Sephardic Jews

Sephardic Jews is an introduction to the history and culture of the Sephardim (Hebrew plural for Sephardic Jews). Although the Sephardim were once the majority of Jews in the United States, in the last 150 years they were replaced by the monumental migration of Eastern European and Russian Jews, many of whom would have had Sephardic origins now forgotten. World-wide there are three to four million Jews who identify as Sephardic, mostly in Israel, but there are several hundred thousand Sephardim in France and the United States and smaller groups in various Latin American countries, as well as Turkey and Morocco.

For many in the United States, Sephardic Jews have become a part of memory and even a figment of the imagination, often with little information about the actual history and heritage of the group. Today, in the American Southwest and in parts of Latin America there is a movement to reclaim Jewish identity among Spanish-speakers. That has sparked interest in learning more about Sepharad, the Spain of the Jews, and the Diaspora of Spanish Jews that sent them to all parts of the earth.

Myths have grown around the concept of Sepharad sometimes obscuring the realities of what it was. There was a “golden age” for Jews during the early Muslim period, but as the reconquest heated up and Christian rule replaced that of Muslims, the Jewish experience turned dark until the light of the Jews was put out in Spain.

In this book, the terms Sephardic Jew, Sephardim, or Sephardi are used to refer to people who are of Spanish Jewish descent and have continued the practice and identity as Jews. The term converso is used to refer to anyone who converted from Judaism to Christianity.

The term anusim refers to the tens of thousands of people who were coerced into baptism under threat and those who were forcibly baptized in Spain and Portugal without their consent. The term crypto-Jew is used to refer to people who converted to Catholicism but continued to think of themselves as Jews and to practice domestic Jewish rituals in the privacy of their homes.

Although historical records indicate that active crypto-Judaism largely disappeared from Spain by the late 1500s and from Portugal and the Americas a century later. Jewish identity did survive into the modern era in Portugal, and elements of Jewish practice and identity have survived in the Americas. Active crypto-Judaism does not seem to exist in the present, but there are important contemporary movements in various Latin American countries of people openly reclaiming Jewish identity. Today, the terms “converso”, “anusim”, and “crypto-Jew” are generic terms that are used for people, who identify as descendants of Jews or who identify with that past as Jews.

The movement that is referred to as Messianic Judaism consists of Christians who add Jewish elements to their ritual practice, and they should be considered to be Christian and not Jews. There is no hybrid status of being Christian and Jewish that is recognized by Jewish rabbinical law, the Roman Catholic Church, or any of the Protestant Christian Churches.

Sephardic Jews: History, Religion and People is written with the purpose of providing a window of information and understanding about the people who have carried the light of Sephardic Judaism for centuries and those who are finding hope in it today.