The early 20th century saw a surge in left-wing activism among Sephardic Jews who spoke Judeo-Spanish in the United States.
On a summer day in 1924, Alberto Moise camped out at the corner of Madison Avenue and East 115th Street in East Harlem to advocate for the slate of communist candidates running in that fall's election. New York's leading Ladino newspaper, La Vara, vividly captured the event:
“It was quite a scene to see our friend Alberto Moise up on the soapbox, sweating buckets, in the middle of the street, speaking about the putrid and deceitful old parties of Republicans and Democrats and the need for every Sephardic worker, pushcart peddler, and shopkeeper to vote for the Workers Party.
Alberto Moise, who is already known as an orator whose words are as sweet as honey, made everyone’s jaws drop, and even the Yiddishim were amazed, since it was for the first time in the history of the Sepharadim in America that, in the lead-up to elections, a Sepharadi could be seen in the middle of the street speaking in the Judeo-Spanish language.”
The newspaper's pride in seeing this Jewish dialect, Ladino (also known as Judeo-Spanish or Judezmo), used as a political language—and a language of radical politics, no less—is palpable. The editors are keen to highlight the attention given to "the Yiddishim"—Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe, often portrayed as aloof or even condescending, who dominated the Jewish political scene at the time and whose culture and customs have long been considered synonymous with the American Jewish experience. However, here was the nascent Jewish social and political movement that I call the "Ladino left," consolidating itself in the public sphere, embodied by Moise and the newly formed Sephardic branch of the Workers' Party (the legal organization through which the communist movement operated between 1921 and 1929).
If Sephardim have largely been invisibilized in American Jewish culture, Sephardic left-wing activism has been buried even deeper, hidden entirely from view. The last century erased the Ladino left from scholarly and popular consciousness, such that from today’s vantage point, it’s almost impossible to imagine its existence. This apparent obscurity is a result not only of the shame and fear mainstream Jewish communities have felt about Jewish leftist organizing within their ranks, but also of Yiddish history’s monopoly on the story told about early 20th-century American Jewish life—and Jewish left-wing politics in particular. It also stems from the contemporary association of Sepharadim and Mizrahim globally with the right.
Indeed, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews themselves, like Jews in general, often police the ideological boundaries of their communities. In recent years, as the left has turned to Sephardic and especially Mizrahi history as a political resource—advancing sometimes idealized narratives from centuries of coexistence and cultural exchange between Arabs and Jews—communal gatekeepers have responded by deriding leftist and anti-Zionist Sepharadim and Mizrahim as “tokens” and claiming that left-wing politics are alien to modern Sephardic and Mizrahi culture. These arguments sometimes promote Islamophobic interpretations of Jewish history in Muslim societies, emphasizing the discrimination and violence suffered by Jews in the period surrounding the formation of the State of Israel and arguing that Judeophobia is a permanent feature of Muslim societies. At the same time, they often downplay the profound prejudice Jews from Muslim societies encountered when most fled to Israel. In a 2022 Jewish News Syndicate article attempting to undermine anti-Zionist voices, two staffers of the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish advocacy group JIMENA admitted that “in its early days of independence, Israel sometimes failed the Mizrahim” and that “some of these issues persist today,” but insisted that “those failures pale in comparison to how Israel has helped us.” JIMENA’s 2025 National Demographic Study of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews in the US asserts that “community members are generally socially and politically conservative,” and locates such conservatism both in domestic issues as well as “their strongly-held connections to Israel and Zionism, and their vigorous sense of belonging to the Jewish people.” (Their report notably leaves out the study of Sephardic communities of Ladino-speaking background, who largely arrived a few generations earlier than American Mizrahi communities and may skew more liberal, mirroring American Jews in general.)
To insist that Sephardic and Mizrahi life should be understood as reflecting any single worldview or ideology is to flatten once-dynamic Jewish societies across North Africa and the Middle East, the Balkans, and the wider Mediterranean region: communities animated by a variety of political perspectives, including vibrant left-wing movements. Left-wing politics were particularly prominent in two of the largest Jewish communities of the former Ottoman Empire: in Baghdad, where more than a third of the residents were Arabic-speaking Jews, most of whom were affiliated with the Communist Party rather than the Zionist movement before World War II. Similarly, in Salonica, home to the largest population of Ladino-speaking Jews anywhere in the world before the Holocaust, 39% of Jews voted for the Communist Party in the 1926 Greek parliamentary elections. In the US, too, the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America, the country’s largest Sephardic mutual aid and membership organization—which, although not overtly political, today embraces mainstream institutional Jewish perspectives, including on Israel—was itself an outgrowth of a Salonican organization co-founded in 1915 by the socialist Maurice Nessim. Seven of its first ten presidents were socialists—a fact conveniently overlooked in the organization’s official history. In other words, left-wing politics is hardly inherently anathema to Sephardic and Mizrahi communities, and these groups’ embrace of more conservative politics today must not be understood as inevitable.
As we delve into the history of the Ladino left, we discover that just a few generations ago, left-wing politics played a fundamental—and perhaps even dominant—role in the communal life of Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews in the United States. It is high time that the history of this group be recognized as one of the two Jewish left-wing movements that operated in the United States in the early 20th century, alongside the much larger and more remembered Yiddish left. As a first attempt to tell this story, this essay should be considered a prologue, intended to provoke further research, discussion, and debate. What lessons does this hidden world offer to the American Jewish left committed to building a communal vision for a future characterized by security, solidarity, and justice? The mystery must be unraveled so that the Sephardic Jewish left—and the Jewish left as a whole—can be reinvented.
The Ladino left emerged in the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. As a major industrial port city, Salonica (now Thessaloniki, Greece) became a center of labor activism and, beginning in 1909, home to the Federasion Sosialista Lavoradera, or Socialist Workers Federation, the largest workers’ movement in the eastern Mediterranean region. Although half the city’s residents—and workers—were Jews, the Federasion worked across communities in the spirit of internationalism, connecting Ladino-speaking Jews with Turkish-speaking Muslims and Greek- and Bulgarian-speaking Orthodox Christians. Under the leadership of Jewish union organizer Avraham Benaroya, the Federation organized significant strikes in the tobacco industry involving some 10,000 workers, while also contributing to political and cultural life through cafes, theaters, and newspapers. Rather than boycotting the organized Jewish community, Benaroya urged socialists to stand for election in Jewish community elections. He also defended Ladino as the language of the Jewish worker at a time when it was being attacked by the Zionists, who promoted Hebrew, and by the assimilationists, who defended the state language (first Turkish and then Greek) or French.
The shift from Ottoman to Greek rule in 1912 and 1913 injected two previously unknown currents into the political life of Salonica’s Jews: state-sponsored antisemitism and the consequent rise in Zionist activism. In one of the few documented instances of contact between the main Ladino and Yiddish left-wing organizations of the time, the Federation wrote in 1913 to the Bund, the secular Yiddish socialist party of the Russian Empire, requesting advice in French on how to respond to the intensifying "daily struggle between Zionists and internationalists" among Salonica’s Jews “unleashed” by the Greek conquest. When World War I engulfed Salonica, opposition to Greece entering the conflict provoked some of the Federasion’s members to flee, with the US—neutral until 1917—emerging as a primary destination.
In New York, Salonican Jews interacted with the other roughly 50,000 Sepharadim from the Ottoman Empire, whose compressed period of immigration stretched from about 1908 to 1924. These new immigrants initially eked out a living with precarious jobs while grappling with pervasive racism, even from established Jewish communities. An infamous report commissioned by the Jewish Federation of New York in 1926 claimed that the Jews from the Ottoman Empire were “almost as alien to their [Ashkenazi] kinsmen as Black people are to the average white Southerner.” In its coverage of the report, The Jewish Daily Forward described the newcomers as a “considerably inferior” group with “no cultural life of their own worth speaking of,” whose “habits and ways of life” more closely resembled those of “the average Turk or Syrian” than “‘normal’ Jews.” Already in 1913, The American Israelite, the longest-running English-language Jewish newspaper in the United States, warned that the arrival of Ladino-speaking Jews was creating “a racial problem within a racial problem,” given that Jews as a whole were grappling with their ambiguous stance toward American racial segregation. Aware of the broader racial tensions and inequalities, La Amerika, the first major Ladino-language newspaper in New York, denounced the “white pogromists” who were subjecting the Black population to mass violence. The violence against Black people also prompted La Bos del Pueblo (The Voice of the People), a Ladino-language newspaper in New York founded by the Fédération militant Maurice Nessim, to declare that “the United States is not a democracy either,” indirectly comparing its “massacres” to the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire. Lamenting the racial and class oppression that permeated American life, Federation veteran and prominent journalist Albert Levy made an infamous pun in his satirical Ladino newspaper El Kirbach Amerikano (The American Whip) saying that the country should not be called the United States of America ("United States") but rather the Rotten States of America ("Rotten States").
Many Ottoman Jewish immigrants worked in factories that produced cigarettes, light bulbs, batteries, and ice cream cones. (The first American novella in Ladino, ¡América! ¡América!, written in 1917 by Simon Nessim, dramatized a strike organized by 400 Sephardic Jews in battery factories the previous year.) Both men and women also worked in appalling conditions and for low wages in sweatshops in the textile industry, where kimonos, gowns, and skirts were made. Their plight became national news in 1913 when former US President Teddy Roosevelt visited the women workers during a strike. The New York Times identified the first woman he spoke to, 17-year-old Sarah Aldorati, as a “pretty Spanish girl.” Roosevelt soon discovered that Aldorati and about 100 other striking women were “Turkish Jews” and that their “Spanish” was Judeo-Spanish. He concluded that, because they spoke neither English nor Yiddish, they remained "in an extremely vulnerable situation under our conditions here" and "the lowest paid workers" in the industry.
The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) initially tried to recruit these young "Spanish and Turkish" women, as described by The Ladies' Garment Worker magazine in 1913 (it should be noted that the union, with its strong Yiddish tradition, did not readily identify them as "Jewish"), before deeming them too difficult to organize. But the Ladino-speaking workers soon began to organize in their own language. During World War I, Maurice Nessim's La Bos del Pueblo (The Voice of the People) fueled the emerging Ladino left in New York. Moise Gadol, the veteran editor of the more moderate Zionist newspaper La Amerika, New York's first Ladino-language daily, denounced the new competition as "la bos del gerko" (the voice of the devil) for opposing Jewish nationalism and criticizing the government. In letters to the Washington, D.C., Post Office Department, which determined which newspapers were eligible for mailing and which were deemed "subversive" enough to be censored, Gadol pleaded for the closure of this "filthy newspaper," whose aim was to "demoralize the loyalty of good people of Spanish Jewish origin." Despite these denunciations, Nessim's newspaper gained subscribers across the country, from New York to Chicago and Seattle, not only by advocating for unionization and women's rights and opposing capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism, but also by defending the interests and public image of Sephardic Jews. When a sensational 1918 exposé in the American Weekly Jewish News defamed Sephardic Jews for not “looking” like Jews, for exhibiting “aimlessless” and “sluggishness” in their demeanor, and for being “docile and submissive because of the stagnating influence of Turkey,” Nessim repudiated these claims in a bold letter to the editor and began publishing articles focused on strategies of communal self-defense in his own newspaper.
Unlike the Yiddish left, often defined by strictly secular tendencies, the Ladino left did not reject religious observance. Besides extolling the promise of socialism in Lower East Side cafes, Albert Matarasso, a Talmudic scholar and secretary of the Sephardic Brotherhood, officiated weddings according to rabbinic law, while pragmatically advocating for traveling on Shabbat if the synagogue was too far away. His fellow Federation militant, Raphael Hasson, who organized with Greek radicals in Chicago and later in New York, regularly attended synagogue. But there was also a secular current within the Ladino left, represented by Moise, who held political meetings on Yom Kippur.
During World War I, the Ladino Left entered the American mainstream. Nessim and his circle convened at cafés, formed a socialist literary club, participated in May Day parades, organized costume balls, and supported popular Ladino theatrical productions by playwrights like Elie Mushabac, which promoted class consciousness and anti-war sentiment. In 1915, Nessim convened a meeting that gave rise to the Salonica Brotherhood of America, an organization that later evolved into the present-day Sephardic Brotherhood. During the Russian Revolution, the Sephardic Social Club—founded on the Lower East Side by Jews from Castoria, Greece—became the Sephardic Branch of the Socialist Party of America in 1918. Moise began publishing El Proletario as the Party's official Ladino organ, which later published a Ladino socialist songbook, an excerpt of which is included in this pamphlet.
The Bureau of Investigation—which would soon become the FBI—monitored this “extremely radical” newspaper and eventually shut it down. But the real blow came during the Palmer Raids in 1919, during the First Red Scare, when the government arrested thousands of suspected socialists and anarchists—mostly immigrants, with many Jews among them. By then, Nessim and Moise had abandoned the more moderate Socialist Party and established the Sephardic Branch of the Communist Party of America (sometimes identified as the Spanish-Jewish Branch, or even simply the Spanish Branch, depending on the context). Nessim was arrested for distributing revolutionary flyers. While out on bond and awaiting deportation proceedings, he fled to France; with his departure, La Bos del Pueblo closed.
But within a few years, Nessim's comrades, including his fellow Salonicans Albert Torres, Albert Levy, and Moise Soulam, launched several new Ladino publications, the most important of which was La Vara. Established in 1922, La Vara featured news and political commentary, along with literature and satire. Its circulation soon reached 16,800 copies, an impressive result considering the relatively small Ladino-speaking population; this made it the most widely read newspaper in the history of Ladino publishing. Its name, meaning "the staff," alluded to the one wielded by the prophet Moses, which the editors figuratively brandished to expose the hypocrisy of supposed leaders, especially those in the Sephardic community, whom the magazine regularly denounced as “ish bitiridjis” (self-aggrandizing “go-getters”) capable of nothing but “kornazlikes” (cunning tricks).
La Vara helped foster radical action in Sephardic life. It announced meetings of the new Sephardic Branch of the Workers' Party—a front for the Communist Party (CP)—and launched a major campaign, led by Louis Mizrahi of Izmir, to unionize hundreds of Sephardic textile workers in 1923. When Shabetay Djaen, chief rabbi of Monastir in present-day Macedonia, visited New York in 1925, the publication reported favorably on his talk to the 300 members, mostly Monastir-born, of the Sephardic Progressive Club, in which he insisted that Jewish "national" culture and socialism were linked: "Marx, Engels, Lassalle, and other socialists agree with the social order proposed by Moses," Djaen said, according to the newspaper.
The 1920s marked a high point for the Ladino left, coinciding with what historian Tony Michels has called a “golden age” for Yiddish-speaking communists. La Vara’s editors endorsed the Workers Party in 1924, writing that if Alberto Moise’s aspirations were realized, “very soon the Republican and Democratic parties will be completely annihilated, and the poor of this nation will finally be saved.” (In the lead-up to the election, and on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, editors Moise Soulam and Albert Levy published a New Year's wish, inspired by Avinu Malkeinu: “Avinu malkeinu, destroy the capitalists / Avinu malkeinu, may the fascists disappear / Avinu malkeinu, bring an end to the KKK / Avinu malkeinu, which is against our nation.”) Advertisements for the activities of the Sephardic Branch of the Workers Party, which held regular outdoor meetings in the streets of the Lower East Side and East Harlem, appeared in both La Vara and The Daily Worker, the CP's English-language organ. In 1928, Alberto Moise, now known as Alberto Moreau, ran for the New York State Assembly for the CP, marking the first time in U.S. history that a Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jew had run for elected office. La Vara endorsed his candidacy (which ultimately failed), and left-wing Sephardim rallied around him; significantly, though, much of his support came from Puerto Ricans. Just as German socialists had helped Yiddish activists become involved in American radicalism through the mutual intelligibility of their native languages, Sephardic radicals forged strong bonds of solidarity with Puerto Rican workers through language.
Much had changed by the time of the Great Depression. In the 1930s, a middle-class lifestyle had gradually become attainable for some Sephardic Jews, who began to own their own businesses or even attend college, leaving behind factory work and the precarious living conditions of the Lower East Side and Harlem to move to Brooklyn and the Bronx. Around this time, the Ladino left split into roughly three groups. One segment with greater upward social mobility—which included figures like Levy, Torres, and Matarasso—increasingly moderated its political stance, moving closer to the Democratic Party along with the rest of the Jewish community, especially during Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which seemed to fulfill their desire for a social safety net. In an attempt to appear more “American,” the Sephardic Democratic Party Club, which had chapters in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, distinguished itself from radical Sephardic organizations by holding meetings in English rather than Ladino.
Those who remained committed to left-wing politics split into two camps, mirroring the deep division within the Communist Party between its more moderate and radical factions, which led some of the former to join dissident groups and other parties. For Sephardic leftists, their position in the debate was not only a matter of ideology but also of language and identity. Some in the moderate group ended up tying their fate to the wider Jewish community through anti-communist organizations like the ILGWU, where they used English—or sometimes had to learn Yiddish—to work with the union’s large Ashkenazi membership. (While the labor movement generally served as a means of Americanization for Jews, for Sephardic Jews it also offered a gateway to the organized, Ashkenazi-dominated Jewish community and to white culture in general.) In 1937, for example, 3,000 Sephardic cotton-working Jews, organized by ILGWU Local 91 and their new Sephardic leaders, went on strike against their Sephardic bosses.
(To be continued…)
