Why Linda McQuaig is so wrong about Venezuela?

The article of Linda McQuaig about Venezuela is so wrong in so many ways. First, she distorts the facts to portray the Venezuelan tragedy as "a bitter class war, with millions of poor people committed to defending a revolution carried out in their name."  Second, she took sides to defend a corrupt and criminal regime, repeating the hollow rhetoric of Nicolás Maduro and his cronies about the "economic war against a nation" that does not exist. Actually, the only war is the one that the regime of Nicolas Maduro is waging against his own people.

But Linda McQuaig suffers from ideological blindness. She cannot see what is happening in Venezuela because she bought the arguments of Maduro to justify his wrongdoings. She forgot to mention that the policies of the Maduro regime - following the same populist prescriptions instituted by Hugo Chávez - have caused the free fall of the economy: deep recession in the last four years (minus 10 GDP this year), hyperinflation rising to three digits (expected to rise to 14,000 percent this year), maxi devaluation of the currency, and the destruction of the national oil company PDVSA.

She cannot see either that Venezuelans are living a truly humanitarian crisis. Hunger is a real problem. Malnutrition among the poor, particularly children, has been widely documented. Venezuelans are also dying or suffering because they don't have access to medication and basic medical services.

Linda McQuaig is blind to the reality that Venezuelans live under a violent and cruel regime. During four months of protests the Maduro regime murdered more than 100 people. Or that there are still almost 300 political prisoners, many of them civilians submitted, illegally, to trials in military courts. She did not say that the political police of the government, Sebin, does not comply with judges ordering the release of prisoners and extorts them and their families, asking for large sums of money in US dollars to "buy" their freedom. Or that the poor are enslaved through the CLAP system, a perverse program of social control through the distribution of food bags. She forgot to say that crime is out of control. More than 20 thousand people are murdered each year. Prisons have become the paradise of criminals, under the control of gang leaders, thanks to the complicity of government officials.

Linda McQuaig is so wrong about Venezuela that she does not know the history of the country. Chávez did not nationalize the oil industry, as she wrongfully wrote. The oil industry was nationalized in 1976 during the first government of Carlos Andrés Pérez. Nevertheless, this should be a "minor" detail for someone who dares to defend a regime that is the source of suffering and horror for millions of Venezuelans.

Being a Sephardi Moroccan Venezuelan Canadian Jew: A case of multiple identities

Everybody is obsessed with identity these days. People look deeper to find their roots. They have their DNAs checked by ancestry.com or geni.com to find out their genetics mix (because we are all the result of a mix –there is no “racial” purity fortunately – but we – the humanity - seem to come from the same parents, as shown by a recent study published in Science journal). There is identity politics and its subdivisions: gender, religious, language politics. Certainly we, Jews, have been obsessed with our identity, either from within but mainly from outside, particularly when those who wanted to destroy us had a supposedly “clear” answer to the question “Who is a Jew?” I won’t try to answer this question – I prefer to leave it as an open question -. Instead I propose to explore the multiples dimensions of identity, and I will try to do so with the case I think I know the better, my own case as a Sephardi Moroccan Venezuelan Canadian Jew.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges said in a lecture about James Joyce and the Irish culture –  he was quoting the Norwegian-American sociologist Thorstein Veblen – that the intellectual pre-eminence of Jews in modern Europe was mainly due to the fact that the Jews in the Western world were dealing with a culture that was not theirs, a culture to which they did not profess any “loyalty” (here I am quoting Borges), a culture that they could approach without superstitions, and in many occasions, with a revolutionary aim.  Without pretending to answer the question Who is a Jew, I can say - based on Borges and Veblen’s points of view – that we are is this double and even ambiguous position in society that allows us to have a look at the same from inside and from outside, with a certain detachment, but also with a certain nostalgia or saudade (as the Portuguese say).

I will explore today two dimensions of this multiple Sephardic Moroccan Venezuelan Canadian Jewish being: the language (or the languages I should say), and what I call the “painful identity”.

The languages

It always seemed to me that the title of the first volume of the memoirs of the Literature Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti, The Tongue Set Free (that could be translated alternately in French as La langue sauvée), referred to the German, the language in which this Sephardic Jew born in Bulgaria wrote his books. Canetti himself explains the title in the first chapter of his memoirs, based on a childhood memory in which a man, the lover of his nanny, threatened to cut off his tongue. The absolved tongue (langue in French or lengua in Spanish) represents the physical organ that the writer "saved" from that man's razor that, with that intimidating gesture, ensured the child's silence (Tomás Eloy Martínez preferred to call this book La lengua salvada or The Saved Tongue/Language). But in the field of interpretations, we could say that Canetti "saved" and "acquitted" the German, the language of the Nazi executioners, as a gesture of reaffirmation and victory. One of his other languages ​​was Ladino (he also spoke French and English), which he called the "language of the kitchen" (la lengua de la cocina), a language that he learned as a child from his mother, a proud Sephardic Jew who thought that her Spanish origins gave them a certain aristocratic character.

I was born in Tangier, Morocco. My parents were born in Tetouan, a small city near Tangier. They are the daughter and son of tetaunis, Jews descendants of those expelled from Spain in 1492. It is probably that my ancestors (Nahon, Serfaty, Laredo, Israel, Abudarham) came to Tetouan from the town of Naon in Oviedo, and Granada, and it is also very probably that they arrived in Morocco at the same time that the moors expelled from Andalusia.

There was an important cultural difference between these two groups of expelled people, or “megorashim” as we say in Hebrew.  The moors kept their language (the Arab) and continued to develop a culture and institutions in their language.  But we, the Sephardic Jews had a particular link with Spain, the Spanish language. Isolated from the rest of the world, those Jews kept this language as a treasure with a mix of nostalgia and pride. The romances, a form of poetry born in Spain that we assimilated and kept in the form of folk songs, express very well this feeling of nostalgia, of homesick, of the cities, the landscapes, the flavours, the music of this country that did not like us, a country that meant also suffering, death and destruction for the Jewish people. This is a strange love affair, a love affair that has the language as its most precious object. That’s why my grandmother sung and even today we sing romances like this one: “En la ciudad de Toledo, en la ciudad de Granada, vivía un mancebo que Diego León se llama …” (in the city of Toledo, in the city of Granada, used to live a young man called Diego León). 

The Spanish was also a mean to express our religious life. There is something in the judeo-español, our particular form of ancient Spanish called Haketía mixed with Hebrew and Arab, that communicates an extra dimension to the prayers and texts of our tradition. A good example of this is the Pesach Hagadah. For me is very important that after saying in Aramaic “Ha lahma hanya di ahalu abahatana dearha demisrayim…”, to recite the judeo-español translation, that is more than a translation, a text that captures the very essence of Pesach as Zeman Herutenu, the Time of our Liberation. And I read as my grandfather and my father did every Seder: “Este es el pan de la aflicción que comieron nuestros padres en tierra de Egipto. Todo el que tenga hambre que venga y coma…”. 

We moved to Venezuela when I was six years old, in 1968. The Spanish language, the language we cherished, this treasure we carry everywhere we go, helped us to make the connection with this wonderful and now troubled country where the Spanish is spoken with the flavour (el sabor) of the people from the Caribbean. In some way, we never felt like strangers in this new land. As my mother said when she saw for the first time the Venezuelans in the La Guaira Port: “It seems that we never left Tangier”. The Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the Moroccans, the Venezuelans, these mestizos peoples, and the experience, so common to us in our history of wandering people, of hybrid cultures, of being a people among the peoples.

But there is a Jewish language that transcends the Ashkenazi / Sephardic division, and that communicates something that is uniquely Jewish beyond the language through which is conveyed, either Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, French or English. There is a scene from Seinfeld that summarizes for me what could be the "Jewish language" par excellence. Jerry's father, who is spending a few days in New York, calls a friend in South Florida (where the old American and Canadian Jews go to retire), who reacts to the unexpected call by asking with a very Jewish cry: " Who died?". The call was not to announce the death of anyone, but to ask a favor. But in the Jewish code "Who died?" says a lot about that way we Jews talk, no matter our origins and languages.

The Seinfeld scene, which reflects the interaction between two typically American Jews, and probably Ashkenazi New Yorkers, could have been perfectly played by two Moroccan or Turkish Jews. The Jewish code, fed by a series of common imaginaries that make up the Jewish thinking and feeling, has a certain universality that even overcomes the barriers of time. In some passages of the Bible and the Talmud, to mention two canonical texts of Judaism, we already find some passages that could have been written by Woody Allen, the Marx brothers or Larry David. For example, in an exchange between the sages around the story of the Tower of Babel collected in the Midrash (legends or stories that complement the biblical narrative) is told, describing the fact that God "came down" to see the construction of the tower, the following: "Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai says: this represents one of the ten descents mentioned by the Torah (made by the Holy One, Blessed be He, to the Earth). 'That the sons of man had built'. Oh well, and what they would have said, Rabbi Berechia exclaimed, that they were the children of a donkey or a camel!"

Going back to Borges and Velben, we can say that the Jewish language, embedded in the languages of our many diasporas, has this duality of memory and irony, and if you want cynicism, that connects us with the past and also provides us with the necessary critical look about the world and the human beings.

Painful identity

Another universal Jewish experience is what I call the “painful identity.” Identity is not purely positive affirmation, it is also conflict or “déchirement” as we say in French. The expression “painful identity” came to my mind when Daniel Shoer Roth, now a journalist in Miami's The New Herald, told me a very revealing anecdote of the twists and turns of Jewishness. A few years ago, Daniel wrote a book about five great Jewish-Venezuelan journalists: Gustavo Arnstein, Alicia Freilich, Paulina Gamus, Carlos Guerón and Sofía Imber. One day a renowned Venezuelan editor and columnist, whose name I won’t disclose, complained to Daniel because he had not included him in the book. Daniel answered with surprise: "I never thought you would consider yourself as a Jew." But identity is a changing and deeply emotional thing. Who knows if this editor and columnist, who at another time in his life chose to avoid identification with the Jews, over the years felt a need to express his Jewishness.

As you know, Spain passed a law two years ago to give the Spanish citizenship to the descendants of the Jews expelled in 1492. I don’t know how many Sephardic Jews have applied for the citizenship, but I do know that many Venezuelans who were barely aware of their Jewish origins have applied to become Spaniards. Individuals bearing the names Maduro (yes, Maduro as the current Venezuelan president), Capriles (as the leader of Venezuelan democratic opposition), De Sola, Ricardo, Mendoza, Benatuil, Curiel, Nunes, from families that long time ago assimilated and became Catholics, remembered suddenly that their ancestors came to Venezuela via Curaçao, from where they arrived as Spanish-Portuguese Dutch Jews, the same families that in the XVII Century arrived to New Amsterdam (today New York) and founded the Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue, in 1654. And these Venezuelans found suddenly their Sephardic connection to obtain the Spanish citizenship to flee the hell that is Venezuela today, the country with the highest inflation rate in the world (14,000 per cent projected for this year, according to the FMI), crime out of control, and scarcity of medications and food.

Another case of “painful identity” that I documented in an article I co-wrote with my friend Néstor Garrido, is the one of Venezuelans who converted to Judaism and decided to move to Israel amidst this horrible crisis. As in many other countries in Latin America (Peru, Colombia, Bolivia), former Evangelical Venezuelans converted to Judaism and decided to make aliah, but they have faced many hurdles, some internal (there is no Israeli consulate in Venezuela because president Hugo Chávez broke diplomatic relations with Israel) and some external (they also faced some problems associated with the politics of conversion in Israel). 

The Jewish community in Venezuela is facing something that we have seen in other once prosperous and vibrant communities in Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Poland or Germany. They are in the process of decline in the middle of a terrible crisis that is affecting all Venezuelans without distinction of religion or origin. I won’t say that the community is facing antisemitism, but the anti-Israeli politics of the current regime has certainly introduced the “Jewish question” into the public sphere, in a country that welcome the Jews after the war and where Jewish institutions (schools, synagogues, social and sport centers, museums) flourished. I would like to mention specially the important role that the Centro de Estudios Sefardíes de Caracas (the Center of Sephardic Studies in Caracas) has played in the diffusion of our Sephardic heritage through conferences, concerts, recordings, books and the journal Maguén-Escudo.

But I don’t want to finish this presentation on a negative note. I want to highlight many of the positive things of the Venezuelan Jewish community, its contributions to science and arts, and its achievements in promoting and enriching our Sephardic legacy. For example, the only Venezuelan Nobel Prize of Medicine is the Sephardi Baruch Benacerraf, whose family migrated to Venezuela from Tetouan, Morocco. Or the case of the filmmaker Margot Benacerraf who won the Critics Prize at the Festival of Cannes for her movie Araya. Or the wonderful novel by Isaac Chocrón, Rómpase en caso de incendio (Break in case of fire), where a Venezuelan Jew returns to Morocco looking for his multiple identities; the recordings of Esther Rofé where she sings the wonderful Spanish romances that we cherished so much; the liturgical recordings of Moisés Serfaty; the translation into modern Spanish of the Haftaroth by Rafael Encaoua and David Suisa; the Letter (La carta) that Lucy Garzón wrote in Haketía, a wonderful piece of Jewish humor; the Sephardic Week Festival organized by Moisés Garzón, Jacob Carciente, Amram Cohén, Abraham Botbol, Abraham Levy, Isaac Benarroch, Aquiba Benarroch Lasry, Miriam Harrar, Priscilla Abecasis, Alberto Moryusef, among many others. I can go on and on mentioning many other accomplishments. I just want to thank Limmud Ottawa for giving the opportunity to talk about this community that is facing today many challenges, but is always fighting to keep alive nuestro corazón judío, our Jewish heart. Gracias.

*Talk presented at Limmud Ottawa on March 18, 2018.