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I never said that, I also lived in Boca and I know. I've heard about Southern Sephardics, but now are hard to find or they changed their names. There are many Sephardics from Latin America that originally came from Istambul almost a century ago.
In the rural areas of Mississippi and Alabama, just like everyone else... they moved away to larger cities. Now there have been so many Ashkenazi Jews that have moved South starting in the 1880s from New York there just are not as many Sephardic Jews.
I met a woman who was a Rabbi, so was her Dad. They were from New York; she studied a lot about the Sephardim in colonial South Carolina. She jokingly said she always assumed all Jews coming to America started in New York. She found the study of old Southern Jewish families very fascinating since in the US we think of Jews as being urban and Northern, not rural Southerners
Charleston still has quite a few Sephardic Jews, a friend of mine went to a Jewish wedding in Charleston and the menu included Shrimp and Grits which was funny to me, I guess they assimilated... were the shrimp kosher LOL?
We know that Miami started its decline in 1960 but it really went downhill after 1980. Castro flushed his toilets and sent the result to Miami. Now Miami has the most dysfunctional traffic, crammed in development and legendary corruption. Go to jacksonville and you get some of the same, but there seems to be a lot less tolls and better traffic flow, less homeless and low life ghetto suburbs. If not for Castro, the worlds longest lasting dictator would Miami have been a better place?
So in your mind you are basically blaming the arrival of Cubans on your perceived notion that Miami has been in a decline since 1960.
You've always had a disdain for what Miami has become and reminisce how different it was back in the days of the Ozzie & Harriet era where minorities knew their place. I guess the election of Trump & his whole spiel of Make America Great Again must have sent you into some nostalgic nirvana to ask a question like this.
As for your question Miami was never like Jax even before those Cubans came over half a century ago. Jax was the business city of Florida and Miami was a more cosmopolitan tourist city and much more populated & diverse.
The better question to ask is if Jax is so great why didn't it grow to similar sized metros in Florida? Why was Jax also eclipsed by Miami in terms of business as well ?
The better question to ask is if Jax is so great why didn't it grow to similar sized metros in Florida? Why was Jax also eclipsed by Miami in terms of business as well ?
Jacksonville has had a lot of growth, but LESS than other cities in Florida, it is growing faster than most cities in the country. So really the question is why has Jacksonville not grown as MUCH as other cities in Florida. With that being said, there are many reasons for the lack of growth vis a vis other Florida cities like Miami
-Leadership of the city was not proactive. Jacksonville did not try to grow as much because the leaders felt they did not need to grow. Orlando had leadership that took advantage of the proximity to Cape Canaveral and courted companies like Martin Marietta back in the 1960s. The convinced the state to turn the Florida Turnpike inland to go near Orlando, they also built the Beeline Expressway( now Beachline). And of course Disney.
-Atlanta became the Southern HQ for Ma Bell, also Federal Government offices for SE, and agencies such as the CDC being put in Atlanta helped. Atlanta is also the capital of Georgia
-Rampant corruption in the city government which led to the consolidation with Duval County (Consolidation has been a plus for Jacksonville overall)
-Sort of related to the corruption is the poor quality of schools
-Jacksonville gets too cold ( for Florida) in winter to be a tourist destination or retirement haven, although many military people choose to retire near Jacksonville. Jacksonville is not the Arctic, there are a handful of freezes every year but 100 miles South it almost never freezes
-The smell of the paper mills from the 1930s-1980s. Now even over 30 years later, people who aren't even old enough to remember let alone experience the smell of paper mills, still THINK Jacksonville smells
-Cuban refugees swelled the population of Miami-Dade County starting in 1960. They stayed close to Cuba thinking that they would go back by 1965, and it did not happen. So they started their own businesses, became professionals etc here in the US, as did their kids and grandkids. American companies set up Latin American divisions Miami instead of gambling on instability in Latin American countries.
-Univision in Miami area really brought Miami into being and integral part of Latin America, leading to more immigration with government problems and unrest in places like Colombia, Nicaragua, Venezuela
-The legacy of segregation was stronger in Jacksonville being part of the Deep South. All of Florida had Jim Crow Laws and legally segregated schools remember, but there was a lot more transplants in Southern Florida.
-Sort of a corollary to the previous point, there is an anti-Southern bias in much of the US. Southerners (both black and white) are country-bumpkin, unsophisticated, uneducated cretins and of course white Southerners are racist in their DNA (unlike the fine people in New England) just pining away for a return to Jim Crow laws
-Recently what has hurt Jacksonville is-- being in the same state as more well known cities, like Miami, Orlando and Tampa. Sort of like San Antonio compared to Dallas and Houston; or San Diego compared to Los Angeles and San Francisco. Orlando has more than most metro areas of its size because of the tourists, Jax is only a 2 hour car ride away, much in the same way Philadelphia plays second fiddle to New York. Miami is internationally known and a center of media and entertainment
Jacksonville is relatively isolated, lots of swamps and pine trees around. Miami is adjacent to Ft Lauderdale, WPB. Tampa has St Pete right across the bay. Jax has St. Augustine, Gainesville and Brunswick, GA as satellite cities.
I think that Jacksonville is going to grow much more than is expected. It will be much more prominent Nationally and Internationally. It has history and a lot of potential.... hopefully it will be capitalized upon
In the rural areas of Mississippi and Alabama, just like everyone else... they moved away to larger cities. Now there have been so many Ashkenazi Jews that have moved South starting in the 1880s from New York there just are not as many Sephardic Jews.
I met a woman who was a Rabbi, so was her Dad. They were from New York; she studied a lot about the Sephardim in colonial South Carolina. She jokingly said she always assumed all Jews coming to America started in New York. She found the study of old Southern Jewish families very fascinating since in the US we think of Jews as being urban and Northern, not rural Southerners
Charleston still has quite a few Sephardic Jews, a friend of mine went to a Jewish wedding in Charleston and the menu included Shrimp and Grits which was funny to me, I guess they assimilated... were the shrimp kosher LOL?
I read somewhere that the first Sephardics arrived during the 18th century from Holland. Sephardics in Miami eat "Turkish" food and they are called "Turks" sometimes, they arrived with Turkish or Ottoman passports. Shrimps are not kosher...but there are kosher shrimps and lobsters made out of strange things. Maybe they have a creative Rabbi that reinterpreted the Torah.
I read somewhere that the first Sephardics arrived during the 18th century from Holland. Sephardics in Miami eat "Turkish" food and they are called "Turks" sometimes, they arrived with Turkish or Ottoman passports. Shrimps are not kosher...but there are kosher shrimps and lobsters made out of strange things. Maybe they have a creative Rabbi that reinterpreted the Torah.
I know shrimp are forbidden in the dietary laws I was joking. There was a picture going around facebook a few years ago a picture of a grocery store sign for hams saying "kosher for passover"
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Holland for a time was ruled by the Spanish Monarchy. And Holland was pretty tolerant in the 1700s, that where the Puritans went before Massachusetts.
The Sephardim originated in Spain and Portugual, they spoke a language called Ladino which is a mix of Hebrew and Spanish/Portuguese (similiar to Yiddish being a mix of German and Hebrew). When the Jews were ordered to leave Spain or convert, the Spanish Jews went around the Mediterranean and many ended up around the Mediterranean in the Ottoman Empire in places like modern day Turkey, Greece, Lebanon, Syria and Morocco. Some went to Holland.
As the England and Spain built empires in the Americas a lot of Sephardim ended up in the Americas.
In Argentina Middle Easterners were called Turks for the same reason.
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Sort of tangentially related. Jacksonville has a large Arab community, one of largest in the US. Most are Christian. The original Arab immigrants came from Ramallah( in todays West Bank) a little more than 100 years ago. Before WWI it was the Ottoman empire. That's why you have Arabs with heavy Southern drawls
My ancestors on my father's side were Sephardic, but they did not leave Spain, Palma de Mallorca. They became Catholics in 1362, but several ancestors were burned centuries after they became Catholic. In 1937, several families of Jewish ancestry were marked for extermination by Italian Fascist in case Nazis invaded Mallorca, it was just idiotic as 80 percent of that city has Jewish ancestry..even Franco had Jewish ancestry.
Ladino is old Spanish..and Catalan, beautiful language. Not much is left of Jewish culture and religion, many are jewellers...some pastries. Now all Sephardic all around the world are automatically Spanish..500 years later.
People of Jewish ancestry are called "xuetes" (an insult in the past, as xua is the pork meat used to make sausages) and "old christians" are called "pork sausage". Now the term is prestigious and honorary...but somebody screamed "Jew" to the former socialist Mayor of Palma de Mallorca....more than 600 years after conversion...."goyims" (is that pejorative?) have a long memory.
Yes, many went to America and to Northern Spain, as northeners hated the Inquisition. The Inquisition was managed by...converts, the worst of them all was Torquemada, Jewish convert, Niño de Guevara, Jewish convert. They burned hundreds of not only Jews, but protestans, etc, etc.
There are several towns that are composed mostly of Jewish converts, some are trying to recuperate food, pastries, traditions, music and restoring sinagoges, even if they don't know the first thing about Jadaism.
There are some really informative comments here. Some narrow minded Miami boosters but more fact than fiction. The main reason I had put up this topic is that every time I go to Jax it strikes me as being a better looking area than Miami, despite the awful ghettoes around the city. Miami in general has a more crowded and ugly feel to it, and the tolls are everywhere inlike Jax where I never seem to encounter any. Even looking at the beach there it seems better than Miami Beach and the people there seem more content too. Anywhere you go in Florida you find that Miami is the worst in every measure, quality of life, traffic, scenery etc. Miami has the feeling of being crammed way too full. Sure, Orlando is as crowded and Naples has a worse ratio of rich to poor but nowhere in Florida is as dysfunctional on every level as Miami. The third world vibe seems strongest in Miami and the farther you go north the less it is present. Hopefully one day Cubans can get rid of their communist regime for good and retake the position of the premier destination in the Caribbean. However, if they follow the example of Miami, they will still live like communists.
There are some really informative comments here. Some narrow minded Miami boosters but more fact than fiction. The main reason I had put up this topic is that every time I go to Jax it strikes me as being a better looking area than Miami, despite the awful ghettoes around the city. Miami in general has a more crowded and ugly feel to it, and the tolls are everywhere inlike Jax where I never seem to encounter any. Even looking at the beach there it seems better than Miami Beach and the people there seem more content too. Anywhere you go in Florida you find that Miami is the worst in every measure, quality of life, traffic, scenery etc. Miami has the feeling of being crammed way too full. Sure, Orlando is as crowded and Naples has a worse ratio of rich to poor but nowhere in Florida is as dysfunctional on every level as Miami. The third world vibe seems strongest in Miami and the farther you go north the less it is present. Hopefully one day Cubans can get rid of their communist regime for good and retake the position of the premier destination in the Caribbean. However, if they follow the example of Miami, they will still live like communists.
The South Florida MSA literally has over four times the population of Jacksonville. In general bigger cities have more immigrants, a higher number of ghettos, more traffic/crowds etc. It sounds like you prefer small town life which is completely fine, everyone has preferences. It's no different in New York, Chicago, L.A or other cities of considerable size.
I've always argued that Miami is a distinct area because of the Cuban influence after Castro took over. You have to understand that the Cuban migration was different compared to most other countries since the first major waves (in the 50s and 60s) were more upper-class/middle-class Cubans who already had connections somewhat with South Florida and they started supporting the groups that came later in the 70s until now (which also started attracting more immigrants from other Latin American/Caribbean countries, such as Colombians, Argentines, Venezuelans, etc.). Without Cuba/Castro, Miami certainly would not be as big as it is, but I still think South Florida would be the largest population center of Florida (no matter what, because of Miami's location it would still have been seen as the gateway to Latin America, just not as many Cubans/Latin Americans living here); as others have mentioned, more like Tampa and the West Coast (with a higher percentage of retirees) as opposed to the international center it has become. Either way, it is almost impossible to think of what it could be like because of many different other factors.
We know that Miami started its decline in 1960 but it really went downhill after 1980. Castro flushed his toilets and sent the result to Miami. Now Miami has the most dysfunctional traffic, crammed in development and legendary corruption. Go to jacksonville and you get some of the same, but there seems to be a lot less tolls and better traffic flow, less homeless and low life ghetto suburbs. If not for Castro, the worlds longest lasting dictator would Miami have been a better place?
Miami went uphill during the 80's as you well now. Bad marielitos were caged in less than two months and it was the time in which realtors and developers got rich. It was also the era in which SMB started to come out out of the cinders.
It would probably be like Liberty City. When Cubans started to arrive, monolinguals were trying to contain blacks burning crosses with no avail. Without Castro, you would also have left.
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