my grandmother, the Iraqi-born daughter of a Turkish mother and a Kurdish father. She and her family had been stuck in Iraq for several years until they could save more money, because the cost of being smuggled into Jerusalem had risen considerably.

Despite this mixture, I identify most with my Syrian side, a result of my parents’ decisions. When I was 9, my mother enrolled me and my three siblings in a Syrian-Jewish day school, where there were two Ashkenazis in my grade. When I was 12, we moved from the mixed Israeli-Sephardic and American-Ashkenazi neighborhood where we lived into the heart of Syrian Brooklyn.

To live in the Syrian community is to be immersed in its traditions, to eat its tangy-sweet meats slow-cooked in tamarind sauce, to speak its Arabic-inflected Hebrew, to sing its Middle Eastern melodies, to dance to the music of the oud, to revere family, and to always have a home open to guests. But it is also to marry young and often forgo higher education to start a family. It can be stifling, and as a young, independent, headstrong girl, I left for college thinking I’d never look back. But as a grown woman, living on the Lower East Side with my Ashkenazi husband and our 2-year-old daughter, I wonder if I’ve lost something. How I can infuse my home with what I love about Syrian culture even as we physically reside outside of it?

If maintaining the heritage is hard, transmitting the history is even harder. At the Syrian-Jewish high school I attended, the Jewish history curriculum—aside from a passage on Maimonides and another on the Damascus Blood Libel—concerned itself with the lives of Jews in Europe, reducing the millennia-old history of my people to a mere footnote. What I know of Sephardic and Mizrahi history is self-taught, the product of months of research while writing a novel. At the same time that I am grateful for all I was able to learn, I’m angry about how far outside the Jewish canon I had to go to find it.

How have Mizrahi Jews fallen so far into oblivion? Where is the record of millennia of history, of Jews who lived in the Middle East and North Africa since biblical times? The community in Aleppo traces its roots to the time of King David. Documents in the Cairo Geniza prove an unbroken Jewish presence in Egypt for 2,000 years. Until 1948, when Israel was founded, 800,000 Jews lived in Arab countries, and another 200,000 lived in Turkey and Iran. About half later moved to Israel, and the other half were scattered around the world. When the veteran reporter Helen Thomas ended her career by telling Jews to go back to Germany and Poland, I wanted to remind her of the thriving Jewish community that once existed in her beloved Lebanon.

Mizrahi Jews, like my grandparents, started leaving the Levant well before Israel’s creation, and those who arrived in the United States were often shocked by what they found. Ostracism of non-Yiddish-speaking Jews was so pervasive in the early 20th century that it’s noted in an exhibit at the Lower East Side’s Tenement Museum. In a tour called “Living History,” visitors are invited into the home of the Confinos, a Greek-Sephardic family who lived in the tenements in 1916. There, a costumed interpreter portraying 14-year-old Victoria Confino answers questions about her old life in Greece and her new life in New York. When I ask her how she feels about Jewish life on the Lower East Side, she sighs and shakes her head. “They treat us like we’re not real Jews because we don’t speak Yiddish,” she says. “And their food,” she shudders. “They don’t use any olive oil; they fry everything in chicken fat.”

In his excellent book The Magic Carpet: Aleppo-in-Flatbush, Joseph A.D. Sutton recounts the tale of the first Syrian Jews to arrive on the Lower East Side in 1910:

During a mid-week prayer service in an Eastern European synagogue, my father, ritually clothed in taleet, a prayer shawl, and tefileen, phylacteries, was approached by an Ashkenazic congregant. Since he did not understand what was being said to him in “plain Yiddish” the man who had spoken to him asked in evident amazement, “Bist du a Yid?” (“Are you a Jew?”). Similar experiences were common.

Sutton details that Syrians weren’t welcomed to worship with their Ashkenazi co-religionists and soon set up their own congregations on the Lower East Side, first in the basement of the Educational Alliance on East Broadway, then at 48 Orchard Street. As they prospered, and as families grew, they left Manhattan for Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

It’s little wonder, then, that Syrian Jews stick to themselves. The community, now in Midwood, Brooklyn, is often described as an insular enclave. In widely used slang, Syrians play off that early experience by calling Ashkenazi Jews J-Dubs. It’s short for J-W, or simply, Jew, as if to say, “Yeah. We got it. You guys are the real Jews.” They call themselves SY and draw sharp distinction between ours and theirs: language and food, behavior and culture.

Ironically, after eight years of marriage to my husband, and my mother-in-law’s patient insinuations, I probably know more Yiddish than I do Arabic. And though I want to preserve my daughter’s Sephardic heritage, she is also half-Ashkenazi, and that side of her should be celebrated as well.

For now, I think of ways I can keep Middle Eastern tradition alive for her. I’ll show her how to dance to Arabic music at parties, flicking her wrists and shimmying her hips. I’ll feed her grape leaves stewed in apricots, a dish of rice and lentils with caramelized onions. I’ll teach her to stuff filah dough with sautéed spinach and walnuts, folding it into triangles topped with sesame seeds. When Passover comes, she’ll join me in helping my mother and grandmother prepare. We’ll spread grains of rice on the table, inspecting them for hametz, passing them from one woman to the next until they’ve been checked three times and are ready to be served at the seder.

I’ll explain the amulet I pin on her clothes, the hamsika hand-pendant that wards off the evil eye. I’ll recount the story of the Arabic-inscribed Ottoman coin I wear around my neck, the one my great-grandmother took with her before she was smuggled out of Iraq, on foot, at night, through the mountains. I’ll tell her about another great-grandmother, who was employed as a seamstress before marrying in Aleppo. After a long day’s work, she would sit beside her family’s large pool, smoking her narghile. I may worry that mainstream Judaism’s institutions will not teach her her history, but I will tell her the stories of these women, teach her to dance the way they did, to cook their food, and express intense emotion in the handful of Arabic phrases I know. I’ll keep her traditions alive for her. And hope that will be enough.

Paula Sadok, a writer living in New York, has recently completed a novel.

Brooklyn Family Keeps Latino-Jewish Traditions Alive [CNN.com]

Benjamin Cardozo isn’t considered Hispanic because he didn’t come from Mexico, Central America, or the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, the three main immigrant sources feeding this country’s largest minority. Portugal doesn’t count, nor does Spain, since the Iberian Peninsula as a whole is seen popularly as the Evil Empire. Brazilians, too, are often excluded from being part of the Hispanic/Latino category because they speak Portuguese, not Spanish, although in Miami, among other places, exceptions are made in increasing fashion to make them feel part of the whole.

Needless to say, neither Hispanic nor Latino were terms in use in Justice Cardozo’s age, so he’s neither one nor the other. But the main problem, no doubt, is his religion: he was Jewish, e.g., not a Catholic, a distinction with a major difference in the Spanish-speaking community, which tends to conflate ethnic affiliation with the majoritarian faith. I say this as a Mexican Jew, the ultimate oxymoron.

Of course, in the age of Obama, categories like these are no longer what they seem—or shouldn’t be. Obama himself is a mulatto: his father was from Kenya, his mother was white. Among recalcitrant Blacks for whom slavery is the sine qua non of the African American experience, Obama is an outsider. All of which makes me wonder if Judge Sotomayor isn’t Jewish herself. After all, she grew up in the Puerto Rican diaspora, was educated among non-Hispanics, and likes the shifting game of identities.

Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. He is the author of Resurrecting Hebrew (Nextbook) and, forthcoming in September, the anthology Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing (Library of America).

Alice Tully Hall interior

This Sunday, after participating in an invocation inaugurating the newly appointed space, Savall and his ensemble Hespèrion XXI will perform a program called “Diaspora Sefardí: From Medieval Spain to the Eastern Mediterranean,” presenting music that originates as far back as the 15th century. But, says Savall, it’s not as simple as stamping a date on traditional music that has been passed down through 400 years via oral tradition. “You listen to a piece of Bach and you can say, ‘This is 1725 or 1730.’ But Sephardic songs you cannot say, ‘This is from 1550 or 1650.’ It’s something that’s moving. It has no date of birth and it has no date of finish, because this music is always alive.”

Although Savall, 67, is knowledgeable enough to be able to discuss every element of the music, its traceable origins—carried from Spain after the Inquisition to North Africa and much of the Ottoman Empire—and musical distinctions—“medieval but also very modern. Beautiful melodies, very strong rhythmic structures”—he prefers to think that something more emotional than technical characterizes the music. “I can imagine the music was the only thing that held these people together through terrible things,” says Savall. “Singing together with family through difficult moments is probably the most necessary thing, when you have lost everything. It’s the only explanation.”

Hespèrion XXI

Hespèrion XXI, which also includes Savall’s wife, the soprano singer Montserrat Figueras, was nominated for a Grammy for 2001′s recording Diaspora Sefardí, from which much of the coming performance will be drawn. They also received renown for the project Jerusalem, which brings together musicians from all over the Middle East and Mediterranean, and will be making appearances all over the world in the coming years.

There are those that see performances of early or traditional music as opportunities for pageantry, complete with costumes and decorative elements meant to recreate the atmosphere of an era long past. Savall and his group, on the other hand, believe the music is too elemental to belong to any one time or place, and therefore they prefer to dress plainly and let the authentic instrumentation (including oud, santur, moresca, and Savall’s own viola de gamba), and a commitment to maintaining the style and speed of the music, provide their performance with authenticity. “The best thing is to be very neutral, let the music take the principal space,” says Savall. “It’s music that helped people to survive. You cannot do theatrics with this.”

Lyrically, the songs fit into an old Spanish tradition: the romance. All of them tell compelling stories, says Savall: “When you listen to these songs from the start you have to keep listening to see how it finishes.” Many of them are lullabies, including one in which a mother sings of her sadness that the man she loves is with another woman (“the children don’t know what she’s talking about.”) Another piece laments the fate of the singer’s sister, who has been imprisoned by the Moors.

Jordi Savall

People have long found innovative ways to pass on this music. Savall says there are recordings from the 1930s of old blind women singing Sephardic songs. “Blind people have a very strong sensitivity and capacity of memory. They sing it particularly for the young generations to keep alive,” says Savall. But he fears we have lost our sense of the sacredness of such transmission.

“We are used to pushing a button and hear the most beautiful orchestra,” says Savall. “When a person has to sing, he has to imagine the song inside in his spirit and has to find a way to reproduce this sound with his vocal stream. This is spiritual and physical.” Through his ensemble he hopes to at least carve out a niche for the music to be heard and appreciated. “We have to compensate the loss of this tradition by giving the music its natural space in the classical world.”

In fact, Savall believes that music has an important role to play in trying to untangle some of our world’s most confounding problems, but he is not sure we’re taking enough advantage of it. “In any civilization, when we are not able to understand people that are different, this is the detriment of the civilization. And we are now going in this direction,” he says. “Music is the most important aspect of the education for dialogue, for respect. It’s one of our last chances.”

Written in Ladino (or Judeo-Spanish, as some call it), the song sounds as if it had been passed down over many generations. In fact, it was written just 25 years ago by Sephardic folk singer Flory Jagoda. The song’s Old World sound reflects her musical training, which began in the small village of Vlacenica, in Bosnia, where she grew up singing along with aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins.

Jagoda, who now lives in Virginia, has made it her life’s work to revive the music and language she grew up with, and which were virtually extinguished during World War II. To date, she’s produced four CDs featuring traditional and original compositions (many of them performed with her children and grandchildren). This is her story.