Sephardic Jews, La America, El Progreso

Yesterday's post features an excerpt from His Hundred Years, A Tale, by Shalach Manot, depicting a Sephardic Jew living in 1920 East Harlem. Today we add context to that post.

One hundred years ago … La America, "A National, Literary, Political and Commercial Weekly," was the primary organ for Ladino-speaking and -reading New Yorkers, i.e. the Sephardic Jewish immigrants from the regions of the Turkish Empire. Here is the front page of the June 11, 1920 issue.

Moshe Gadol founded the newspaper in 1910. Tamir Karkason writes that its circulation reached 1,000 in 1915, and that "The majority of the essays in the weekly were dedicated to the immigrants' daily life, their problems, their achievements and their encounters with the surrounding society."

According to Werner Sollors, La America tended to represent mainstream viewpoints, viewing askance radical or atheist politics. It contrasted with El Progreso, the weekly started in 1915 by Moishe Nessim, a Greek Jew. El Progreso went through several overhauls, and several names, before folding in February 1920. This despite attempts to lure non-Ladino readers, with, for example, an English page. Here are samples from one of its last issues, under the title La Epoca de New York: :

The English page, below, makes clear the paper’s political bent, as it calls “disgraceful,” the expulsion of the duly-elected Socialist members of the New York State Assembly (which we covered in our January 8 post).

The biweekly was published at 338 Eldridge Street, in the heart of the Lower East Side, the center of Jewish immigrant life.

Regarding Sephardic Jewish Press in New York, Aviva Ben-Ur writes:

Ladino-speaking Jews, descendants of the Iberian Jewish exiles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, began to emigrate from the Ottoman Empire (Turkey and the Balkans) to the United States in the 1880s. By 1924, thirty thousand had settled in the United States, with the largest concentration (approximately twenty thousand by the early 1920s) in the city of New York.  

Sephardic Jews, with their unfamiliar physiognomy and languages, coupled with their ignorance of Yiddish, were often not recognized by their Ashkenazi brethren as Jews. One of the independent media Sephardim formed in order to remedy their social isolation and create their own channels of community self-help was the Judeo-Spanish press. The American Ladino press, printed in Hebrew letters, from 1910 through 1948 included nineteen known publications, and, with the exception of one Los Angeles bulletin and one tabloid published in New Brunswick, New Jersey, appeared exclusively in New York. (“Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) Press in the United States,” Jewish Women’s Archive.)

Sources/further reading:

Ben-Ur, Aviva. Sephardic Jews in America. New York: New York University Press, 2009.

Sollors, Werner. Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature. New York: New York: New York University Press, 1998.

WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GOLDMAN, JUNE 11, 2020.

TAGS: Sepahrdic, Sephardim, Jews, immigration