“SPANISH ISRAELITE(S), SON(S) OF COLOMBIA”: ERNESTO CORTISSOZ AND ABRAHAM Z. LÓPEZ PENHA IN BARRANQUILLA, 1850–1950

Abstract

Barranquilla, a city on the Colombian Caribbean, blossomed from a tiny village at the beginning of the nineteenth century into a booming, forward-looking port city by 1900. Unlike the rest of Colombia, Barranquilla became a magnet for multiethnic overseas immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Caribbean Sephardim, mostly from Curaçao, made vital contributions to the development of Barranquilla and, in fact, their trajectory seemed to echo the historical arc of the city itself. Among these individuals were Ernesto Cortissoz, businessman and commercial aviation pioneer, and Abraham López Penha, author and literary promoter. Cortissoz was a freethinker who expressed a strong reservation toward religion and, while he married a non-Jewish woman and his descendants assimilated into Catholic society, he did not convert to Catholicism. By contrast, López Penha had an affirmative, creative and public engagement with Sephardic and Hispanic American identities. He corresponded with figures such as Ángel Pulido and Miguel de Unamuno—the famous Spanish advocates of Sephardism—and had a consummate devotion to Spanish language and letters. The trajectories of these individuals reveal that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean Sephardim were not vestiges of the early modern period but rather engaged participants with distinct Jewish responses, and contributions, to modern Hispanic American contexts.