Today we're talking about Jewishness. I don't know how to start this video without it sounding like a coming out video,
but I've done this intro 4 times and I've gotta say it's pretty difficult. It's sounding like a coming out video.
It's something that I've never shared with you guys directly, I may have mentioned it in passing in one of my lives,
and recently I've been talking about it on Twitter a little bit more, so if you follow me on there you probably already know what this video's about.
I am Jewish. I am a Sephardi Jew, we'll get into what that means later, I'm gonna give all the details.
But basically I just want you guys to know that this is a side of myself that I've never explored before.
And that's not to say that my journey with my Sephardi-ness is just starting, like I've always known that I was Sephardi and stuff like that, but,, y'know
Anyways, enough with the fluffy intro. Today we're gonna talk about everything Jewish.
Well, everything to kinda get started-- my brain dump of everything I've been thinking about these past couple of weeks.
We're gonna talk about types of Jews, we're gonna talk about my type of Jew, we're gonna talk about Jewish history, we're gonna talk about
modern-day Jewishness. We're gonna get all into it. So when you think of Jews, you're probably thinking
Matzo balls, you're probably thinking Yiddish. You're not wrong to think those things, I do not blame you, but
those things are connected to just one kind of Jew. Those are Ashkenazi Jews, which represent just a small portion-- well, not a small portion, but they represent not all Jews.
We come in different flavors. You're probably like "What?! There's different kinds of Jews?" Yes, there are different kind of ethnic
divisions within the Jewish people, and kind of the 4 biggest ones (I'm not saying these are all of them),
but there are 4 that kind of make up the largest percentage of the Jewish people. Those are Ashkenazi Jews, like I just said.
Ashkenazi Jews originated from central Europe, so a lot of them from France & Germany. Hence Yiddish.
There are Sephardic Jews, 'Sephardic' comes from the word 'Sefarad' which means 'Spain' in Hebrew, so it's Jews that originated
in Spain, Portugal, and Northern Africa. Like I said, this is the group that I belong to.
there are Mizrahi Jews, 'Mizrahi' comes from the word 'Mizrach' in Hebrew which means 'East',
and there are Ethiopian Jews. Those are kind of the 4 big head honchos within the Jewish people,
not saying those are all of them, once again. Kind of just the 4 biggest.
So now that we've talked about different kinds of Jews, we can delve more into the Sephardic people, which is my division.
So if you know anything about history, you know that in 1492,
Spain was basically like "Hm. We don't like Jews no more." Spain was like "Jews, Muslims,
you guys are not Christian, hate to break it to you, so you have one of three options:
you can stay here and convert, which produced a lot of what we call 'conversos',
you can leave the country, so a lot of them migrated to other parts of central Europe,
or to the Americas, so Latin America & Northern America.
OR you can stay here and die for your faith, which, naturally most of them picked the first two options.
Which leads us into my personal history! So when I was a kid and I asked my mom "Where does our family come from?"
She told me that we were Sephardic Jews, she told me that that basically meant
Jews from Spain, and she told me we were from a tiny piece of territory called Gibraltar. Now, Gibraltar
is this teeny teeny tiny teeny tiny teeny piece of territory at the southern tip of Spain.
Which today is a territory of the United Kingdom, [retching noise] I know.
Why y'all gotta take everything? It's literally this big and the UK can't keep their hands off it. Anyways...
But she told me that we came around the early 1800's, maybe like 1820's-ish i think?
So my people, the DaVegas, migrated from Gibraltar to the United States.
to Charleston, South Carolina. And when I was doing my research (cause I was going through family records but also public records on the internet),
and I found that there was such a big Sephardic Jewish community in South Carolina.
like, I found records of my ancestors that are buried in Sephardic Jewish cemeteries,
cemeteries founded by Sephardic Jews for Sephardic Jews. I was like "Ah, that's so cool."
And for those who don't know, which is probably all of you actually, my last name (DaVega) is a Sephardic Jewish last name.
So we have a lot of variations: DaVega, Da Vega with a space in between it,
DeVega, Veiga with an 'i' in the middle and stuff like that, so
there is a lot of variation, but every person I've ever met with my last name is in my family. I've never met another person with that last name, so
I do think it's very rare. One of a kind ~
But basically, as I was growing up, I already knew that I was Jewish, so then I was confused cause I was like "We're like, a whole-ass Pentecostal Christian family,,"
Why are we not Jewish? Why are we not practicing Judaism?
And I guess I didn't think about it too hard until I got to middle school and high school,
and I would meet other kids who were Jews, like practicing Jews. I was like "Augh.."
You guys are actually practicing Jews, so interesting.. and most of them were Ashkenazim, like I said, so I didn't have access to
a lot of other Sephardic people. Like I said, most people that I've met that are Jewish are Ashkenazim,
they are kind of the majority in North America, I think.
But still, it was a feeling of jealousy because they knew about their history, and they
knew about that part of their identity. I didn't really have that, I was just like... #jewclub...
But either way, it re-introduced that curiosity because I was like "What is this thing that I am, but have no idea about?'
But basically, what's actually re-introduced Judaism into my head recently was actually Chanukah.
Because Chanukah ended like 4-5 days ago I think, and I actually participated this year.
I kind of got my foot in the door. I cooked Jewish food, I participated in a virtual Sephardic Jewish Chanukah celebration (which was actually very fun, I learned a lot).
[man singing Chanukah blessings] asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tsivanu..
[woman playing fast-paced guitar]
[singing in Ladino] Chanukah linda sta aki, ocho kandelas para mi..
So what really attracts me about Judaism in contrast with Christianity (what I grew up with),
Pentecostal Christianity, is that Christianity is pretty much dependent just upon belief, whereas Judaism is a lot more integrated with practice
and culture and history. And I don't know, it's easy to identify with because there's a lot of tangibleness to it.
With Christianity, I feel like I was always just waiting for it to come as I was growing up, I was like..
looking at my mom, who's a super spiritual and connected person with her Christianity, and I was like "oh.."
Maybe I'll have that someday. But.. it's been 20 years and I'm still just like hm..
and that's why I've kind of re-entered back into the idea of exploring it [Judaism] recently.
So that's kinda my spiel for now, I just wanted to explain what a Sephardic Jew was, because there's so little
content about Sephardic Jews on YouTube, especially from Sephardic people.
There's a lot of documentaries and there's a lot of news from when Spain allowed Sephardic Jews to get citizenship 5 years ago, but
from actual Sephardic people, not that much content. So I actually have some questions I wanna answer,
that people have been asking me when I tell them about this rediscovery path that I'm on.
A lot of these are coming from non-Jews that I've told about it, hence the curiosity.
Do I support Israel? [sigh] We have to get rid of this false equivalency of
Jewish people and the Israeli government. That is not a thing. I feel like there's this kind of
black & white, two-dimensional idea (in North America at least) of what people think Jews are.
Palestinian Jews exist. So when you say-- I saw some tweet recently where it was like,
"Goodnight to everyone except Jewish twitter, #FreePalestine" and I was just like.. there are Palestinian Jews.
And it's always non-Jews and non-Palestinians saying that shit, I'm like.. "OK."
So we've got to stop this weird equivalency of Jews & the Israeli government. I do not support them, I am not a Zionist,
Not all Jews care about the propagation of a free Jew state. Great idea, a free Jew state, but why does it have to step on
the human rights and lives of so many other people? A lot of people tell me "You can't be a Jew if you're not a Zionist," and I'm like
????? Why do we all have to live in the same house ?????
I don't know if that's too simplistic, I am a Jew rookie apparently.
Another question I've gotten is "So are you gonna take that trip?" And 'that trip' is referring to a birthright trip,
so if you're a Jew in the West or just Jewish diaspora in general,
you can get basically an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel to reconnect with the homeland and shit like that.
I do not feel any connection to Israel. If I was going to feel a connection to any piece of land, it would be to Gibraltar.
So no, I am not going to take a birthright trip.
Last question: Am I going to learn Hebrew? Noooo! There is more than one Judaic language.
I can name a couple. Of course there's Hebrew, Yiddish, there's Amharic, and most exciting of all, there's Ladino, which
is also called Judeo-Spanish. Ladino is the language of the Sephardic people, and it's kind of like a mix,
it's basically like Old Spanish with Hebrew syntax, which is really interesting. So I don't know if you've ever heard it, but it basically sounds like:
It's really beautiful and I'm lowkey being like.. can I learn some Ladino?
There's only about 200,000 speakers of Ladino today, so if you're interested.. time's a-ticking.
A lot of Sephardim kind of lost the language along the way, just like our faith. #BneiAnussim
So that's basically it, thank you for tuning in to chapter one of..
the Sephardi chronicles, I guess I can call this the Sephardi chronicles.
Thank you so much for watching, I know that this content is kind of out of the normal of what I do.
But you can go follow me on Twitter, that's e-l-y-s-s-e-d-a-v-e-g-a if you would like to see more updates about this personal journey and Sephardic content in general.
I definitely want to share this with you guys and document it for my own interest up the line.
So yeah! I hope that you enjoyed it and I hope that everyone has a wonderful week, buh-bye.