Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History by Aviva Ben-Ur

Author:Aviva Ben-Ur [Ben-Ur, Aviva]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2009-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

In the Ivory Tower

“The Philo-Sephardic movement in Spain,”78 which developed at the turn of the century, included campaigns to repatriate Sephardim and to spread awareness of the Ladino language. Among its followers were Ángl Pulido, Benito Pérez Galdós, Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, and Rafael Cansinos-Asséns, all of whom encouraged Eastern Sephardim “to maintain their traditions and reverentially love and study them.”79 For some of these Spaniards, interest in Sephardic civilization led to an empathic ethnoreligious identity. Pulido, the so-called apostle of the Sephardim, came to suspect that he himself had Sephardic roots.80 Spanish novelist and critic Rafael Cansinos-Asséns (1883–1964), through kabbalistic calculations, arrived at the conclusion that his ancestors were crypto-Jews. His conviction led him to join the small group of Moroccan and European Sephardim who dwelled in Madrid, and he saturated his pamphlets, essays, short stories, poems, and novels with Sephardic themes.81

This philo-Sephardic movement found its spiritual offspring in Spanish intellectual circles in the United States. The catalyst was Federico de Onís (1885–1966), professor of Spanish languages and literatures at the University of Salamanca and the Center for Historical Studies in Madrid and renowned as one of the world’s leading scholars of Spanish and Latin American literature. In 1916, Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler appointed Onís to organize Hispanic studies on a new foundation. Butler was responding to an exponential increase in the popularity of Spanish academic studies, witnessed nationwide, particularly in the fields of language and literature. One scholar describes the boon in Spanish studies during the years on either side of World War I as “arguably the biggest and most dramatic surge ever in the history of U.S. Spanish studies.”82

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