I’m a Sephardic Jew and it’s complicated
I’m a Sephardic Jew. What does it mean?
It means that Jewish is my religion and that my cultural and culinary heritage come from the Arabic world. Actually, my DNA shows an ancestry that is mostly Arabic, Egyptian, Italian. To me, North Africa is this distant region of the world where my parents were born and that I ‘ve never seen. Arabic is this language my grandmother was using to soothe me, in tender words that I could barely understand: Habibi, laziza and so many more that disappeared from my memory after her passing.
As a Sephardic Jew, I always counted my blessings, grateful that my family didn’t experience the horror of the Nazi extermination camps, nor the destruction in pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe. Today, I start understanding that things are not that simple.
My father was born in 1920 and was a young adult during the Second World War. Tunisia at the time was a French colony and therefore came under German rule. My family was never deported in trains through Eastern Europe, but I remember my father mentioning war a few times when I was a kid. He told us how he learned to drive in a “work camp”, how he actually pretended to know how to drive because it was safer to have an “important job” for the general, how he was fed pasta with worms and slept on the floor, but “it was better to not complain,” how he had to go under a fence and escape because “someone could get angry at any time.”
Read more about the The Jews of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia
I also remember him telling me how happy he had been growing up in Tunisia even though he was so poor, how proud he was to have built his own business after the war, how close he was to his Muslim friends and business partners. He had to move to France in 1956, “for a better future” but also because it was unsafe for him to stay. His business ended up under the control of his “business partners”. His house rented to another Tunisian family who stopped paying rent as soon as he was out of the country.
Today, as I realize that even though the holocaust didn’t destroy entire branches of my family tree, my family was discriminated against for being Jewish.
Recently, as I was walking through the streets of Sicily, I discovered so many synagogues that had been destroyed, so many churches built on top of the remains of Jewish ritual baths or sites of prayers, so many Jewish quarters decimated, their residents having to flee or convert to Christianity for their own safety. That was in the middle of the 15th century, but the traces were still present. They fled to North Africa and that is probably how my ancestors are Tunisian.
As I looked at the numbers of Jews left in the Arabic world, from hundreds of thousands after the Second Word War, to just hundreds today, I realized that so many, like my parents, uncles and aunts, had to leave their countries and everything they had built in order to get the right to live in Europe, the United State or Israel. For my parents it may have been a blessing in disguise. They had to start from nothing, but they didn’t have a lot to begin with. But what about my uncle who was one of the most famous jewelers of Tunis and had to leave gold and precious stones to save his wife and daughter? He ended up cleaning clothes for a living, never taking a single day off to make sure he would provide for his family. What about my grandmother who only spoke Arabic and spent the last thirty years of her life in a country she didn’t relate to?
The massacre of October 7h in Israel, and the increase in antisemitic attacks in the past years and more recently cannot be ignored. But even though it’s not the case today, the Arabic world was once a safe place for Jews. Christians and Jews lived and worked together for centuries. For all those times of war, genocide, extermination, there were many more of peace, love, and harmony.
Antisemitism comes from a minority, atrocities against Israel come from a minority. I believe in the power of love, in the power of forgiveness, in the power of life over death, in the power of the light in the eyes of our kids. I believe in the power of free will and today I choose LOVE AND PEACE. What do you choose?
This is one of my most personal article and I was wondering if I should post it. But I cannot say silent because silence would be the opposite of what I believe in. Silence is death. I choose to speak up and share my truth. You might agree with it, or not. Any way it is my truth. I would always be interested in listening to yours as long as it’s shared with love and respect for one another and a desire to open a door to a better future.
Over the years I have been focusing more and more on Epigenetics and how the traumas, and victories, of our ancestors impact us and the generation after us. If you find yourself wondering why you are “over- reacting” to a situation, search in your past but also look if it’s part of a bigger pattern that your parents, grand parents, and beyond have experienced. If it’s the case and you want to free yourself from this intergenerational trauma, please reach out. I will be happy to schedule a session to help you.
