A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [98]
Today there is rarely a charcuterie in France that doesn't sell smoked salmon, but in the early 1960s, Parisians who wanted it went to Rue des Rosiers. Although a little out of the way, the street had tremendous potential because it was not far from the central market, Les Halles, which had everything but smoked salmon. To get smoked salmon, people walked over from Les Halles to Rue des Rosiers, turned up the little side street, spent hundreds of francs at Klapisch, then walked forty yards back to Rue des Rosiers, noticed a little bakery with challah and bagels and other exotic breads in the window, and spent a few francs at Finkelsztajn's.
Henri always watched what was going on in the neighborhood, and he was becoming irritated by this trade. He wanted to see a little more of the money spent at his shop and began offering herring and other traditional family foods, as well as a few Sephar-dic dishes and even Madagascar specialties from his wife. Soon others started doing the same. The Ashkenazim started noticing that hummus and vine leaves sold well. The Sephardim started catching on to poppyseed strudel and cheesecake. Soon it was hard to tell a Sephardic store from an Ashkenazic one.
But although they looked the same, the people were still different. They were not as different as a Pole and an Algerian (they did, after all, share common religious, moral, and intellectual traditions), but one was a Mediterranean and the other a Central or Northern European. Significantly, the North African Jews who settled in Marseilles and other points along the French Mediterranean found it far easier to adjust to living in France than did those in Paris or Strasbourg. But the jobs and opportunities were not in ihe south.
It was not only the climate but the history of the two peoples since 1492 that had shaped different mentalities. While North African Jews had experienced occasional persecution and even violence, especially in Morocco, they had not had a Holocaust; nor had their society been shaped by centuries of Cossack raids and regular pogroms. While the Ashkenazim had learned to either keep a low profile or assimilate in a world controlled by Christians, the Sephardim had learned to be a separate but assertive subculture in a society composed of separate groups.
There are slight differences in practice between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. Religious Sephardim wear the four fringes, the tzitzit, tucked in rather than showing on the outside of their pants, which is a sign of piousness among Ashkenazim. Even the most religious Sephardic boys do not wear peots, curled side locks. Ashkenazim consider rice not to be kosher for Passover but Sephardim End eating rice on Passover completely acceptable.
Traditions also vary among Sephardic groups. In the Sabbath service at the Esnoga, the Dutch royal family is blessed in old Portuguese. Algerian Sephardim have a lamb feast the night before Passover. Yiddish, essentially German dialect written in Hebrew, is uniquely Ashkenazic. But North Africans speak Judeo-Arab, which is Arab dialect written in Hebrew. The Dutch, Turkish, and Greek Sephardim speak Ladino, a Jewish dialect based on fifteenth-century Spanish.
One of the richest differences among Jewish subcultures is in music. The biblical readings of both the Ashkenazic and Sephardic service are chanted on a five-tone medieval scale. The music is not noted on a score but simply alluded to by marks above the Hebrew lettering indicating the direction of pitch. This leaves considerable latitude in the actual melody of the music, and a wide range of religious music has been created, much of which is passed down by unwritten tradition. The Sephardim are particularly noted for the beauty of their chants; a number of celebrated operatic singers have recorded Sephardic airs.
While the music can be very different and unfamiliar, any Jew should be able to go to a synagogue anywhere in the world and follow the service.
What the North African Jews were not prepared for in Paris was