Another Judaica question

[figmo]

I have looked all over the Internet and have not found a direct answer to this question.

If you are a Reform Jew, your mother is Sephardic, and your father is Ashkenazic, are you Sephardic, Ashkenazic, or can you choose depending upon how you were raised?

Comments

[judith-s.livejournal.com]

Of course Reform Jews allow you to self-identify. Most people who are half Sephardic tend to identific Sephardic in my experience. Although given how pale you are, you would probably feel more at home in an Ashkenazic community. Most of the Sephardic Jews tend to be darker skinned.

[figmo.livejournal.com]

Actually, I grew up with a dark-skinned grandmother (her parents came here from Alexandria, Egypt), so I'm used to identifying with Sephardic Jews.

I asked this question because one of my co-workers claimed the "Sephardic vs. Ashkenazic" line is passed down via the paternal line, whereas I'd always learned it was passed down the maternal line.

[merlinpole.livejournal.com]

I asked this question because one of my co-workers claimed the "Sephardic vs. Ashkenazic" line is passed down via the paternal line, whereas I'd always learned it was passed down the maternal line.

Er. Um. I don't think there is a good answer, it's "none of the above." It depended where the particular Sephardim went and what customs got kept. There are apparently a lot of Ashkenzai Jews whose ancestors 500+ years ago had been on the Iberian pennisula, and wound up in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and what today is the Ukraine and adopting Ashkenzai customs over the years, changed over to Askenazim. [I think there is some material on line regarding the history of Jews in the Kiev area that explains that. It's also possibly one of the reasons why the pecking order in Europe among Jews was Littvak, then Rushishaw [spelling = Russian/Ukrainian Jews], and the "Galitzianer" (Austria-Hungarian/Galician Jews), perhaps depending on how long they'd followed Ashkenzai customs.

Jew who left Iberia for Turkey and other Muslim-majority lands, stayed identified as Sephardim. The ones who went to the Netherlands I think tended to adopt Ashkenzai customs. The ones who decamped to the Yucatan, what today is New Mexico, and that general region of the world, went into hiding for five centuries or so, during which many of them lost explicit family secrets that they were Jews, and others merely keeping it very very secretive and practicing endogamy. The ones in New Mexico apparently started coming out of the clost the past 15 years or so. Others have been discovering "so -that's- why our family lights candles Friday nights and has chicken for supper!"