Jewish genealogy is no longer the sole realm of Eastern European Ashkenazim.
CRYPTO-JEWS in Cuba, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico: Dr. Stanley Hordes of the University of New Mexico.
Photo: Courtesy
Many begin the quest for information about their Sephardi ancestors each day, assisted by increasing new resources.
Modern Sephardi Jewry includes descendants of Jews expelled from Spain during the Inquisition as well as Oriental or "Mizrahi" Jews who lived in the Middle East, Near East and Central Asia - all non-Yiddish speaking, non-Ashkenazi Jews. Researchers, assisted by DNA projects, are also investigating the Sephardi roots of some Eastern European Jews.
Metro conducted interviews with some leading Sephardi genealogists, who revealed many insights into their research.
Sephardi genealogy research wasn't so important in the early 20th century, relates Dr. Yitzhak Kerem, a specialist in Greek Jewry, who sees genealogical research as "another way to learn history."
When Jews began expressing ancestry interest after the success in the 1970s of Alex Haley's Roots, American Jewish culture was Ashkenazi - Sephardim weren't the Jewish mainstream. Shelomo Alfassa of the International Sephardic Leadership Council says the issue was a numbers game, as the American Sephardi population was exponentially smaller than the Ashkenazi one.
American Sephardim were busy blending in, offers Dr. Jeffrey Malka, a Virginia-based author and researcher. "They didn't want to draw attention to being different; many were ignorant of their own history," while genealogist and businessman Alain Farhi disagrees: "Sephardi genealogy always existed, but wasn't publicized or discovered by the masses or the American genealogist."
While "Ashkenazi research focuses on civil-registry documents - researchers generally know what records are available and where they are kept," says Dr. Daniel Kazez, adding that Sephardi researchers must contend with linguistic and civil restriction barriers, informal archives, decentralized small Jewish communities, unusual handwriting, and archivists who speak Greek, Turkish or Arabic. Kerem adds that the necessary research languages are often daunting to students and researchers.
All these experts agree that the Internet gave Jewish genealogy a jump start - particularly for Sephardim - by increasing the amount of readily accessible information, guidance, and resources.
The Internet made it easier to extend the reach of genealogy and collect data beyond national borders, says Farhi, while Harry Stein of Sephardim.com says that those with similar interests could share generations of family lore.
Perhaps it took longer for Sephardi genealogists to go public, adds Stein, because they tried to keep their identity low-key or secret. The Nazis and the Catholic Church were threats, and they remembered the Inquisition, alive in the New World into the 19th century, he adds. "Hiding identity has been a converso/anousim tradition for more than 500 years."
Stein took up genealogy after he married a Sephardi woman and wanted his children to understand their heritage. His friends kept telling him how lucky he was to have married an Abravanel. "Frankly, I didn't know who or what that was. I had to get the facts." The quest for information is just beginning, he says. Experts say there may be more than 20 million people of Sephardic ancestry in the American Southwest and in South and Central America. "The region is bursting with curiosity," he says. Stein's Web site includes some 2,000 global forum members. The Internet "has opened doors never before available to researchers," he declares.
Farhi adds that now, generations of family lore can be shared with others who may have heard the same stories.
"In 1979, after my father's death, I discovered among his papers a handwritten tree compiled by my grandfather, who died in 1940," he relates. Farhi collected information and distributed copies of the tree. As related families sent data, he created an extensive database. He's solved some unanswered questions and has organized major DNA projects. One endeavor close to his heart is safeguarding the civil records of the Egyptian-Jewish communities in Cairo and Alexandria.
Sephardim are also quite individualistic, notes Jerusalem-based Sephardi genealogy pioneer and researcher Mathilde Tagger. When she asked families to share information, many responded, "My genealogy has no interest for someone outside the family."
Tagger's became interested in researching her family after the funeral of her grandmother at 97, which was attended by relatives from all over the world. Her uncle commented, "If we had a family tree, they'd all be together, at least on paper," and told Tagger: "You'll build this family tree." Many of her important indexes and databases are now posted on Dr. Malka's SephardicGen.com site.
Many of her important indexes and databases are located at SephardicGen.com. Two recent databases, based on various onomastic studies, are "Jewish Surnames in North Africa" (more than 12,000 names) and "Jewish Surnames in the Balkans" ( over 5,300 names), annotated indexes of major publications, indexes of rabbis buried in Salonika and Izmir and more.
In the mid-1990s, relates Malka, there were few internet-based Sephardi genealogy resources.
He caught the genealogy bug as he helped his father edit his memoirs, Jacob's Children in the land of the Mahdi: The Jews of the Sudan. On JewishGen, he found help researching his mother's Ashkenazi family, "but they told me there was no way to do Sephardi genealogy because there were no records." He kept searching for Sephardi resources, and discovered information in obscure academic texts, which led him to more resources.
As he learned more, he created the Resources for Sephardic Genealogy Web site, which includes articles on genealogy, history and links; his mailbox filled with questions and requests, prompting him to write Sephardic Genealogy: Discovering Your Sephardic Ancestors and Their World (Avotaynu, 2002) to provide answers and encourage others interested in tracing their roots.
