Stephen Birmingham - The Grandees: America’s Sephardic Elite

The Grandees

Americas Sephardic Elite

Stephen Birmingham

For Roger H. Klein, in Memory

Contents

Sephardim:

Many sufferings, which they had endured for the sake of their faith, had made them more than usually self-conscious; they considered themselves a superior classthe nobility of Jewry.

The Jewish Encyclopedia

PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF STEPHEN BIRMINGHAM

The Auerbach Will

A New York Times Bestseller

Has the magic word bestseller written all over it Birminghams narrative drive never falters and his characters are utterly convincing. John Barkham Reviews

Delicious secretsscandals, blackmail, affairs, adultery the gossipy Uptown/Downtown milieu Birmingham knows so well. Kirkus Reviews

An engrossing family saga. USA Today

Colorful, riveting, bubbling like champagne. The Philadelphia Inquirer

Poignant and engrossing Has all the ingredients for a bestseller. Publishers Weekly

The Rest of Us

A New York Times Bestseller

Breezy and entertaining, full of gossip and spice! The Washington Post

Rich anecdotal and dramatic material Prime social-vaudeville entertainment. Kirkus Reviews

Wonderful stories All are interesting and many are truly inspirational. The Dallas Morning News

Entertaining from first page to last Those who read it will be better for the experience. Chattanooga Times Free Press

Birmingham writes with a deft pen and insightful researchers eye. The Cincinnati Enquirer

Mixing facts, gossip, and insight The narrative is engaging. Library Journal

Immensely readable Told with a narrative flair certain to win many readers. Publishers Weekly

The Right People

A New York Times Bestseller

Platinum mounted The mind boggles. San Francisco Examiner

To those who say society is dead, Stephen Birmingham offers evidence that it is alive and well. Newsweek

The games some people play manners among the moneyed WASPs of America The best book of its kind. Look

The beautiful people of le beau monde Mrs. Adolf Spreckels with her twenty-five bathrooms Dorothy Spreckels Munns chinchilla bedspread the St. Grottlesex Set of the New England prep schools, sockless in blazers the clubs the social sports love and marriagewhich seem to be the only aspect which might get grubbier. Its all entertaining. Kirkus Reviews

It glitters and sparkles. Youll love The Right People. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A fun book about Americas snobocracy Rich in curiosa More entertaining than Our Crowd Stephen Birmingham has done a masterly job. Saturday Review

Take a look at some of his topics: the right prep schools, the coming out party, the social rankings of the various colleges, the Junior League, the ultra-exclusive clubs, the places to live, the places to play, why the rich marry the rich, how they raise their children. This is an inside book. The Washington Star

All the creamy people The taboo delight of a hidden American aristocracy with all its camouflages stripped away. Tom Wolfe, Chicago Sun-Times

The Wrong Kind of Money

Fast and wonderful. Something for everyone. The Cincinnati Enquirer

Dark doings in Manhattan castles, done with juicy excess. A titillating novel that reads like a dream. Stunning. Kirkus Reviews

Birmingham certainly keeps the pages turning. Fans will feel at home. The Baltimore Sun

1

THE BOOK

In 1960, there appeared what must have been one of the least heralded books in the history of American publishing. It was called Americans of Jewish Descent, and was put togethernot written exactlyby a scholarly New Yorker named Malcolm H. Stern. The book consisted almost entirely of genealogical charts, and represented a labor of mindboggling proportions.

Americans of Jewish Descent weighs close to ten pounds and is beautifully bound and printed on heavy, expensive stock. It is just over three hundred pages long, including an elaborate index, and traces the ancestry of some 25,000 American Jewish individuals back into the eighteenth, seventeenth, and even the sixteenth centuries, under family headings that list everyone from the Aarons to the Zuntzes. It was never intended to be a best seller; a limited first edition of just 550 numbered copies was printed. Nonetheless, though unheralded, unacclaimed by the critics, and unnoticed by the vast majority of the American reading public, the book created an immediate and profound stir among a small group of American Jews who had long considered themselves an elite, the nobility of Jewry, with the longest, richest, most romantic history: the Sephardim. They were the oldest American Jewish families, and they traced themselves back to the arrival of what has been called the Jewish Mayflower, in 1654, and even farther back to medieval Spain and Portugal, where they lived as princes of the land. Despite its priceforty dollarsand its size, the book was soon gracing the coffee tables and bookshelves of some of the most elegant and prestigious houses in the country and a second printing was ordered. The book was suddenly The Book, and was being studied for the tiny errors that appeared, almost inevitably, in a volume of this ones size and scopethree centuries of interconnected family trees.

The Book created no stir at all among Sephardic Jews who lived not at elegant or prestigious addresses but in Sephardic communities in such places as Cedarhurst, Long Island, and The Bronx. These Sephardim had no Jewish Mayflower to trace back to, no ancestors who had fought in the American Revolution. They had arrived in the United States, under quite different circumstances and after a quite different history, during the first three decades of the twentieth century and as refugees from the fires of revolutions in Turkey, the Balkans, and Asia Minor. They had spent the first generation of their emigration struggling to emerge from the ghetto of New Yorks Lower East Side. Had they had access to Malcolm Sterns book, it would merely have confirmed the impression among these Sephardim that the old Sephardim were the ultimate snobs, who treated all Jews of lesser vintage with condescension, aloofness, and utter disdain. Americans of Jewish Descent includes only those Americans descended from Jews who arrived in the United States before 1840. All who arrived since are thereby automatically excluded from the vellum pages and, as it were, the club.

What Dr. Stern had done, intentionally or not, was to compose a curious combination of a Jewish Whos Who and Social Registerfatter than the former, much harder to get into than the latter. The Book immediately emphasized a distinction which everyone knew existed but which most people preferred not to talk about, between the old, established Jewish families and the Johnny-come-lately arrivals, the distinguished upper crust and the brash parvenus. With its 1840 cutoff date, Dr. Sterns book eliminates, as he explains in a preface, the large migration of German Jews in the 1840s, which achieved its greatest impetus following the European revolutions of 1848. Dr. Stern says that this date is arbitrary, but it isnt really, because it eliminates those Jews to whom the Sephardim consider themselves specifically and emphatically superior. These are the upstartsKuhns, Loebs, Schiffs, Warburgs, Lehmans, Guggenheims, and their likewho achieved such importance in banking and commerce in the latter part of the nineteenth century; who, by the sheer force of their money, grew to dominate the American Jewish community; and whom the older-established Sephardim therefore looked down upon and actively resented. The Germans have been not only upstarts but usurpers.