Joseph Gedalecia, President. A. J. AMATEAU, Secretary.
These Spanish Jews preserved their standing as merchants, artisans or
even small semi-professionals. In some towns, notably Salonika, they
came to form the bulk of the population. They were seldom persecuted as
they had no suppressed nationalism to defend against an invader. They
never sank to the level of the native peasantry. Though materially
comfortable, their intellectual development stagnated, under Turkish
discouragement of education, until the young Turk movement of a few
years ago. This was accompanied by a spread of popular education and
with it knowledge that there was a world outside their own particular
corner of the Orient. Ambition and a desire to see the world stimulated
an Oriental Jewish migration which is largely responsible for their
presence in New York city. It is almost the only Jewish migration to
America that was not due to poverty or persecution. The Spanish Jews
chose America as their place of pilgrimage in the face of the fact that
the Spanish government has recently sent representatives to Turkey for
the purpose of inducing them to return to Spain, an evidence that that
country believes them to have qualities that would be an asset to the
country of their choice.
The present westward migration of the Spanish Jew had less to offer than
their migration eastward five hundred years ago. In New York their
isolation has been complete, for the Yiddish speaking East Side Jew does
not understand them any better than does the American, and rather
despises their lack of intellectual attainments.
In physical equipment these people are superior to the Russian Jew; they
have strong, handsome physiques. The men have drifted to day labor
rather than to the unwholesome work of the garment trades. The girls
alone are in these trades; it is said, indeed, that they have usurped
the whole of the East Side kimono work from the Russians. Free from the
weakening effect of European persecution, the Ladino-speaking Jews have
shown even in their short and handicapped history in America so far, a
daring business sense which enables them to point to half a dozen
American millionaires of their race. The Russian Jew among his million
immigrants can point to scarcely more.
It is to give scope to these native abilities by adapting them to
American conditions that Mr. Gedalecia and other leaders of the race
have for four years been working up to the mass meeting of last month.
This was held under the auspices of the Federation of Oriental Jews, a
union of eighteen benefit societies which the Spanish and Portuguese
Sisterhood and the North American Civic League for Immigrants were
largely instrumental in forming about three years ago. Night classes for
Ladino Jews have been opened in two public schools. Intensive work has
been done by the Industrial Removal Office, also, in distributing
individuals in other parts of the country besides New York or sending
them to Panama, Central and South America and the Philippines, where
their antique Spanish dialect survives and where, without the handicap
of language, in more than one case, beginning as peddlers, they have
become merchants. Many of those who have succeeded in business import
their goods from the United States, thus becoming a medium of bringing
about business relations between this country and its Latin-American
neighbors.