has anyone ever asked you where are you from I'm from New York New York Houston Texas La Canada and then when you tell them where you grew up they lean in and ask you where you really from America for a long time but polish before that Mal German and some Poland and Ethiopia Stalin Persia M Tunisia I get asked this question a lot I know some of you are wondering why a guy that looks like me is telling the Jewish story well let me set the record straight I'm definitely Jewish so is she so is
he so are they yet we all come from the same place go far enough back and 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 that's when I learned that to be perceived as Jewish you needed to look white here's another fun fact I am Jewish what you needed a last name like Rosen bomb or Goldstein you needed grandparents who said I they 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 no what way it's impossible I wasn't white I played varsity football no inhaler required and while some of my grandparents did speak Yiddish they were just as likely to use Hebrew Arabic or Creole when they talk to one another and that's not just because the stereotypes I've just described are one-dimensional and ridiculous though they are it's also because these stereotypes rest on a very narrow and recent view of Jews totally ignoring most of our history
what exactly do I mean by that well 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 the strange practice eventually those descendants grew into an entire nation of people worshiping the same God and eventually they carved out a distinct identity in set of practices that's the basic story each of us has a family story that fits into the wider Narrative of our people today I'm going to tell you mine moving backwards through time we'll
climb down the branches of my family tree until we get to the roots because as the product of five different diaspora communities I know how complicated it can be to answer the question where are Jews really from but the further back we rewind the clearer the answer becomes so let's start our journey down the family tree 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's that or if they're good at geography and they 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 surpr there was a time when the Caribbean was home to a thriving Jewish Community this is theed Shalom Synagogue this is a Spanish Portuguese synagogue in Serena this is Nel he took me on a tour of my family history through the artifacts of Jerusalem's Israel Museum and you heard him right this is a synagogue from suram that was disassembled shipped to Israel and reassembled right
here in Jerusalem so everything you see in white was basically shrunken down the scale so it can fit into the museum but all the artifacts are original some are older some are later and this Sedaka box from 300 years ago tells you a lot it reads which means rescuing captives which is unfortunately a very contemporary issue but imagine a world in which Jews were captured and ransomed on a regular basis and this is what they're collecting money for my ancestors might have gone to services in the synagogue or maybe a nearby synagogue called the a
synagogue founded by Jews of color 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 ashkanazi Jews look European and why many Iranian Jews look Iranian and why many Caribbean Jews look like well me so what brought Jews to the Caribbean was it the pristine beaches the rum the dance hall beats yeah I wish 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 though conversion didn't help much when the church suspected you were secretly practicing Judaism and sent the Inquisition authorities after you I got a small glimpse into the Inquisition when I visited with the head of the archives at Israel's National Library this is a ledger that was run by the administration of
the Inquisition in po in lbone and that's documenting the the different Auto def that were conducted in Lone how many people were executed who was the priest to give the the sermon at the time 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 but if Iberian Jews weren't from Spain and Portugal where were they from and how did they get to Spain in the first place meet everyone's favorite old school colonizers the Empire that's always
on our minds that's right all hail the power of the Roman Empire the mighty Roman Empire rolled into Judea in 63 bcee and refused to leave for 6 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 the Roman overlords but the honeymoon period period didn't last the struggle got ugly fast welcome to the great Jewish Revolt 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 so these coins are Jewish coins which were restruck on Roman coins and used for the temple service in the great Revolt this is a coin that says on one side she is shekele of Israel and there's the letters that represent the date so this says Shin which means year five which is very rare because the rebellion was suppressed shortly after year five and on the other one it says y holy Jerusalem
these coins would have been made just months or even weeks before the rebellion was crushed in 70 CE the Roman Empire won they burned the temple to the ground destroyed entire cities and an estimated 1/3 of the population was dead while many survivors stayed others decided to relocate to greener pastures across the Empire including to the Iberian Peninsula hence my mom's story but that's only half the tale because there's a whole other side of my family tree and their story has just as many twists and turns my dad's maternal grandparents were among the founders of
the first religious kibuts in 1937 so s shitty shitty personally it sounds pretty rough to me I can't imagine what was going through in my great-grandparents head when they showed up to this having come from Germany but I guess anything was probably better than staying in 1930s Germany the Holocaust was the climax of a long complicated and painful history for Jews in Germany we know in the medieval period that sometimes it was only a very small amount of Jews that were allowed in a certain town I mean only 17 families here 19 families there they
had to get a special Charter that enable them to actually live there seems like a very precarious position to be where it's like okay yeah you've been granted these rights even if it's not equal rights to at least the the right to be tolerated in a certain city or Village uh but you're already getting ready for the almost the eventuality that uh that's going to be rescinded and how you're going to respond to that yeah so Jews were always the wandering Zoo even even if he was not wandering was always waiting with a small suitcase
somewhere because again like in Spain even after 1500 years in Germany the Jews were still considered foreigners and while Jews came to Germany over the centuries fleeing persecution or seeking opportunity or both my German family's tradition is that they had been in Germany for nearly 2 Millennia they'd come to Germany from Judea over 60 years after the temple was destroyed and they came as slaves of the Roman 10th Legion yeah those guys again because even 60 years after the Romans had sacked Judea they were still fighting with those pesky rebellious Jews see despite the destruction
and the dispossession and the trauma there was still enough fight left in judea's Jews to make the Romans miserable the face of this rebellion was an extreme and charismatic Warrior named Shimon Baka who supposedly made his soldiers bite off a finger to prove their bravery I guess he was from the Game of Throne School of warfare 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 but the Rebellion only lasted a few years the Roman Emperor hadren sent onethird of his army
to crush the rebellion and with it any lingering dreams of Jewish Independence the Ripple effects of this Revolt were I mean throughout the generations but until today what hadrien basically did is tried to sever the link between Jews and Jerusalem is he basically raised from the dead the name Palestine which the Greeks refer to as like the the the Philistines by the time of the Romans the Philistines no longer existed there were no Philistines in Judea which served hadrien perfectly and he basically raised from the dead that that term and just named the entire country
the Provincia Syria Palestina it's the subsection of the the District of Syria we're going to call it Palestine no Judea no Jews and this is to sever that connection so it strengthens a lot more where we are today we're even we're still dealing with the ripple effect of hadrien now when he defeated barva and suppressed the Revolt he wanted to make sure that not a single Jew would dream of rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem or rebelling he need to make an example and one of the things he did is he went to TRV and he
made an arch of hadrien and this is what remains of it and we understand this to be the official Archway to commemorate the suppression of the bar Revolt this was found in TV you're telling me that 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 hadrien had erected to 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 in your face Adrien so we're going from the Barba Revolt to Germany and then back to the very spot where Rome declared Jewish sovereignty in this land had ended if you listen closely you can hear my great-grandparents getting the last laugh so that's part one of my dad Story the German side the other side is from Jerusalem my paternal grandfather's family has been in Jerusalem for Seven Generations they lived in a community that would come to be known as the old ISU the
retroactive term for the Jews living in Palestine before the political Zionism of the late 19th century so I went to the old yeshu Museum in Jerusalem to learn more about the community my family lived in the circumstances were pretty dire serious poverty disease very little access to clean water and food and under Muslim rule Jews were not even allowed to own property the Jews 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 ashkanazi Jews
who had been coming in small groups for hundreds of years from Western Central and Eastern Europe and of course those Jews from families that had never left the land and they intermingled and created Jewish life in some of the most difficult circumstances I can't help when I look at this footage to think that my ancestors could be in any one of these shots this was the period in which my ancestors were walking the streets and so I look at these people in front of me and I feel incredible Pride but also a level of sadness
to what they certainly experienced my family in this land in this city were second or even third class citizens they were meaning they didn't have the same rights as anybody that was an Arab Muslim some of my ancestors came to the oldish Shu in the early 1800s as part of a little known Jewish sect called the pushim the pushim were Lithuanian Jews a community with a complicated and controversial history suffice to say starting in the 14th century Lithuania became a Haven for Jews fleeing European persecution the region would go on to become home to some
of the most important Torah Scholars as well as some of the most horrible massacres of Jews my dad's family that returned to Israel were known as pushim followers of a Lithuanian Jewish scholar so impressive he became known as The Genius of Vilas the vagon as he's called in Jewish circles had dreamed of returning to the land of Israel but was never able to and so in the early 1800s 500 of his disciples traveled by foot to Constantinople 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 the old Yu's ashkanazi Community had fallen into terrible debt when they couldn't pay up the Ottomans kicked them out of Jerusalem and burned down their synagogue so my ancestors went instead to one of judaism's holiest and most mystical cities spat a city defined by tourist study spat is about not being distracted from what you're learning you know we are on a Mountaintop we're far away from other cities at that time was very difficult to get here today it's still difficult to get here today there are still
very few distractions there are no movie theaters here there are no shopping malls we only got our first set of traffic lights a few years years ago so when you come the spot other than maybe this beautiful view there's very little to distract you here your focus is uninterrupted Torah study my ancestors who came toat were following a long tradition of seekers and Scholars but less than three decades after my family arrived the Jewish Community was devastated by a series of tragedies in 1834 there's a a pogram that is initiated by the Drew Community Jews
are killed their houses are looted their houses are destroyed and many many uh of the Jewish Community die those that stick around after the pogram are then confronted with the greatest earthquake that uh Israel faced in the last thousand years in 1837 when the town was completely devastated there really wasn't much elsewh to go my family went to Jerusalem this time they were allowed in when my family came to Jerusalem they integrated into the diverse Jewish Community there which sometimes made for strange bedfellows literally because according to my dad's family one of those Lithuanian jerusalemites
married an Iraqi jerusalemite adding another Branch to our family tree that head straight to Baghdad now to understand Iraqi Jews you have to go back 2,600 years to 586 bce. yeah that's a long way back in the family tree but it's how my ancestors got to Iraq see the Jews were doing their thing in the capital in Jerusalem and by doing their thing I mean agriculture trade governing and worshiping at their Holy Temple in Jerusalem these are clay seal Impressions that were stamped by a ring and here's a lot of seals and stamps of different
types this is a a royal administration of the kings of Judah and Israel in the time of the first temple and the temple is the key word here because the temple in Jerusalem wasn't just the center of Jewish life it was also the symbol of that ancient Jewish belief that distinguish us from all other nations our belief in one God one of the words that comes up a lot with when we talk about the idea of Temple and cultic worship is the idea of Purity and when we think of Purity we imagine for example purity
of the body 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 and 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 and respect each other and build an ethical Society so 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 um you know that sort of moral conscience that he expects of humanity and 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 500 years before the Romans took a swing at Judea the Babylonian Empire set the standard they sacked the temple and destroyed the Jewish Community dragging its Elites off to Exile in Babylonia AKA Iraq but the community kept their faith in the one true God and believed he would return them to Zion and almost 50 years later many
returned and started to rebuild the Temple which as you know would eventually be destroyed by the Romans but not everybody in Babylon went back some stayed and their Community grew into a major Center of Jewish life and it remained that way for thousands of years that is 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 the Iraqi government arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned them outlawed the teaching of Hebrew and Jewish history and stole
their assets and property and yet they held on to their identity so the truth is even today if you ask an Iraqi Jew who are you they'll say a new day B I'm a Babylonian je 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 wherever we could that means that we've been forced to cultivate
resilience to adapt no matter where we are after thousands of years in the diaspora we've become Mosaic but 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 Jerusalem and the land of Israel but we learned how to be Jewish when we were away from home so where are we from we've lived everywhere my ancestors lived in Spain and Guyana and Germany and Lithuania and Iraq but they clung to their minority identity knit themselves tightly into their communities and they 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 and 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 here is where we're from
