A Lesson in Diplomacy from Caracas
On August 7, 2026, a 72-year-old man who is not a career diplomat drafted a letter on the letterhead of the Asociación Israelita de Venezuela. Four days later, Caracas and Jerusalem signed a joint communiqué reopening consular ties after seventeen years of rupture. Meanwhile, professional diplomacy between Spain and Israel collapses one tweet at a time. A rabbi, Isaac Cohen Anidjar, had outperformed the professionals.
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Asked recently about Nicolás Maduro by the journalist Jorge Benezra, Cohen declined to speak ill of him. I take that reticence to be the method, not a failure of it. He said years ago that he never wanted politics and takes no pleasure in them, but that the situation obliges him. The situation has since become larger than Venezuela. Last year the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain appointed him the country’s dayan, its rabbinical judge. Which means he is now asked about Pedro Sánchez as well, and about the opportunistic anti-Israel turn his government has taken these past two years, a smokescreen for troubles closer to home.
Cohen learned the craft at home, in the literal sense. He recalls that his grandfather Yamín, dayan of Tangier, would pick up the telephone, speak to the governor, and solve the problem. There is an old Jewish word for this kind of mediation: shtadlanut, in its positive historical sense. Ashkenazi Europe made it famous, but the first mishtadlim on record were Sephardim, in 1354. And it has become rare now that social media has taught ambassadors the visceral release of posting.
Benezra describes the office where his interview took place. The telephone rings multiple times. People from the community come in and out asking for things, the way one calls on a mayor. On the wall behind him, a juxtaposition of photographs: Cohen with King Juan Carlos, with Chávez, with Maduro. It is the room of a diplomat without portfolio. And perhaps it is why the Venezuelan community still had someone to ask, even as it has shrunk from an estimated 22,000 people when Chávez took power to fewer than 6,000 today.
Cohen was born in Tangier in 1953, when the city was an International Zone and the Kingdom of Morocco did not yet exist. Arabic and its Moroccan darija were spoken there, alongside French, Spanish, and the Spanish that left in 1492 and went on living as Haketía. Every community carried its own memory. This was not the idealized convivencia that some nostalgic Europeans like to imagine, but it was coexistence. He was raised in his grandfather’s house and in a lycée that doubled as a yeshiva. At fifteen he left for Paris, later studied in Jerusalem, and in 1977, at twenty-four, arrived in Caracas to serve a Sephardi congregation. He has been there almost fifty years.
His Spanish is perfect. It has been said to carry a faint Hebrew and French inflection, the trace of a man who has spent his life mediating between worlds. Spanish was not handed to him directly, and that is precisely the point: the Spanishness he claims is neither a pose nor a passport of convenience. It is an inheritance he received, then went looking for, and has now inhabited twice over, first as a Sephardi Jew of Tangier and then as a Venezuelan.
In the middle of a polarization to which anti-Israel and anti-Spanish propaganda have each contributed their share, Cohen’s voice does something neither camp will fully enjoy, and which is more necessary than ever. In a climate that rewards viscerality at the expense of argument, he refuses the process of Othering that some on both banks of the Mediterranean keep working at. He does it in both directions. Speaking of the antisemitic pressure Spanish Jews are living under, he is careful to say that it does not come from the Spanish people, that it is government policy. Then he turns the other way: “Jewish roots in Spain are deep and profound”, he says, a sentence worth repeating from time to time. Sepharad was, after all, the most fertile ground Jewish civilization found in medieval Europe. But Cohen goes further: “Every stone in Spain has Jewish roots”.
That sentence is stranger than it sounds, perhaps because what it contains is immense. The diasporic Jewish author has narrated himself, historically, from the periphery or from the frontier. Elsewhere is always the cornerstone: one is either not quite authentic so far from the center, or more authentic precisely for standing outside it. I have called this exogenism in my academic work, the consciousness of belonging somewhere else, and it has been the ground on which diaspora Jewish self-narration was built for centuries. Hannah Arendt, following Bernard Lazare, sorted the emancipated Jew into two figures: the parvenu, who asks to be let in, and the conscious pariah, who accepts exclusion and turns it into a vantage point. To Arendt’s two one might add a third, the self-deprecating assimilationist, who claims membership in an essence by paying the entrance fee with his own Jewishness.
Cohen is none of the three. He does not petition, nor does he accept exclusion as the price of lucidity. Ultimately, he surrenders nothing. One of the perverse ways in which Antisemitism works is by making the Jew a permanent foreigner, no matter where. Cohen does not protest the exclusion; he denies its premise. He claims the stone, not a residence permit.
It is a brave thing to do in the current climate, to insist on bridging identities that ideological reductionism and shortsightedness are pulling further apart by the month. Cohen’s is an intriguing act of self-narration, performed in just a handful of lines. But it is, furthermore, a lesson in diplomacy.
Spain and Portugal once tried to say something similar in writing. Spain’s law of 2015 describes Jewish presence in Iberia as “ancient and palpable to this day in vestiges of word and of stone” and offers itself as a meeting point between today’s Spaniards and those driven out after 1492. It accepted the family use of Ladino or Haketía as legal proof of belonging: the household language of Tangier admitted as a document of Spanishness. Portugal had opened its own door two years earlier. The response was not symbolic: more than 150,000 people applied in Spain before the window closed in 2019, and Portugal received over 124,000 Sephardic applications in 2022 alone, most of them from Israel.
I remember, more than a decade ago, sitting in Professor Ross Brann’s office at Cornell, where I was his student, and telling him that Spain had passed the law. He had not yet heard. There was something almost comic in it: five centuries on, Sepharad was still producing news, and this particular piece of it had reached one of its scholars across his own desk. Brann is right to warn, book after book, against the temptation to romanticize that period. Every stone in Spain may have Jewish roots, as Cohen suggests, but some of those stones were thrown, and the Inquisition was built of the same material as the synagogues it emptied. But to claim Sepharad is not to deny what happened. It is to refuse to let the expulsion or the forced conversions define who one is. That is what Cohen is doing, and it is harder than nostalgia.
My Israeli friend Liron received his Portuguese passport two weeks ago, from the Sepharad his family came from, and we celebrated it as long-lost brothers. He was among the last. Portugal revoked its Sephardic route this May; Spain closed its window in 2019. Both Iberian doors are now shut, and they shut while the relationship they were meant to repair was falling apart. This is what Cohen means when he says we thought the historic error of the expulsion “had been corrected”. Note the tense.
How different was the prospect ten years ago, when communities in Spain were starting to fill with descendants of Sephardim collecting Spanish and Portuguese citizenship, many of them Israelis, embracing a country that turned out to resemble them more than they expected. For a moment we could all see the constants: Spanishness and Jewishness as amalgamating identities, almost as versions of one another.
Reading Cohen, part of me feels something like hope: hope for a return to the kind of Spain-Israel relationship that center-right governments in both Spain and Portugal once set out to build. For the restoration Cohen speaks of is not only a restoration of passports. It is, ultimately, a restoration of identities.
While thinking all this through, I asked my friend Gershon, who is from Ceuta and has spent thirteen years bringing Jewish visitors to Spain, whether it was still possible to rebuild what we had a decade ago. He answered without pausing: “I don’t see how”.
One relationship was rebuilt by a man who picks up the telephone. The other is still collapsing one tweet at a time. So one might want to hold on to Cohen’s words instead. Words that could not have come from a professional diplomat, whatever that means these days, but that came instead from a rabbi, from a shtadlan, from a Spaniard.