Sephardic Community Research Articles

Setting the boundaries of punitive jurisdiction – a new reading of a query by the Mahamad of the Sephardic congregation of London to the attorney general and its political implications (1707)

Focusing on the wording and actual implementation of the sanction of Herem, this article explores the punitive policy of the Sephardic community of London in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Suggesting a new reading of a 1707 petition by the wardens of the congregation to the attorney general, this article claims that the royal attorney general’s opinion that the use of excommunication by the congregation might be problematic, initiated a gradual change in the wording of the by-laws of the community, almost excluding the word Herem, replacing it with milder formulas.

Banking and philanthropy in pre-state Jewish Palestine: particularist Sephardic philanthropy disguised as support for the general Zionist cause

This article focuses on the historical case study of a privately owned bank, analysing the owners’ contribution to the emergence of philanthropic discourse and practice in pre-state Jewish Palestine (1935–1945). The bank’s founder, a Jewish immigrant from Thessaloniki, drew on a long tradition of charitable giving. His philanthropic work targeted members of the local Sephardic community as its main beneficiaries, yet it was often carried out under the guise of general Zionist giving. Philanthropy with particular Sephardic goals was thus habitually construed as contributing to the general Zionist cause. The bank’s genuine commitment to the Sephardic community was not seen as antithetical, however, to business considerations, but rather as a way to advance the bank’s business interests by creating an ethnically defined market.

Embracing a Western Identity: Jewish Oregonians, 1849–1950 by Ellen Eisenberg

Reviewed by: Embracing a Western Identity: Jewish Oregonians, 1849–1950 by Ellen Eisenberg Mark I. Greenberg (bio) Embracing a Western Identity: Jewish Oregonians, 1849–1950. By Ellen Eisenberg. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2015. X + 292 pp. To the growing scholarly literature on American Jewish regionalism, enter Ellen Eisenberg’s monograph on Jewish Oregonians. Her work speaks directly to differences in the experiences of American Jews who settled outside the East Coast’s large urban areas. “Many remain convinced that Jewish authenticity resides only in the East, and that to put Jewish and Oregonian in the same phrase is somehow oxymoronic. Yet Jewish Oregonians and Jewish westerners have long embraced both parts of their identities and see them as compatible,” the author contends (9–10). [End Page 101] Analysis of the complex interplay between regional and ethnic identity unfolds in six chapters. Eisenberg begins with Oregon’s first Jewish settlers–“town leaders, civic boosters, and neighbors”–who settled small towns in the mid- to late-nineteenth century (15). Their prominence and high levels of acceptance within the state’s social and political hierarchy, as compared with Jews in other regions, stemmed from their acculturation prior to arrival, status as pioneers, contributions to community building, and racial status as white. The author explores migration in the second chapter as well, arguing that the Sephardic/German/Eastern European periodization often used to explain Jewish immigration to America does not work in Oregon. Instead, Bavarian Jews predominated in Oregon’s first wave, joined in Portland by growing numbers of Jews from Posen in the 1860–1880s. Particularly through the synagogue they founded in 1869, these Poseners served as a cultural bridge to the late nineteenth-century influx of Eastern Europeans Jews. By 1920, over 2,000 Sephardim from the Mediterranean Basin comprised the second largest Sephardic community in the U.S. after New York City. Despite their national differences, modernization influences in the southern Pale of Settlement prior to arrival in America, acculturation in America prior to arrival in Oregon, and an occupational structure that reduced class conflict created “relative cohesion among ethnic groups in Portland’s Jewish community” (70). Chapters 3 and 4 analyze social and political relationships between Jews and non-Jews within and outside of the Jewish community. Neighborhood House, founded in 1905 by Portland’s National Council of Jewish Women chapter, served as an important point of contact between the city’s American-born and immigrant communities through the 1930s. For affluent women, Neighborhood House offered “significant work outside the home” (91). Recent immigrants benefitted from the charity’s educational, recreational, and social opportunities but sometimes resented the unequal relationships that underlay the NCJW’s “assimilationist and preservationist impulses” (107). The interplay between class and ethnicity also played out in the political sphere. Electoral campaigns and ballot measures in the first several decades of the twentieth century revealed the emergence of a “Jewish vote.” Working-class and affluent Jews came together across class lines to oppose Sunday closing laws and Prohibition, policies they associated with Christianity’s influence on daily life. The School Bill unified the Jewish community against an initiative strongly supported by the Ku Klux Klan and tainted by religious intolerance. Yet the “Jewish vote” was not guaranteed. Despite Joseph Simon’s strong support from white elites, working-class Jews in South Portland believed that he represented [End Page 102] Oregon’s moneyed interests, and they did not rally around him during his various local, state, and national campaigns. Two decades later, Portland Jews voted overwhelmingly for progressive gubernatorial candidate Julius Meier, but he faced ugly, anti-semitic attacks from Christian opponents. The monograph’s interwoven theme of western exceptionalism, Oregon style, is in strong evidence again in the final two chapters. Anti-Zionism never became popular in Portland, unlike in San Francisco. By the 1930s, the city’s increasingly affluent, acculturated, and accepted Jewish community embraced a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a remedy to growing antisemitism in Europe and as a philanthropic enterprise. Several prominent local rabbis and lay leaders, most notably Stephen Wise, founded the Portland Zionist Society and gave the movement greater credibility. Portland Zionists did not succumb to fears that their views...

A Minority's Minority: An Ethnographic Study of Sephardic Jewish Community in Atlanta

This paper explores the Sephardic Community in Atlanta through the lens of an ethnographic study of a micro-culture. The methodology that was employed in order to complete this research was that of a standard ethnography, i.e. interviews, observations, and comparison with current research on the community. Throughout the paper, the Sephardic culture is contrasted with its larger Eastern European counterparts, the Ashekenazim. Their cultures, as they exist internationally as well as the Atlanta area, are a focal point of the paper so as to have a well established point of reference to which to compare the Sephardic Atlanta culture. The paper allows for further discussion and understanding of the Sephardic people in the United States and more specifically in the greater Atlanta area, where they are the minority of a minority.

The Sephardic Jewish community of Nis

In 1492, Sephardic population was expelled from Spain, which spurred a great migration and caused them to seek refuge in other countries. One of these places of refuge was the city of Nis. Having arrived in the city on the Nisava River, a new phase of life for Sephardim began in the 17th century. They slowly built their society, taking a good care of their culture, language, customs, traditions, religion, in a word, of their ethnic identity. In this regard, the objective of this paper is to point to the existence and importance of a small community of Sephardic Jews in the city of Nis and its vital existence from the Turkish time until the beginning of World War II. This community was very active in the city, and it spawned great merchants, bankers, craftsmen, and individuals who participated in wars and thus helped local Serbian population. This community also invested in education of the youth and the creation of Jewish societies, whose role was to provide assistance to all members of the community. The desire for survival and creation was unshakeable, but inhumane events in 1941, when a large number of Jews were killed, stopped the Sephardic community in its intents and dealt a severe blow to this nation.

Reaching Beyond the Local: The Itineraries of an Ottoman-Sephardic-American Minhag

This paper focuses on the emergence of Seattle’s Sephardic community as an alternative liturgical center in network with even newer Middle Eastern and North African immigrant coreligionists in the United States and abroad. Historically operating within a hierarchical relationship to an older, institutionally endowed Spanish-Portuguese congregation in New York City, Seattle’s musical liturgies developed relatively autonomously through oral transmission in conjunction with national Spanish-Portuguese prayerbooks aimed at standardizing a Sephardic-American religious rite. The study probes a common early modern Mediterranean past among Ottoman and Northern European Sephardim and their progressive regional divergences to elucidate the understudied significance of selective cultural genealogies to the development of Sephardic religious institutions, liturgical practices, and intra-communal tensions on American soil. The local publication of five prayerbooks since 2000 represents not a reactive assertion of provincial particularity in the Pacific Northwest but rather the coming of age of Seattle’s religious press as a liturgical source for successive waves of Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa seeking usable prayer texts.

Zones of interculturality and linguistic identity: tales of Ladino by Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria

Ladino, the heritage language of cultural affiliation for many Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria and beyond, is often discussed in terms of language endangerment and of cultural loss for this community and humanity more widely. However, for intercultural communication specialists, especially those with a linguistic focus, the Ladino experiences of Sephardic Jews in Bulgaria, as set against the backdrop of their changing political and social realities, provide rich insights regarding the linguistic complexities of identity. Through the Ladino-framed narratives of (often elderly) members of this community, we have learned how they drew, and continue to draw, upon their diverse linguistic and cultural resources to define themselves, to articulate their various identities, and to communicate within and beyond Bulgarian society. In order to connect these insights to current discussions of interculturality, and as informed by intercultural thinking, we developed the following five-zone framework: (1) the (intra-)personal, that is a zone of internal dialogue; (2) the domestic, that is a zone for the family; (3) the local, that is a zone for the Sephardic community in Bulgaria; (4) the diasporic, that is a zone for the wider Sephardic Jewish community; and (5) the international, that is the international community of Spanish-speakers. Further, the project presented here is methodologically innovative involving: several languages (i.e. it was researched multilingually as well as focused on multilingual communities) and therefore issues of translation and representation; and the use of researcher narratives as an additional means for managing the inherent reflexivities in our work.

A keleti (mizrahi) zsidók letelepítése Izraelben. Egy társadalmi leszakadás eredete

A tanulmány célja kettős: egyfelől bemutatni az 1948 tavaszán függetlenséget nyert Izraeli Állam területére érkező zsidó menekülttömeg, köztük holokauszttúlélők és a muszlim országokat elhagyni kényszerülő tízezrek befogadásának, szociális, élelmezési és közegészségügyi ellátásának, oktatásának, valamint foglalkoztatásának nehézségeit, másfelől kidomborítani azokat a társadalmi és területi különbségeket, melyek a szervezett letelepítési programok, a tudatos társadalmi és gazdasági integrációs törekvések ellenére sem mérséklődtek, sőt stabilizálódtak.A dolgozat első része számszerűsíti azt a hatalmas bevándorlási hullámot, amelynek eredményeként Izrael népessége alig több mint három esztendő alatt tulajdonképpen megduplázódott, majd ezt követően bemutatja a menekültek befogadásával járó kihívásokat, érzékeltetve azon társadalmi törésvonalakat, amelyek a korábban, cionista elhivatottságból érkezettek, illetve az újonnan, hontalanná vált nincstelenként betelepedők között kialakultak. Noha az állami intézményrendszer még csak formálódóban volt, a fenti nehézségek kezelése egyértelműen központi tervezést és végrehajtást követelt, amely kezdetben gyakorta kaotikusságot mutatott; az ötvenes évek derekára azonban alapos szervezettség vált jellemzővé, átfogó szociális, területi-települési és gazdasági programalkotással.A tanulmány második fele ezen állami beavatkozássorozat következményeit tárja fel, hangsúlyozva a társadalmi és területi különbségek fennmaradásának eredendő okait, többek között a térbeli és szociális perifériára kerülés hatásait, az egyoldalú ipartelepítés problémáit, a delokalizáció kihívásait, továbbá a központosított településfejlesztés és politikai döntéshozatal hátrányait.

Acertijos y adivinanzas en el periódico sefardí <i>Ilustra Güerta de Historia</i> (Viena, 1880-1882)

The Sephardic newspaper Ilustra Guerta de Historia was published in Vienna between 1880 and 1882. It was run by Sem Tob Semo, one of the most influential figures of the Sephardic community of Vienna. This newspaper specialized in serial novels, yet it also published pieces of popular culture, in a section entitled “Sala de pasatiempo”. This section included many riddles in Judeo-Spanish, almost completely unknown in Sephardic studies. The aim of this article is to present these Judeo-Spanish riddles, tracing their parallelisms with the Spanish tradition and attempting to establish their possible sources.

Portuguese New Christians in the Turkish “Carrefour” Between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean in the Sixteenth Century: Decentralization and Conversion

Abstract This article analyzes some cases of multiple conversion among Portuguese Jews in the Ottoman Empire. Paradoxically, it was the lack of homogeneity of the Ottoman Sephardic communities that explained the success of “three-faced” men, such as Duarte da Paz, Tomé Pegado da Paz, and Matias Bicudo. They were able to change dress, religion, and masters during their careers as informers because they remained inconspicuous within the Ottoman Empire due to their marginal social position; there were many possibilities for identity change without the general knowledge of the different religious groups. The inability of more visible personalities like D. Grácia Nasci, D. Joseph Nasci, and D. Salomon ibn Ya’ish to perform so easily this type of change had something to do with their “centrality”: they possessed strong social, economic, and cultural ties to Sephardic communities, and their close relationship with the Osmanli Sultans made such a metamorphosis virtually impossible.

Between Ashkenaz and Québécois: Fifty Years of Francophone Sephardim in Montréal

As a result of its historical cleavage on the basis of language (English and French) and the continuing importance of a majoritarian Francophone province (Québec), Canada is proactive about protecting communal identity. This double context of a proactive Canadian commitment to identity and Québécois commitment to Francophonie inadvertently encourages the preservation of ethnolinguistic distinctions within the Jewish community. Diasporic Jewish experience in Canada is thus intrinsically different from what prevails in the United States, particularly as it relates to Francophone Jewry. In Montréal, the religious ideal of klal Yisrael—unity of the Jewish people— is significantly tempered by the bilingual host environment. Canadian multiculturalism serves as a buffer for the ethnic identity of Jews from North Africa, while Montréal bilingualism encourages Frenchspeaking Jews to preserve their identity as Francophones. Ideal notions thus operate in contradiction with social fact: the ethnoreligious ideal of a single Jewish people transcending all sub-group divergences versus the lived reality that Ashkenazim and Sephardim are distanced by divergent histories, traits, languages, and rites. This surrounding national (and, in Québec, sub-national) context fosters— indeed, encourages—the preservation of ethnolinguistic distinctions within the Jewish community. In this way, the Québec Jewish experience differs substantially from both Israel (where language is no longer a significant differentiator between Ashkenazim and Sephardim) and the United States. These conclusions remain salient fifty years after the Sephardic community first began its collective emigration to Québec.

The Death of the Duke of Gandía: Historical Memory and Invention in a Judeo-Spanish Ballad

La muerte del duque de Gandía is a late romance noticiero , which recounts events surrounding the assassination of Juan Borja (Giovanni Borgia) in Rome in 1497. During the sixteenth century, this romance appeared in printed ballad collections and circulated in chapbooks. Eventually, it became part of the Judeo-Spanish oral tradition, in which it is called El pexkador . Between 1890 and 1973, numerous versions were collected in Sephardic communities around the Mediterranean and in the United States. This article poses two questions: 1) When a historical narrative underlies the story being told by a ballad, how faithful does the oral tradition remain in its memory of those events? 2) As the historical events become increasingly distant in space and time, how do the forces of invention operate on these texts? The sixteenth-century text is anti-Borgia in sentiment; it suggests the involvement of other family members in the murder. In the modern oral texts, the political message disappears. Some elements of the well-documented historical event are conserved while others are transformed so that the story recounted continues to be meaningful to the communities that sing/recite the ballad.

Más poemas sefardíes de contenido histórico

In addition to her book Entre dos (o mas fuegos) , where the author published poetical texts concerning different events in the history of the Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans, she offers here the edition and study of more than 20 historical poems (among them, 8 “Coplas”), written by authors such as Alexandro Pereẓ, Ya‘acob Moseh Altaraŝ, Sa‘adi Halevi, Eliyah Carmona, etc. The texts deal with a range of variegated issues, some already previously studied, and some new, among them, the bombardment of Belgrade in 1862; the Habsburg occupation of Bosnia in 1878; the fire of Sarajevo in 1879; the Sephardic community in Constantinople in 1922; Great Britain and Palestine in 1939; the Holocaust; the independence of Israel and the tough life in the new State in 1949 and in 1952; the Cold War and the Korean War in 1952; etc.

Dibaxu: a comparative analysis of Clarisse Nicoïdski's and Juan Gelman's bilingual poetry

This essay reads Argentine poet Juan Gelma's 1994 bilingual Ladino-­Castellano book Dibaxu in light of its intertextual relationship with Franco-­Bosnian author Clarisse Nicoïdski's work, especially her 1986 bilingual Ladino-­English poetry collection Lus ojus, las manus, la boca. I return to Gelman's text, written in a foreign, diasporic, and Jewish language in order to acknowledge Nicoïdski'ʹs work not only as a pre-­text, but as a fundamental intertextual source for Dibaxu. In doing so, I observe the different reasons these two poets have to use the Ladino language: while Nicoïdski seeks to establish a link with her Sephardic community, Gelman uses the language to escape the limited trappings of a national identity. Both, however, work towards the maintenance, or survival, of Ladino.

RECONQUERING “SEPHARAD”: HISPANISM AND PROTO-FASCISM IN GIMÉNEZ CABALLERO'S SEPHARDIST CRUSADE

On September 1, 1929, Ernesto Gimenez Caballero, a pioneer of Fascism in Spain and founder and editor of La Gaceta Literaria, Spain’s leading vanguard literary and cultural journal, embarked on what the Gaceta referred to as a ‘‘largo y singular viaje de trascendencia nacional y literaria’’ [a long and singular voyage of national and literary transcendence] (Piqueras Gaceta Literaria 1/423). At the insistence of nationally acclaimed scholars of Sephardic history and culture, the Spanish Ministry of State sponsored Gimenez Caballero on his trip, designed to assess the situation of the Sephardic communities of Europe and Asia Minor, the possibilities for Spanish commercial and cultural expansion in the region, and the success of Spain’s prior philosephardic campaigns. Taking this voyage as a point of departure, this article examines Ernesto Gimenez Caballero’s interest in the Sephardim through a close study of the Gaceta Literaria, government reports documenting his voyages to the Sephardic world, and documentary film. Until recently, Gimenez Caballero’s importance in Spanish intellectual history has been trivialized by his caricaturization as a sensationalist ideologue. As Enrique Selva has recently argued, perhaps more than any other Spanish intellectual of his time, Gimenez Caballero fully immersed himself in the divergent intellectual tides of the interwar period, by placing himself ‘‘en el centro del huracan’’ [in the eye of the hurricane] (Selva Gimenez Caballero 15). Moreover, it was precisely this posturing*which some scholars have dismissed as extravagant and histrionic* that allowed Gimenez Caballero to play a seminal role in articulating and assimilating Fascist doctrine in the Spanish context, even to the point of becoming, in Selva’s words, ‘‘la mayor incarnacion de la via a traves de la cual se formula la ideologia fascista y se comienza a difundir en nuestro pais’’ [the greatest incarnation of the particular path through which Fascist ideology was formulated and began to be disseminated in Spain] (15 6). As Douglas Foard argues, Gimenez Caballero’s trajectory was not anomalous or eccentric, but rather representative of the volatile political and intellectual climate throughout Western Europe in the interwar period. Most recently, other works that discuss Gimenez Caballero have focused on his interest in the Sephardim. Certain authors have concluded that his ‘‘philosephardism’’ must be understood as ‘‘instrumentalist’’ and subordinate to his nationalistic and imperialistic designs and characterize him as ‘‘un fascista filosefardi que deviene antisemita’’ [a Fascist philosephardist who turned antisemitic] (Rohr 30; Alvarez Chillida 273). Others have discussed the importance of the imagery of ‘‘Sepharad’’ in the elaboration of Hispanidad and in the vanguard origins of Spanish Fascism (Rehrmann 51 74; Shammah Gesser ‘‘La imagen’’ 67 88). Shammah Gesser

Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic world

T hese four volumes, plus a volume consisting of the index and resources, the Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, fill a gap in the area of Judaic studies. Presenting over 2,100 articles signed by over 350 international specialists, the alphabetically arranged entries cover Jewish history, religion, culture, and language in the Islamic world and the contemporary diasporas of the Sephardic community. In entries ranging from 300 to 18,000 words, readers will learn about a wide range of disciplines related to the Jews in the Islamic world, including history, anthropology, ethnology, folklore, law and jurisprudence, linguistics, sociology, politics, philosophy, religious studies, women’s studies, art history, literature, film studies, material culture, and biographies—all presented without bias.

Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New Marsha Bryan Edelman Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New, edited by Philip V. Bohlman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 218 pp. plus music CD. $35.00. Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New is the end-result of an endowed series of Jewish Studies lectures presented at the University of Chicago in 1999. Conceived initially as an exploration of the intersection between modern Jewish history and the arts, the offerings took on a somewhat musical cast but never completely surrendered that broader conception. As such, the present volume contains essays that deal with essentially musical concerns, as well as others whose musical content appears peripheral at best. [End Page 193] In his foreword, Sander Gilman notes the Jews' attempts, especially in the nineteenth century, to become truly "modern" by adopting the musical styles of the larger "civilized" European community. Gilman documents the antipathy that greeted composers of "Jewish blood" and points to the similarly negative reception given to more general efforts at Jewish music-making in a Western context. Mitchell Ash asks whether there might actually be "Multiple Modernisms" to be addressed before one can consider the role of music in it. Ash is most interested in the history of science, and his references to music are only tangential. He echoes Gilman's (and others') observation that Jewish prominence in the arts and sciences in the period 1900-1945 is a strategy for acculturation, and admits that most of their work was decidedly secular and unrelated to the accident of their birth. Pamela Potter's essay takes up the earlier question of the "Jewish" identity of the Jews making music in Germany. While she does point to ethnomusicological activity in Russia and Palestine, Potter observes that antisemitism led the German Jews to reject the idea of cataloging their own musical culture. She observes that the Nazis' designation of music by Jewish composers as "degenerate" resolved the question of a "racial" component in Jewish music; the residue of such "scholarship" appears to have left its mark even on contemporary German scholarship regarding Jewish music. In a volume that otherwise focuses entirely on European music, Kay Kaufman Shelemay's essay on the role of music in the transformation of the Beta Israel community is a welcome contribution. She offers a comprehensive history of the musical influences that affected the group's liturgy, documenting the acculturation of the Beta-Israel to the modern world, and the linguistic as well as ritual evolutions in their contacts with Europe, Israel, and America. Most interesting is the observation that this "exotic" community is having an effect on Western cultures as it rewrites its own history in the modern era. Edwin Seroussi's essay on "Sephardic Fins des Siecles" is most clearly related to the notions of both modernism and Jewish music. Seroussi describes the musical response of the Spanish-Portuguese exile community to modernizing pressures from Salomon Sulzer and the Ashkenazic majority of Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century. He acknowledges the community's inevitable acceptance of modernity, but points to its return to Sephardic tradition in the inter-war years as ultimately a rejection of modernism. Seroussi's claim is buttressed by evidence that the historic, Arabic origins of the Sephardic community are making a decided comeback as a new, pan-Sephardic community asserts its cultural identity in twenty-first-century Israel. By contrast, the most curious essay in the volume is by Michael Steinberg, who examines the "Singspiel" of Charlotte Salomon. The artist used the constructs [End Page 194] of musical theater to structure her collection, and incorporated "song lyrics" into some of her paintings, but her "musical" references are to Bach and Wagner rather than to Jewish sources. The many examples of her work that are included as illustrations in the volume (and on its cover) are a welcome addition to what is generally a handsomely produced book, but the essay is about art produced by a young German woman "exiled" to live with her grandparents in France after Kristallnacht, and not really about Jews or music. In his epilogue, Bohlman adopts the Five Books of Moses as the ultimate metaphor with which...

El humor gráfico en la prensa sefardí: el caso de las portadas de El Ĵuguetón de Constantinopla

This article focuses on the critical edition, description and analysis of 53 covers of the humorous newspaper El Ĵugueton of Constantinople. They are characterized by the rare use of graphic humour in contemporary Sephardic press. Both images (photographs, cartoons, etc.) and surrounding texts contain invaluable information about the daily life of Sephardic communities in Turkey during the interwar period. In addition, they chronicle the process of westernization, modernization and secularization of the Sephardic Jews of Turkey and the Balkans.

Sephardic Business: Early Modern Atlantic Style

Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert. A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal',) AtfontL· Diaspora and the CrL)L) of the Spanish Empire, 1492-1640 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. ? + 242.Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds. AtlantL· Diasporas: Jem, Converjo,), and Crypto-Jewj in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500-1800. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. xvii + 307.Francesca Trivellato. The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and C roo -Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 470.Jackie Ranston. Belisario: Sketches of Character: A Historical Biography of a Jamaican Artist Jamaica Old Masters Series 2. Kingston, Jamaica: Mills Press, 2008. Pp. xix + 409.Tim Barringer, Gillian Forrester, and Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz, EDS. Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center for British Art/Yale University Press, 2007). Pp. xix + 592.Josette Capriles Goldish. Once Jew?: Stories of Caribbean Sephardim. Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2009. Pp. xv + 334.Edward Kritzler. Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jewj Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom - and Revenge. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Pp. xi + 324.It may be difficult for nonspecialists to appreciate the success of early modern Spanish and Portuguese Jews and conversos in the Atlantic world region. Some 20,000 exiled Spanish and Portuguese Jews and a far greater number of conversos still in Catholic territories built up a commercial empire so triumphant that it supported communal life, sometimes lavishly, in such far-flung locations as Hamburg, London, Kingston, and Recife. Their transnational commercial success, while it lasted, comprises a doubly remarkable achievement, given, as Francesca Trivellato of Yale reminds us, that no country would have chartered an exclusively Sephardic commercial company, nor could Sephardic merchants raise considerable capital among non-Jews to set up large-scale operations Familiarity of Stranger*), p. 68). Sephardic Amsterdam, built up from nothing after 1595, like all of these communities, mostly by conversos who became New Jews (Yosef Kaplan's phrase), was an admired and renowned mother city within but a few decades. On the ocean's far side, until roughly 1800, the Sephardic communities of Suriname and Curacao outshone every other Jewish collective in the Western hemisphere. (Interaction of these New Jews with old Sephardim remains a complex question.) Curacao's Mikve Israel new synagogue building, inaugurated in 1732, could house a congregation of 400 men and 200 women; so well off was the community that a membership contribution (finta) was introduced only in 1810. New Jews greatly helped revivify, if not reinvent in exile, the unique style of Spanish and Portuguese Judaism. Sephardic men in the post-Columbus Americas hunted manatees off the coast of the Guianas, founded colonial settlements, captained hundreds of ships (many with Jewish names), ran sugar and coffee plantations, fought in local militias before such permission was granted in Europe, and constructed western outposts of Judaism which attracted graduating rabbis from Amsterdam's Ets Haim yeshiva well into the nineteenth century. Something both exotic yet familiar exudes from the history of these clean-shaven Jews, as they were referred to sometimes by Ashkenazim. In nearly all ol their homelands, Sephardim comprised both agents and victims of empire, in Jonathan Israel's already classic formulation.The rich and sophisticated new works on western Sephardim and conversos here reviewed indicate that the study of conversos/Sephardim has finally transcended its tendency to exoticize and romanticize its object. (This is less true of Kritzler's Jewiah Pirate*) of the Caribbean, to which I will return below. …

Sephardic Scholarly Worlds: Toward a Novel Geography of Modern Jewish History

This article presents synthetically the scholarly contributions of four generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Sephardic intellectuals, pioneers of the field of Sephardic Studies, who were born in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans and Levant. These individuals participated in a world of Judeo-Spanish letters that stretched from Jerusalem to Vienna, Livorno to Cairo, Adrianople to Ruschuk, and Sofia to Sarajevo, but whose center of gravity lay somewhere between the Ottoman port cities of Salonica, Izmir, and Istanbul, cities with the largest and longest-running Ladino printing presses and the three largest Judeo-Spanish communities of the period. In the mid-nineteenth century, this unorganized collection of scholars began pursuing the study of Sephardic communities as they read the works of the German and East European Haskalah, translated Hebrew as well as western literatures and contributed to the flowering of the Ladino press. As the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire contracted, and as they witnessed a series of wars and disasters—most dramatically the near destruction of various Balkan Jewish communities during the Second World War—they began producing serious scholarship on the history and traditions of their own communities, compelled as much by their commitment to scientific studies as by their sense that the world of Judeo-Spanish culture they knew so intimately was poised to disappear. As the authors reconstruct this history, they argue that modern Sephardic intellectual history existed not in the form of a few isolated or marginalized thinkers, but in dynamic engagement with a wide landscape of Jewish and non-Jewish thought.