Contemporary Sephardic and Mizrahi Literature


Book Description

This book argues that the literary texts produced by Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who migrated from the Middle East and North Africa in the 1950s onwards, should be considered as part of a transnational arena, in which forms of Jewish diasporism and postcolonial displacement interweave. Through an original perspective that focuses on novelists, poets, professional and amateur writers, the book explains that these Sephardic and Mizrahi authors are part of a global literary diaspora at the crossroads of past Arab legacies, new national identities and persistent feelings of Jewishness.




Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry


Book Description

Sephardic Jews have contributed some of the most important Jewish philosophers, poets, biblical commentators, Talmudic and Halachic scholars, and scientists, and have had a significant impact on the development of Jewish mysticism. Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry brings together original work from the world's leading scholars to present a deep introductory overview of their history and culture over the past 1500 years.




Modern Ladino Culture


Book Description

Olga Borovaya explores the emergence and expansion of print culture in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), the mother tongue of the Sephardic Jews of the Ottoman Empire, in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. She provides the first comprehensive study of the three major forms of Ladino literary production—the press, belles lettres, and theater—as a single cultural phenomenon. The product of meticulous research and innovative methodology, Modern Ladino Culture offers a new perspective on the history of the Ladino press, a novel approach to the study of belles lettres in Ladino and their relationship to their European sources, and a fine-grained critique of Sephardic plays as venues for moral education and politicization.




Double Diaspora in Sephardic Literature


Book Description

The year 1492 has long divided the study of Sephardic culture into two distinct periods, before and after the expulsion of Jews from Spain. David A. Wacks examines the works of Sephardic writers from the 13th to the 16th centuries and shows that this literature was shaped by two interwoven experiences of diaspora: first from the Biblical homeland Zion and later from the ancestral hostland, Sefarad. Jewish in Spain and Spanish abroad, these writers negotiated Jewish, Spanish, and diasporic idioms to produce a uniquely Sephardic perspective. Wacks brings Diaspora Studies into dialogue with medieval and early modern Sephardic literature for the first time.




A Sephardi Sea


Book Description

A Sephardi Sea tells the story of Jews from the southern shore of the Mediterranean who, between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, migrated from their country of birth for Europe, Israel, and beyond. It is a story that explores their contrasting memories of and feelings for a Sephardi Jewish world in North Africa and Egypt that is lost forever but whose echoes many still hear. Surely, some of these Jewish migrants were already familiar with their new countries of residence because of colonial ties or of Zionism, and often spoke the language. Why, then, was the act of leaving so painful and why, more than fifty years afterward, is its memory still so tangible? Dario Miccoli examines how the memories of a bygone Sephardi Mediterranean world became preserved in three national contexts—Israel, France, and Italy—where the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa and their descendants migrated and nowadays live. A Sephardi Sea explores how practices of memory- and heritage-making—from the writing of novels and memoirs to the opening of museums and memorials, the activities of heritage associations and state-led celebrations—has filled an identity vacuum in the three countries and helps the Jews from North Africa and Egypt to define their Jewishness in Europe and Israel today but also reinforce their connection to a vanished world now remembered with nostalgia, affection, and sadness.




Narratives from the Sephardic Atlantic


Book Description

Identity, family, and community unite three autobiographical texts by New World crypto-Jews, or descendants of Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity in 17th-century Iberia and Spanish America. Ronnie Perelis presents the fascinating stories of three men who were caught within the matrix of inquisitorial persecution, expanding global trade, and the network of crypto-Jewish activity. Each text, reflects the unique experiences of the author and illuminates their shared, deeply rooted attachment to Iberian culture, their Atlantic peregrinations, and their hunger for spiritual enlightenment. Through these writings, Perelis focuses on the social history of transatlantic travel, the economies of trade that linked Europe to the Americas, and the physical and spiritual journeys that injected broader religious and cultural concerns into this complex historical moment.




The Imaginary Synagogue: Anti-Jewish Literature in the Portuguese Early Modern World (16th-18th Centuries)


Book Description

This book scrutinizes literary works based on Judaism, Jews and their descendants, written or printed by the Portuguese, from the forced conversion of Jews in 1497, until the ending of the distinction between New and Old Christians in 1773. It tries to understand what motivated this vast literary production, its different currents, and how they evolved. Additionally, it studies the image of New Christians and seeks the reasons for the perpetuation of this perception of Jewish descendants in the Early Modern Portuguese world. The Imaginary Synagogue seeks to identify which Jews and which ‘synagogue’ those authors constructed in their texts and their reasons for doing so, and offers conclusions on the self-affirmed Catholic importance of this literary current.




Sephardic Jews in America


Book Description

A significant number of Sephardic Jews, tracing their remote origins to Spain and Portugal, immigrated to the United States from Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans from 1880 through the 1920s, joined by a smaller number of Mizrahi Jews arriving from Arab lands. Most Sephardim settled in New York, establishing the leading Judeo-Spanish community outside the Ottoman Empire. With their distinct languages, cultures, and rituals, Sephardim and Arab-speaking Mizrahim were not readily recognized as Jews by their Ashkenazic coreligionists. At the same time, they forged alliances outside Jewish circles with Hispanics and Arabs, with whom they shared significant cultural and linguistic ties. The failure among Ashkenazic Jews to recognize Sephardim and Mizrahim as fellow Jews continues today. More often than not, these Jewish communities are simply absent from portrayals of American Jewry. Drawing on primary sources such as the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) press, archival documents, and oral histories, Sephardic Jews in America offers the first book-length academic treatment of their history in the United States, from 1654 to the present, focusing on the age of mass immigration.




Sephardism


Book Description

In this book, Sephardism is defined not as an expression of Sephardic identity but as a politicized literary metaphor. Since the nineteenth century, this metaphor has occurred with extraordinary frequency in works by authors from a variety of ethnicities, religions, and nationalities in Europe, the Americas, North Africa, Israel, and even India. Sephardism asks why Gentile and Jewish writers and cultural figures have chosen to draw upon the medieval Sephardic experience to express their concerns about dissidents and minorities in modern nations? To what extent does their use of Sephardism overlap with other politicized discourses such as orientalism, hispanism, and medievalism, which also emerged from a clash between authoritarian, progressive, and romantic ideologies? This book brings a new approach to Sephardic Studies by situating it at a crossroads between Jewish Studies and Hispanic Studies in ways that enhance our appreciation of how historical fiction and political history have shaped, and were shaped by, historical attitudes toward Jews and their representation.




The Memory Work of Jewish Spain


Book Description

The 2015 law granting Spanish nationality to the descendants of Jews expelled in 1492 is the latest example of a widespread phenomenon in contemporary Spain, the "re-discovery" of its Jewish heritage. In The Memory Work of Jewish Spain, Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa examine the implications of reclaiming this memory through the analysis of a comprehensive range of emerging cultural practices, political initiatives and institutions in the context of the long history of Spain's ambivalence towards its Jewish past. Through oral interviews, analyses of museums, newly reconfigured "Jewish quarters," excavated Jewish sites, popular festivals, tourist brochures, literature and art, The Memory Work of Jewish Spain explores what happens when these initiatives are implemented at the local level in cities and towns throughout Spain, and how they affect Spain's present.