Deportation, a word that has become sadly commonplace in the United States, comes from the Latin “portare,” which means to carry, or carry away. I associate the word with the image of a “port,” which is supposed to be a haven, a place of arrival. To “deport” is to remove from the port, and the image that comes to mind is of ships leaving and going out to sea.
Whenever I hear of deportations, I can’t help but think of an earlier era before that word existed. Before deportations, there were expulsions. If we go back just over 500 years, to 1492, we are in the era when Columbus landed in the Americas, with the support of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabela.
It was also the year when the Jews were expelled from Spain. Jewish people had lived in Spain for over a thousand years, but in 1492, the Spanish king and queen decided to unify their kingdom under one religion—Catholicism. At the start of 1492, they had conquered Granada, the last Muslim kingdom, and rather than demolish the architectural gem that was the fortress and palace of the Alhambra, they simply took it over and proclaimed the Edict of Expulsion from there. I was in Granada last year and visited the Alhambra and could not have imagined a more beautiful place, surrounded by flower gardens and fountains, from which to declare so cruel a message—that a community of many thousands of people were no longer welcome in what had once been their home.
I get emotional thinking about this history. Even though it happened so long ago, it feels recent to me because I am a descendant of those Jews that were expelled. Since that time, we have called ourselves Sephardic Jews, from the word “Sefarad,” which means Spain in Hebrew. It never ceases to amaze me how the weight of memory can be carried on the shoulders of descendants for centuries.
Expulsion meant departing from Spain on foot or donkey, leaving behind your possessions, and finding your way to a port, to the sea, and a new place to call home. Many of these journeys, as was the case with my family, led to the lands of what was then the Ottoman Empire and eventually to what is now Greece and Turkey. Even centuries later, the memory of their Spanish homeland meant so much that Sephardic Jews continued speaking Spanish, the language of those who expelled them and turned them into wanderers across so many seas. This Spanish, which came to be called Ladino, acquired loan words from many languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, French, and Turkish, but at its core it remained a Spanish that could be understood by other Spanish speakers. It was because they spoke Ladino that my paternal grandparents felt confident about leaving Turkey and searching for a new home in Cuba in the 1920s.
Sephardic Jews like my abuelos felt they’d discovered a tropical paradise where everyone spoke Spanish just as their ancestors had. But they had to flee a different kind of authoritarian regime after Fidel Castro came to power, expelled again as they built yet another home in the United States.
This history of expulsion and searching for home led me to want to find an origin for my identity. In my search, I have visited the Spanish city of Toledo numerous times. There not only can you still walk through the winding streets of the medieval Jewish neighborhood, but you can visit the Museo Sefardí, an astonishing Sephardic Museum housed in what was once a fourteenth-century synagogue. It is miraculously well-preserved, the walls lined with Hebrew inscriptions that take your breath away. Inside that space, I have felt transported to the time before the expulsion, when the Jewish people of Spain still felt they belonged and couldn’t conceive of the day they’d no longer be welcome. And in the museum, I’ve met Spaniards who feel certain their ancestors were Jews who converted to Catholicism in order to stay in their homes.
After years of trying to imagine what the expulsion from Spain was like for my ancestors, I sat down to write a middle-grade novel, Across So Many Seas, focusing on four Sephardic girls, Benvenida, Reina, Alegra, and Paloma, growing up in Spain, 1492, Turkey, 1923, Cuba, 1961, and Miami, 2003. Benvenida doesn’t know what the word “expulsion” means when she first hears the Edict of Expulsion read aloud in the town plaza of Toledo in 1492. Her older brothers explain what it means, but it isn’t until she lives through the arduous journey to the port and eventually to the sea and a new home that she really comes to know what it means. Centuries later, Benvenida’s story resonates in the later generations, as Reina, Alegra, and Paloma, grandmother, mother, and granddaughter each find a connection to their heritage as Sephardic Jews while composing their lives anew in an ever-changing present. Together, they visit the Sephardic Museum in Toledo and in that magical space Benvenida’s words touch their hearts.
At a moment of so much Jewish uncertainty about how to take pride in our heritage, I never expected that Across So Many Seas might be of interest to a wider readership. When the book was recognized with Newbery Honor Award from the American Library Association, I felt grateful for this mainstream affirmation of the very particular history of the Sephardic Jews, and the way that history resonates.
Because Across So Many Seas also shines a light on the larger emotional drama of the immigrant story, as families separate, some leaving, some staying, abandoning beloved homes for the uncertain promise of a new life. I am part of this history that flows from Spain to Turkey to Cuba to the United States, a melancholy history that is preserved in the many Sephardic songs about lost loves, departures, and goodbyes.
In this vehemently anti-immigrant moment, as deportations continue, I remember my ancestors expelled from Spain over 500 years ago, an event so traumatic that the memory of how it hurt to be forced into homelessness is still vivid today.
I shudder to think how shocked they’d be to know that expulsions haven’t ended.
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Ruth Behar is the James W. Fernandez Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and the author of the Newbery Honor Award winning novel, Across So Many Seas.
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