Our family’s prideful Sephardic legacy is not limited to our father’s father’s side, the Bensignors. It also extends to our father’s mother’s side. On our father’s mother’s mother’s side, the Amados, our ancestor Joshua Abraham Crespin was Chief Rabbi of Smyrna in the early 1800s. Crespins date back to France 1,000 years ago; some emigrated to England in connection with the Norman Conquest in 1066.
Our ancestor Hayim Pontremoli was Chief of the Rabinnate Court of Smyrna. And his younger brother, our ancestor Hiya Pontremoli, also rose to serve as the Chief Rabbi of Smyrna, in the middle of the 19th century. Other members of the Pontremoli family were
the Grand Rabbi of Nice, France and the Chief Rabbi of Turin, Italy.
And as for more modern times, we are very proud to say that our great-grandfather’s brother, our great great uncle, was Hayim Nahum, the Chief Rabbi of the Ottoman Empire, at the beginning of the last century. Rabbi Nahum then was invited to move to
Cairo and became the Chief Rabbi of Egypt, a position he held for the following four decades, until his death in 1960. News reports say 10,000 people attended his funeral.
The Chief Rabbi of Seville and the Crown Rabbi of Castile. A Chief Rabbi of Smyrna. A second Chief Rabbi of Smyrna. Chief Rabbis in France and Italy. The Chief Rabbi of the Ottoman Empire. The Chief Rabbi of Egypt. These are our ancestors.
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
Earlier in 2025, our second cousin once removed married her sweetheart on the Costa Brava in Spain, north of Barcelona. Fifteen Amado/Nahoum cousins gathered there for
the occasion. On Friday night, some of us met and said Shabbat prayers, lighting the Sabbath candles and praying over the wine and challah. And we had tears in our eyes, realizing it was the first time in over five hundred years that our family had prayed and
spoken Hebrew in our ancestral homeland.