How Can You be Jewish and Hispanic?
Several years ago, I found myself in conversation with a college professor about the Muslim conquest of Spain in the medieval period. At one point I mentioned that I was a Sephardic Jew. He quickly responded by saying that “Sephardic” was essentially synonymous with Spanish. His remark was not intended to belittle the term. Rather, he meant that Sephardic Jews were not, in his view, ethnically or racially distinct from other inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula. The Jews of medieval Spain, he suggested, were fundamentally the same as their neighbors who were descended from Celtic, Roman-Iberian, and Visigothic ancestors. The only real difference between them, as far as he was concerned, was religion. Given, this was before the advent of widespread DNA testing, but his response is interesting to consider even decades later.
The implication of his argument was straightforward. Sephardic Jews were, in essence, Spaniards or Portuguese who happened to practice Judaism. Ashkenazic Jews, however, were understood differently. They were often perceived as a distinct ethnic, sometimes even “racial” group set apart from the surrounding populations of Central and Eastern Europe. Within this framework, a Jew from Germany or Poland was not simply German or Polish; he was Jewish ethnically, racially, and religiously. By contrast, a Jew from Spain or Portugal, according to the logic of my professor, was thought to be fundamentally Iberian, whose Jewishness was defined primarily by faith.
Over time I have come to realize that my professor’s assumptions are not unusual. In conversations with Ashkenazic friends—many of whom are only minimally observant—I have frequently encountered a similar understanding of Jewish identity. They often speak of themselves as ethnically Jewish, even racially so, despite the many difficulties inherent in describing Jews as a race. When they refer to themselves as Jews of Russian, German, or Polish ancestry, those national labels typically function as markers of cultural differences or variations in liturgical tradition, within an overarching Jewish ethnic identity.
Yet when these same individuals encounter Sephardic Jews—particularly those from Crypto-Jewish backgrounds—a different question tends to surface: how can someone be both Hispanic and Jewish? A friend of mine experienced this directly many years ago when a congregant at a local synagogue asked her rather bluntly, “Are you really Jewish?” She replied that she was. My friend is, for lack of a better term, racially white, which made the moment revealing. The issue was not race in the usual sense. Rather, it was the assumption that “Hispanic” identity itself signified something non-Jewish. Similar doubts are often directed toward Jews from other backgrounds as well, i.e., Ethiopian Jews, Indian Jews, or Jews from Arab countries.
For Sephardic Jews, and especially for descendants of Crypto-Jews, this skepticism often arises from outward markers such as appearance and surnames. They may not resemble the stereotypical image of an Ashkenazic Jew, and their family names frequently are Spanish or Portuguese rather than those recognizably Jewish to the typical American. They are not, after all, Russian Jews who simply migrated to Argentina or Mexico.
Interestingly, the same confusion sometimes appears among non-Jewish Hispanics. Because of shared language and cultural familiarity, they too may struggle to understand how someone they regard as Hispanic can also be Jewish. A few months ago in the midst of the war against Hamas, a individual of Hispanic ancestry labeled my wife and me as traitors to Hispanic identity for being Jewish.
These experiences ultimately lead to a deeper question: what exactly is Jewishness? What defines who is a Jew? Sephardic and Ashkenazic communities certainly developed different ways of responding to the social and political worlds they inhabited, particularly in the medieval period. Yet those historical differences do not settle the matter. Is Jewishness primarily a religion? Is it rooted in genetics? Is it a matter of ancestry or “blood,” as many descendants of Crypto-Jews sometimes insist? Or is it better understood as belonging to a people whose identity resists the usual categories of race, ethnicity, and religion?
These complex questions may seem irrelevant in our day in age, but the current and tragic upswing in antisemitism is something which has caused many individuals to ask themselves what exactly is meant by when someone says they are Jewish. I hope to explore this question over a series of posts.
