Ethereal Proximity:

Sephardim, Intergenerational Trauma, and the Holocaust

Caity Rose Campana

RLG 5619: Holocaust Representations

Professor Oren Stier

25 April 2020

1

Today, one need only switch on the television or log into social media to witness the recent meteoric rise in popularity experienced by consumer DNA tests. Easily accessible and undoubtedly appealing, these tests provide customers with access to “comprehensive genetic profiles” that detail ancestry composition, carrier status, and more—often for less than $200.

And while ads like 23andMe’s colorful “Meet Your Genes” campaign,1 which anthropomorphizes genetic traits, tend to emphasize the tests’ health-related aspects, there is another side to this complicated equation: the promise of explicit ancestry categorization based on saliva samples forces the scientific and social realms to reckon with one another in unprecedented ways. As we adjust to this new reality, conversations about trauma and identity, especially in the fields of sociology, psychology, and anthropology, are becoming more common. Building upon such conversations, and set against the turbulent backdrop of genetic testing, this paper aims to explore the links between Sephardi Jewish identity, intergenerational trauma, and the Holocaust. The following questions guide this undertaking: What was the experience of Sephardim during the Holocaust? Do we see evidence of Sephardim self- identifying with the Holocaust, and if so, where and how? How does trauma manifest in communities? Is there a difference between intergenerational trauma and trauma itself? Does one need a genetic connection (i.e. the person is a direct descendant of a survivor) to a particular event (in this case, the Holocaust) in order to claim the trauma surrounding that event as a part of his or her identity? Finally, can trauma serve as a marker of Jewish, specifically Sephardi, identity?

Through analysis of journal articles, book chapters, lectures, and various studies, I hope to demonstrate that (1) the negotiation of contemporary Jewish identity is a complex, ongoing

1 “Meet Your Genes℠,” video, 00:30, YouTube, posted by 23andMe, July 22, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tSkiL0jxIM.

2 process, (2) the Holocaust is an undeniably important part of this process, and (3) among Jewish people, trauma related to the Holocaust is not limited to genetic—or even familial—ties. Though certainly not exhaustive, this research paper spans historical, scientific, religious, and sociological topics. Beginning with an outline of the theoretical perspective it assumes, it goes on to examine definitions of intergenerational trauma, using Janet Jacobs’ work as a model. A brief, elementary discussion of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is necessary as background information and is meant only to demonstrate to readers that experts continue to seek scientific connections between genetics, trauma, and identity. Following this section is a discussion of

Holocaust memory that highlights James E. Young’s proposed collective/collected memory dichotomy. The narrative surrounding Holocaust memory is largely an Ashkenazi-centric one, primarily because this was the group affected most by the Nazis’ attempts to annihilate European

Jewry. In the final section, preceding elements are synthesized with the experience of the

Holocaust among Israeli Sephardim, who despite having fewer genetic associations with the event still overwhelmingly consider it an integral part of their identity as Jewish people. Through the application of Alexander’s theory to the phenomenon of non-Ashkenazi people connecting with the Holocaust and its associated trauma, the contents of this essay challenge the notion(s) that Jewish identity is one-dimensional, monolithic, or that it can be reduced to one’s genes. By extension, it investigates, in at least a superficial way, what it means to identify with the

Holocaust.

Theory

Before delving into a discussion of the connections between intergenerational trauma,

Holocaust memory, and Sephardi identity, it is necessary to summarize the basics of the 3 theoretical model against which these connections will be set: Jeffrey C. Alexander’s theory of cultural trauma. Alexander holds that such trauma “occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.”2 Outlined in the 2004 collaborative work Cultural Trauma and Collective

Identity, this compelling model was selected because of its unique take on collective trauma and identity narratives, and because of the distinct challenges it poses to both modes of lay trauma theory (Enlightenment thinking and psychoanalytic thinking). The Enlightenment perspective emphasizes collective trauma while the psychoanalytic perspective emphasizes personal trauma.

Alexander argues that there is a fundamental limitation to both, and to lay trauma theory overall: it relies on the assumption that trauma is organic, that certain events—be they famines, genocides, wars, or the like—are traumatically essenced. In other words, both modes assume that trauma is the natural result of certain extraordinary events, what the author refers to as “the naturalistic fallacy.” With the limitations of lay trauma theory named, he goes on to propose a new theory of cultural trauma:

First and foremost, we maintain that events do not, in and of themselves, create collective trauma. Events are not inherently traumatic. Trauma is a socially mediated attribution. The attribution may be made in real time, as an event unfolds; it may also be made before the event occurs, as an adumbration, or after the event has concluded, as a post-hoc reconstruction. Sometimes, in fact, events that are deeply traumatizing may not actually have occurred at all; such imagined events, however, can be as traumatizing as events that have actually occurred.3

Upon reading this, our first instinct may be to bristle at the matter-of-fact language and almost insensitive assertions Alexander appears to make. After all, how could anyone even think

2 Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, by Jeffrey C. Alexander, et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1.

3 Ibid., 8. 4 to suggest that events like the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not traumas unto themselves? To understand what the author is really suggesting, we must separate moral characterizations from sociological classifications. He does not mean to imply that events widely believed to be traumatic were not objectively horrific; they were. Rather, he is positing that trauma—specifically collective trauma—is socially constructed, and that it is a body linked to but separate from an actual event. Trauma becomes trauma via conscious, repeated human efforts to recognize and name it as such, and collective trauma hinges on the decision of a society or group to make meaning out of disruptive events. As Alexander writes, “It is the meanings that provide the sense of shock and fear, not the events in themselves.”4 By these definitions, and for the purposes of this paper, the Holocaust and the collective trauma to which it is joined are in fact two unique entities.

Although trauma may be “widely experienced and intuitively understood,”5 the process of its narrative construction is anything but simple. According to Alexander, this process is governed by four topic questions that the “carrier group,” or community at the epicenter of trauma naming, must answer to. These are:

A. The nature of the pain. What actually happened—to the particular group and to the wider collectivity of which it is a part? … B. The nature of the victim. What group of persons was affected by this traumatizing pain? Were they particular individuals or groups, or “the people” in general? Did a singular and delimited group receive the brunt of the pain, or were several groups involved? … C. Relation of the trauma victim to the wider audience. Even when the nature of the pain has been crystallized and the identity of the victim established, there remains the highly significant question of the relation of the victim to the wider audience. To what extent do the members of the audience for trauma representations experience an identity with the immediately victimized group? Typically, at the beginning of the trauma process, most

4 Ibid., 10.

5 Ibid., 2. 5

audience members see little if any relation between themselves and the victimized group. Only if the victims are represented in terms of valued qualities shared by the larger collective identity will the audience be able to symbolically participate in the experience of the originating trauma. … D. Attribution of responsibility. In creating a compelling trauma narrative, it is critical to establish the identity of the perpetrator, the “antagonist.” Who actually injured the victim? Who caused the trauma? This issue is always a matter of symbolic and social construction.6

Answers to these topic questions are mediated by various institutional arenas, including religion, aesthetics, law, science, mass media, and state bureaucracy.7 The lettered items above represent the criteria through which I aim to assess Sephardi identity construction via Holocaust trauma and memory, and by extension illustrate that genetic proximity to an event is not the single determining factor of that event’s importance to a given person’s cultural identity.

Intergenerational Trauma

A comparatively young subject, intergenerational trauma (also called transgenerational trauma) has garnered considerable attention—among psychologists, sociologists, and theorists alike—in recent years. Defined loosely as the transmission of trauma from one generation to the next, it colors academic exchanges about the lasting impact of historical events, just as it has come to carry more weight in many individuals’ perceptions of personal familial cohesion and mental health. The term looms over my extended maternal family, often bandied about in a borderline dismissive way when word of a second cousin’s diagnosis with bipolar disorder or an aunt’s brush with suicidal ideation reaches us. “What can we expect,” someone might say, “when the trauma follows us?” But despite my mother’s identity as the daughter—and mine as the

6 Ibid., 13-15.

7 Ibid., 15-21. 6 granddaughter—of people who lived through the Soviet famine of 1932-33,8 which saw the deaths of millions of Ukrainians, I’ve maintained a certain skepticism about the event’s role in the development of our family’s character. Is the obsessive-compulsive disorder I’ve struggled with since high school really the result of my grandparents’ having nearly perished in the fields of Zhytomyr? Does our family really fixate on issues of food and energy waste because of an inherited, diluted fear of starvation? How much of this experience did we choose, and how much of it is beyond our control? Similar questions tend to contribute to a larger mosaic of dialogues about intergenerational trauma and its significance to identity. Its status as a trendy topic has also engendered the popularity of self-help literature that presents intergenerational trauma as something to “work on” or be rid of altogether. If anything, these works, such as Mark Wolynn’s controversial It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and

How to End the Cycle, reinforce the haziness of intergenerational trauma as a social/scientific concept. After all, how can a person “end the cycle” if, as the author proposes, the cycle itself partially depends on something as basic as gene expressions? Two very different interpretations pave the way for a discussion of potentially broader conceptual approaches to intergenerational trauma: Janet Jacobs’ 2016 study of trauma transmission among descendants of Holocaust survivors and epigenetic studies from 2014 and 2016.

Intergenerational trauma has been studied most extensively among Holocaust survivors and their descendants. In The Holocaust Across Generations: Trauma and Its Inheritance Among

Descendants of Survivors, Janet Jacobs characterizes it as an “inherited legacy of an unwanted

8 I use this title as opposed to the more popular Holodomor, mainly because this term (derived from the Ukrainian holod [hunger] and mor [plague]) stresses human responsibility for the event. Arguments about the famine’s status as a genocide continue, and this is a debate I’m electing to distance myself from. Likewise, I’ve opted to avoid labeling my grandparents as “survivors.” 7 past.”9 Jacobs’ study, which comprised participant observation at commemorative events as well as ethnographic interviews with 75 respondents (60 children of survivors, 15 grandchildren), underlines the role of narrative, ritual, and religious observance in identity negotiation:

The research illuminates the role of narrative in shaping descendant selfhood and in connecting descendants to a terrible past. According to Ron Eyerman, it is through narrative and discourse that the past “is recounted, understood and interpreted through language and through dialogue.” In the case of Holocaust descendants, the children and grandchildren of survivors draw on multiple “founding stories” in which the past is evoked to create identities of victimhood, heroism, and moral agency. The past, then, as conveyed through narrative, becomes a frame of reference for the construction of a descendant self that is tied to the social and historical conditions of physical and cultural annihilation.10

It is important to mention that “selfhood,” as it is used above, refers to participants’ identities as the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, not explicitly as Jewish descendants of Holocaust survivors. In fact, Jacobs makes a point of explaining that one of the

75 interviewees was a first generation descendant of non-Jewish Eastern European parents who had been imprisoned in a Nazi slave labor camp, and she does so to “illuminate the diverse cultural links that exist within the history of Holocaust trauma.”11 But while these cultural links are indeed significant, Jacobs’ work still assumes that the family is “the socio-cultural setting in which trauma is conveyed across generations.”12 Moreover, it does not label respondents according to the diaspora population with whom they are affiliated, but based on survivors’ countries of origin (listed in the introduction), one can infer that the majority of those who took part in the study were Ashkenazi. The narrative aspects of intergenerational trauma, here and in

9 Janet Jacobs, The Holocaust Across Generations: Trauma and Its Inheritance Among Descendants of Survivors (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 10.

10 Ibid., 149.

11 Ibid., 3.

12 Ibid., 149. 8 another Jacobs study that shows how ritual can help Holocaust descendants separate from their traumatized parents but still retain connections to the Holocaust,13 are further complicated by relational experiences. Carol A. Kidron intimately explores these experiences in her study of 55

Israeli descendants of Holocaust survivors (she refers to them as “HDs”). Interview excerpts give powerful insight into the role of narrative as a therapeutic means to connect with the dead, the event of the Holocaust, and familial trauma: “When asked how those who were ‘not there’

[Holocaust victims in the family] could be so powerfully present, she [an interviewee named

Rivka] explained, ‘From the beginning, their absence had a name, bits of stories, and those who would make sure they were present. The Holocaust was a terrible tragedy, but, for us, we lived life to the fullest alongside the dead—both present and absent.’”14

Jacobs writes of people having “‘inherited’ the post traumatic symptoms of their traumatized parents,”15 but her decision to place “inherited” in quotation marks speaks to the term’s ambiguity. The Holocaust’s emergence as “‘a dominant psychic reality,’”16 bolstered initially by early psychiatric studies that signaled symptoms of post-traumatic stress in children of survivors, has provoked different types of research. Some experts seek to explain the phenomenon of intergenerational trauma through analysis of social spheres, while those in other fields have looked to epigenetics—the study of gene expression alterations due to environmental influences—for answers. Two examples of the latter variety frequently circulate in trauma literature. The first study, led by Linda M. Bierer, revealed that a group of children of Holocaust

13 Janet Jacobs, “The Cross-Generational Transmission of Trauma: Ritual and Emotion among Survivors of the Holocaust,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 40, no. 3 (June 2011).

14 Carol A. Kidron, “Inheriting Discontinued Bonds: Trauma-Descendant Relations with the Genocide Dead,” Death Studies 38, no. 5 (May 2014): 322.

15 Jacobs, “The Cross-Generational Transmission of Trauma,” 343.

16 Ibid. 9 survivors, or “Holocaust offspring,” exhibited reduced cortisol excretion when compared to a control group, a pattern also observed among survivors themselves.17 The second, led by Rachel

Yehuda, found that “Holocaust exposure had an effect on FKBP5 [a binding protein encoded by a gene that is typically linked to mental disorders] methylation that was observed in exposed parents as well as in their offspring.”18 This study claims to be the first demonstration of traceable epigenetic inheritance of trauma in humans. These and other attempts to answer provocative questions such as “What if our bodies remember the trauma of past generations even if we’re not conscious of it?” comprise important contributions to the medical field, and to trauma studies overall. Nevertheless, their results are offset by a causative inclination. They indicate that something is indeed happening within the genes of Holocaust survivors and their descendants, but the actual impact on peoples’ lives is equal parts subjective and vague.

Despite their wildly varied approaches to the topic, epigenetic studies and Jacobs’ work operate under the common assumption that family ties—and, by extension, genetics—are the key vehicles of intergenerational trauma. Although Jacobs never overtly states that her research is oriented around genetic connections, she does fail19 to highlight the experience(s) of people who were raised in Holocaust-adjacent environments (i.e. by survivor parents or grandparents) but who are not bound by DNA to those survivors. What of the affiliations of NPE20 people or

17 Linda M. Bierer et al., “Elevation of 11β-Hydroxysteroid Dehydrogenase Type 2 Activity in Holocaust Survivor Offspring: Evidence for an Intergenerational Effect of Maternal Trauma Exposure,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 48 (October 2014): 1.

18 Rachel Yehuda et al., “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation,” Biological Psychiatry 80, no. 5 (September 1, 2016): 372.

19 This is not meant to be read as a criticism of Jacobs’ work, which does exactly what it says it will do: it explores the transmission of Holocaust trauma within familial confines.

20 Non-paternity event, a term used in genetics to describe a situation in which the paternity of a child is misattributed. Today the acronym is more widely applied to anyone with misattributed parentage (maternal or 10 adoptees? Pondering the position of individuals with uncommon experiences within the constellation of familial Holocaust trauma leads us to sizable questions, the most glaring being this: what is the true difference between intergenerational trauma (as defined by Jacobs) and the chosen trauma described by Alexander? If disruptive events are essentially memorialized in the same way under both, through narrative, ritual, religious, and relational avenues, then is the familial element the only thing truly separating the two? The fact that self-identification as second, third, and now fourth generation “survivors” among descendants of Holocaust survivors is becoming increasingly common seems to give some weight to this theory. But to appreciate even broader implications, we might return to Jacobs’ description of the Holocaust as comprising an “unwanted past.” What if the past is hideous and regrettable, but nevertheless wanted— among descendants of survivors but also Jewish people with less proximal connections to the event—because it has become a symbol of strength and resolve, something that anchors one to his or her identity? Kidron, Kotliar, and Kirmayer, in another study of Israeli second generation

Holocaust survivors, appear to suggest this: “Although descendants experience what they recognize as emotional ‘effects’ of parental trauma, they describe this as a desirable burden of memory and not as a maladaptive psychological disorder.”21 To better understand the desirable burden of which the authors write, we must turn to the topic of Holocaust memory construction.

Holocaust Memory

In a 2000 essay titled “The Holocaust’s Life as a Ghost,” Zygmunt Bauman likens the

paternal) and is often alternatively transcribed as “Non-parental event” or “Not parent expected.” In keeping with trends in the NPE community, I use it as a noun here (a person can be an NPE).

21 Carol A. Kidron, Dan M. Kotliar, and Laurence J. Kirmayer, “Transmitted Trauma as Badge of Honor: Phenomenological Accounts of Holocaust Descendant Resilient Vulnerability,” Social Science & Medicine 239 (October 2019): 5.

11 modern world to a landscape haunted by the lasting impact of genocide. Bauman also writes of

“hereditary victimhood”:

Hereditary in this case is mainly imagined, acting through the collective production of memory and through individual acts of self-enlisting and self-identification. Thus the status of the ‘Holocaust children,’ that is of hereditary victim, is open to every Jew, whatever his or her parents might have been ‘doing in the war.’22

This concept of collective memory as a catalyst to identity construction echoes throughout contemporary works, especially those concerned with the Holocaust. But what exactly is collective memory? A simple Google search yields a rather obscure answer: “The memory of a group of people, passed from one generation to the next.”23 Attempts to narrow the definition of collective memory have more often than not resulted in the introduction of new terms to describe group memory. Perhaps the most compelling of these is James E. Young’s proposed “collected memory,” which he argues “allows for many, possibly conflicting memories to be gathered in common spaces, where they are then assigned singular meaning—by the nation-state, religious community, or any other social group with an interest in creating unity among its disparate parts and individuals.”24 And while “collective memory,” as understood in its broadest sense, is still an accurate descriptor, Young asserts that it glosses over the fragmented, rough nature of historical memory. It also advances the illusion that individuals, on some fundamental level, possess the same essential memory of an event. This is obviously not the case, and the Holocaust is no exception; women and men, adults and children, Jewish people

22 Zygmunt Bauman, “The Holocaust’s Life as a Ghost,” in Social Theory after the Holocaust, ed. Robert Fine and Charles Turner (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 13.

23 “Collective Memory,” in Lexico (Oxford University Press, n.d.), https://www.lexico.com/definition/collective_memory.

24 James E. Young, “An Interview with James E. Young,” by Jennifer L. Geddes, The Hedgehog Review 9, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 68.

12 from different diaspora groups all had unique experiences during this event. What unites them is not the sameness of memory, but rather the event itself, and consequently the collection of memories surrounding it. Before moving on to a discussion of Holocaust memory’s varied iterations and their meaning to Jewish identity, it’s important to restate the intention of this paper, or rather the opposite. The question of why Holocaust-related trauma has come to be seen as a marker of Jewish identity—or, in reference to Young, why there is an interest in creating unity within the global Jewish community—is not what I’m trying to answer. First, because the

“why” is subjective, and second, because it actually may be clearer than we realize: antisemitic actors have practically always ignored the cultural diversity within Judaism, instead opting to paint all Jewish people as a collective “other” whose presence needs to be dealt with. By this I do not mean to suggest that oppression has been the most significant factor in Jewish cohesiveness, but it may partially contextualize the ongoing quest for it.

Three divisions shape our brief exploration of Holocaust memory: the event from the trauma, the trauma from the memory of the trauma, and the memory of the trauma from the memory of the event. The act of remembering the Holocaust looks different depending on social, political, and geographic setting, and the ways in which the event “has been selectively remembered to shape the post-war national identities and politics in Germany, collaborating countries, the Allied powers, and Israel”25 have been assessed by many scholars, Young among them. That said, the reasons these entities give for deliberate Holocaust remembrance are often very similar, and ensuring that it—genocide, committed against Jews or any other group of people—never happens again lies at the heart of most. The question then becomes centered on how such purposeful remembrance is maintained. Jacobs, Young, and others hold that the

25 Lawrence Baron, “Experiencing, Explaining, and Exploiting the Holocaust,” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 50, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 162.

13 preservation of Holocaust memory occurs through rituals, public commemorative events, symbols, monuments, film, and other media. Though unalike in a purely utilitarian sense, these agents of Holocaust memory are joined together by the theme of narrative representation. Even if

Schindler’s List and, say, a Holocaust memorial site in Poland are informed by their own exclusive conditions, they nonetheless work to tell the story of a single event.

The Holocaust saw the deaths of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis, a loss of unquantifiable magnitude that has shaped the contemporary world in profound ways. Memory of this event is embedded in our global consciousness, and there is little denying that it is also an important component of Jewish identity. This is clearly outlined in a 2013 survey of Jewish

Americans conducted by the Pew Research Center as part of their Religion & Public Life

Project. The survey tackles topics such as intermarriage, religious beliefs, social and political views, and opinions about Israel, but the section of particular interest to this paper deals with different elements of Jewish identity. As a part of this chapter, respondents were asked to rate characteristics “essential” to being Jewish (answer options included eating traditional foods, observing Jewish law, being part of a Jewish community, having a good sense of humor, caring about Israel, being intellectually curious, working for justice/equality, leading an ethical and moral life, and remembering the Holocaust). By a larger amount than any of the other traits listed, 73 percent of the net Jewish population surveyed identified “remembering the Holocaust” as an integral part of their Jewishness. “Jews by religion” and “Jews of no religion” indicated the same, at 76 percent and 60 percent, respectively.26 While the study does differentiate between these two groups (as opposed to “people of Jewish background” and “people with a Jewish affinity,” who are not included in the net Jewish population), it does not distinguish between

26 A Portrait of Jewish Americans (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2013).

14 diaspora populations. Regardless of whether respondents were majority Ashkenazi, Sephardi,

Mizrahi, etc.—and despite the fact that “remembering” is never explicitly defined—what we can glean from the Pew findings is the seriousness with which American Jews approach Holocaust remembrance, not just as a cultural obligation, but as a foundational part of their identities as

Jews.

Judaism may be a religion of memory (one could argue this was the case long before the

Holocaust), but identifying with the Holocaust, or with Holocaust memory, alone is not in and of itself a marker of Jewish identity. Non-Jewish people today frequently align themselves with and invest themselves in the memorialization of the Holocaust, in part because the event was, as

Young posits, “universalized, it was meant to become a lesson for all of humanity in many spheres…[and] it has become the extreme example by which to measure various theories of culture—philosophical ones, religious ones…”27 Young’s observations go hand-in-hand with

Point C of Alexander’s process of narrative construction: relation of the trauma victim to the wider audience. Outsiders, in this case non-Jews, “symbolically participate”28 in Holocaust memory through memorials, museums, Holocaust education, the consumption of media related to the event, memorial attendance, observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and more. But what makes Holocaust remembrance unique among Jewish people, and what might help explain why American Jews named it as essential to their cultural identities in the

Pew survey, is trauma—intergenerational or otherwise. For them, remembrance is more than symbolic participation; it’s internalized and reified by constructed cultural trauma. In other words, what distinguishes collected Holocaust memory as an attribute of Jewish identity is the

27 James E. Young, “An Interview with Prof. James E. Young,” by Adi Gordon and Amos Goldberg, Yad Vashem, last modified May 24, 1998, https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/james-e-young.html.

28 Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” 14. 15 trauma surrounding it. This trauma has been chosen and constructed, as illustrated by Alexander, though a particular process, and by design includes all Jewish people, regardless of genetic or familial proximity to the atrocities of the event itself.

Sephardi Identity

The substance of this essay hinges on the notion that Sephardim did not bear the brunt of the Holocaust. And while it’s true that Ashkenazi populations suffered the most in terms of numbers and direct impact, many Sephardi communities across Europe also experienced near- annihilation. Consequently, it’s essential to make note of the unique experiences of these victims and survivors, as my intention is not to disregard such an important part of history, nor is it to dictate who possesses “legitimate” claims to Holocaust trauma. The experiences of Sephardim during the Holocaust are often so overlooked that, as Henry Abramson puts it, a “double occlusion” has formed: not only are Sephardim frequently written out of the overarching

Holocaust narrative, but scholarly accounts of the topic are difficult to come by.29 Regardless, it is clear that the Sephardi enclaves in Greece, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia (today Croatia, Serbia,

Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Slovenia) were devastated during World War II. Cities with Jewish populations that were hit exceptionally hard include Sarajevo, Belgrade, Sofia, and Salonika.30 The latter, once home to the largest Jewish community in Greece, saw its Jewish numbers decrease from 50,000 pre-war to 2,000 post-

29 Henry Abramson, “A Double Occlusion: Sephardim and the Holocaust,” in Sephardic & Mizrahi Jewry, edited by Zion Zohar (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 285.

30 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Sephardi Jews during the Holocaust,” The Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/sephardi-jews-during-the-holocaust.

16 war.31 Only ten percent of the overall Greek Jewish population survived World War II.32 The fate of Salonika’s Sephardim mirrored that of Ashkenazim in other parts of German-occupied

Europe, both in cruelty and patterns of forced labor, ghettoization, and mass murder. One story from the city, foreign yet familiar, summarizes the Nazis’ contempt for Jewish existence: “The

German authorities demanded a ransom for the release of the Jews [who had been held captive for labor]. The Jewish community in Salonika collected money in Salonika and Athens and sold the Jewish cemetery in Salonika to raise the required sum. (Salonika’s city administration purchased the cemetery, then broke up the headstones for construction materials and later built a university at the site.)”33 While the Nazis’ systematic persecution of Greek Jews was much like their persecution of other European Jews, Sephardi experiences during the Holocaust varied by country. For example, the Jews of Croatia suffered at the hands of the Ustaša, a fascist organization known for its brutal killing methods, and Serbian Sephardim were the first Jews in

Europe to be murdered via experimental gas vans in 1942.34 Other communities experienced minimal losses. Nevertheless, the fact remains that countless Sephardi Jews were indeed victims of the Holocaust, having faced the prospect of obliteration like Ashkenazim did.

Fragments of collected memory span from the Sephardi Holocaust experience. The story of the Jewish community in the Dodecanese island of Rhodes, and what it has come to represent for the diaspora, is an example of this collected memory. Once home to a rich, ancient Judeo-

31 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Salonika,” The Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/salonika.

32 Abramson, “A Double Occlusion,” 287.

33 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Salonika.”

34 Abramson, “A Double Occlusion,” 293. 17

Spanish culture—often considered the “mother community”35 of the Jewish Levant—Rhodes lost most of its Jewish inhabitants to the Holocaust. In the summer of 1944, Sephardim were deported from the island, sent on a grueling sea voyage, placed in a transit camp, and eventually transported to Auschwitz by the Nazis. The tragedy of Rhodes represents population dislocation but also what Aron Rodrigue refers to as the end of a “mixed tapestry” of cultures. As he notes in a 2005 lecture, “It took the murderous force of the Nazis to take the Jews out of the Levantine mosaic...Rhodes memory is unparalleled…[it] acts as a source of identity building…it also epitomizes the old Levantine matrix that exists no more, that was essential to the making of the

Judeo-Spanish world.”36 But while this embodies a Sephardi narrative of direct event exposure being fixed in the collected memory of the diaspora, the question of what it—and the innumerable stories like it—means for broader identity construction remains.

This is the question with which the remaining section is concerned. However, one substantial limitation looms over my interrogation of the topic: partially because of the large

Sephardi population in the country and partially because little work on post-Holocaust Sephardi identity has been carried out in the United States, the remainder of this paper exhibits a total bent toward Israel-centered research. While still illuminating, this research describes phenomena occurring within a distinct vector of influence. As Kidron observes, In Israel “the enlistment of

Holocaust survivors and their descendants in public monumental commemorative projects…is perceived by critical scholars not only to sustain Jewish collective memory but also to legitimate the state’s sovereignty in the Jewish historical homeland in the face of protracted geo-political

35 “Stroum Lectures 2005: Rhodes, the Island of Memory - Aron Rodrigue,” video, 58:30, YouTube, posted by StroumJewishStudies, February 15, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aErzdWHxsbM&feature=emb_title, 56:55.

36 Rodrigue lecture, 52:02. 18 debate over territorial rights.”37

A jarring scene from the recently popular Netflix miniseries Unorthodox, which follows a young woman’s departure from New York’s Hasidic community and her subsequent attempt to build a new life in Berlin, epitomizes the complex position of Holocaust memory in Israel. After arriving in Germany, the protagonist, Esty, befriends a group of international musicians (one of them an Israeli violinist named Yael), who invite her to swim with them at Großer Wannsee.38

During the car ride to the lake, the group casually chats about things to do in the city:

Robert: “Let’s show her something nice” [in German] Yael: “Like what, Hitler’s bunker?” [in English] Esty (shocked): “It’s still there?” Yael: “Or we can take selfies at the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe.” Axmed: “That, Yael, is a superb idea, and the memorial to the murdered homosexuals is just across the street, and while we’re at it, there’s one to the murdered Sinti and Roma nearby too.” … Esty (stern): “My grandparents lost their whole families in the camps.” Yael (flippant): “So did half of Israel, but we’re too busy defending our present to be sentimental about our past.”39

Although fascinating, this vignette relies heavily on the “mythological sabra” stereotype described by Yael Zerubavel in a 2002 article for Israel Studies: the native-born, thick-skinned, forward-looking Israeli.40 The exchange between Esty and Yael hints at tension, but altogether misses the very conscious efforts made by Israel to lift up and remember the Holocaust as an important marker of Jewish—and Israeli—identity. These efforts indicate that, as we will see,

37 Kidron, “Inheriting Discontinued Bonds,” 324.

38 The lake located in the suburb of Wannsee in Berlin, where the Wannsee Conference—a meeting organized to coordinate the implementation of the “Final Solution”—was held in January 1942.

39 Unorthodox, season 1, episode 1, “Part 1,” written by Anna Winger, aired on Netflix.

40 Yael Zerubavel, “The ‘Mythological Sabra’ and Jewish Past: Trauma, Memory, and Contested Identities,” Israel Studies 7, no. 2 (July 1, 2002).

19 trauma creation is a process; it took time for Israelis to “choose” Holocaust trauma and allow it to begin defining their ethnoreligious and national identities. This process involved answering specific questions about the nature of the pain surrounding the Holocaust, the nature of the

Holocaust victim, and the attribution of responsibility,41 and has yielded captivating insights into the links between trauma, memory, and Sephardi identity.

Today, defining the term “Holocaust,” problematic though it is for its sacrificial connotation, is not necessarily a difficult task. We generally know what happened and we have an idea of how many innocent lives were lost. We are aware of the many shades of horror that colored the event; the death factories, gas chambers, crematoria, ghettoes, and mass graves.

Various “symbols” have coalesced into a Holocaust consciousness of sorts, informed by collected memories of the genocide. But just as in other parts of the globe, it took time for this consciousness to form in Israel, for the “complete picture to come into focus”42 so that people who were not there could fully comprehend the extent of the devastation. So, Alexander’s question of the nature of the pain has a relatively straightforward answer here. It is the question of what exactly happened to the “wider collectivity” that complicates the cultural trauma- building process surrounding the Holocaust.

Alexander poignantly asks in the introduction to Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity,

“Is the suffering of others also our own? In thinking that it might in fact be, societies expand the circle of the we.”43 This quote has special significance to the question of Holocaust victimhood, in part because collective Jewish suffering is not a new concept. As Howard Stein observes,

41 Point C, relation of the trauma victim to the wider audience, is discussed in the preceding section on Holocaust memory.

42 Hanna Yablonka, “Oriental Jewry and the Holocaust: A Tri-Generational Perspective,” Israel Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 97.

43 Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” 1. 20

Jewish history is marked by many instances of pain, from slavery to expulsions to pogroms.44 If the borders of Point B (the nature of the victim) are set by the group as a whole, then Holocaust trauma as an element of Jewish identity, even among those removed from the event, is possible.

In Israel, Sephardim have been instrumental actors in this process of border setting. For example, one of the prompters for Israel’s post-Yom Kippur War push for Holocaust education was a demand on the part of marginalized Jews—including Sephardim—to garner more representation.45 This conceptualizes the Holocaust as a collective Jewish trauma, and reinforces the notion that no matter a Jewish person’s diasporic affiliations, Holocaust memory essentially

“belongs” to all Jews. But how did Israel move from a country with complex relations to survivors and “marginalized groups” to one where, for two minutes, all life pauses in silent remembrance on Yom HaShoah?

An attempt to answer this question goes far beyond the scope of this paper, but Hanna

Yablonka’s tri-generational study of Sephardi (or “Oriental”) Jewry in Israel gives us an idea of what exactly expanding Holocaust trauma looks like. As she summarizes, “The first generations viewed the destruction of the European Jews with profound compassion, but felt that the Shoah was a chapter in the history of the European Jews. Their children attempted to connect, facing, to a large extent, resentment and alienation. Their grandchildren already have the Shoah burnt into their souls—being an integral part of their self-definition as Israelis.”46 Here, “generations” is used differently than in earlier examined studies; it refers to a whole generation of Jewish

Israelis, not just the children and grandchildren (genetic descendants) of survivors. As Alexander

44 Howard Stein, “‘Chosen Trauma’ and a Widely Shared Sense of Jewish Identity and History,” Journal of Psychohistory 41, no. 4 (April 1, 2014).

45 Zerubavel, “The ‘Mythological Sabra,’” 119.

46 Yablonka, “Oriental Jewry and the Holocaust,” 94. 21 suggests, aesthetics played a major role in the progression Yablonka presents. The link between

Sephardim and the Holocaust came largely “in the form of Sephardic artists who internalized the essence of the Holocaust in the Israeli experience and now offered alternative ways to commemorate it.”47 Sephardi artists wanted to create new, inclusive patterns that would continue the dialogue of Holocaust memory, mainly through films and plays. The attitudes of the third generation of Sephardi Israelis are exemplified in the alternative Tel Aviv Holocaust Day ceremony described by Yablonka. Attended by over 1,000 people, most of them young

Sephardim and Mizrahim, the ceremony embraces commemoration without mourning, yet still echoes cultural trauma: “This illustrates the way a large number of Sephardic Jews have become inseparable bearers of the collective memory; consciously or not; have been caught up in the sweep of emotions and fears that the Holocaust summons; and derive meaning and insights from it.”48 The message of third generation cohesion revealed by Yablonka reverberates throughout studies conducted by Alon Lazar and Tal Litvak Hirsch, namely one in which they assessed (1) the willingness of Israeli high school students (many of them Sephardi) to create Holocaust- commemorative web content and (2) what kind of messages the students would want to relay via said content. Lazar and Hirsch found that two goals emerged as most important to the students: combating Holocaust denial and preserving Holocaust memory “in order to keep the Jewish people strong and united.”49 The students made no mention of disparate diaspora groups; to them, it seems, the Holocaust is a Jewish trauma, full stop.

The attribution of responsibility—the identity of the antagonist—is key to negotiating

47 Ibid., 105.

48 Ibid., 114.

49 Alon Lazar and Tal Litvak Hirsch, “High School Students and Online Commemoration of the Group’s Cultural Trauma,” Research in Education 92 (November 2014): 76.

22 cultural trauma surrounding the Holocaust. For baseline purposes, the culpable group is obvious:

Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler. Beyond this, questions of perpetrator/bystander/innocent party distinctions abound, inextricably tied to the hazy “German” label. These questions aside, the attribution of responsibility for the Holocaust is certainly clear enough for a consistent trauma narrative to form. For example, Rodrigue momentarily reflects on the “uneconomical” deportation processes by which the Jews of Rhodes were killed;50 such instances of deeply ingrained bureaucratic systems renders identifying the guilty party that much easier. Finally, the post-Holocaust Hebrew poetry of Sephardim, an example of “deep feelings of brotherhood,”51 does double duty. While these works give us a window into how the attribution of responsibility was conceptualized by Jews not directly affected by the genocide, they also demonstrate how

Sephardim related to the Holocaust from the beginning. These sentiments are perhaps most beautifully captured in the below excerpt from “I Will Shiver and Quiver” by Rabbi Menashe’

Saliman Shahrabani:

My enemy Hitler enacted a law Hitler the unbeliever and cruel [:] [“] whoever has a Hebrew name I will utterly blot out his remembrance [“]

He killed sages and wise and honorable and loyal [Jews] and smote the mother with the children he spilled our blood as water

and went out to the war and conquered kings of the earth…52

Shahrabani’s words hint at the concept of shared destiny described by Yablonka, but also

50 Rodrigue lecture, 16:02.

51 Lev Hakak, “The Holocaust in the Hebrew Poetry of Sephardim and Near Eastern Jews,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 89.

52 Ibid., 95. 23 the idea that Jewish cohesion via trauma is not a phenomenon exclusive to the Holocaust. His use of the determiner “our” and his identification of Hitler as a personal enemy are not only powerful, they evince a process of collected cultural trauma and memory that began long before the tragedy of the Holocaust.

Conclusion

The subject matter of this paper fits into a larger conversation about attempts to narrow

Jewish identity down to clean percentages via genetic testing. Such a thing can technically be done, but what does that really mean for Jewish being, collective and personal? Clean percentages, ultimately, are the result of spitting in a tube. They don’t reveal how a person was raised, the stories they heard as children, or the customs they’ve known since their youth. They are not concerned with language, narrative, or emotion. Identifying with the Holocaust through memory is not unique to Jewish people, but aligning oneself with the cultural trauma of the

Holocaust through memory has become a fundamental part of Jewish identity, regardless of diasporic roots or genetic bonds. Because of this, it is nearly impossible to distinguish between intergenerational trauma and cultural trauma. After all, is a Jewish person any less a part of the next generation of Jews, any less responsible for bearing the memory of the Holocaust, if he or she is not a descendant of survivors? Moreover, while an event might be horrific, the trauma constructed around it doesn’t always have to be. Sephardim with no genetic ties to the Holocaust and Ashkenazim who lost entire extended families to the genocide may make different contributions to collected Jewish memory, but they are nevertheless united by a wanted trauma.

Lived experiences, especially in a world still impacted by antisemitism, speak for themselves; just because a connection is ethereal doesn’t mean it isn’t authentic. 24

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