eSefarad Noticias del Mundo Sefaradi
By Josh Nathan-Kazis
Part 12: ‘Even If You Don’t Speak Ladino’
I flew back to Madrid from Lisbon on an afternoon flight. The garbage was worse. Even in nicer neighborhoods, piles of junk hugged the sides of buildings. A windblown plastic bag wrapped itself around my leg.
A week and a half into my trip, I was worried I had failed. I had flown over to figure out if I could become a citizen. I had spoken to dozens of people, filled a tall stack of notebooks with my sloppy notes, typed on my laptop for hours, spent nights in hostels and hotels all over the Iberian Peninsula, rode on buses and in taxis, arrived unnecessarily early at airline terminals, and still just had a few rumors and secondhand accounts of the passport law.
I had one more chance: I had an interview scheduled for the next morning deep in the corridors of Spanish power, in the offices of Spain’s foreign ministry on the outskirts of Madrid.
I rode the subway out to the interview. No matter how dirty the city grew, the subway stayed pristine. The disembarkation ritual on the Madrid metro involves politely asking whether the person standing between you and the door plans to get off at the next station, then smiling as the train slows and you do-si-do your way around them. It’s inefficient and wonderful.
The offices of the foreign ministry are in a set of grey glass towers out in the northern part of Madrid. I had a meeting with one of the men actually writing the new citizenship law, a diplomat named Álvaro Albacete Perea.
Albacete has an unusual job in the foreign ministry. He is, essentially, an ambassador to the Jews. That means he spends part of his time helping Sephardic communities abroad, and part of his time liaising with Jewish organizations like the American Jewish Committee. “It’s important to be coordinated with them,” he said of the Jewish groups.
The latter part of the job had Albacete attending a meeting the day before I landed between the Spanish king and the leaders of Keren Hayesod – United Israel Appeal, a massive fundraising group that had its biennial meeting in Madrid. Before I flew to Spain, I had requested an interview with the king and had been told that he doesn’t do interviews. He apparently does do meetings, though, particularly when Sheldon Adelson is involved. Adelson, the billionaire Republican casino magnate, was in negotiations at the time to open a massive casino complex in Madrid, and came to the Keren Hayesod meeting as a delegate. The king, though he was about to undergo hip surgery, attended a reception with the delegates. Adelson also got a private tour of Toledo and a meeting with the mayor of that city. (The casino plans have since been scrapped. Maybe Adelson didn’t like Toledo.)
Albacete is tall, his hair slightly graying around the temples. Aside from the map of the world behind his desk and the bookshelf filled with Jewish history books, his small office is relatively sparse. When I asked if he was Jewish, he was taken aback — it’s not polite to ask that so directly, he told me. “That’s very sensitive for us,” he said. “It’s not part of our culture.” (He’s Catholic.)
Though the changes to the Sephardic citizenship law proposed in the November 2012 press conference are being worked through in the justice ministry, Albacete has been participating in the drafting. He more or less denied that the proposal had been made to directly counterbalance the Palestinian statehood vote.
“The announcement was made by the minister of justice and the minister of foreign affairs, and to be honest I’m not in their mind,” he said. “But my personal feeling is there is not any connection with that.”
I had arrived in Madrid to claim my birthright. I left unsure that it was mine.
As for what’s been holding up the change, Albacete admits to two reasons. The first is that the change is technically complicated — it requires a law making its way through parliament that would change Spain’s civil code. The other problem is that they seem to have realized that drawing the line between Sephardic and non-Sephardic Jews is next to impossible.
“Probably that’s the reason why the production of that new piece of legislation is taking so much time, because it’s not so easy,” Albacete said. “I have read and I have written different draft proposals for that, we are still working on the wording of the law.”
Albacete’s ideas about how it would work seemed vague. “We would take into consideration the name” — as in whether you have a typically Sephardic surname — “the knowledge of the language” — as in whether you speak Ladino. “We would take into consideration many, many things and we’ll ask the Jewish communities where the person or the people live to tell us something about him or her, [and] we will ask the Federation here in Spain to help us.” He said there would likely be a limited time window for applications.
He knew the plan didn’t sound convincing. “If you have any suggestion to do that in a different way, please tell me,” he said.
I didn’t, and I didn’t envy him for needing to come up with one. It seemed like Albacete couldn’t win. If his government’s goal really had been to placate Israel and the American Zionists, the vast interest the proposal has generated among Moroccan Jews in Israel seeking passports to allow them to move to the EU would likely erase any goodwill. If their goal had been to generate warm feelings among American Sephardim, the idea that they wouldn’t qualify because they don’t speak Ladino would be infuriating.
I asked if I should apply if the law actually does pass. “Please,” Albacete said. He laughed: “Even if you don’t speak Ladino.”
Fuente: http://m.forward.com
Part 13: Chatham Square
I met up with my girlfriend in Casablanca two days later. (We went to Fez. I asked her to marry me. She said yes!) When we returned to Madrid the following Saturday for a stopover on the way home to New York, the garbage strike was over but the city seemed even more unsettled. We watched a tremendous protest moving up Calle Atocha from the window of our hostel, followed by a heavy retinue of riot police vans. When we flew home to New York the next day, I was ready to leave. I had arrived in Madrid to claim my birthright. I left unsure that it was mine. It was, in part, realizing that Abraham de Lucena may not have actually been my ancestor, and that Luis Gomez may have actually been from Portugal, and that all these Iberians together only accounted for a minuscule trickle of my blood. And that, as a result, Gomez in Toledo and de la Obra in Córdoba, and even the tourism bureaucrats in Lucena, had a claim to the Spanish Jewish past that seemed even stronger than my own. For the government, symbolic and apparently fake gestures towards the Sephardim seemed to be a diplomatic tactic. For the converts and the Spaniards claiming Jewish descent, identifying with the Sephardim looked, in some cases, like a bold resuscitation of an alternative Spanish identity that had been denied for generations. Viewed from another angle, it turned trendy and kitschy and a little anti-Semitic. It repelled me. I didn’t really want to be Spanish anymore. In fact, it didn’t seem like it would be an option. In early December, Spain’s right-wing ruling party introduced a measure in the parliament that reiterated the government’s interest in offering citizenship to Sephardic Jews but offered no further details on the plan. I emailed Royo to ask about the parliamentary group’s action; she sounded just as annoyed and bewildered as when we had met at her office. “Business as usual: Waiting for them to announce the terms and requirements that the applicants for Spanish nationality will need,” she wrote. Albacete did not respond to two emails, sent as this article approached publication, asking for updates on the passport law. Portugal passed a law over the summer that made similar promises. Though the Portuguese law, unlike the Spanish law, is on the books, it’s just a single sentence offering citizenship to the descendants of Portuguese Sephardic Jews. A spokesman for the Portuguese embassy in the United States told me over email in early January that, contrary to press reports, the justice ministry was still writing a law that would establish specific requirements. So, right now, the Portuguese passports don’t exist either. On Christmas Eve, I caught the end of the Spanish king’s annual address to the nation. He looked sad and tired. The next week, I organized an expedition to find Luis Gomez’s grave. Our group met at 9 a.m. on December 31 in Manhattan’s Chinatown. A statue of Confucius in Chatham Square faces north up the Bowery; we met behind his back, in front of the old Shearith Israel cemetery. It’s a tiny lot the size of a dog run. Zachary Edinger, Shearith Israel’s sexton, rode the subway downtown to unlock the iron gate for my cousin Jonathan, my brother Saul, Saul’s girlfriend Kristen, and me. We had been inside a few times before, though not in years. No one has been buried at Chatham Square since the 1820s, but it’s the oldest Jewish cemetery in the United States, and the synagogue still holds ceremonies and memorials there. From the outside it doesn’t look like anything. I realized, as I waited for Edinger to open the gate, that I had walked by a thousand times since my last visit, each time forgetting it was there. De Sola Pool’s book reports the English, Hebrew and Portuguese (Portuguese! Claim totally undermined) text of Gomez’s tombstone, but not its location. He died in 1740, after the purchase of the grounds, and likely would have been buried here. But the borders of the cemetery have been cut back over the years, and graves were lost. Gomez doesn’t appear on the map of the cemetery in the de Sola Pool book. We decided to look around. It was freezing. The lock on the gate stuck when Edinger tried to get it open. He warmed it with his hands and tugged again; it snapped clear. Inside, the frozen ground cracked under our shoes as we treaded over the plots. We saw the grave of Simon Nathan, our great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, who came from England in 1746. His brother-in-law, Gershom Mendes Seixas, the first rabbi born in North America, has a funny-looking pyramid-shaped grave right next to him. We saw the grave of Luis Gomez’s son Mordecai, another ancestor. But though we read every stone we could, Gomez himself didn’t seem to be there. I didn’t feel defeated. Was Luis Gomez lost? I didn’t care. The long-dead ancestors, their bodies disintegrated, amount to a meaningless little genetic sliver in our source code. The men and women themselves were morally skewed — slave owners, if not slave traders. It wasn’t with them that I felt a connection. The graves, however, represent something else. We’ve chosen to care about them. Our parents and grandparents had chosen to bring us here as kids so the bits of rock would stir us when we visited later. My grandfather and his father chose to lead the institution that kept the graves up. They’re ours not because of blood, but because we’ve made them ours. We didn’t stay at Chatham Square long. Our feet were cold. It felt like it would snow soon. We hustled through Chinatown to a diner for breakfast. Josh Nathan-Kazis is a staff writer at the Forward. Contact him at nathankazis@forward.com and on Twitter @joshnathankazis.
