Has anyone ever asked you, “Where are you from?” When you answered, did they lean and ask: “But where are you really from?”
Jews get asked this a lot. While Jews live all over the world, we all come from the same place. That means that if you go far back enough, all Jews have the same answer to the question “But where are you really from?”
“When I was growing up in San Diego, no one ever thought I was Jewish,” Unpacked host Yirmiyahu Danzig explained. “That’s when I learned that to be perceived as Jewish, you needed to look white. You needed a last name like Rosenbaum or Goldstein. You needed grandparents who said ‘Oy vey!’ and you probably looked like someone who couldn’t run a mile without their asthma inhaler.
“So, whenever I outed myself as a Jew, there were always a few people who did a double-take. I wasn’t white. I played varsity football (no inhaler required). While some of my grandparents did speak Yiddish, they were just as likely to use Hebrew, Arabic, or Creole when they talked to one another.”
These kinds of stereotypes are one-dimensional and ridiculous, and they rest on a very narrow view of Jews, that totally ignores most of Jewish history.
According to Jewish tradition, roughly 4,000 years ago, a man named Abraham began doing something odd. He began to worship one god, and one god only. His descendants kept up with this strange practice. Eventually, those descendants grew into an entire nation of people worshiping the same god.
Sure, some of them repeatedly backslid into polytheism, but enough of them stuck with the whole “one God” thing, and eventually, they carved out a distinct identity and set of practices.
That’s the basic story of Judaism’s orgins, but stories aren’t static, and neither are people. We move. We mingle. We migrate. Sometimes by choice, more often, by necessity.
Each of us has a family story that fits into the wider narrative of our people.
To illustrate this, Danzig shared the story of his heritage, tracing back the branches of his family tree to its roots. He talked with archaeologists, historians, and scholars who placed his family’s story into a wider context.
As the product of four different diaspora communities, Danzig knows how complicated it can be to answer where Jews really are from. Still, the further back we rewind, the clearer the answer becomes.
The Jews of the Caribbean
“When I tell people that my mom’s from Guyana, they usually react in one of three ways. First, they’ll look at me and say, ‘Where?’ Or, if they’re good at geography and want to show off a little, they’ll ask ‘Which one?’ (For the record, it’s this one.) But all that is just a prelude to the most common reaction, which is: ‘I had no idea there were Jews in Guyana,’” Danzig explained. “Surprise!”
There was a time when the Caribbean was home to a thriving Jewish community.
One example of this community is the Tzedek Ve-Shalom synagogue, a Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in Suriname, that was disassembled, shipped to Israel, and reassembled at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Tour guide Nachliel Selavan explained that while parts of the synagogue were “shrunken down” to fit in the museum, all the artifacts displayed are original, including a Tzedaka (charity) box from 300 years ago, which reads “pidyon shvuyim” (meaning “rescuing captives). “Imagine a world in which Jews were captured and ransomed on a regular basis. And this is what they’re collecting money for,” Selavan said.
“My ancestors might have gone to services in this synagogue or maybe a nearby synagogue called Darchei Yesharim, a synagogue founded by Jews of color,” Danzig explained.
Caribbean Jews, like all Jews, survived because while remaining uniquely Jewish, they also adapted to and integrated with the cultures around them through marriage and conversion.
That’s why many Ashkenazi Jews look European, why many Persian Jews look Iranian, and why many Caribbean Jews look like, well, Danzig. What brought Jews to the Caribbean in the first place?
Sadly, it wasn’t the pristine beaches or dance hall beats. It was something a lot less fun: the Spanish Inquisition.
Jews lived in the Iberian Peninsula since at least the first century CE, and possibly before. By the 14th century, they were thriving, producing some of the Jewish world’s greatest scholarship, literature, and art. But things took a dark turn in 1492. The King and Queen of Spain gave all the Jews in their territory a choice: death, expulsion, or conversion. Conversion didn’t help much for conversos or crypto Jews — Jews who had converted to Christianity, often under pressure. When the church suspected they were secretly practicing Judaism, the Inquisition authorities were sent after them.
Dr. Yochai Ben-Ghedalia, head of archives at the Israel National Library, illustrated the horrors faced by Iberian Jewry by showing Danzig a ledger run by the administration of the Inquisition in Lisbon, Portugal. The ledger documented the different auto-da-fé (when Jews and others accused of heresy were sentenced and executed) in Lisbon.
This document represents a theme throughout Jewish history: whether Jews clung to their faith or tried to assimilate, time and again, they were seen as outsiders — foreigners who didn’t belong.
If Iberian Jews weren’t from Spain and Portugal, where were they from, and how did they get to Spain in the first place?
The Roman Empire
That brings us to everyone’s favorite old-school colonizers. The empire that’s always on our minds and close to our hearts –- though not always in a good way. They’re the reason some of Danzig’s mom’s family ended up in Spain, and some of his dad’s in Germany.
That’s right. All hail the power of the Roman Empire.
The mighty Roman Empire rolled into Judea in 63 BCE and refused to leave for six centuries. Even today, the land is littered with the artifacts and architecture they left behind, as well as the name they gave the region: Palestine.
At first, the Jews of Judea had a fairly warm relationship with their Roman overlords, but the honeymoon period didn’t last, and the struggle got ugly fast. In the Great Jewish Revolt of 66 CE, a group of Jewish revolutionaries wiped out an entire Roman garrison, and then a second one. It didn’t look good for the Romans. If they didn’t put down the Jewish rebellion now, other colonies might start getting ideas.
Just a few years later, in 70 CE, the Empire won. They burned the Second Temple to the ground, killed or enslaved more than a million Jews, and sent many more across the empire – including to the Iberian Peninsula. These became the Sephardic Jews, the origin story of Jews in the Caribbean.
From Judea to Germany back to Judea
That’s only half the tale, because there’s a whole other side of Danzig’s family tree. Their story has just as many twists and turns. Danzig’s dad’s maternal grandparents were among the founders of Israel’s first religious kibbutz in 1937, Kibbutz Tirat Zvi.
The kibbutz system was the early Zionists’ version of a socialist utopia, but it took a lot of work in difficult conditions to keep the kibbutz going.
“Personally, it sounds pretty rough to me. And I can’t imagine what was going through my great-grandparents’ heads when they showed up to this, having come from Germany. I guess anything was probably better than staying in 1930s Germany,” Danzig said.
The Holocaust was the climax of a long, complicated, and painful history for Jews in Germany.
In the medieval period, sometimes only a very small number of Jews were allowed to live in a certain town. They had to get a special charter to live there. That permission could be rescinded, too, meaning Jews always had to be ready for the possibility they could be kicked out of their homes.
Even after 1,500 years in Germany, the Jews were still considered foreigners. While Jews came to Germany over the centuries, fleeing persecution or seeking opportunity, Danzig’s family had been in Germany for nearly 2,000 years, arriving in the area from Judea as slaves of the Roman 10th Legion over 60 years after the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed.
Even decades after the destruction of the Temple, the Romans were still fighting the Jews. Despite the destruction, dispossession, and trauma, Judea’s Jews were still putting up a fight.
The face of this rebellion was an extreme and charismatic warrior named Simon Bar Kokhba, who supposedly made his soldiers bite off a finger to prove their bravery. His forces were able to establish a short-lived Jewish kingdom, even minting their own silver, with a triumphant slogan: To the freedom of Jerusalem.
However, the rebellion only lasted a few years. The Roman emperor, Hadrian, sent one third of his army to crush the rebellion – and with it, any lingering dreams of Jewish independence.
“The ripple effects of this revolt were throughout the generations, but until today, what Hadrian basically did was try to sever the link between Jews and Jerusalem. He basically raised from the dead the name Palestine, which the Greeks referred to as, like, the Philistines,” Selavan explained.
By the time of the Romans, the Philistines no longer existed. There were no Philistines in Judea, which served Hadrian perfectly.
“He basically raised from the dead that term and just named the entire country the Provincia Syria Palestina,” Selavan added. “It’s the subsection of the district of Syria, [and] we’re gonna call it Palestine: No Judea, no Jews. This is to sever that connection, so it strengthens a lot more where we are today and we’re still dealing with the ripple effect of Hadrian.”
When Hadrian defeated Bar Kochba, he set up an arch to memorialize his victory at Tirat Zvi, the same place Danzig’s family would eventually return to.
“The same line of my family that was, according to our tradition, taken by the 10th Legion, enslaved and brought to Europe, was the same line that came back to the same place where Hadrian had erected this sign to basically say: ‘That’s it. No more Jewish sovereignty, no more Jewish strength, no more Jewish army.’ In this very site, they rebuilt an autonomous Jewish community, one of the first in thousands of years,” Danzig said. “If you listen closely, you can hear my great-grandparents getting the last laugh.”
The Old Yishuv
The other side of Danzig’s dad’s story lies in Jerusalem. His paternal grandfather’s family has been in Jerusalem for seven generations. They lived in a community that eventually became known as the Old Yishuv, the retroactive term for the Jews living in Palestine before the political Zionism of the late 19th century.
Life in the Old Yishuv was extremely difficult. There was serious poverty, disease, and very little access to clean water and food. Jews were even banned from owning property.
The Jews of the Old Yishuv were a mix of Arabic speakers returning from Iraq and other parts of the Middle East, Jews that fled the Spanish Inquisition and returned to the land already in the 1500s, Ashkenazi Jews who had been coming in small groups for hundreds of years from from Western, Central and Eastern Europe, and, of course, those Jews from families that had never left the land. All these groups intermingled and created Jewish life in some of the most difficult circumstances.
“My family in this land, in this city, were second or even third-class citizens. They were dimmi, ahl al-dhimma, meaning they didn’t have the same rights as anybody that was an Arab Muslim,” Danzig explained.
Some of Danzig’s ancestors came to the Old Yishuv in the early 1800s as part of a little-known Jewish sect called the Perushim, a group of Lithuanian Jews who followed a Jewish scholar known as the Genius of Vilnius or the Vilna Gaon.
The Vilan Gaon had dreamed of returning to the Land of Israel, but was never able to. In the early 1800s, 500 of his disciples traveled by foot to Constantinople and from there sailed to the Holy Land. They wanted to go to Jerusalem, but the Ottomans in charge weren’t letting any more Jews from Europe into the city, because the Old Yishuv’s Ashkenazi community had fallen into terrible debt. When they couldn’t pay up, the Ottomans kicked them out of Jerusalem and burned down their synagogue, which became known as the Hurva, the Ruin. Because of the ban, Danzig’s ancestors instead went to one of Judaism’s holiest and most mystical cities: Tzfat.
“Tzfat is about not being distracted from what you’re learning,” tour guide Danny Zehavi explained. The city is located on a mountaintop and is far away from other cities. “Your focus is uninterrupted Torah study.”
Danzig’s ancestors were following a long tradition of seekers and scholars, but less than 30 years after their arrival in Tzfat, the Jewish community was devastated by a series of tragedies. In 1834, the Druze launched a pogrom, killing Jews and looting their homes. Those who stuck around after the pogrom were confronted with the most significant earthquake that Israel faced in the last thousand years in 1837.
After the disasters, Danzig’s family moved to Jerusalem, integrating into the diverse Jewish community there. There, one of the Lithuanian Jerusalemites married an Iraqi Jerusalemite, adding another branch to his family tree heading straight to Baghdad.
The first exile
To understand Iraqi Jews, you have to go back 2,600 years to 586 BCE.
Back then, the Jews were doing their thing in their capital in Jerusalem: agriculture, trade, governing, and worshiping at their holy Temple in Jerusalem.
The Temple in Jerusalem wasn’t just the center of Jewish life. It was also the symbol of that ancient Jewish belief that distinguished us from all other nations: Our belief in one God.
“One of the words that comes up a lot when we talk about the idea of temple and cultic worship is the idea of purity. When we think of purity, we imagine, for example, purity of the body,” biblical scholar Yael Leibowitz explained.
“There’s a whole separate category of impurity, which is moral impurity. The Bible speaks of it as almost this invisible pollutant that spreads throughout the Land,” Leibowitz added. “Actually, what ethical monotheism introduced to the world was this idea that we were in a contract with that one God, but that that God expected us equally to worship Him through ritual, respect each other, and build an ethical society. The Temple really is that microcosm. The Temple represents this universal recognition of God and what God wants from humanity, the goodness that God demands of us, the, you know, that sort of moral conscience that he expects of humanity.”
That’s what the Jews were doing or trying to do for roughly 400 years in Jerusalem, but then the mighty Babylonian empire came to town. Five hundred years before the Romans took a swing at Judea, the Babylonian empire set the standard, sacking the Temple and destroying the Jewish community, dragging its elites off to exile in Babylonia.
The community still kept their faith in one God and believed He would return them to Zion. Almost 50 years later, many returned and started to rebuild the temple, which the Romans would eventually destroy.
Not everyone in Babylon, AKA Iraq, went back, though. Some stayed, and their community grew into a major center of Jewish life, and it remained that way for thousands of years. At least, until the modern Iraqi government ended 2,600 years of tradition and scholarship with a snap of their fingers.
Today, most Iraqi Jews live in Israel, the only place that would take them after their government arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned them, outlawed the teaching of Hebrew and Jewish history, and stole their assets and property.
It was in Iraq that we learned how to be a diasporic people. This was where we learned how to straddle the tragedy and the opportunity that came with being in semi-permanent exile.
For most of our history, Jews have been outsiders. We’ve been expelled and ethnically cleansed, forced to seek refuge in any place that would take us, but that means we’ve been forced to cultivate resilience, to adapt, no matter where we are. After thousands of years in the diaspora, we’ve become a mosaic.
Even as we learned to reinvent ourselves and to adapt, even as we built up a thriving diaspora, we never forgot Zion. We longed for Israel, but we learned how to be Jewish when we were away from home.
So, where are we from?
We’ve lived everywhere. Danzig’s ancestors lived in Spain, Guyana, Germany, Lithuania, and Iraq, but they clung to their minority identity, knit themselves tightly into communities, and took their culture everywhere they went. Over the centuries, it would have been a lot easier to just melt into the larger culture, to be like everybody else. It would have saved us a lot of grief.
But we didn’t.
That is what kept us rooted, over all these centuries, to this place. That’s why every Jew can say, no matter where their family ended up, that here, Israel, is where we’re from.
