-Welcome to the University of Washington
Department of History Annual Lecture.
My name is Joel Benoliel,
and I'm very happy to have been invited
to introduce the speaker tonight, Devin Naar.
I'm going to give a very untraditional introduction.
My assumption is that you can all read his bio
on the History Department or the Stroum Center website.
And so if you're interested in the books
that he's published and where he went to school
and all the traditional things,
I don't want to read that to you.
So you could read that on your own.
That's not my introduction.
What I'm going to talk about is
how we are uniquely connected, Devin and I.
We've known each other for just 10 years,
but our connection goes back perhaps hundreds of years.
Now, personally I've been on this campus off
and on for over 60 years.
I started my freshman year in 1963.
And the very first quarter of my freshman year,
in the middle of that quarter,
President Kennedy was assassinated.
In 1967, just before I received my degree,
which was a BA in Political Science,
my first of two degrees from the university,
the Vietnam War was raging
and it resulted in many of my classmates
being drafted into that war.
We later called ourselves the bookends
because our college experience was bookended
from beginning to end with life-changing moments of history
over which we had no control.
And I recently had the privilege of serving for six years
as a regent at the university,
and I used that bit of my own history
to counsel students who were feeling
like the world was coming to an end.
First when political events were happening
that they had no control over,
and then we had a virus that shut down the campus,
they had no control over that.
And I wanted them to understand that life goes on,
you overcome, you prosper, and history does not control you.
In 2005,
the Jackson School invited a Stanford history professor,
Aron Rodrigue, to our campus to serve as a scholar in residence.
He was an expert on many things involved in Jewish studies,
but in particular the impact of the Holocaust on Sephardic Jews.
He gave three lectures right in this room, 2005.
The first one was The Holocaust
and the End of Judeo-Spanish Culture in the Balkans.
The second was Rhodes, the Island of Memory.
And the third was North African Jewry and World War II.
My wife and I attended the second lecture,
the one about the isle of Rhodes,
because that year as it happened,
we were planning to make our first trip
to visit the isle of Rhodes
where my wife's grandparents were born.
We were also keen to meet Professor Rodrigue
because he was born in Turkey,
where my mother was born, he studied in Manchester, England,
where my father was born, and we enjoyed meeting him.
We stayed in touch,
and years later, we invited him back to Seattle
to be the keynote speaker at an annual Holocaust memorial
that's given in Seattle every year for the victims,
the Holocaust victims from the isle of Rhodes,
which is an amazing horrible story of murder.
Years later, we had the occasion
to welcome one of Professor Rodrigue's doctoral students
to the university as the first Sephardic scholar
to teach in the newly created Sephardic studies program
in the Stroum Center at the Jackson School.
That student was Devin Naar.
In 10 short years
since he earned his PhD at Stanford
under the tutelage of Aron Rodrigue
and came here to take up his position as a professor,
he's been instrumental in making the expertise
of the University of Washington recognized nationally
and internationally
when it comes to Sephardic history and culture.
He's put our university on the map.
You will get to see some of his work tonight.
He's also involved around the world
with the effort to save the Ladino language,
which was the daily language of our grandparents.
He has helped archive here at the University of Washington,
the largest collection of Ladino publications
anywhere in the world.
He has shined a bright light on the Sephardic experience
in the old country and here in the new country.
Devin and I share a unique history.
Not only are we both devoted to elevating
and enhancing Sephardic studies,
but our own families are part of the immigration story
that he's going to describe tonight.
His research uncovered the fact that 100 years ago,
this year, 1924, his great-grandfather
and my grandfather,
both of whom were serving as rabbis
in neighboring parts of the Ottoman Empire,
left their homes and set out for America
to serve the growing Sephardic presence here.
Devin's research determined
that those two families set sail on separate ships for New York
on the very same day in August, 1924.
It is my honor and privilege to present
my dear friend and the University of Washington's
professor, Devin Naar.
[ Applause ]
-Well, thank you so much, Joel,
for that invitation -- that introduction, excuse me.
I really, really appreciate that.
And our history does go back very far.
Generations back in fact. You know,
one of the gifts of being at the University of Washington
and here in Seattle has not only
been the opportunity to work with my colleagues
in the history department and in Jewish studies
and across campus with undergraduate and graduate
students, some of whom I see here today with our staff,
but also to develop partnerships
with the local Sephardic community
in which Joel and Maureen Benoliel
have been instrumental in helping to initiate
the Sephardic studies program
that Joel described about a decade ago.
And here in Seattle,
I've been really privileged to be considered
and embraced as uno de los nuestros,
as one of our own among Seattle Sephardic Jews.
But also I realized that even though I've been here 10 years,
I remain a musafir, a kind of a guest.
And as tonight is the Jewish holiday of Tu BiShvat,
which begins, its known as Frutikas in Ladino,
it's a kind of a Jewish Arbor Day,
I would like to wish those of you celebrating Frutikas Alegre.
Happy Tu BiShvat.
I'd like to thank Glennys Young and Nick Grall
and the entire history department team
for organizing this series.
And to my colleagues who have spoken and will speak after me,
it's a privilege to share the stage with you.
And I'd also like to dedicate my lecture tonight to my mother,
Barbara, who's not able to be here this evening.
[ Speaks foreign language ]
Before delving into my talk,
I'd like to offer a land acknowledgement
that's drawn from one that my colleague Josh Reid
shared last week.
Today we meet on the historical contemporary lands
of the Duwamish, Suquamish and Muckleshoot
nations and other Coast Salish peoples
who called the waters and coastline
of the Salish Sea Home.
As a University of Washington professor working
on indigenous homelands,
I'm accountable to supporting Native students
and the tribal nations among whom I work.
Josh offered a fund he supports for Native students
as something you might consider doing to support
and recognize our connection,
and also the ongoing impact of settler colonial society here
at the University of Washington and in Seattle.
And I'd like to mention a few others
that you might consider supporting,
such as Real Rent Duwamish partnership
with Native Americans and Chief Seattle Club.
So with that, I'd like to begin with a Seattle Icon,
Pike Place Market. Anybody ever been there?
When it opened in 1907,
horse-drawn carriages and ferries brought fruits,
vegetables, milk, eggs, and meat to the new market.
And the Seattle City Council member declared
that it was one of the greatest days in the history of
Seattle, a history
that had only gone back less than 60 years by that time.
Now, if this is a visual icon of the city,
I'd like to pair this with a sound recorded in the city.
Now, if you wanted to think of an iconic sound of Seattle,
music of Seattle, maybe you want to think about Hendrix,
or maybe Nirvana,
or some of the group
that has made Seattle famous for its music.
But instead,
I'd like to offer a field recording from many decades ago
of someone chanting something
you probably do not associate with a history of Seattle.
[ Man chanting ]
That is the al-Fatiha,
the opening verse of the first Surah,
the first chapter of the Quran.
Now, I suspect that it is one of the first,
maybe the first, recordings of the Quran
created right here in Seattle.
Who was the one chanting it?
It was not an imam, not even a Muslim,
but rather a Jew,
a son of a rabbi born in the Ottoman Empire,
who came to Seattle in the wake of World War I.
And here he is, Jacques Azouz, Jack Azose, with the passport
that he used to come to the United States in 1920.
Azouz was born in Eskisehir, in Anatolia, in Ottoman, Turkey,
but it was in the town of Yenikoy on the Black Sea,
where his father was serving as a rabbi,
where he attended the local... [ Speaks foreign language ]
The Muslim primary school.
And that is where he learned to recite the Quran as he describes
and will tell us in his oral history excerpt here.
-My father met one of the Turkish hojas spiritual leader,
and he told him,
"If I send my boy to your school,
would you teach him how to read and write a Turkish language?"
He told him, "Yes. Welcome.
Tell him to come over, bring him over."
And I went there.
I started from the A, B, C in the Turkish language.
And every Thursday they used to read the Quran.
My father told him, "Please, don't teach him the Quran.
Just for us,
you know, it is not, you know, right to read the Quran."
He says, "Okay."
And he used to tell me, this teacher used to tell me,
"Go sit in the back of the room."
And we used to sit down over there like this,
you know, on the floor, --
-With your legs crossed.
--- with the legs crossed, and listening to the boys,
you know, the kids my age, you know, reading the Quran.
One month, two months, six months, a year,
just listening, listening, listening.
I memorized the Quran myself,
which up to this day today, I still know.
And one day he called one of the boys says,
"Will you recite the Quran?" He started reciting the Quran,
but making all kinds of mistakes.
Finally, he says,
"Boys, any one of you can read better than this boy,
you know, the Quran?"
Here, you know, I didn't know about it.
So I said, I raised my hand,
"Hoja Fendi, I know better than him."
He pull his beard, little with the white beard,
you know, this teacher, says, "Come over here."
He gave me the book. I said, "Not by the book.
I know it by heart." He said, "Okay, start reciting."
So I start reciting the Quran,
and he thanked me for knowing the Quran better than him.
That's how it started.
-So it was essentially by accident
that Azouz became a Hafiz,
an honorific bestowed upon someone
who has memorized the Quran.
It's something very difficult to do.
And even if that was an accident, it was with intention
that Azouz had learned Turkish and elementary Arabic
as his father wanted him,
even though he was a rabbi, to be conversant in the languages
and the culture of the Ottoman State and of Muslim society.
Not to be separated, but rather integrated.
So hopefully I've already destabilized a little bit
about what you might expect in terms
of thinking about Jews and Muslims,
especially if we think about it from a contemporary lens,
and their relationships, and how those connections have played
out right here in Seattle.
I hope that it's a reminder of the power of history
to show us cultural, and political,
and social constellations of the past
that may seem almost impossible to imagine
could have once been true or real;
just as the present is different from the past,
we might be able to also think about different futures as well.
Now, if the man reciting the Quran,
a Jewish man reciting a Quran in Seattle,
is not enough to disorient you a little bit,
please take a closer look at the passport,
which an Armenian acquaintance helped him acquire,
shall we say under the table, in Paris.
Note what nationality he was assigned
when the French government issued his passport.
[ Speaks foreign language ]
Do you understand what this means?
They assigned him Levantine Jewish nationality, essentially.
Say, what?
Citizenship of the Levantine Jewish nation, you say?
Well, where is such a nation?
Where is such a state? Is there an army?
Is there a government? No. This is a fictitious nation.
There was no such thing. In effect,
this was a locution used by the French government
to describe Jews from the former Ottoman Empire
who had arrived without documents,
which was the case for Azouz who was essentially stateless.
And this is the document
that he used to come to the United States
after having stowed away from Istanbul to France.
Now, if Azouz spoke Latino at home,
he learned liturgical Hebrew,
he learned Turkish and some Arabic in Rushdie,
then he learned Greek from his Orthodox Christian neighbors,
and subsequently Italian and French in high school.
By the time he arrived in the United States,
multilingual and well educated,
albeit stateless, he did not know any English at all,
which eventually became his eighth language.
When he arrived in Seattle,
he joined relatives already here,
some of whom had planted roots,
perhaps nowhere more visibly than at Pike Place Market,
that Seattle icon we saw before.
Jews from the Ottoman Empire became so visible
at Pike Place Market
that the United States National Park Service register
of historical places highlights the group for contributing
"a remarkable number of market merchants
and small shop owners". As the title of my talk
is Mediterranean Imprints and Erasure in Seattle,
we can see the participation of Jews
from the Ottoman Empire
as a key manifestation of their imprint on the city.
But underlying that imprint
is an uncomfortable story about erasure.
And this is where my talk connects
with Josh Reid's from last time.
Seattle was and is built on the indigenous territories
of the inside peoples,
the Duwamish and the Coast Salish peoples.
And indeed, one of the sites
that dramatically represents the erasure of indigenous presence
is none other than that Seattle Icon, Pike Place market.
The market was built atop the neighborhood
where Chief Seattle's daughter Kikisoblu
known as Princess Angeline, once dwelt.
And you can see here, her residence.
And as this White settler observed in the 1890s,
Kikisoblu shanty town had to be erased in order
for White European civilization to blossom.
Pike Place used to be called the Public Sanitary Market,
and it was supposed to be sanitary,
not only in terms of hygiene,
but also because it was cleansed in terms of class and race.
Jews from the Ottoman Empire
certainly did not create settler society here in Seattle,
nor were they the major beneficiaries of the enterprise.
But they like other immigrant groups,
entered settler society
and they were able to make their imprint at a place
like Pike Place,
precisely because of the erasures of indigenous society
that had already taken place and continue to take place.
Whatever the successes that Jews from the Ottoman Empire
achieved here in Seattle were by no means preordained,
but rather their position in local society
remained both ambiguous,
perhaps even precarious as questions about just
how European, just how White,
how western, how civilized,
how capable of participating in Seattle
and American democracy they actually were.
Thinking about the interplay between imprints and erasures,
and the tensions between both of those dynamics,
I'd like to divide the remainder of my talk into three parts.
First, I'd like to explain how and why
Jews from the Ottoman Empire wound up in Seattle.
Seemed so far away from the Ottoman Empire.
I mean, it seems so because it is far away.
And how did they arrive here in such relatively large numbers,
so much so that about 20% of the Jewish population in Seattle
were comprised of Ottoman born Jews prior to World War II
when nationally,
Sephardic Jews are about 5% of the Jewish population,
and Jews are about 2% of the American population.
So we're talking about a pretty small percentage
that is vastly overrepresented here in Seattle,
which became the second largest hub of Sephardic Jews
only after New York City.
Second, what kind of community life
did they build for themselves in Seattle,
and what kinds of relationships
did they develop with their neighbors,
especially in the neighborhood
they would call home for more than a half a century,
the Central District,
as well as with other folks
who came from the lands of the Ottoman Empire.
And finally,
what kinds of obstacles did they encounter along the way
in terms of navigating America's racial hierarchies,
US immigration and naturalization laws,
and exclusionary practices right here in Seattle?
It's important to note that this year, 2024,
not only marks the 100th anniversary of the arrival
of Joel Benoliel and my families,
but it marks the centennial of the 1924
US Immigration Restriction Act,
which has, in some ways,
its foundational origins right here in Washington state.
So by zooming in and out,
we'll see how the experiences of Jews
from the Ottoman Empire
help us elucidate broader dynamics at play in Seattle,
in Washington state, and in the United States as a whole.
And in investigating this aspect of the history,
we'll push back a little bit against the image of Seattle
as a liberal and welcoming place.
Or perhaps we might recognize how liberalism and racism
can coexist, perhaps even work in tandem,
sometimes reinforcing each other.
In order to understand how Jews from the Ottoman Empire
came to call Seattle home,
we've got to go even a little bit ways further back
all the way to 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
The other part of that is the dispossession
of the indigenous peoples of the Americas began.
And the other part of that
is that King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella
subjugated the Muslims at Granada
and also expelled the Jews from the kingdom.
And in fact, wealth confiscated from Jews
in Spain was utilized by the Spanish crown
to help fund Columbus's voyages. Many Jews expelled from Spain
in 1492 traversed the Mediterranean,
and they settled in what was then the Ottoman Empire.
The region here comprising the Balkans, Turkey,
parts of the Middle East and North Africa all
reflected in the yellow,
where they found opportunities to reside
in the kingdom of -- pardon me,
in the empire governed from Istanbul by the Sultan.
And you can see the vastness of this empire.
Think about how what we now consider,
say Greece and Bulgaria
were essentially part of the same imperial framework,
the same country as not only Turkey and Egypt,
but also Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iraq.
You didn't need a passport to move between those spaces.
The Ottoman authorities granted non-Muslims,
namely Jews and Christians,
certain privileges and protections
in exchange for special taxes.
They could practice their religion,
they could form their own institutions,
they could develop their own language,
they even developed musical styles in the maqam mode,
the Middle Eastern style of music
that you can still hear in the synagogues,
the Sephardic synagogues of Seattle today,
which sound like the chanting you might encounter in a mosque.
[ Man chanting ]
Jews from Spain known as Sephardic Jews,
or Sephardim, coming from the Hebrew word Sepharad,
referring to the Iberian Peninsula,
also cultivated their own language,
which has been alluded to already known
as Ladino or Judeo-Spanish,
or Judesma, which is based in 16th century Spanish,
and historically written in Hebrew letters.
Over the generations
it incorporated increasing influences
from the surrounding cultures
of the Eastern Mediterranean vocabulary and ways
of thinking from Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Italian, French.
That's the language that Jack Azose who is reciting the Quran,
that's the language he spoke at home.
That's the language of Joel's grandparents,
of my grandparents.
Sephardic Jews became deeply embedded
in their Ottoman context in other ways.
Take, for example,
these artifacts from the early 20th century,
which have been among those collected as part
of the Sephardic studies collection.
We have a Jewish wedding contract,
and a Scroll of Esther,
which interestingly enough incorporate Islamic iconography,
the Star and Crescent,
which were also the symbols of the Ottoman State,
an emblazoned on the Ottoman flag in 1844, okay?
So you can see how Jews --
I mean this maybe seems a little bit unusual.
Okay, you have a Jewish wedding contract
with the symbols of Islam on top.
I mean, that's really fascinating.
It was in the 20th century, however,
that this world began to break down and come undone.
The Ottoman Empire would become engulfed
in more than a decade of war with wars
on either end of the Great War of World War I.
And this would be the cause of Jews to leave the region,
perhaps a third of Ottoman Jews
left in the first two decades of the 20th century
with the United States being one of several destinations,
although not necessarily the preferred destination, okay?
They left because they were in search
of economic opportunities.
In the island of Rhodes, for example,
one of the major industries was the sponge trade,
and the sponge trade went bust.
So people sought new opportunities, okay?
And the folks who came to Seattle in particular
came from relatively small places.
This one doesn't even get a name on the map.
So the island of Marmara,
the town of Tequidah or Rhodes still,
the island of Rhodes down here,
which is today part of Greece,
but was part of the Ottoman Empire for 400 years
and had maybe about 30 years,
part of the Italian Empire before
and into the Second World War. These are three main places
from which Sephardic Jews came to Seattle.
But they also came from some of the larger metropolises
like Istanbul, Edirne, Izmir, Salonica, and Manastir.
And, you know, these were big cities.
In 1900, there were more Jews living in Salonica
than there were people living in Seattle, okay?
There were 90,000 Jews in Salonica, 80,000,
as we learned from my colleague John Finley,
about 80,000 people living in Seattle around that time.
So they would come to the United States,
and what would they encounter?
As John also led us to investigate,
the symbol of the Statue of Liberty.
And for Sephardic Jews coming to the United States,
the Statue of Liberty would take on two competing ideas,
as would the concept of liberty
in the United States more generally.
And this is expressed in the many Ladino newspapers
that were published in the United States,
mostly in New York City. On the one hand,
the Statue of Liberty symbolized the promise of American freedom,
of opportunity, the dream of American exceptionalism.
And on the other hand,
the Statue of Liberty was seen as a symbol
of American hypocrisy.
The words next to the image of the Statue of Liberty
here are actually basically Turkish written
in Hebrew letters.
[ Speaks foreign language ]
Long Live American Liberty.
But this was intended satirically
for long live liberty was the slogan of the young Turks
who introduced the Constitution into the Ottoman Empire in 1908,
but just a few years later,
1915 perpetrated the devastating Armenian genocide.
And for some of the Ladino newspapers,
the New World was just like the Old World,
except instead of Armenians being the target
of mass state violence in the United States,
some of these Ladino newspapers
claimed the target of state violence was Black Americans.
The Ladino readers of the press were also reminded
that once you arrive in the United States,
the Statue of Liberty has her back to you,
a sign of how America abandons the people
once they're in the country, and especially the working class.
Both of these attitudes about American liberty
could be found among Sephardic Jews
who settled across the country.
When you arrive to New York, however,
how do you wind up so far away in this northwestern corner
of the continent?
You can take the train to Seattle,
which became the terminus of the transcontinental
great Northern Railway in 1893.
The 1897 Klondike Gold Rush drew immigrants of all kinds,
and many more came for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific
Exposition in 1909.
And the reality was that when Sephardic Jews started
to come in the first years of the 20th century,
they were following a well-trodden path,
heading west as pioneers.
And indeed, in the communal collective memory,
the first Sephardic Jews in Seattle are called pioneers.
They followed in the wake of the promise offered
by manifest destiny,
the notion, perhaps the ideology
that the United States is destined by God
to extend its dominion across the entire continent,
to spread democracy, capitalism, civilization.
Lady Columbia, pictured here,
the female symbol of the United States
that in some ways preceded the Statue of Liberty,
brings with her technologies of progress and modernity,
and she lays telegraph lines with one hand
and carries the school book of civilization
with her other hand.
She moves west along with White settlers and caravans
with a railroad farming,
along with her bringing the light of civilization,
pushing indigenous peoples and their buffalo
out of the scene into the darkness.
All ready prior to World War I,
Seattle emerged as the second center of Sephardic Jewish Life
in the United States.
And you can see here reflected in the list of agents
of the main Ladino newspaper in 1912,
you can see Seattle is at the top of the list
with the representative being Haim Leon.
And we're going to come back to them a little bit later,
or rather, his son.
Now, if you were reading a Ladino newspaper published
in New York like during this period,
and if you parachuted from some other place
and you didn't know anything about American geography,
and you were reading those Ladino newspapers,
you would probably surmise
that Seattle was a borough of New York City
because there was so much coverage about what was going on
in Seattle,
it was like it was right there in the heart of things.
Indeed, ultimately, what drew Sephardic Jews to Seattle,
and this is a theme that is repeated in oral histories,
and in the press, and in collective memory,
was the beauty of the city and of the nature;
the bountiful water, the lakes, the sound, the ocean.
They said it reminded them of home in the Mediterranean,
and we must infer they would've come during the summertime
for that to be the case.
Here's a poem published in Ladino
by the editor of one of New York's major Ladino newspapers,
who is invited to be the director
of a Sephardic school here in Seattle in the 1930s.
And he writes this poem upon his first visit.
And if you understand Spanish,
you'll probably understand a lot of this, okay?
It is called, and you can see, and if you know Hebrew letters,
you can maybe follow it along and sound it out.
[ Speaks foreign language ]
And by the way,
that's how you say Seattle in Ladino is Seattle.
And somebody who is a resident or citizen
of Seattle is called a Seattleino.
You can follow on in the English with me.
[ Speaking foreign language ]
Here in this paradise where Alberto Levy came to reside,
the Sephardic Jews would begin to build their own community.
Part 2 is about building that community.
By the time that Albert Levy had arrived in Seattle,
Sephardic Jews had already been present in the city
for about three decades.
The first Sephardic Jews arrived here around 1902
from that tiny unmarked island in the Black --
in the Sea of Marmara,
which is the island of Marmara, which is not far from Istanbul.
They were told about economic opportunities
in the faraway place of Seattle by Greek friends
who had been here, and they returned home.
And indeed, when these first Ottoman Jews arrived in Seattle,
as they also spoke Greek,
they initially passed their time with fellow Greeks
at a Greek cafe drinking Greek coffee -- I mean,
Turkish coffee -- Arabic coffee -- I mean Ottoman coffee.
And here you can see the two first pioneers,
Jack Policar and Solomon.
Jack with his spouse, Esther,
and Solomon with his spouse, Luna.
And their initial point of contact
was really with the Greek community.
And we can think of the Sephardic Jews in Seattle
initially participating in a broader kind of
Ottoman immigrant community,
because Seattle's Greeks had also come initially
from the same island, Marmara,
but they had come about 20 or 30 years earlier.
And they had also come from the island of Leros,
which is just next to the island of Rhodes.
And they had built their own church,
they left their imprint on the city by 1921
in collaboration with Greek Orthodox Christians
and Russian Orthodox Christians,
which my colleague Yolanda Campbell
will discuss about the Russian connection with Seattle.
So when the Saint Demetrius Church,
which by the way is named after the patron saint of Salonica,
moved to its current location in Montlake,
it was a Sephardic Jewish architect
who was commissioned to design the building.
And a certain point, Sephardic Jews,
it seems would've been more likely to marry Greeks
than to marry European Ashkenazi Jews here in Seattle.
Now, it was not only Ottoman Greeks
with whom Sephardic Jews came into contact,
but it was also with Ottoman Armenians.
There was even one member of the Armenian community here
in Seattle who was so close to the Sephardic community
that he learned and spoke fluent Ladino.
And he contributed,
his name is listed in the Ladino newspapers
supporting various Jewish causes.
But perhaps the most famous Armenians to pass
through Seattle before settling in eastern Washington
were Balaban and Tertsagian,
who discovered the wonderful apple orchards
in the Cashmere Valley.
And they decided to make a delicacy familiar to them
from their home in the Ottoman Empire,
but with a Washington spin.
This was lokum or Turkish delight,
which became Washington state's unofficial candy,
Aplets & Cotlets, which are basically Turkish delight.
But it's not only with Ottomans, other Ottomans
that Sephardic Jews developed a sense of community,
they also interacted with the other Jews
and the established Jewish community.
And I want to show you a little clip here from Fortuna Calvo.
This is from a 1978 documentary made here in Seattle called
"The Song of the Sephardi".
And she was the first Sephardic child born in Seattle
in 1908 to Solomon and Luna Calvo.
And she recounted her father and Jack Policar
first encounter with the established Jewish community,
which begins with an encounter with a Greek.
-My father, Solomon Calvo, with Jack Policar,
were the first Sephardic Jews that arrived in Seattle.
And as they were -- got off the train
and they were walking on the street, they met a Greek man.
And they asked him if he could show them
where they could go to meet some Jewish people.
And this Greek man thought about it for a while,
and then he says, "I can take you to a Jewish tailor."
And they said, "Fine."
So he took them to this Jewish tailor
and he talked to the two boys,
but they did not speak Yiddish, and they were speaking Spanish.
So he told them to stay and in the evening he took them home.
And he took them home to his wife, and his wife says,
"Who are these young boys?"
She asked her husband. He said,
"These two boys were brought to this door
and they're telling us that they're Jewish
and they have no place to go."
And she said, "Good, leave them here.
Have them come in."
And they tried to talk to them,
but they couldn't talk to each other.
They couldn't speak Yiddish, and they tried speaking in Spanish,
they couldn't be -- they weren't understood.
So they said, "Fine, you stay."
But they were wondering if they were Jewish.
And finally, my father said to them, in motions,
"Bring me a book, I will read to you."
So they brought him a Hebrew book and he read to them
from the Hebrew book,
but he didn't read like they do.
It wasn't the same.
And they sent a letter to New York asking,
"We have two boys here that are telling us they're Jewish.
They do not speak Yiddish,
and they do not read the Hebrew like we do.
They speak Spanish. Are these boys Jewish?"
And my father used to tell us with tears in his eyes
that when the letter came back, it said,
"These boys are Jewish just like you.
They are Sephardim."
-If everybody knows where that letter is,
I'd love to see it because that has yet to be discovered.
But you can see what begins to emerge here
are some tensions between the already established
Ashkenazi European Jewish community,
which did not recognize the newcomers
from the Mediterranean as fellow Jews.
How could they be Jewish when they had names
like Policar and Calvo,
when they didn't speak the Jewish language, Yiddish,
and they spoke Spanish or Ladino,
when they pronounced Hebrew differently,
when they ate foods that were different,
and they came from completely different geographies.
And in fact,
the food became a very important piece of the tension.
I mean, sort of to make fun of each other,
the Sephardim called the Ashkenazi Jews, the schmaltzy,
because they cooked with chicken fat,
and the Ashkenazim called the Sephardim canolas
because they cooked with vegetable oil.
So that's a little bit playful,
but undergirding this
were actually some serious anxieties about who is
inside the community, who is beyond the community.
Where did this community begin to take shape?
The central area of Seattle today,
what we call the Central District,
these were the Turkinos.
This is how they often call themselves in Ladino, Turkinos.
See Turkinos, Seattleinos, okay?
These Ottoman Jews, like Jews in general,
initially settled in the central area.
And a report from New York in the New York Ladino newspaper
describes that neighborhood in two clusters of settlement
in this area of little Jerusalem.
Almost all live on Jackson, Maine and King Streets.
You get a little map there.
Can you picture the city here between 10th and 14th Avenues
where everyone already knows them
and everybody calls the district, Jerusalem Town?
The Marmaralis and the Tekirdalis;
those are the ones who live there,
those from Marmara and those from Tekirdag.
At 16th and Washington,
the Rhodeslis concentrate themselves, those from Rhodes,
where they are joined by the few from Constantinople,
from Istanbul, from Salonica, and from Izmir.
And you get a lot of details
about what this universe was like from the newspapers.
In 1913, for example,
the Sephardic Bootblacks formed the first union for the --
and it was the first union for the entire trade in Seattle.
And the Seattle Times couldn't really figure out who they were.
So they said, "Ah, this is the Greek Bootblacks Union."
Well, they associated with Greeks again,
not quite legible for the general population either.
So in addition to working as bootblacks,
the young men, generally young men who first arrived here,
found employment delivering fish to train companies,
restaurants, and hotels.
They sold fruit, they operated postcard stands,
and they worked in construction for ship companies, okay?
By 1916, there were about 800 of them,
a third spoke English,
nearly a third were independently employed.
Those who were able to become a little bit more successful,
they became fruit vendors, fish merchants,
shoe repairmen, tailors, barbers, dress sellers.
Eight already own their own home; a sign of economic status.
They lived in a mixed area in Seattle,
inhabited by Ashkenazi Jews, by Chinese,
by Filipino community in the bright green there,
the Japanese community in the beige,
here, the Sephardic Jews sort of at the intersection.
Interesting, like the community sort of clustered,
even though there's overlaps,
there were sort of in their own kind of areas.
And the Sephardic Jews were basically at the intersection
of the Ashkenazi Jewish community,
the Black community, and the Japanese community.
That was the primary sets of overlap there, okay?
Now, it was here in the central area
where the Sephardic Jews established
their own institutions such as synagogues.
There were initially three,
each organized around people from a specific locale.
Those from one place had their own synagogue.
Those from another place had their own synagogue.
And still today, there are two such synagogues
that exist in Seward Park,
still organized in some ways around the places from which
their founding families came over a century ago.
Now, notice when the congregations were all founded,
these are not the years that the buildings were erected,
but the communities began to incorporate themselves, 1914.
What happened in 1914? World War I.
This was a sign that returning home
probably wasn't going to happen because a lot of the folks
that initially came, they weren't planning to stay,
they were planning to make some money like a lot
of other immigrant groups, not necessarily Ashkenazi Jews,
but Greeks oftentimes returns.
People from eastern --
southeastern Europe often returned, okay?
It took them a while to raise the funds necessary
to build the buildings.
The Sephardic Bikur Holim building,
which you can see announced in the Ladino newspaper,
was built in 1929.
Here's a photograph of an early wedding at the Ezra Bessaroth,
the Rhodes congregation in 1922.
What they did in order to raise the funds were the --
who played such an instrumental role here?
Were women in the community
who played an instrumental role in raising the funds
through selling baked goods and handicrafts
to their own community. This is, you know,
dollar by dollar they built the foundations
for their institutions.
And we can see the way in which this marks the imprints
that Sephardic Jews left on the city would shift
as the demographics of the city shifted.
So, for example,
the original Sephardic Bikur Holim building erected in 1929,
it still stands today,
it's the home of Tolliver Temple,
a church that caters to the Black community in the area,
which was recognized in 2023
as a historical landmark by the City of Seattle
for its role as a home both to Sephardic Jews
and to African Americans here in Seattle.
And you can see this is what it looks like today.
You can still see the stars of David on the doors.
You can see where the Hebrew inscriptions used to be
at the top right here.
You can see this is the 10 Commandments in Hebrew.
So there's a certain kind of respect
spoken to the pastor there who is very aware of this history
and is cognizant
and conscious of the preservational aspect
of the work that he has been doing there.
But it wasn't only spaces like this,
religious spaces that came to be shifted from one community
to another,
but some of the spaces were shared to a certain extent.
And Washington Hall is perhaps the best example of this.
Though it was established in 1907 by the Danish Brotherhood,
the hall became an important venue
for all kinds of communities.
Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois spoke there.
Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday performed there.
And for Sephardic Jews,
it became the site of their first prayer services.
But when during World War I,
a scheduling snafu resulted in the group from Rhodes
being kicked out of the hall on the night of Yom Kippur,
which is the most sacred night in the Jewish calendar,
that made the reserve of the Rhodeslis intensified.
They said, "We need our own space."
But despite this conflict,
Washington Hall remained a key site
as it continued to be used by Sephardic Jews
to perform Ladino Theater Productions,
making Seattle the only other city in the United States,
once again, beside New York with a robust
and active Ladino theater scene in the 1920s and 1930s.
Leon Behar pictured here was a noted Ladino playwright
in Istanbul who came to Seattle
after completing his Ottoman military service
and ran the Ladino Theater troupe.
There were other interesting dynamics
that emerged out of the space of the Central District.
One of those dynamics has been recently captured
in a graphic novel by Josh Tuininga about his own family.
And it depicts the relationship based on family stories
about his great-uncle Marco Calvo,
who was a Sephardic Jew from Marmara, and Sam Akiyama,
an issei himself from Japan.
And the novel recounts
how at the time of Japanese incarceration
during World War II,
when Sam and his family were about to be rounded up.
Sam entrusted his family home to Marco Calvo.
And during the period of incarceration,
Marco Calvo looked after the Akiyama home,
and after the family returned from incarceration, --
-- Calvo gave him back the keys and the rent money
that had accumulated during that time.
Now, that was an unusual story,
but one that reveals some of the possibilities of the past,
the possibilities of friendship and solidarity
in the face of oppression. You can see here,
it's not only Sam
who becomes the target of distrust and concern,
but you can see here in the upper left square.
"And where the hell are you from?"
"I can tell you don't belong here either."
That sort of captures the final sentiment
that I'd like to explore in my talk,
which relates to the obstacles
that Sephardic Jews encountered on their way
and once they arrived in Seattle.
And it reveals a level, an element of vulnerability,
structures of discrimination in place, not only in Seattle,
although it is in Seattle.
And once we understand those dynamics that can help us,
why Sephardic Jews wound up concentrated
in the Central District in the first place.
Now, in order to understand these dynamics of legalized
and popular discrimination, exclusion, racism,
antisemitism, and nativism,
not only in Seattle but at the national level,
we have to go back.
We have to go back to the establishment
of the United States.
The first Naturalization Act
that was passed at the first Congress of the United States
in 1790 determined
that only White persons were eligible to become citizens
of the United States.
And that remained -- you can see here, free White person, okay?
So in order to become American, you had to be White, full stop.
And that remained on the books until after the Civil War,
as John Finley mentioned,
when people of African nativity,
Black people also became eligible
to become naturalized citizens.
But if you were not clearly White or Black,
you were not eligible to become a citizen of the United States.
And that principally excluded Asians from citizenship.
Beginning in the late 19th and into the 20th centuries,
representatives of many different groups from Chinese
to Japanese, South Asians and others,
they all went to the court to try to demonstrate
that they were eligible for naturalization,
all by claiming that they were White.
And we learned from this dynamic that at this time,
race was not only about skin color or appearance,
maybe not even principally about that,
but rather we need to understand race as an ideological,
cultural and political construct
that is constantly redefined based
on context and contingency, perceptions,
not only of appearance, which was key,
but also culture, perceptions of mentality,
of religion, of civilizational status, of language.
These became points of negotiation and navigation.
And so happens that the plurality of the main cases
that the courts adjudicated involved plaintiffs
from the Ottoman Empire, namely Syrian Christians and Armenians,
who successfully convinced the courts to recognize them
as White by law during World War I,
in part because they said, "Hey, we're Christians.
Doesn't that make us White?"
By that time, the rising tide of nativism
and the entrenched race science and eugenics thinking of the era
provoked Congress to initiate the largest study of immigration
perhaps ever conducted by Congress.
The infamous,
albeit bipartisan Dillingham commission through the work
of 300 staff members produced 41 volumes
of social science research
that resulted in a remarkable
if alarming dictionary of the races,
which on Page 5 ranked the immigrant races of the world
from most desirable to least desirable.
And it might not surprise you who's at the top,
and it might not surprise you who's at the bottom.
What's interesting for our purposes here
is who's kind of in the middle?
Hebrews and Syrians
are at the very bottom of the Caucasian category.
And then there's another category just below that,
which is Turkish.
And Turkish was below the Caucasian line
and considered part of the Mongolian racial category.
So coming from Turkey, being classified as Turkish,
posed a grave liability
because it had implications for one's eligibility
for naturalization, whether you could become American or not.
And here's how this debate played out in the New York Times
already in 1909, and the title of the article
"Is the Turk a White Man?"
The American courts have barred from citizenship Chinese,
Japanese, Burmese and their half-breeds.
Will they Bar Turks?
And here you get into the psychology of the era.
"The original Turks were of the yellow or Mongolian race.
But in their westward progress
the Turks freely intermingled with the Caucasian races
whom they subjugated.
The Turks today are descendants of Arabs, Kurds,
Slavs, Albanian, and Greeks. But," here it is,
"the Turkish mind," it's not talking about how they look,
it's talking about how they are perceived to think,
"the Turkish mind does not work as ours.
They are a cruel and massacring people,
and they have lost none of their ancient proclivities.
But they're also Europeans as much White people as the Huns,
Finns and the Cossacks."
So the New York Times left the question unresolved.
And so when it came to Seattle,
there was some flexibility in the classification schemas.
And we can see that play out very interestingly
in some World War I military registrations
for Sephardic Jews in Seattle in the category of race.
So here we have Yuda Levi, who's from Manastir.
This is Bitola in Macedonia today.
Although it says like, what is this?
Balkan States Turkey, okay? That's how he's described.
And we have Vitaly Siva, who's from Constantinople, Turkey.
Check out the race. Jew, okay? Check out the race.
Turk.
Actually, this guy was a little more clever because Jew was
a little bit higher up than Turk in this context.
Or check out these.
These guys are from, you see, the island of Rhodes, Turkey.
It's part of Greece today.
Although you can see the mainland Turkey
when you're peering from the coast of Rhodes,
check out what wound up their -- what their races wound up being.
Mongolian, right?
So if you are designated Mongolian,
you are not eligible to become a citizen
of the United States at this time.
So this became a liability,
and there was a lot at stake in what classification,
what category, you wound up getting placed in, okay?
And the idea that being classified in relationship
to Turkey was a liability,
was something very strange for Sephardic Jews
who came from the Ottoman Empire,
because many of them closely identified
with the Ottoman Empire.
Here we can see a Ladino newspaper back in Istanbul
in 1913,
praising the efforts of the Sephardic Jews here in Seattle,
raising money to support the Ottoman homeland
during the Balkan Wars.
And this was led by Sam Alhadeff,
who was from the island of Rhodes,
an island that was in the process of becoming part
of the Italian Empire.
And what this newspaper in Istanbul reports is,
Seattle is where many Jews who originate from Turkey are found
and who always attached to their motherland from which they came.
And another document that wound up in our possession
here in Seattle is a prayer for the Sultan written in Ladino.
So what Sephardic Jews in Seattle
and the United States more generally had to do
is they had to learn to disassociate themselves
from their empire of origin, to distance themselves from Turkey.
This would be the only way
they perceived to protect themselves from the orientalist
and racist images of the scimitar-wielding, bearded,
befezzed terrible Turk.
That association caused great liability for them.
It could threaten their eligibility
to become a naturalized citizen.
And once the United States entered World War I,
subjects of the Ottoman Empire risked not only
being excluded from naturalization,
but also being classified as enemy aliens;
perhaps they could be imprisoned,
perhaps they could be deported.
And as the United States and the Ottoman Empire,
and subsequently,
Turkey did not have diplomatic relations from 1917 until 1927,
those with Ottoman nationality
experienced particular precarity during those years.
And so how did Sephardic Jews respond?
They began to renounce their association
with the Ottoman Empire.
They were forced, essentially to do so for their own protection,
to distance themselves from the Ottoman Empire,
from Turkey, from the Orient, from Islam,
to try to prove that they were good Americans
and deserved to be in the country.
And how could they do that? Here we go;
with the hope
that the war may overthrow the Mohammedan rule in Turkey.
It's like complete opposite of what they were saying three
or four years before.
Turkish Jews in the Seattle
have subscribed $4,000 to the Third Liberty Loan,
support the war effort,
and their wives are actively engaged in the Red Cross work.
Just a few years ago in New York,
the Ottoman Red Crescent --
who is in charge of the Ottoman Red Crescent?
An Ottoman Jew and an Ottoman Muslim.
Now, the dynamics are different
and they have to be careful, okay?
Perhaps the most important move
that Sephardic Jews made at this time was to insist
that they no longer be called Turkish Jews,
and they launched a campaign to do this.
Say, "We must stop calling ourselves Turkish.
We must stop calling ourselves Ottoman.
We must stop calling ourselves Oriental,
or let other people call us by those things because who are we?
We're Spanish Jews."
They drew on their own history,
and they went back 500 years to say, "We are really from Spain.
We just happen to be living in the Ottoman Empire
for all those centuries, but we're really Spanish.
And you know what?
Spain is in Europe,
and Spain is a neutral country, and Spaniards are White people,
or at least they're White enough to get citizenship,
but exotic enough to make us fit into that category.
You can still be a little bit peculiar and be called Spanish."
And we can conceptualize this as another form of erasure.
A kind of self-fashioning, yes, but also a self-erasure.
And thus, it was that Spanish Jews from Rhodes,
after having been kicked out of Washington Hall,
wound up erecting their first synagogue.
And here you can see Harry Torica,
whose grandson is with us,
by the way,
mentioned as the leader of the congregation Ezra Bessaroth.
And Torica was known for being progressive,
and he served also as the president
of the Sephardic Club Tifereth Israel,
which sought to improve the intellectual, moral,
and social conditions of Sephardic Jews in Seattle,
specifically to defend their honor and dignity.
And indeed being called a Turk or an Oriental,
or a Mongolian in this era was undignified.
These were essentially perceived as slurs.
But even still under the new heading as Spanish Jews,
they were not protected because in the end,
they were still Jews and they were still vulnerable.
Indeed, before the Ezra Bessaroth Synagogue was
even open, the building was attacked
and desecrated by unknown assailants
as the Seattle Times reported.
And notice how they call it a church,
just general place of worship, okay?
And even under the title of Spanish Jews,
Sephardic Jews could not escape the ire of the era's
race scientists and eugenicists.
Even an article in the Seattle Times
in 1925 considered Spanish Jews
among the intermediate racial types,
along with Turks, Arabs, and interestingly enough,
Russians probably due to Tatar presence.
Tatar presence,
who were perceived as not really Europeans,
but not really Asians either; not really White,
but not completely not White.
Notably, Jews in general were not included in this category,
just these hybrid Spanish Jews. Now, by this time,
nativist sentiment in the country had triumphed,
and the 1924 Immigration Act had come into effect
with President Coolidge signing into law by decreeing that,
"America Must Remain American." These 40 years of restrictionism
beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882,
came into effect.
The idea was to ensure that people ineligible
to become naturalized citizens in the first place
wouldn't be able to enter the country at all.
And those less desirable,
lower on that racial ranking folks
from Southern and Eastern Europe and the Middle East,
their numbers should be severely reduced.
What's important for our story
is that the chief author of this Restriction Act
and the quota system more generally,
was a Washington State Congressman Albert Johnson.
He was initially a journalist who wrote for the Seattle Times,
but he cut his political teeth in 1907,
supporting White workers
who attacked and expelled South Asians working
at the lumber mills in Bellingham.
Johnson supported the White rioters
as he feared the Hinduization of the region
and the usurpation of White control over labor and industry.
He ran for Congress in Tacoma in 1912
on a specifically anti-immigration platform,
and he called that -- he claimed that it was time
for the United States to put up the bars against immigrants.
He opposed not only South Asians,
but he was suspicious of Southern and Eastern Europeans
who believed would provoke labor unrest
by supporting socialism and class revolution.
Chief among his targets were Jews
about whom he infamously declared,
"Jews are filthy, un-American and often dangerous
in their habits."
As a eugenicist and race scientist,
he also opposed miscegenation between Blacks and Whites.
It's probably not surprising
that he was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan,
although he got elected nine times in a row
by his constituents. What might be surprising,
not only that, is that he convinced all of Congress
to get behind his goal to curtail the stream
of alien blood invading the country
that he thought was going to undermine its
White Protestant character.
And his Immigration Restriction Act passed
by ridiculous margin of 323 to 71 in the house,
and 69 to nine in the Senate.
There was one person sitting across the Atlantic
in a jail cell not far from Munich,
who observed the passage of the US Immigration Restriction Act
with glee, and that was Adolf Hitler.
In Mein Kampf,
the only country Hitler
praised for establishing the closest thing
he had ever seen to a racialist estate,
something that he hoped would one day materialize in Germany
was none other than the United States.
He praised the dispossession of the Indigenous peoples
and their imprisonment on reservations.
He supported the prohibition against marriage
between Blacks and Whites.
He favored the barring of Asian migration,
and with the 1924 Immigration,
he saw the United States as finally getting the picture,
"No more Jews."
I'm not sure how surprising it would be for you to find out
if you don't already know
that Washington State became the only state in the union
to put a pro-Nazi candidate on the 1936 presidential ballot.
William Dudley Pelley, leader of the Silver Shirt Legion,
modeled on the brown shirts,
ran as the Christian Party candidate for President.
He didn't get many votes, but he was on the ballot nonetheless.
The new Immigration Restriction Act had an immediate
and profound ramifications for our story here in Seattle.
Six thousand miles away near Istanbul,
a rabbi and his family
had been invited
by the Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation of Seattle
to serve as their new spiritual leader that same year in 1924.
But now, the quotas and the visa requirement
had been put into place,
and the only way that Rabbi Avraham Maimon and his family,
this is Joel Benoliel's family could come to the country,
was through a special exemption from the quotas
that was available only to ministers
of any religious denomination.
And I bet some of the people that added
that exemption really say,
"Oh, we shouldn't have said any religious denomination,
but anyhow --" at first,
only the minister himself was to be exempted,
but soon Congress issued a joint resolution in favor
of family unification,
enabling the minister and his family
to bypass the quotas to come to the United States
if the children were minors.
And that's how the Maimons got permission to get on a boat
in the autumn of 1924,
with the intention of arriving in Seattle in time
for Rosh Hashanah to celebrate here in this city
in Pacific Northwest, but they did not have such luck.
Upon arrival at Ellis Island,
they were classified by race as Turks,
which again, potentially brought them below the White threshold.
Being classified as Hebrews may have been less bad.
Moreover, they were detained and imprisoned at Ellis Island
because they were deemed likely public charges on the grounds
that the rabbi's wife suffered from a physical defect,
trachoma, a common non-fatal eye infection
that immigrant authorities used to weed out undesirables
before they entered the country.
The condition was called -- was associated with Middle Eastern,
Mediterranean, and Southern European folks,
allegedly from dirty societies and communities.
As reported on the front pages of the Ladino newspapers
in the New York,
the Maimons spent more than a week
locked into Ellis Island's prison
as they waited what appeared to be their imminent deportation.
Separated by gender,
they spent Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year,
not with their new community in Seattle,
but behind bars at Ellis Island.
Only thanks to the editor of New York's Ladino newspaper,
who happened to be a communist from Salonica,
by the way,
was the Maimon family eventually liberated after eight days
and sent on a train to Seattle.
We now can understand why Ellis Island was sometimes called,
not only the Island of Hope,
but also the Island of Tears.
Once in Seattle,
Sephardic Jews faced additional obstacles,
especially related to naturalization.
In an oral history,
talking about the ordeal of naturalization, Yuda DeLeon,
who went by the name Gordon,
because he went to elementary school, and teacher asked him,
"What's your name?"
He says, "Yuda," and she said, "What?"
And he says, "Yuda." And, "He said, Gordon?"
He says, "Okay, Gordon, I'll be Gordon."
So he was Gordon.
He came from Ottoman Rhodes to Seattle as a boy,
and he became one of the first Sephardic Jews
to graduate from the University of Washington
after attending Garfield High School,
which around this time,
the graduates were about 6% Sephardic Jews,
which is again, ridiculously overrepresented.
And in this oral history,
he describes his community's encounter
with the chief naturalization commissioner in Seattle,
John Speed Smith, who held his post from 1907 to 1932.
Smith played a major role in excluding Armenians and others
from Asia Minor from naturalization
on the grounds that they were not White.
And it appears that this judge tried
to pull the same argument for Sephardic Jews.
He was vehemently nativist, anti-Asian, and believed
that only Christians should be considered true Americans.
As the head of the naturalization office
for that region, he had a lot of power.
He and Albert Johnson,
you might say, we're like two peas in a pod.
So here is Gordon Leon or DeLeon,
his account in his oral history here.
A little -- there's a little snippet.
There's a little break in the middle,
and that's where he goes into very long detail
about taking the naturalization exam,
which he eventually passed,
even though Smith really tried to get him to not pass.
-And we had a big problem here of the Sephardics
becoming citizens of the United States.
In those days,
you had --
well you had what they call open examination court
in the federal court.
And they used to question -- they used to interrogate you.
And then if you pass, or if not, you have to go back to school.
I mean -- -Who interrogated you?
The judge? -The commissioner.
Commissioner, yeah,
the naturalization commissioner who was a judge also.
Judge P. Smith, the son of a SOB,
"You've been the cause," I said,
"for a lot of our Sephardic Jews in the city of Seattle
from becoming citizens of America."
I said,
"Many of those men are good citizens, raise nice families.
They have never committed any crimes.
They've lived -- law abiding citizens."
But I said, "Every time they come here, you scare them.
You do everything to keep them from --" --
So I go to Smith for the judgment.
"Well, how did I do? All right? Did I satisfy you?"
I says, "And from now on," I says,
"when Sephardic Jews come to your place,
treat them decently."
-As a consequence,
did many Sephardic Jews not become citizen?
-Yes. Mm-hmm.
-This may help us explain
why the Sephardic pioneers in Seattle
did not become naturalized for so many years.
Yuda DeLeon describes
how his father was unsuccessful at becoming a citizen.
Solomon Calvo did not become a citizen until 1938.
Jack Policar did not become a citizen until 1943.
Solomon Alhadeff, the first --
one of the first Rhodes in Seattle
who had organized the fundraiser in support of the Ottoman Empire
back in 1913, he didn't become a citizen until 1943,
and he probably was classified as an enemy alien twice,
once during World War I as an Ottoman National,
and once during World War II because Rhodes had switched,
become part of the Italian empire,
and he was classified as an enemy alien, as an Italian.
And he tried -- he was very clever.
He tried to get out of this by claiming that he was stateless.
And this is maybe one of the few instances
in which one would try to claim to be stateless.
And being stateless would be less of a liability
than being Italian.
What's fascinating is a lot of these pioneers couldn't --
were not naturalized for about 40 years,
although some were.
So it was not a blanket ruling.
It really had to do with the whims of this
one naturalization judge who had a lot of power here, okay?
Now I want to move toward our conclusion.
And I want to share just a couple more slides about
how the ways in which these broader dynamics
and racial hierarchies
wound up playing out even among the Jewish community
and locally here in Seattle.
So we spoke a little bit about
how there were some initial tensions
between the Sephardic Jews
and the Ashkenazi Jews here in Seattle.
And the Jewish Transcript,
which was the Jewish newspaper here,
published for a long time, had a big editorial in 1928,
talking about how the Sephardic Jews are distant
from the Jewish establishment. It says, "Here in Seattle,
we have more than 3,000 Sephardic Jews,
the second largest Sephardic community in the country,
but we know very little about their lives in America
and in the old world.
Here in this country,
particularly, we Jews
have picked up some un-Jewish lessons
from a snobocratic environment,
and we too are afraid of differences in character,
language, habits among ourselves.
Though some may not know it,
we Jews were originally all half n-words.
Scientists referred to our Semitic race
as the dark branch of the White race."
And what the article goes on to describe
is that if the Ashkenazi Jews only recognize the way
in which they have been racialized, the which way --
the ways in which they have been cast out by dominant society,
rather than replicating, internalizing,
and projecting that same rhetoric on Sephardic Jews,
if they just embraced,
maybe there would be more of a kind of...
[ Speaks foreign language ]
This kind of tension may also explain
why in the era around World War II,
the Jewish fraternity here at the University of Washington
did not admit Sephardic members,
although that's no longer the case All of these dynamics
also bring us back to the question of the Central District
and why Sephardic Jews wound up largely in the Central District,
not only because their institutions were there,
but because perhaps, especially in the interwar years,
there were certain places
where they weren't allowed to go if they identified
or were identified as Jews.
And here you can get a sense of some of these restrictions,
and my colleague,
Jim Gregory is going to delve into this
in much greater depth in a future session, right?
The Jews were not explicitly --
or Hebrews was the racial term at the time,
were not specifically identified in most
of the restrictive covenants,
but in some, here, you can see.
And perhaps the most provocative one is right here near Bellevue,
Clyde Hill, after World War II,
"This property shall not be resold, leased, rented,
or occupied except to or by persons of the Aryan race."
Okay?
And we do have one other very unusual dynamic here in Seattle,
which is in the vicinity of Ballard,
and this is also from Jim Gregory's project,
where you can see here in the terms of membership,
"No Asian, Black or any person born in the Turkish empire,
nor any lineal descendant of such persons
shall be eligible for membership in the club."
What's amazing about this
is that birth in a defunct empire -- this is 1941.
The Ottoman Empire had not existed for about 20 years,
but if you were born as a subject of this empire,
you and all of your descendants
forever will not be eligible for membership in this club.
Being born in the Ottoman Empire
became a genealogically transmitted racial stain
that you could not expunge.
That is a special Seattle dynamic for you,
which I think speaks to something
about the unique Ottoman presence here.
It probably had to do with Sephardic Jews
who were perhaps the largest of the groups
coming from the Ottoman Empire at this time,
but we need more research to investigate it properly.
Now, by way of conclusion,
I want to bring us to the Second World War and its aftermath.
And one of the fascinating things that transpires
is we can see how immigration restriction
continue to have dramatic effects in the dialogue
between the old world and the new.
In a fascinating set of documents,
initially composed by a young woman, first letter,
she writes to her relatives in Seattle
when she's nine years old,
from the island of Rhodes, Clara Barkey,
whose daughter is with us here too.
She describes the world on the island of Rhodes,
"And as things begin to become more challenging
with the rise of fascist government,
anti-Jewish laws coming into place,
eventually the family is forced to leave the island,"
because her father was from Aydin in mainland Turkey,
and as a foreigner, not as an Italian national,
the family was being expelled.
And it's only thanks to that expulsion
that in a sense,
the family was saved the fate of the rest
of the Jews of the island of Rhodes,
who some years later in 1944,
were all deported to their deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Thanks to Clara Barkey's correspondence with her uncle
and the intervention of Hugh de Lacy,
who was in the US House representing Washington State,
the family was able to eventually secure visas
to come to the United States
after spending the war years in a refugee camp in Tangier,
in Morocco, which was one of the only places in the world
that would accept them.
Now, what's fascinating is when the family arrives
and the father can't come,
because the quotas for him as a Turk,
"He's not coming for a while."
But we see the rest of the family;
Clara and her siblings and her mother,
they arrive at the United States on a ship they leave from Spain,
and you can see the way
in which the racial categories are being transformed.
Look what happens here.
The mother, Clara Barkey --
the mother of Clara Barkey is Matilda Capelluto Barkey.
Regina, by the way, is a dear friend, she's still around.
Do you see what it says here in the racial category?
Hebrew, struck, and on top is written, White.
And in the flash of a moment, this bureaucratic act,
the destiny,
the fate of this family will be forever changed
because they will enter the United States
with a completely different legal status,
a completely different outlook to what the possibilities
of participation in American society are.
By sharing the histories of the Sephardic Jews in Seattle,
and this is just a little tiny snippet --
I've tried to acquaint us with an aspect of local history
with worldwide linkages
that perhaps we were not so familiar with.
And in the process,
I've tried to destabilize some notions
that we may have taken for granted,
whether assumptions about relationships
between Jews and Muslims,
or assumptions about the culture
and the liberal status of Seattle.
I've also tried to show the diversity among intentions
between different kinds of Jews
and how America's racial hierarchies and prejudices
have been refracted through government,
through culture,
through social institutions and on the streets of the city.
I've also tried to show the interplay
between the processes of imprint and erasure
and how they're connected;
whether the imprint of settler society in our region
and the erasure of indigenous people,
whether the imprint of Sephardic presence at Pike Place Market,
but the simultaneous erasure of their roots in Muslim societies,
and all of the tensions built into those dynamics,
tensions that remained unresolved
and continually developing especially,
we can see that in our present debate around immigration,
who is desirable and who is not, locally and nationally.
The vitriolic and nativist rhetoric we may hear today,
it's not new, similar in many ways,
eerily so to those debates around the nationality quotas
set 100 years ago.
While those are no longer in effect,
and there are no longer racial prerequisites for naturalization
which were abolished in 1952 and the quotas in 1965,
there are still dynamics that are at play
that echo those of an earlier age.
And another recent development has been the formation
of the Sephardic Studies Program
about which Joel alluded earlier,
the University of Washington.
While a relatively new initiative,
we've been inspired by the founding figures
in the field of Sephardic studies.
Albert and Emma Adatto,
who are siblings from Istanbul,
who completed their master's degrees
at the University of Washington in the 1930s
on various aspects of Sephardic culture and history,
and they, and a few students and faculty
at Columbia University at the same time,
and only those two universities,
University of Washington and Columbia University
initiated the field of Sephardic studies 90 years ago.
And now, here at the UW,
in partnership with our local community,
we have established not only
one of the only Sephardic studies programs in the country,
and I hope you can understand
why such a program might be justified,
but we've also worked with community members to collect,
digitize, and make accessible original archival materials
from the Ottoman Empire,
and have established the largest collection
of Ladino sources in the United States.
And we have more Ladino books than Harvard
or the Library of Congress;
not so bad for this northwest corner of the country.
In a certain sense,
the Sephardic Studies Program and our collection
is a product of
both the processes of imprint and erasure;
erasure in the way
that Ladino has not been transmitted as a spoken language
to the current generation.
It's not spoken natively to any children in Seattle
or anywhere in the world,
although I'm trying with our family.
But that erasure is also connected to the work of public
and academic scholarship.
That makes a new imprint, an imprint of Sephardic history,
of culture, the prospect of a Sephardic future.
This is just one tale of Mediterranean Imprints
and Erasures,
one that I hope can help us see
how our worlds are more connected,
whether through cooperation or violence,
and other dynamics, more connected than we might imagine.
How 1492 produced both the expulsion of the Jews from Spain
and initiated the dispossession of the indigenous peoples
in Americas,
and how the descendants of the primary people
impacted those events have come to meet again
in different ways here in the Pacific Northwest
500 years later,
or how the end of the Ottoman Empire
impacted the development of Seattle,
or how the son of a Turkish Jewish woman slated
to be deported with her family at Ellis Island
when she was only a girl,
how that son became the chair
of the Board of Regents of the University of Washington.
Take that, Albert Johnson.
And that person is my friend Joel Benoliel.
And this is just one way
in which the historical processes
I have tried to describe continue to echo
into our own day.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
-Thank you so much, Devin, for this breathtaking talk.
I'm sure your heads must be spinning just
like my head is after hearing all that.
And we will have -- my name is Dr. Smadar Ben-Natan.
I also teach here at University of Washington,
and I will be leading a short questions and
answers session now.
I will start, though, with two questions that I have,
one about the past and one more about the present.
The question is about the --
my question about the past is you describe
the Jewish community in Seattle as very diverse.
So you have the European Ashkenazi Jews,
and you have the Sephardi Jews that you talked about,
and you described some tensions between them,
but also various institutions,
different synagogues for small cities where people came from,
so it does seem
like the community remains extremely diverse.
And I'm coming from Israel,
where also Jews from so many places in the world
were gathered and there was a sense
that the Jewish community should be united, should be one.
And I can imagine that also in the United States
as a religious minority there -- and this is my question to you,
was there a notion that the Jewish community should unite?
Was there a pressure either from within
or from without to the community to, you know,
sideline these differences and become more united?
-Great question. Yes, and no.
So in this earlier period before World War II,
there were two dynamics that were at play.
One was a move toward unification,
and that you could sort of see in a backhanded way
in that editorial that I referenced, which say,
"We should come together because we're all sort of alienated
and we're all sort of targets of racialization."
But that idea of unification
or coming together would be intensified
in the post-World War II era in particular.
So especially
as American-born children go through
the American educational system,
Ladino and Yiddish fall by the wayside,
men especially serve in the armed forces
during World War II.
The differences diminish substantially.
And whereas in the earlier period
it was considered intermarriage for somebody from Rhodes
and somebody from Tekirdag to marry together.
And then there was another period
in which Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic Jews,
it was considered intermarriage for them to marry.
Those barriers gradually fall in the wake of World War II,
and so there does become a more unifying dynamic
that does take place here in Seattle and in Washington State.
And there's a book about the history of the Jews
of Washington State.
The film, the "Family of Strangers",
which sort of describes this process of
how strangers would eventually begin to come
to form a sort of family unit, one more of a unified community.
-Thank you.
Interesting that that was a later development.
So my second question more about the present,
so the Naturalization Act that you described
and the restrictions of immigration,
those were cancelled.
But now we have new racial categories.
So if some of you
and some of us are filling up applications
to various places and opening accounts,
we need to classify ourselves according to racial categories
and in the current racial categories,
both those originating in Europe
and those originating in the Middle East
are considered White, right?
If you click and -- -Jews, you mean?
-No, generally. -Oh, to people.
-Yeah, people generally.
-Yeah, yeah, people in general, right.
That's correct. -Yes.
So I don't know if you know, but I'm curious to ask,
do you know how it came about
that people originating from the Middle East,
which is not only like Turkey and parts of the Ottoman Empire
but, you know, greater parts
where people are not socially considered
as White are actually classified as White?
-They lobbied for it during -- prior to and during World War I,
the -- especially Syrian and Syrian-Christian
and Armenian communities organized campaigns
to have themselves recognized as White by law.
And they were essentially successful in that
and those rulings between 1909 and 1915,
and there were some still, the last Armenian case was 1925
which involved our friend John Speed Smith
who was holdout who -- he was holding out on that.
Eventually everybody --
we would say and everybody from the Middle East,
although that was not a category at the time,
but everybody from essentially the Ottoman Empire
would eventually come to be considered White by law.
And that was because those advocating for it,
the representatives of the civil associations of Armenians
and of Syrians wanted the protections and the privileges
and the rights that came with citizenship.
So they went out of their way to try to demonstrate
that they were White,
and they leaned on a variety
of different classifications and criteria,
especially leaning on the idea of them being Christian.
It so happens that most of the people from --
called Syrians at the time,
which were mostly actually people from Mount Lebanon,
but anyhow, they were called Syrians at the time,
and they were Christian and they say, you know,
"We're Christian."
And there's a really famous exchange between one of these --
one of these plaintiffs, and the judge who says you know,
"I'm White because I'm Christian," and judge says,
you know, "You're not White, you're Bronze."
And the Syrian guy says -- I'm paraphrasing,
but he says something sensitive,
but he says,
"Well, you know, I come from the same place
that Jesus Christ himself was from.
If Jesus Christ was standing before you,
would you give him citizenship in the United States?"
And the judge said, "If he looked like you, no."
But that logic will be overturned.
That logic will be overturned
and Middle Eastern as a category,
since we could say around World War I has been
in the White framework.
Now, there have been moves --
because you mentioned the contemporary also
in your last question,
there have been moves in recent years
to get Middle Easterners
and North African people or Tswana people
out of the category of White
because it doesn't match with the social realities.
And so we'll probably see continued movement
around that right now.
And then it becomes a very interesting question about
where do Jews of different varieties
fit into that framework.
Like is Middle Eastern, is it like an ethnic thing or is it
like where your citizenship prior to coming
to the United States from? So it gets a little bit thorny.
-As it always is.
-Yeah.
-Okay, so I have another question from the audience here,
which is really interesting,
"How does the Spanish origin of the Ladino language
of Sephardi Jews impact their relationship
with Latino American community in Seattle?"
-Great question.
So I think in the first part of the 20th century,
there was, as far as I understand,
a not very large Spanish-speaking
population in Seattle.
And so where you find Sephardic Jews really having
relationships with Spanish-speaking communities,
Latin-A communities, especially in a place like New York.
And you have some very interesting dynamics
that develop in New York City
because Sephardic Jews wound up settling in large --
relatively large numbers in Harlem.
And there is a puckerful story about
why Spanish Harlem is called Spanish Harlem,
which is that when Puerto Ricans started coming to New York City,
they discovered that there were already people speaking Spanish
and living in Harlem,
so they went and they joined the Sephardic Jews there,
and that's how you got Spanish Harlem.
And those folks became very closely associated
with each other,
especially in the organized labor movement
and in radical politics in New York.
Now, in a place like Seattle,
it seems like the timing didn't necessarily correspond such
that people speaking Spanish,
when they begin to arrive in larger numbers,
Ladino was already on its way out
and there were no new immigrants coming in.
And so I am not sure exactly,
and maybe some people in the audience could speak to this
at greater length,
but --
if there are any sort of official relationships
between Sephardic Jewish organizations and Latin-A
organizations,
although I think it's a fruitful space for possibility.
-Okay. Thank you very much, everyone.
And thank you so much, Devin,
again for this wonderful lecture.
[ Applause ]