To Italy and France (and Back…to Spain)
Over the years, Fern and I have traveled through Europe on vacation, and some of our strongest memories come from the times we've unexpectedly run into fellow Sepharadim along the way.
This past June we were in Venice, Italy. On our visit, we made a point of walking through the Jewish Ghetto. Of the five synagogues still standing there, only two can currently be toured: the Turkish and Greek, and the larger Spanish and Portuguese. Our guide mentioned that she herself is Sephardic — one of only three Jewish families who still actually live in the Ghetto (her in-laws are another one of the three). Her family's roots in Venice go all the way back to the year 1454, and they still know exactly where they came from before that: Greece. Romaniotes.
From Venice we went on to Florence, one of our favorite cities anywhere, home to a striking Ottoman-inspired synagogue. Not long after checking into our hotel, we stopped by to see Franco, a local leather jacket maker we'd gotten to know over the years. At some point in the conversation he used the word mishpahah, and I asked whether he just happened to know the word, or whether he was de los muetros - one of us Turns out his father's side is Catholic, but his mother's side is Jewish - and Sephardic, no less, tracing back to Spain before the family left for Florence in 1470.
Franco walked us a couple of blocks over to introduce us to his cousin Jean, who works in Florentine gold jewelry — also Sephardic, on the same side of the family.
Another time, we were in the south of France, at Cap Ferrat, visiting the villa and gardens once owned by Beatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild — a wonderful convergence of French Jewish history in one place. We stopped for lunch at the villa's tea room, and our waiter greeted us by name: "Welcome, Mr. and Mrs. Bensignor." Then he asked, quite directly, if I was Sephardic. Noam, it turned out, whose own family is from Algeria and Tunisia, had made something of a personal study of Sephardic surnames — and he recognized Bensignor right away as a French rendering of a Ladino name.
Five hundred years on, we Sepharadim still seem to find one another.
Like Alfonso, a leather jacket maker in Barcelona, then in his seventies, whom we first visited back in 2007. I mentioned that my family had left Spain five centuries earlier, at the Expulsion. He told me his family had been in Spain a thousand years before that. We happened to walk into his shop on a Friday afternoon, and he pulled out a decanter of sherry so we could toast Shabbat together. We've returned to his store twice since — it's now run by his daughter, another generation carrying it forward.
And once, in Toledo, where family memory says a branch of ours lived before the Expulsion, Fern and I walked into the Sinagoga del Tránsito, now a museum. Standing in what had once been the sanctuary, I felt a chill and my eyes filled with tears, thinking I might be standing exactly where my ancestors once prayed, more than five hundred years ago.
I still feel it, every time I think back on that moment.
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