GEORGE MONTEIRO
623
achieved such importance in banking and commerce in the latter part of the
nineteenth century; who, by the sheer force of their money, grew to dom–
inate the American Jewish community; and whom the older-established
Sephardim therefore looked down upon and actively resented." As one
might have expected, Sephardim and Ashkenazim inevi tably intermarried.
"The old Sephardic names with their Spanish and Portuguese musicality–
Lopez, Mendes, Mendola, de Sola, de Silva, de Fonseca, Peixotto, Solis,"
notes Birmingham, "begin gradually to be replaced by the somewhat
harsher-sounding Ashkenazic, or German, names, as the old Iberian fami–
lies feel the influx of the Germans throughout the nineteenth century, as
the Sephardim and Ashkenazim intermarry and the Germans-as the
Sephardim complain-try to 'dominate' with their stiff-necked ways."
That their collective Iberian experience remains of some significance
to the Sephardim, however, is insisted upon. "The Spanish-Portuguese part
of their collective past is of enduring importance to the Sephardim of
America," says Birmingham. It gives "these old families their feeling of rel–
evance, of significance, of knowing where they 'fit into the scheme of
things,'" for they are a people of historical substance and accomplishment.
In fact, it was "in both Spain and Portugal in the years before they were
forced to flee, [that] the Jews-as a people, a race-had been able to reach
heights of achievement unlike anything that had happened elsewhere in
their long history." Cohn behaves as if he were unaware of the long Iberian
component, through his Sephardic mother, in his heritage. When some of
Jake 's friends seem to detect in Cohn something they call his "superior"
way, they are merely fueling the fire in a situation that seems only to damn
him further in Jake's eyes. As Bill says of Robert Cohn, "He's got this
Jewish superiority so strong that he thinks the only emotion he'll get out
of the fight will be being bored." Of the "Sephardim"
The Jewish
Encyclopedia
observes: "Many sufferings, which they had endured for the
sake of their faith, had made them more than usually self-conscious; they
considered themselves a superior class-the nobility of Jewry."
His entry in the
Dictionary
if
Literary Biography
begins by pointing out
that "Harold Albert Loeb [is] now best-known as the prototype for the
character Robert Cohn in Ernest Hemingway's
The Sun Also Rises."
Loeb
had recognized immediately upon the novel's publication that he was the
model for Robert Cohn. In Paris Loeb had talked with Hemingway about
his private life, making Loeb himself, notes Bertram Saranson, "the chief
source of Hemingway's knowledge about him." But Hemingway had not
only appropriated the details of Loeb's life; he had made Cohn obnoxious
and foolish. And that "change" Loeb resented. When he made his indig–
nation known, it was Hemingway's turn to complain. "A guy named Loeb
was in town and was going to shoot me," he wrote to Scott Fi tzgerald (pre-
