Sephardim in Harlem

One observer of Jewish Harlem in its brief heyday was the Puerto Rican activist Bernardo Vega. An early migrant who reached New York in 1916, he notes in his memoir a restaurant called La Luz. “We were attracted by the Spanish name, although the owner was actually a Sephardic Jew,” he writes. “The food was not prepared in the style that was familiar to us, but we did notice that the sauces were of Spanish origin.” It’s a rare outsider’s reference to East Harlem’s other Jewish community. New York’s Sephardim – mainly Jews from the Eastern Ottoman Empire, some 40,000 strong in the 1920s, were descended from Spanish exiles of Columbus’s day. They spoke Ladino, a mixture of medieval Spanish with Hebrew, Turkish, Italian, Greek, and Portuguese, and wrote it with Hebrew characters.

Individual Sephardic families – the Hayses, Hendrickses, and Peixottos -- some with roots in New York dating to the 1600s, made up a Jewish aristocracy in the 19th century. They had little to do with a second migration from Turkey, Cyprus, and other Mediterranean ports, who swelled the community’s numbers and added spice to Jewish Harlem. Relations between the Sephardim and their Eastern European brethren were often fraught. For their part, the Eastern European immigrants were baffled by these Jews who didn’t speak Yiddish, looked Hispanic, and prayed in such strange accents. At times, the Sephardim found a warmer reception from their Spanish-speaking, non-Jewish neighbors. Caribbean immigrants could communicate somewhat with these Jews in their medieval Spanish tongue, and intermarriage was common enough that Sephardic newspapers warned gravely against it.

Jewish Harlem Pt. 2

The Jewish presence in Harlem dates back to the years after the Civil War, when the future Barrio was a semi-rural village both geographically and psychically distant from New York City. Its eastern reaches were crisscrossed by streams originating from the Harlem River, and rocky promontories, lowland marshes and wide-open fields contributed to the remove. Wooden shanties pockmarked the area, as seen in this ca. 1890 photograph of Fifth Ave between 116th and 117th Streets. In time, a commercial strip developed along Third Avenue north to 125th Street, populated with single-story shops and homes. A group of German Jews began to set up small stores. Twelve members held the first Sabbath services in Harlem in 1873.

The Harlem pioneers were cut off from the more substantial community on the (lower) East Side. They formed their own synagogues, Jewish schools (cheders), and social groups, including the Harlem YMHA and B’nai B’rith, but it was the railroad that insured the survival of Harlem’s Jews. The Second and Third Avenue elevated trains were completed by 1880, making the arduous trek to Delancey Street a 45 minute commute. Real estate speculators launched an unparalleled construction boom that filled over half of East Harlem with private homes, tenements, and brownstone apartments. Established German Jews moved to Fifth Avenue and its environs, while more utilitarian buildings to the east and south gave shelter to the Irish and Italian rail workers.

Waiting to fill the rest of newly developed Twelfth Ward was the first wave of the largest migration of Eastern European Jews In history. Many were fleeing the Russian pogroms in 1903 and the growing chaos of the Bolshevik revolution. Their sheer numbers – nearly 800,000 in 1910, or 41% of all new immigrants -- changed the character of New York City. The storied Lower East Side, with its peddlers, piecework, and vibrant Yiddish press, became a cradle of Eastern European Jewry. Its narrow tenements were filled to bursting with strivers from Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and nearly every other nook and cranny around the world that Jews once called home.

Russian peddlers and tailors joined American-born Jewish merchants, small businessmen, successful bankers, and other white-collar professionals. German Jews, clean-shaven and reform-minded, shared the sidewalk with bearded, shawl-draped immigrants seemingly plucked from the Middle Ages. By 1910, East Harlem was home to over 90,000 Jews and dozens of synagogues of varied denominations, from small shuls of former shtetl neighbors to the grandiose Ohab Zedek, one of the largest synagogues in turn-of-the-century New York, home to the famous cantor Yossele Rosenblatt.

Harlem’s success would be its undoing. The neighborhood that had been a pressure valve for the teeming Lower East Side began to swell itself. The land speculation led to overcrowding and neglect; conditions only worsened as the nation plunged into World War I. All non-essential construction ceased. Rents climbed skyward and buildings fell into disrepair. Mention of “East Harlem” began to take on the desultory tone that it bears to this day. Jews with any savings began to eye the wider spaces of the Bronx and Brownsville, Brooklyn.

Within a generation, the community that had risen to sophisticated heights was a ghost of its former self. The Jewish population of Harlem spiraled downward, losing nearly 100,000 members in 1923 alone. The Federal Immigration Acts passed a year later shut off New York to Eastern European Jews entirely, and the community simply dried up. The poorly-maintained apartments were swallowed up, abusive rents and all, by African-American migrants from the south, whose neighborhood choices were far more circumscribed than that of the Jews. Along with them came another hardscrabble American minority, the Puerto Ricans.

• Navigable map of Harlem, ca. 1903
  
• More on Yossele Rosenblatt and The Jazz Singer
• When Harlem Was Jewish, by Jeffrey Gurock
  

Jewish Harlem Pt. 1

Before there was Spanish Harlem, there was Jewish Harlem.

The eastern edge of Manhattan, from Fifth Avenue to the East River between 96th St. and 142nd St., is today New York City’s Latin heart, “El Barrio” to over 50,000 residents of Puerto Rican and other Latino ancestry. Walking around these streets, where salsa music streams from tenement windows, it’s hard to imagine that this was once the second largest Jewish community in America. But scratch the surface of today’s Barrio, and another ghetto emerges. It’s hard to miss, for instance, Mt. Sinai Hospital, founded in 1852 as Jews’ Hospital, on 100th Street across from Central Park. But only city records recall that the immense Baptist Temple on West 116th Street, was once the home of Ohab Zedek, one of the largest Jewish congregations in New York at the turn of the century. Between the two, at the foot of West 110th St., stands La Hermosa Church, formerly the Jewish-owned Park Palace catering hall, one of the hottest Latin dance halls from the ‘30s to the ‘50s. Even the Grace Aguilar branch of the New York Public library on 110th St. between Lexington and Third Avenues, which would seem to be a proud Puerto Rican institution, is named for the English Jewish poet and novelist of Spanish extraction.

In Harlem, Jews and Latinos struck up a musical relationship. Jewish entrepreneurs sold and recorded Latin music to Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and other Spanish speakers. They rented out dance halls and social clubs to Puerto Rican revelers, encouraging the local music scene. They were among the first devotees of a tropical music that grew right in their backyards, that wasn’t just the sombrero-topped Hollywood facsimile of Latin rhythm. Harlem’s Jewish businessmen in the ‘30s – the owners of the Park Plaza, the proprietor of Seeco Records, Sidney Seigel – saw the neighborhood change into a thriving Caribbean community.