When I was a boy, my Aunt Zarita, a woman of wide experience and wider culture, said to me, “You will find as you grow older that you will get along much better with los cristianos than you will with the Ashkenazim. Because of your name, they will think you are one of them, and when you inform them that you are a Jew, there will be a brief flicker of anti-Semitism because even the best of them have that sixth toe. Then they will forget. But from the Ashkenazim you will usually get the patada [kick]. And most will resent you for being a sefardita.

My aunt, no bigot, turned out to be quite right about Ashkenazim, as Jews from East and Central Europe are called; in my own youthful experience they seemed both to resent and to envy Jews whose names, like mine, suggested an ancestry deriving from anywhere along the Mediterranean littoral, and in particular from old Spain (Sefarad). As a freshman at Columbia in the early 1930’s I was ignored by Zeta Beta Tau, the Jewish fraternity, but was rushed by the Anglican Alpha Delts who considered me a “white Jew.” (As my aunt had predicted, they meant no offense, thinking the characterization would please.) My first wife, of Russian Jewish origin, was never comfortable with my family—to her mother I was “that s’fard.” But my second wife, who is Anglican, was puzzled to hear the remark of an Ashkenazi friend when we first got married: “Oh, your husband is a Spanish Jew? He probably wouldn’t even talk to me.”

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My heritage goes back many centuries to a golden era in Spain when the Catholic monarchy bestowed on my family the particle of nobility, the “de” which some among my relatives would preserve and others reject. All this was before the mass expulsion of Jews in 1492, when my ancestor Daniel de Toledo, later Toledano—jefe de los sabios (chief of the wise men) and gran rabino of the great Jewish community in Castile—was forced to lead his clan to a new life in Tangier, in Morocco.

There they found an already existing community, “Moorish” Jews whose forebears had migrated from King Solomon’s Israel on the ships of Hiram of Tyre. Once in Morocco, Daniel made a pact with the Sultan, clearly separating his flock from these native Jews (to whom the newcomers referred as forasteros, strangers).

If the stories I heard as a child were true, the jefe de los sabios lived not only to write the laws of his co-religionists, but to become Grand Vizier to the Sultan. For this and for other services, he and his descendants were awarded, in perpetuity, the heads of all cattle slaughtered in accordance with Jewish ritual law in Tangier, giving rise to the legend that the Toledanos got their intelligence from all the bovine brains they ate.

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My more recent past—I skip over generation upon generation of rabbinic leaders and authorities—was hardly less colorful. Zarita Nahon, my aunt, was the daughter of a man who, in the mid-19th century, ran guns in Morocco against the French and Spanish for Sir John Hay Drummond-Hay of the British Diplomatic and Consular Service, considered by some to be a progenitor of the modern British secret services. Once, on a bet, this man, my grandfather—he had been born José but was renamed Rafael during a serious illness in order to deceive the angel of death—swam the Strait of Gibraltar, a cruder passage than the English Channel. In his later years, José lost his sight. In their New York apartment, my grandmother Estrella would read to him night after night from Don Quixote and, when the last page had been turned, would start again from the beginning. He died with a tune from a zarzuela on his lips.

My aunt herself was a philologist and teacher of modern languages who brought the glories of French to generations of boys at DeWitt Clinton High School, then one of New York’s best. Her students included, it seems, half the budding intellectuals in New York, among them the young literary-critic-to-be Lionel Trilling and the young poet-to-be Delmore Schwartz. (“You’re Zarita Nahon’s nephew?” Trilling asked me when I was an undergraduate and he a young professor at Columbia, and came very close to hugging me.) She traveled widely in Europe and North Africa, at a time when a wagon-lit was not considered proper transportation for a single woman, collecting, on behalf of the anthropologist Franz Boas, the medieval ballads and romances that had disappeared in Spain but which still remained current among the oldest of the Spanish Jews of Tangier; successfully resisted the romantic protestations of the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française in Paris; and was a friend of the Spanish poet-philosopher Miguel de Unamuno.

I myself was born in the International Zone of Tangier after my father, having married and started a family in New York, returned there as a foreign correspondent in 1912, covering the landing of the French in the small fishing village of Casablanca. By the time my father brought the family back to New York, I spoke a fine Spanish and English, and a weak French, but I am told that I spoke Arabic like a tarrachito, a Moorish urchin.

We lived first in an Irish neighborhood, across the street from a church and a parochial school whose pupils trounced me for my suspiciously broad accent, insisting I was British. Not long after, we moved to South Harlem, even then beginning to sink from its middle-class status. But it was during summers in the Rockaways, with its beaches and shops and vaudeville theaters and sauntering crowds, that I first became aware of the difference between being Jewish and being Spanish-Jewish.

There, almost everything was Jewish. Lillian Russell’s mansion was now a Jewish rooming house, and a great estate nearby had been transformed into a Hebrew orphan asylum. The butcher, dairy, and grocery were all kosher (a word I did not recognize because we pronounced it kasbér), and everyone on our block—as on other blocks in every direction—was Jewish. But how could they be, I asked myself, if they did not speak Spanish or know the significance of Sefarad?

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The kids I played with on the beach, in quisitive and tactless, had their own questions about me and my family: what did my father do, besides reading the New York World and various heavy tomes on the front porch on Sundays? And what was my religion?

My father, I told them, had been a newspaperman and was now in the import-export business; he also ran a translation service. To my friends, however, a newspaperman was a Gentile (and a drunkard), and import-export meant nothing. They regarded us as some alien species, unrelated to the Jews of Manhattan’s Lower East Side or the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. As to our religion, they accepted the judgment of one aging grandmother who identified us as “ketliks.” My last name seemed to confirm this.

“So, what are you?”

“Jewish.”

“G’wan. Say something in Yiddish.”

“What’s Yiddish?”

“Look, when your grandmother talks to your mother, what does she speak?”

“Spanish.”

Meaningful looks. “You don’t know Yiddish, how can you be Jewish?”

I consulted my father, a bad choice: he was a purist who scolded my mother when she started a sentence in one language and finished it in another. “Yiddish is not a language,” my father ruled. “It’s a dialect.” This information did not increase my popularity with my friends, but at least I was able to explain that Spanish Jews did not know Yiddish. “All right,” they retorted: “Say something in Jewish.” “Do you mean Hebrew?”

I felt I would be on safe ground quoting the opening line of the shema, the “Hear, O Israel” prayer I had been taught to say every night after I was in bed and my mother had turned off the light. Unsure whether I might be blaspheming by uttering the prayer in broad daylight, I also threw in the blessing over wine which my father would recite on Friday evenings if we had guests for dinner.

My performance confused them, first because my pronunciation differed—broad a for their o, t for their s, a different system of emphasis—and secondly because, as it turned out, none of them knew the Friday-evening ritual. But in time they were willing to concede that I was perhaps a Jew—if only in a way that reaffirmed our differences: “Yeah, you’re Jewish, but my father says you think you’re better than we are.”

Maybe they were right. Certainly we were more deeply schooled than many of them in the old traditions. For my friends, the Passover seder, universally celebrated among Jews of all descriptions, was just a big family gathering presided over by an ancient relative or a bachelor rabbi. For me, it was the happiest evening of the year, a family evening, during which my father would regularly interrupt the singing and the Passover story with jovial commentary, and would then be interrupted himself by the children competing to get the bocados (matzah and haroset—a paste of chopped nuts, fruit, and wine—wrapped in lettuce) into their mouths. Ironically, when I found myself at the seder of an Ashkenazi friend years later, it was I, and not my host, who was the stranger. When I tried to join in the singing and the responses, my credentials were challenged—“How do you know these things?”—as if saying barúkh instead of bórukh made me an outsider. This, I discovered, was an aspect of the Spanish Jew’s own particular form of exile.

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When I reported my friends’ comments to my father, he said, “Don’t let it bother you. Your family never lived in a ghetto, and your ancestors wrote philosophical dissertations during the Golden Age in Spain. But we are all Jews, and when the sword falls, it strikes our necks as much as theirs.”

Perhaps so. In the meantime, however, we remained busy with our distinctions—and, I should add, our subdistinctions.

In my teenage years, I would travel part of the way to school each day with my aunt—she going to DeWitt Clinton on Tenth Avenue, I to Ethical Culture at 63rd Street and Central Park West. Sometimes we would stop at the bridle path at Sixth Avenue to let a particular horseman cross into Central Park. “That man could have been your uncle,” my aunt would say, naming a very rich German Jewish family. “He wanted to marry me, but I couldn’t. It would have broken my mother’s heart.” One of my aunt’s brothers had indeed married a German Jewish girl, whose family—supporters of the Reform congregation of Temple Emanu-El, where the dietary laws and the sanctity of the Sabbath were equally ignored—had made my grandmother miserable. To many in my family, Reform Jews were simply alemanes, Germans—hardly Jews at all, but rather practitioners of a local variant of Protestantism.

As for the East European Jews, that larger branch of the Ashkenazi tree that included the Litvaks and Galitzianers and all the rest, I can report that there was indeed a period in my youth when some in my family became involved with the “Second Avenue intellectuals.” They included the editors of the Jewish daily Forverts (“Forward”) and the Yiddish writers and poets and thinkers who sat in cafeterias for hours, holding forth eruditely and passionately on life and letters and looking down on Mahler and Schnitzler and other assimilated Viennese Jews who were neither fish nor fowl nor good pickled herring. I kindled to the élan vital of these people, to the energy and enthusiasm of their ideas; but their rhetoric and their Marxist reasoning grew out of an experience culturally alien to me. I could never understand what Judaism had to do with Marxism, and why questioning the latter was tantamount to being disloyal to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

And so I grew up feeling that if Jews were somehow alien in America, Sephardi Jews were alien twice over, once in America and once among the Ashkenazim, of whatever subethnic origins, by whom they were outnumbered. But as if to compensate, and just as my aunt had predicted, things were different for me among los cristianos. I remember, in the 1950’s, being introduced to the cultural attaché of the Spanish embassy in Washington. “Toledano? Toledano?” he asked. “Sefardita?” “Sefardita de Toledo,” I answered, and the attaché turned to the ambassador, remarking, “Español puro.”

These, it seemed, were more my people than Saul Bellow, Clifford Odets, or Sholem Aleichem. As an adult, I read the letters written to my aunt by Miguel de Unamuno, and felt with this Catholic poet a kinship I could not feel with those with whom I had eaten and argued on Second Avenue, or with whom, for that matter, I had worked during my years as an editor at the political weekly, the New Leader. When, in 1959, my friend and fellow journalist Earl Mazo walked with me across the muddy acres of what had been the Warsaw Ghetto, he wept, for this was where he had been born. In later years, I walked the streets of Toledo, feeling, unreasonably, that I was home.

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And yet. . . .

In Rome, not so long ago, when I tried to visit the synagogue in the old Jewish ghetto, I was stopped by the sexton. “The Sabbath service is going on,” he said to me in Italian. “Why do you wish to enter?” “Mi chiamo Toledano,” I answered. He made a slight bow and said, “Bene,” in recognition, as if I had produced my family tree. But as it turned out, the services were being held in the basement, because an arsonist, oblivious of fine distinctions, had gutted the synagogue proper, making it impossible for Ashkenazim or Sephardim to worship in the grand hall above.

Just as my father had instructed me so many decades ago, when the sword falls, it strikes all necks alike.

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