Ashkenazic Communities Research Articles

What Does a Kohen Have to Do with the Protocols of the Ashkenazic Community of Amsterdam? A Conflict between Community Sanctity and the Righteousness of the Ancients

Abstract This article deals with an incident in the Ashkenazic community of Amsterdam in 1772 that was documented in the protocols of the community. A member of the congregation confessed to the rabbi after the death of her husband, a kohen, that she was in fact a convert. The rabbi informed her son that as the son of a kohen married to a convert he was defined as a ḥalal (disqualified), and thereby lost his status as a kohen. A few weeks later, the rabbi and his bet din (Jewish tribunal) were required to reconsider the halakhic significance of the mother’s testimony about herself and the status of her children and came to the opposite conclusion, that the mother was not a convert and her son was indeed a kohen. The article discusses the possible reasons for re-examining a halakhic question that had already been decided and for reversing the decision, while clarifying the founding ethos of the community, its style of conduct, and the nature of its records. Finally I speculate about what lay behind the mother’s admission.

From Thieves to Martyrs: The Story of Two Jews from Early Modern Moravia

This paper focuses on the story of two Jewish men who were convicted of theft and executed in Prostějov, Moravia, in the spring of 1684. Although the two were offered a pardon in exchange for converting to Christianity, they resolutely refused. Their story was recorded in a contemporaneous Yiddish song that serves as the basis for the current case-study. The informative layer of the text portrays an event that can be contextualized within the campaign to proselytize Jews in the Bohemian lands at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Likewise, it indicates the great significance that Jews and Christians alike attributed to public conversions—or the lack thereof. From the formative perspective, the text crowns the two Jews as martyrs who died sanctifying God’s Name, disregarding their undenied legal culpability. Accordingly, this paper traces developments in the Ashkenazic ethos of martyrdom from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. It also highlights the shared cultural legacy that bound the larger early modern Ashkenazic communities, such as those in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Frankfurt, or Prague, to smaller Jewish settlements, like those of Moravia. Besides its hagiographical function, this historic song also imparts didactic and moralizing messages. It censures those who are too lenient vis-à-vis their children’s education as well as criticizing the habit of gambling, practices that may lead to criminal activities and push those involved to the margins of Jewish society.

On the Yehi Raẓon Formula in the Blessing for the New Month in the Ashkenazic Rite

In the early custom of Ashkenaz, on the Shabbat preceding the beginning of the month, the coming of the new month (Rosh Ḥodesh) would be announced after the reading from the Torah and before the Torah scroll was returned to the synagogue's Holy Ark. The ritual included reciting the paragraph beginning with the words mi she-‘asah nissim (may He who performed miracles) and continuing with an announcement of the timing of Rosh Ḥodesh. In the second half of the eighteenth century, an addition to the liturgy appeared before the Mi She-‘asah Nissim section: a passage beginning yehi raẓon (may it be Your will) that the Babylonian Talmud relates was recited daily by the sage Rav following the Amidah prayer. This article suggests some reasons for the addition of the passage, traces the spread of the practice of its recitation among Ashkenazic communities, and concludes with an examination and explanation of two apparently erroneous additions to the Yehi Raẓon formula.

On the Yehi Raẓon Formula in the Blessing for the New Month in the Ashkenazic Rite

In the early custom of Ashkenaz, on the Shabbat preceding the beginning of the month, the coming of the new month (Rosh Ḥodesh) would be announced after the reading from the Torah and before the Torah scroll was returned to the synagogue's Holy Ark. The ritual included reciting the paragraph beginning with the words mi she-'asah nissim (may He who performed miracles) and continuing with an announcement of the timing of Rosh Ḥodesh. In the second half of the eighteenth century, an addition to the liturgy appeared before the Mi She-'asah Nissim section: a passage beginning yehi raẓon (may it be Your will) that the Babylonian Talmud relates was recited daily by the sage Rav following the Amidah prayer. This article suggests some reasons for the addition of the passage, traces the spread of the practice of its recitation among Ashkenazic communities, and concludes with an examination and explanation of two apparently erroneous additions to the Yehi Raẓon formula.

Between Domestic and Urban Spaces: Preparing for Shabbat in Ashkenazic Communities, 13th–15th Centuries

Between Domestic and Urban Spaces: Preparing for Shabbat in Ashkenazic Communities, 13th–15th Centuries

Between Domestic and Urban Spaces: Preparing for Shabbat in Ashkenazic Communities, 13th-15th Centuries

Between Domestic and Urban Spaces: Preparing for Shabbat in Ashkenazic Communities, 13th-15th Centuries

Deserto: Zwischen den Welten by Luis S. Krausz

Reviewed by: Deserto: Zwischen den Welten by Luis S. Krausz Dagmar C. G. Lorenz Luis S. Krausz, Deserto: Zwischen den Welten. Vienna: Sonderzahl, 2017. 132 pp. Luis Krausz's Deserto offers a highly personal introduction to the Brazilian post-Shoah Austrian-German-Jewish community, and it challenges genre boundaries. This intriguing prose work examines ways in which an extended family copes with the trials of exile and uncovers effects of the Shoah and Nazi persecution in the generation of the grandson. Anecdotes, historical information, and a wealth of cultural insights pertain to the youthful narrator's journey from his native São Paulo to Israel and England. In these different settings he encounters members of his family and the Ashkenazic diaspora. The narrative perspective blends adolescent naiveté and an adult awareness, past and present. In the account the norms of the diaspora society become visible, as do the distinct traditions to which his relatives subscribe—Reform Judaism, Jewish orthodoxy, and secular cosmopolitanism. Not without a transgressive bent, the narrator notes the extraordinary traits of his society from an insider's point of view. His trip enables him to gain distance from Jewish São Paulo with its bourgeois homes hidden behind hedges and the cemetery [End Page 114] of Vila Mariana as the residents' final destination (16). Moving "zwischen den Welten," Krausz's narrator increasingly assumes the role of an affectionate, erudite interpreter. Krausz draws a cultural and historical panorama that extends beyond Central Europe, notably Vienna, into the destroyed world of the shtetl, where the Ashkenazic communities originated. Krausz's earlier novel Verbannung (2011) focused on the formative years of the narrator in Jewish São Paulo, but Deserto suggests an impending departure. The narrator is identified as the grandson of exiles, who, like the author, is beholden to the high culture of Austria and Germany: classical literature, music, and the humanities. To him, Europe represents an unattainable ideal as well as a forbidden fruit. Deserto foregrounds the narrator's travels to Israel and England and the exile milieu in which his relatives live. Like his parents, they escaped National Socialism, and like the Ashkenazim in Brazil, they assimilated themselves superficially while maintaining Jewish values and identity as expressed through their attire, practices, and food as well as a language rooted in pre-Shoah Vienna and Berlin speech. References to post-Enlightenment history and the ideal of Bildung epitomized by Heine, Freud, Zweig, Schnitzler, Mann, and Wassermann establish an intellectual cohesion in Krausz's novel. From German-Jewish literature and his elders' accounts, this Brazil-born grandson has constructed a text-based identification wiTheurope that instilled in him a longing for the mysterious "drüben" and for the past. Integral to this cultural profile are furthermore an appreciation for Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms; proficiency in German and classical languages; and the etiquette of the European bourgeoisie. Krausz also specifies language registers and accents that identify distinct groups within his circles, for instance the "altvertraute Wiener Vorkriegsdeutsch" (95) or the Jewish "Jargon," the Yiddish-accented German that the sixteen-year-old narrator understands but does not speak. For those who can afford it, the lifestyle of the exiles includes a household with maids, tailors, and pastry chefs from the territories of imperial Habsburg, Viennese-style furniture and soups, pastries, meat dishes, even "panierte Schweinsschnitzel" of the cuisine of Old Vienna, and the Jewish delicacies hamantashen, kugel, and tsimmes. In his memory book Die Tante Jolesch oder Der Untergang des Abendlandes in Anekdoten (1975) Friedrich Torberg mourned and celebrated Ashkenazic culture, which he considered forever lost. Krausz subtly revises the notion of finality and replaces it with a notion of diasporic dispersement evident [End Page 115] from the perpetuation but also the repression of Ashkenazic patterns. Cultural cohesion, he suggests, requires transparency as well as taboos, for example, traveling to post-Nazi Austria or Germany or breaking the silence about the Shoah and Eastern Jewish life. Uncle Richard's taboo-breaking but enjoyable trip to the Salzburg Festival is one example. It stands in contrast to Uncle Eugen's avoidance of a collection of Yiddish folk songs and early Zionist dances, which he keeps intact but does not share or...

A Communal Tree of Life: Western Sephardic Jewry and the Library of the Ets Haim Yesiba in Early Modern Amsterdam

A Communal Tree of LifeWestern Sephardic Jewry and the Library of the Ets Haim Yesiba in Early Modern Amsterdam David Sclar (bio) Mass production of books in the early modern period broadened the quest for learning, promoted the invention of new educational tools, and generated wider social networks. As wealthy individuals assembled vast collections of texts, and institutions formed new spaces as centers of specialized scholarship, an increasingly large and diversified readership gained access to, utilized, and shaped knowledge on a grand scale. Semipublic libraries developed into cultural hubs, at once enabling and driving intellectual, social, and religious developments in Europe. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, a book collection belonging to the Ets Haim Yesiba (Tree of Life Seminary), the scholastic arm of Western Sephardic Jewry in Amsterdam, emerged as the period's first Jewish institutional library.1 It grew in size and importance as thousands of Conversos emigrated to the Dutch Republic in search of religious tolerance and financial opportunity. As a whole, these newly professing Jews, whose ancestors had been forcibly baptized in Spain and Portugal, took advantage of their new surroundings. They amassed immense wealth through mercantilism, formed new communities in western Europe and across the Atlantic, and built strong communal institutions, including a host of charities, the Talmud Torah educational system (under which formed the Ets Haim Yesiba),2 and the monumental Esnoga synagogue.3 They forged an identity as a Naçao (Nation) and frequently referred to themselves as "Portuguese" Jews, indicative of a deeply intertwined Jewish and Iberian heritage.4 As carriers of new knowledge, books—specifically, traditional texts in Hebrew, and Bibles, liturgies, and legal works in vernacular languages—supported the population's Judaization, particularly within the walls of the Ets Haim (Figure 1). [End Page 43] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Adolf van der Laan, 't Gesigt van de Portugeese en Hoogduy[t]se Jodenkerken tot Amsterdam (Amsterdam: Pieter van Gunst, ca. 1710). Image provided by the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary (PNT A41.1.21.1). The imposing Portuguese synagogue (Esnoga) appears on the left, with the Ets Haim Yesiba and its library located in the smaller building in front of it. The Great Synagogue of the Ashkenazic community is situated across the canal on the right. The library of the Ets Haim Yesiba stands as a unique development in the history of premodern Jewry, and possibly of religious and communal institutions in early modern Europe in general. It did not belong to any single person, grew under the decentralized and ever-changing leadership of elected officials (parnasim), and served the broad religious and moral concerns of the Portuguese Jewish community. Unlike contemporary patrician and university libraries, formed by or for and according to the whims of intellectual and socioeconomic elites, the Yesiba's collection was a formal repository of texts funded by patrons and community coffers in the service of an expansive educational program. The Livraria, as it became known, originated as a sort of purchasing department responsible for providing students with textual and ritual supplies in support of their primary instruction. As the community grew, however, so did the school and its library. Through decades of Converso immigration, crises posed by nonbelievers and religious enthusiasts,5 and the expansion of the Western Sephardic diaspora, religious and lay leadership formed a rabbinic library of record consisting of hundreds and eventually thousands of volumes. Throughout its history, [End Page 44] its user base included pupils enrolled in yeshiva, elder students in the community seeking greater textual fluency, and scholars in the Medras Grande (the highest class of the Yesiba) pursuing advanced studies and working on their own publications. The Library's maturity reflected broad European developments in authorship, publishing, and reading, as book collections began to fill rooms rather than mere shelves. Collecting still required literacy, money, supplies, and texts from which to copy, but printing with movable type, particularly in cultural and economic centers like Amsterdam, revolutionized the availability of materials and the capacity to publish. Greater access to texts and increased literary awareness contributed to intellectual and social development. In the case of Portuguese Jewry, the Ets Haim's growing...

Competing Perspectives on Legal Decision Making in Early Modern Ashkenaz

The respective roles of jurists and judges in the decision-making process offers a valuable perspective on judicial practice and the delivery of justice in early modern Ashkenazic communities. This essay is concerned with differences in the approaches of poseqim (jurists) and dayanim (judges); it suggests that these distinctions were reflections of the institutional settings in which they worked, the size of their communities, and regional factors. Data unearthed from communal records and rabbinic responsa offer important evidence of disparities between the offices of early modern dayanim and poseqim, their distinct personae, and their respective views of how judicial rulings are decided. Moreover, these differences were related to the slow transition to fixed rabbinic-communal courts in western and central Europe that was a product of forces peculiar to the resettlement of Jews in the west, the deliberate development of communal traditions, and the role of the enlightened absolutist state. The impact of the growing recourse to non-Jewish courts, especially as it evinced differences between eastern and western/central European history and culture, was also a factor. Clearly, regional forces influenced the distinct legal efforts and perspectives of judges and jurists, as did the discrete functions they were assigned, their particular training, and the institutional standing of rabbinic courts. These differences became more glaring in the two centuries prior to the collapse of the ancien regime, as structural changes in western Ashkenazic communities contributed to a new Jewish legal culture.

“You Have Saved Me from the Judgment of Gehenna”: The Origins of the Mourner's Kaddish in Medieval Ashkenaz

This article traces the origins and rapid spread of the Mourner's Kaddish, a liturgical custom first attested in late twelfth- early thirteenth-century Ashkenazic halakhic texts. While scholars have traditionally linked it to the martyrological needs of post-1096 Ashkenazic communities, this article suggests that the rise of the Mourner's Kaddish was one manifestation of a broader shift in medieval Jewish conceptions of the afterlife. An analysis of the exemplum that provided the new custom with a “myth of origins” reveals carefully inserted allusions and symbolism, which together propound a coherent theology of eschatology, divine recompense, and intercessory prayer. This theology closely mirrors doctrinal developments underway in Christian Europe—specifically the “birth of purgatory” and its accompanying commemorative and intercessory practices. The exemplum, moreover, couches its message in subtly polemical terms, criticizing and ridiculing those very elements of Christian belief and practice that were being covertly incorporated into the Jewish liturgical realm.

A shtetl under the sun: the Ashkenazic community of Curacao

A shtetl under the sun: the Ashkenazic community of Curacao

New Perspectives on the Challenges of Modernity in France

New Perspectives on Challenges of Modernity in France JAY R. BERKOVITZ. Rites and Passages: The Beginnings of Modern Jewish Culture in France, 1650-1860. Jewish Culture and Contexts Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Pp. viii + 333.ALYSSA GOLDSTEIN SEPINWALL. The Abbe Gregoire and French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism. The S. Mark Taper Foundation Imprint in Jewish Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 341.OVER THIRTY YEARS AGO, Michael Meyer aptly observed that Jewish experience varied from region to region, making it difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint historical periods, such as advent of modernity. As he wrote, Scattered among nations, Jews have participated to varying degrees in simultaneous and successive foreign civilizations while at same time carrying on their own heritage.1 Two recently published books, one by Jay Berkovitz and other by Alyssa Goldstein Sepmwall, clearly demonstrate value of regional and national studies of modernity. When read in tandem, internal Jewish perspective provided by Berkovitz and vast global perspective offered by Sepmwall highlight distinctive national and regional features that marked adjustment to modernity experienced by minorities under French rule.Jay Berkovitz's Rites and Passages is a cultural history of FrancoJewish community between late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. Berkovitz focuses on the progressive refashioning of traditional values in encounter with secularization, modernity, and non-Jewish ideas and symbols (p. 91). His examination of how Jewish self-image shifted is based on internal Jewish sources analyzed over longue duree. This methodology enables him to explore critical regional distinctions among French Jews, both between Sephardim of Bordeaux and their Ashkenazic brethren, as well as within Ashkenazic communities, where he separates between urban Jews of Paris and Metz, and Jews of rural Alsace (pp. 14-27, 35-58, 85).Berkovitz claims that certain modern trends, including changes in Jewish identity and Jewish communities, were apparent during ancien regime. These include an erosion of religious practices among urban elite and growing subordination of rabbinate to lay parnasim and merchants m Bordeaux and m Metz. Berkovitz's critical contribution and innovation is his assertion that visible changes m identity preceded Revolution and Emancipation. Berkovitz convincingly argues that during late eighteenth century a regional Franco-Jewish identity emerged m Alsace and Lorraine, one that was m direct tension with these Jews' previous identification with pan-Ashkenaz. Whereas during two centuries before 1789, shared rituals, educational patterns, and judicial structures encouraged unity across Rhine and further east, m decades before Revolution, Jews living m both villages of Alsace and m city of Metz began to forge an additional and separate local identity, reflected m particular customs and liturgy and in selfsufficient communal structures (pp. 73-83).Other discernible elements of modernity were also visible m prerevolutionary France, including a small group of maskilim, comprising essayists, Hebraists, and poets. It was common for these maskilim to engage m contemporary political discussions, arguing that Judaism was compatible with citizenship (pp. 94-97; 174-77).Having identified seeds of change m prerevolutionary period, Berkovitz claims that m short term, French Revolution hindered, rather than helped, modernization of French Jewry, particularly among Ashkenazim. In wake of Revolution, acute anti-Jewish hostility, deteriorating economic conditions, religious persecution, emigration of an entire generation of yeshivah students and rabbis, and closing of schools, synagogues and two Hebrew presses impeded Jewish community's ability to adjust to their new civic status (p. …

Death Twice over: Dualism of Metaphor and Realia in 12th-Century Hebrew Crusading Accounts

This article analyzes the peculiar phrase "being killed a second time" referring to the Jews, which is found in the Hebrew accounts of the First Crusade in 1096. Through a comparison with and analysis of Christian hagiography and medieval Latin documents using the same phrase, the study shows that there is a dual meaning of this metaphor. On the one hand, the phrase conveys the Jewish martyrs' strong commitment to their God by showing their willingness to die twice at the hands of crusaders; on the other hand, it alludes to ambiguous and questionable behavior of forced converts or to indecisive Jewish behavior in the face of forced conversion. Converts were perceived as dead once they left Judaism. Their first "death" could have been reversed either by martyrdom or by returning to their original creed. Second death, therefore, could refer to martyrdoms of converts. Through a second death these Jews achieved their atonement and exoneration. Most of the converts, however, "came back to life" upon their return to Judaism. The metaphor reveals that conversion to Christianity constituted a far more serious and common problem than the Jewish authors could admit openly. At the same time, "being killed a second time" discloses the sources' polemical and apologetic tone. Despite the rigid image held of the Ashkenazic community in several modern studies, the analysis of the metaphor reveals a compassionate community, with a sympathetic attitude and realistic approach toward the converts.

Piety, Pietism and German Pietism: Sefer Ḥasidim I and the Influence of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz

This article questions the considerable influence attributed to German Pietism in the Middle Ages. It begins by arguing that the first 152 sections of the standard Sefer Ḥasidim is a separate work (called in this essay SḤ I) and is set apart from the rest of Sefer Ḥasidim in language, religious leitmotifs and spiritual demands. Indeed, in many ways SḤ I is opposed to the most basic tenets of Ḥasidei Ashkenaz . More than half of the extant manuscripts of Sefer Ḥasidim are of SḤ I only. The essay then attempts to chart the putative influence of German Pietism in Germany, France, Provence, Spain, and Eastern Europe. It finds that other than the doctrine of penance which took a deep hold of the Jews in central and eastern Europe, there was no influence whatsoever. Confusion has arisen in great part because three very distinct terms have been confused—piety, pietism, and German Pietism. The first means simply scrupulous adherence to the dictates of one's religion. The second connotes a form of spirituality common to many religions, among them Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Its occurence in Jewish communities in France and Spain in the Middle Ages has nothing to do with Ḥasidei Ashkenaz . The third term, German Pietism, denotes a very distinctive form of pietism that arose in the late 12th century characterized by an idiosyncratic ideology and a radical social and religious agenda. This movement was without influence. Indeed, no mention is made of it in the entire literary corpus of the Ashkenazic community.

Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Ninteenth-Century Prague (review)

Reviewed by: Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Prague John M. Efron Sylvie-Anne Goldberg. Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Prague. Translated by Carol Cosman. Originally published as Les deux rives du Jabbok: La maladie et la mort dans le judaïsme ashkénaze: Prague XVIe–XIXe siècle, 1989. Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society, no. 9. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. xviii + 303 pp. Ill. $45.00; £37.50. This is an ambitious book: Sylvie-Anne Goldberg sets out to treat the attitudes to illness and death among Central European Jews, from the early modern to the modern period. Informed by the Annales school in general and by Philippe Ariès’s work on death in particular, her approach is to apply their historiographic methods to the Jewish past in order to illuminate what is a severely underresearched area. In the process of reconstructing Jewish mentalities, she sheds light on the most intimate of life’s moments for Jews—analyzing what attitudes, beliefs, and practices concerning illness and death they shared with their Christian neighbors, and what set them apart. Goldberg ably demonstrates that the Jews’ customs concerning illness and death were in many ways remarkably similar to those of their neighbors. For example, Latin was used for Jewish funerary inscriptions until the ninth century, after which time they were written in Hebrew; Goldberg attributes this to the flourishing of Ashkenazic communities in Germany and France, the intellectual prestige and authority they came to enjoy, and the subsequent development of new, sacred conceptions of the relation of these new communities to the dead. Most strikingly, she has found no indications of the existence of a specifically Jewish cemetery before the eleventh century, and she hypothesizes that until this time, “Jews were buried . . . in funerary spaces shared by others and doubtless without the benefit of headstones” (p. 25). After about 1000 c.e. this situation changed. She suggests that the emergence of the Jewish cemetery was due to the spread of Christianity among Europeans, whose increasing sacralization of burial places—illustrated by the transference of the cemetery from outside the town to the interior of the church—forced Jews to make provision for their own funerary space. No longer could burial grounds be shared places of rest for Christians and Jews. Elsewhere, Goldberg indicates those times and places where specific historical moments gave rise to particular Jewish customs. For example, the Crusades and the mass slaughter they brought in their wake for the Jews of the Rhineland saw [End Page 705] the appearance of memorial books, the kaddish (prayer for the dead), and the annual lighting of memorial candles for the dead—all of which remain essential to the funerary practices of Jews to this very day. In other spheres, Jewish practices are reminiscent of those among Christians, even though the origins of the two may be distinct. For example, similar to the notion of Christian mercy as expressed by Catholic brotherhoods, the Jewish obligation to visit the sick (bikkur holim) was based on a notion of “disinterested kindness” (hesed shel emet)—but rather than a mere imitation of Christian practice, Goldberg says that among Jews the visitations were inspired by the advent of Lurianic Kabbalah in the sixteenth century. In particular, Jewish burial societies first emerged in Italy (though Christian guilds in German lands had them as well), in areas populated by Iberian Jewish exiles. Kabbalah, with its themes of resurrection, atonement, and the individual life of the soul, inspired a “virtual explosion of books on death rituals” between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries (p. 86). One of these was the book by Aaron Berachia of Modena called Crossing the Jabbok (1626)—an allusion to the purifying river of fire that, kabbalists said, the soul passes over after death in order to reach the realm of eternal life. It is Goldberg’s claim that death and suffering define community. Thus the centerpiece of her study is the hevra kaddisha of Prague, or its burial society, established in 1564, which became the prototype for all...

Residence, social mobility and ractice theory: the case of Sephardic Jews of Sydney

This paper focuses on residential mobility of an ethnic group within a complex linkage between religion, ethnicity and race. It places the triangular transactional relationship between white Australian gentiles, white Ashkenazic Jews and Asian (non-white) Sephardic Jews together with the strategy of residential movement, within the conceptual framework of Bourdieu's Practice Theory. In doing so, the study highlights the unique situation of Sephardim as a fragmented minority within a larger minority (the Ashkenazic community), and within a multicultural ocean of migrants dominated by a white Anglo-Celtic culture based on racial criteria. Supported by several case studies, the study shows how the practice of residential movement has changed the system, making it less rigid and more open to migrants, and how the gradually changing system has influenced the lives of the doers (Sephardic Jews). Specifically, the practice of residential movement has gradually increased diversity in the make-up of Australian residential structure. At the same time, this major social change has been accompanied by change in the make-up of the Sephardic community, involving reconstructed kinship relations and ethnic identities, particularly Sephardic acculturation into the Australianised Ashkenazi subsystem