Sephardic Heritage Update
A collection of current Essays, Articles, Events and Information
Impacting our community and our culture
A Publication of the Center for Sephardic Heritage
“Service is the rent we pay for living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time. Education is improving the lives of others and leaving your community and world better than you found it.” -Marian Wright Edelman
Special Edition Building Your Library
All Articles by David Shasha
Building Your Jewish Library: The Basics
Building Your Sephardic Library
Important Book Resources for Sephardic Studies
La Celestina and Soledades: Two Important Works of Converso Literature
A Broken Frame: Sephardi Occlusion and the Repairing of Jewish Dysfunction
The Idiot Sephardim: A Confrontation between a Sephardic Student and a Yeshiva University Professor
Building Your Jewish Library: The Basics
Introduction: On Being a Jew Today
It is not at all easy to be a thinking, reflective Jew these days.
Given the staggering array of competing groups and different denominations, today’s Jews will not find it simple to practice the religion of their ancestors without entering into some walled-off ghetto.
There is a Zionist nationalism that has for all intents and purposes eviscerated the literary traditions of the past and forced that entire edifice to fit into one constricted box: Judaism is solely about living in the land of Israel.
And then there is an increasingly predatory Orthodoxy that looks at the outside world as a vast, twisted labyrinth that is resolutely un-Kosher.
Zionism and Orthodoxy have from time to time been fused into another broader amalgam, and these days we have new and dangerous alliances, hybrid formations of great power, that seek to carve out an even more limiting and circumscribed area for Jewish identity; an identity that often excludes more than it includes.
In addition, we now have new forms of Jewish renewal that have served to tinker with the Jewish past and brought us Jewish models of New Age hype and Self-Help narcissisms where the Jewish content of the movements will not be recognizable to those learned in the old literature. Such “new Judaisms” cater to the caprices of a culture that tends to make it up as it goes along rather than embrace historical reality.
The primacy of ego-driven religion has drawn people to new spiritual snake-oil salesmen who have sprung up to capitalize on the situation and caused some profound ruptures within the Jewish tradition.
For Sephardic Jews, a minority within a very agitated minority, the situation is even more troubling. For those Sephardim, few in number, who still care anything about their past, the current Ashkenazi hegemony is deeply oppressive. Great and grave historical injustices have taken place within both Zionism and Orthodoxy – considered the two most “Jewish” of the contemporary Jewish forms of identification – that have forced many Sephardim to acclimate to non-Sephardic identities and traditions. Most members of the current Sephardic community are under one or another of these exclusionary Ashkenazi Jewish identities and have buried their past deep into the ground. Resigned to their fate, many Sephardim find this to be liberating and a progression from a past increasingly deemed irrelevant.
But for those who do indeed care about their Sephardic identity, these historical injustices have pushed them, unwittingly, into a place where the Jewish component of their identity has been subsumed and at times destroyed. These Sephardim have forgotten that there is no Sephardic heritage without the innate values of the Jewish religious tradition. This means a firm grounding in the classical heritage: the Bible, Talmud, Kabbalah and all the rest. Without an intimate knowledge of Jewish texts and the practice of Jewish ritual law, Halakhah, such Sephardim find themselves inconveniently placed outside the parameters of the Jewish world, their activism demeaned, marginalized, and stigmatized.
Given this complex state of affairs, it is not at all easy for Jews today to find their way to the intellectual heritage of Judaism as a faith tradition and as a socio-religious construct.
I was recently writing an essay on the wonderful new book from the scholar of Midrash Avivah Zornberg and argued there that the great hope of contemporary Jews – the academic scholars of Jewish tradition – has now turned into an almost complete disaster: The academic study of Judaism once understood its role in the larger faith community, but now sees itself as a mere cog in a sterile world of university learning that has no connection to the realities of everyday people.
The arcane nature of current Jewish scholarship places an unwanted impediment in the path of those Jews who seek to affirm their intellect and who refuse both the depredations of ArtScroll – the largest Jewish publisher in the world and an arm of the Ultra-Orthodox Yeshivah world – and the paradoxical disdain of Israeli culture for its own literary and religious heritage.
After putting together a reading list on Sephardic heritage a couple of years ago, I realized, after some three decades studying Jewish texts and scholarship, that it is equally necessary to assemble a similar reading list for Jewish subjects as well. That will be the purpose of this bibliographic essay; to orient the general reader to the best available literature in Jewish studies.
Entering the Jewish Arena
1. Jose Faur, The Horizontal Society: Understanding the Covenant and Alphabetical Judaism (Academic Studies Press, 2008)
The new two-volume work by Jose Faur, the most brilliant Sephardi rabbi of his generation and a prominent academic scholar of the classical rabbinical tradition, is an extraordinary synthesis of his three previous English-language works, particularly his groundbreaking study Golden Doves with Silver Dots (first published in 1986, currently out of print).
Taking as his point of departure the various conceptual pillars inherent to the classical Jewish tradition, that of God, Books, Politics, and Memory, Faur reconstructs with great skill and perspicacity the entire rabbinical system and shows how that edifice cohered and functioned as a sophisticated organism that organized a Jewish civilization that was co-equal but not the same as that of ancient Greece and Rome.
Central to the book’s thesis is the primacy of what Faur calls “alphabetical” Judaism: a form of cultural literacy that marks the critical aspects of identity; an identity that is predicated upon reading, language, and dialogue as the very essence of Jewish identity.
Given the complicated and sometimes misleading ways in which Judaism has been incorporated into Western Civilization through Christianity, Faur’s innovative bricolage is a much-needed corrective for Jew and Gentile alike to correctly understand the Jewish tradition.
In The Horizontal Society we are taught that Judaism is a series of horizontal dialogues based upon the Sacred Scriptures which, having been passed over from God to man, now serve as the basis upon which human society is arranged and structured. The horizontality of Jewish civilization is presented as the polar opposite of a Western civilization that is vertically predicated upon mythic (and often very real) violence that has too often valued the hierarchical concept “Might makes Right” rather than deploying the democratic give and take inherent to the rabbinical system.
The Horizontal Society is a work richly designed for those who seek to better understand Jewish principles from the standpoint of modern Liberal ideas and how many of those ideas have been framed in a Hebrew context. These ideas contrast with the authoritarianism of the Hellenistic thinking that permeated European thought until the dawn of the American Revolution; which, as Faur shows, absorbed much of the old Hebraic wisdom in constructing its own form of Religious Humanism.
It is the indispensable concept of Religious Humanism that has served as the central theme of Jose Faur’s many writings and in The Horizontal Society he gives the reader the summa of his thinking on the subject, thus offering the most illuminating introduction to Jewish civilization that we currently possess.
2. Moses Angel, The Law of Sinai and its Appointed Times (William Tegg and Company, 1858, Reprint Edition, General Books LLC, 2010)
The foundation of Post-Biblical Judaism is anchored in the Synagogue. In addition to the formal prayers that comprise the bulk of the Synagogue service is the weekly reading of the Torah portion. Moses Angel, the headmaster of the Jews’ Free School in London, produced a now-forgotten classic of Jewish thought which follows these weekly readings portion by portion. In an elegant Victorian style, The Law of Sinai and its Appointed Times provides the reader with a deeply learned reading of the Pentateuch that is rooted in the Sephardic tradition of Religious Humanism; a reading that combines scholastic rigor with an ethical humanism that was once the hallmark of the Sephardic tradition at its very best.
Moses Angel presents to the reader a wholly traditional understanding of Judaism and Jewish texts that is framed by the laws and customs of the Rabbinical heritage as it has developed over the ages. The book brings together the multi-leveled strata of an expansive Jewish tradition that highlights human values and the power of Judaism to address the simple concerns of individuals. It is an extraordinary introduction to Judaism and Jewish values that embraces modernity through a resolute affirmation of the literary heritage and intellectual tradition of Jewish thought in all its manifestations.
Biblical Foundations
3. Mary Ellen Chase, Life and Language in the Old Testament (The Norton Library, 1955)
One of the biggest casualties of the ongoing war for the Jewish soul is the Hebrew Bible.
Scholars have shut out the traditional community by focusing exclusively on text-critical matters at the almost complete expense of what has come to be known as “The Bible as Literature.” Jewish scholars have gone out of their way to reject new and innovative approaches to literary study and remade the Bible into a stale and lifeless piece of work that has little relevance to the contemporary reader.
At the other end of the spectrum, Orthodoxy has gone to great lengths to shut out academic scholarship; a matter that seems to be just fine with the scholars themselves. In Orthodox editions and translations of the Hebrew Bible there is an uncritical fusion of rabbinic interpretations with a resolute rejection of any literary techniques in the analysis of a text which is not deemed to be a “text” but which is a magic oracle.
For those who wish to continue to practice Jewish ritual, but who do not want to close off their rational faculty, there is not much available these days that will bring a critical understanding of the Hebrew Bible and ancient history to their minds.
Once upon a time we had cheap pocket editions of W.F. Albright and Cyrus Gordon’s groundbreaking studies, but today there is the polemical literature of the scholars or the ArtScroll Orthodoxy and precious little in between.
In choosing Mary Ellen Chase’s excellent book I realize that it is currently out of print and not very well known. But the book is one of the best introductions to Hebrew Scripture and echoes the great essay “Odysseus’ Scar” by the philologist and literary scholar Erich Auerbach from his classic 1953 study Mimesis; an essay that has served literary students of the Hebrew Bible in great stead for many years.
Chase’s classic book examines the socio-historical culture of the Israelites, but more significantly enters what she calls an examination of the “Hebrew mind”; a very valuable analysis that, like that of Faur, makes important distinctions for the educated Western reader between the Jewish tradition and that of Greco-Roman civilization. Her treatment of rhetoric and language is truly inspired and gives the student a strong sense of what the Hebrew Bible is all about.
For those who cannot locate a copy of Life and Language in the Old Testament from the on-line sellers of used books, I can happily recommend the extended essay on Genesis from the brilliant scholar of religion Karen Armstrong, In the Beginning (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996) and the more elementary work of Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews (Doubleday, 1998), which are both popular studies that serve as excellent introductions to the general reader.
4. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962)
As the years pass, the library of books written by Abraham Joshua Heschel, perhaps the most outstanding Jewish activist and humanist in recent memory, becomes ever more valuable and necessary. A number of his books will appear on this list.
As a primer to the Hebrew mind and the Scriptures, The Prophets is a rich motherlode of information. Tracing the essence of Scripture to revelation rather than text-critical principles, Heschel has given us the most searching and profound study of prophecy that has ever been written.
Each page of The Prophets bristles with uncanny insights and deep spiritual truths. Better than any other contemporary writer, Heschel restores for us the genius of the Biblical prophets and expresses that genius in a way that refreshingly confirms their eccentricities and the staunch ethicality of their mission.
If we are to understand the mindset of the Hebrew Bible, it is absolutely necessary for us to come to see the way that those who brought God’s word to Israel parsed reality. The great transformation in ancient culture wrought by the Hebrew prophets is expertly delineated in Heschel’s masterpiece.
5. James L. Kugel, The Bible as it Was (Harvard University Press, 1997)
James Kugel is one of the most accomplished scholars in the field of classical Biblical exegesis. Beyond what we know through the traditional commentators such as Rashi, there is a long and illustrious tradition of Biblical interpretation that goes way back into Second Temple history. The best known of these works is the Dead Sea Scrolls, but in Kugel’s outstanding studies we discover a hidden, yet fertile history of glossing the Bible that predates the rabbinic materials. Using works that have been grouped under the rubric of Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha – once the exclusive provenance of academic scholars – Kugel dazzlingly reconstructs Scripture in a way that shows its deeply mediated nature.
Rather than focus exclusively on the text-critical problems of the German school of Higher Criticism, The Bible as it Was schools us in a Tanakh that has become the object of retellings and interpretive glosses that took on a life of their own.
The very roots of Jewish, Christian and Muslim tradition are to be found in this little-known glossolalia. It is important for those looking to better understand the Hebrew Bible to examine these early interpreters of the Bible and to come to see that the Bible is a richly layered set of texts which has given birth to an exegetical literature that has magnified its depths of meaning.
Those who seek to isolate the Bible from these exegetical traditions help to destroy the richness and complexity of the work. Our debt to James Kugel’s masterful reconstruction of this tradition is immense.
Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism
6. Lawrence H. Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1994)
The ongoing controversy over the Dead Sea Scrolls, a well-publicized document find at Qumran, has served to transform our understanding of the sectarian nature of Second Temple Judaism and the origins of Christianity. In the expert hands of the scholar Lawrence Schiffman, the Dead Sea Scrolls are placed in a Jewish framework.
A master of Jewish Halakhah and classical history, Schiffman brings to this important subject a sensitivity that is often missing from other works on the matter. Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls is a book that serves to reconstruct the period in which the Scrolls were written, giving us a panoramic view of the origins of Pharisaic Judaism and the development of Christianity.
By seeking to reincorporate the Qumran community into the emerging rabbinical society and the world of Jesus, Schiffman highlights a vibrant and complicated Jewish civilization that has been illuminated for us by the Scrolls which themselves predate both the rabbinical texts as well as the New Testament.
7. George Foot Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of the Tannaim (Harvard University Press, 1927-1930, reprint Hendrickson Books, 1997)
Without question the most comprehensive and intelligent work ever written on the Jewish Sages in their formative period, Moore’s three-volume study is essential reading for any student of Jewish civilization and is one of the most necessary books for the study of the Talmudic tradition.
In spite of the drubbing that contemporary scholars continue to give it, a critical approach that has lamentably done much to eviscerate the rabbinical heritage in the misleading name of “objectivity”; George Foot Moore, the great historian of religions at Harvard University, produced a sympathetic, thoughtful, and deeply learned study of the rabbis.
Judaism is a work of careful historical scholarship that is enlivened by sophisticated thematic discussions of the most basic and vital themes in the work of the Sages. It is a book of great depth and informational density which does not seek to sit in judgment of the Talmudic tradition, but to present that tradition in the way that the rabbis saw their task. It is a book that contains a great amount of precious detail and will serve the student of the rabbinical literature as an essential reference book that will be used often to clarify critical and historical issues that are needed to make sense of the literature.
8. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Heavenly Torah: As Refracted Through the Generations, edited and translated from the Hebrew by Gordon Tucker (Continuum Books, 2005)
Originally composed in Hebrew in the early 1960s, Heschel’s magnum opus on the Sages remains one of the most discerning and engaging portraits of the rabbis that we currently possess.
Looking at many of the same themes he discusses in The Prophets from a Talmudic angle, Heschel’s lays bare the thinking of the great rabbis in ways that address the human condition. Predicating the book’s discursive framework on the great debate between the Tannaim Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Ishma’el, Heschel examines what would become one of his most frequent concerns, the relationship between the mystical and the rational.
In Heavenly Torah the debate between Akiba and Ishma’el over the natural and the supernatural becomes a model of two different spiritual worldviews and two approaches to Divine revelation.
This epic and genuinely rewarding book, which in the original Hebrew edition filled out three large volumes and served as the final scholarly project that Heschel worked on in his illustrious and productive career, is the great Jewish thinker’s scholarly meditation on Religious Humanism. Are we duty-bound to accept God’s Word in an unthinking manner, or must we apply reason to tradition?
In Heschel’s own life the push and pull between the allure of the Maimonidean-Sephardic tradition was contrasted by the immanent-mystical thinking of Heschel’s Eastern European Hasidic forebears.
Heavenly Torah, like George Foot Moore’s Judaism, is an encyclopedic work that serves to illuminate the classical rabbinic texts and will faithfully serve the student of that literature.
The Judeo-Arabic Age
9. Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (Yale University Press, 1998)
After the study of the Talmud, the great American Jewish scholars held an important place for the Geonim, the rabbis of the Muslim Middle East whose work clarifies and expands on the Talmudic tradition. Many excellent studies on the Geonim were published in the early part of the 20th century, though today many remain out of print and inaccessible to the general reader.
The Geonim are now little-known to all but the most expert students of rabbinical lore. This is a great shame because in the development of Geonic culture we had the first great defense of the Talmudic tradition against Jewish naysayers better known as Karaites. It is not known these days that the Karaites presented a great threat to the Talmudic tradition and if left unchecked might have obliterated the “Horizontal Society” erected by the Sages and put in its place a more rigid system based completely on a static reading of Scripture.
But beyond this important fact, the Geonim took Judaism out of its Greco-Roman provenance and into the new and dynamic world of Arabo-Islamic civilization. In this new Judeo-Arabic synthesis, Judaism found a partner in religious discussion and analysis.
In the work of the most important of these Geonim, Se’adya Gaon, Judaism found someone to overhaul the old system and translate it, literally and conceptually, into Arabic. Rising to the challenge of the emerging Islamic synthesis, Geonic culture admirably rose to produce many critical studies and textbooks that continue to be used as primary sources to this day, allowing the rabbinical student to engage the classical materials through the prism of a new learning and a new monotheistic civilization.
Robert Brody has written a thorough and useful study of this period which serves as an introduction to the work of the great figure Maimonides.
10. Herbert A. Davidson, Moses Maimonides: The Man and His Works (Oxford University Press, 2005)
There is no more important figure in the history of the Jewish rabbinate than Moses ben Maimon. Much has been written about him, but as we move further and further into the polarized Jewish culture I described earlier, the less and less we seem to known about the real Maimonides and what he really represented to Judaism.
A recent addition to our Maimonidean library is the excellent biography from Joel Kraemer, a scholar expert in Islamic humanism and Jewish tradition. And while that book is a vital addition to the Sephardic library, in more specifically Jewish terms I would recommend the comprehensive study by Herbert Davidson that serves as a primer to the massive literary output of Maimonides and its importance to the Jewish tradition.
From the school of the late, great Harry Wolfson, a school that has been wrongly eclipsed by that of Wolfson’s peer Leo Strauss, Davidson is an expert in Arabic philosophy and brings to the study of Maimonides a deep knowledge of the many areas in which Maimonides worked.
There is no way to fully express the centrality of Maimonides in our understanding of Jewish civilization. There is almost no aspect of Jewish tradition in which he does not play a pivotal role. His synthesis was famously rejected by the Franco-German rabbis who fought bitterly the attempt to bring scientific-critical thinking into rabbinical studies.
Maimonides’ grand synthesis of science and tradition followed the path of his Muslim compatriots, and led to the promulgation of a Religious Humanism that forever marked the way in which Sephardic tradition would process the Jewish heritage. It is no understatement to say that Maimonides was the most important rabbi who ever lived, as he brought into harmony the science of the Western tradition with the revelation of the Hebrews. It is this Religious Humanism that marks the culture of the Middle East and which serves as a prime expression of its most cherished values.
Davidson provides an expert entryway into the intellectual world of Maimonides and his book is a classic of rabbinic history.
11. Ross Brann, The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (John Hopkins University Press, 1991)
Beyond philosophy, beyond science, beyond the Halakhah developed by Maimonides in the tradition of the Geonim was the emergence of a new type of secular writing that was to become an important part of the Judeo-Arabic tradition.
A student of Se’adya Gaon, Dunash ben Labrat came to Muslim Spain from the Arab East and brought with him his master’s teachings and treatises on the Hebrew language. It is widely known that in Arabic culture the place of language is central. In rabbinic culture, religious values were paramount and there was little if any concern for what we now call “secular” literature such as poetry and narrative.
All this changed in Muslim Spain and its new class of courtier-rabbis who developed a form of metrical Hebrew poetry that is one of the core components of the classical Sephardic tradition.
Ross Brann is the most distinguished scholar of this Andalusian tradition of poetry and literature and his classic study The Compunctious Poet is a comprehensive work that examines all the major figures in the Sephardic school and places their work in a wider Jewish context.
From the time of the first Geonim to the emergence of the great poets of Andalus, we see a massive aesthetic revolution in the Jewish world that absorbed the Maimonidean system, but adapted that Religious Humanism to a literary art that had previously not existed in rabbinic circles. The adaptation of this Arabic literary art to Hebrew uses was not without its detractors, Maimonides himself included, but it emerged to enrich the palette of Hebrew literature in ways that have marked the Sephardic revolution as one of the most central events in the history of Jewish civilization.
The Compunctious Poet has now been supplemented by Peter Cole’s excellent anthology of the poetry, The Dream of the Poem (Princeton University Press, 2007). These two books provide a comprehensive introduction to one of the most important aspects of the Jewish heritage.
The Mystical Age
12. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, 1941)
While Judeo-Arabic culture brought science and rationalism to Jewish tradition, rabbis in the Rhineland were developing a literature out of the neglected and forgotten treatises of the old Jewish Gnostics; works once considered heretical and dangerous.
Out of this new thinking came a number of developments that have since been grouped together under the rubric of Kabbalah (in Hebrew meaning “tradition”), or Jewish mysticism.
The acknowledged dean of all Kabbalah scholars is the German-born Gershom Scholem whose hundreds of studies and critical editions served to place Kabbalistic studies on a firm academic footing.
In his epochal work Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, we are presented a series of masterful lectures arranged chronologically according to the various historical periods of mystical thinking in Judaism. From the earliest stages of Talmudic mysticism to the emergence of Hasidism in the post-Enlightenment world, Scholem guides the reader through the labyrinths of mystical thought with the utmost care and scholarly assurance.
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is one of the most important works of Jewish scholarship ever produced and has been rewarded with great critical and popular acclaim. In a fascinating twist of fate, the once-neglected and despised Kabbalah became under Scholem’s tutelage better known than much of the “normative” Judaic thinking that once sought to suppress it.
13. Isaiah Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts, translated from the Hebrew by David Goldstein (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1989)
In 1949, less than a decade after the publication of Scholem’s masterwork, Isaiah Tishby published an excellent Hebrew anthology of selections from the primary text of Kabbalah, the Zohar. Thought by traditionalists to be the work of Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai, and by modern scholars to be written pseudepigraphically under that name by Rabbi Moses de Leon, the Zohar is the primary text of the Jewish mystical tradition and is often thought in Orthodox circles to be on a par with the Bible and Talmud.
Tishby’s great scholarship made the Zohar, a lengthy treatise written in rabbinic Aramaic, available to Modern Hebrew readers. His two-volume set Mishnat ha-Zohar provided the reader with a wisely-chosen compendium of Zohar texts arranged according to theme and topic along with scholarly notes and learned introductions and explanatory matter.
David Goldstein’s excellent translation of Tishby’s Hebrew translations from the Aramaic widened the scope of availability of this great masterpiece of Jewish scholarship. A thorough and reliable English translation of these important texts for the history of Jewish spirituality was now widely accessible to the general reader and remains available for those who wish to learn more about a literature that has been mauled and abused by the hands of people like those who run what is known as “The Kabbalah Centre” whose followers include Madonna and Demi Moore.
Entering the Modern Age
14. Marc Saperstein, Exile in Amsterdam: Saul Levi Morteira’s Sermons to a Congregation of “New Jews” (Hebrew Union College Press, 2005)
The Maimonidean tradition of Religious Humanism entered the Modern Age under the aegis of those converted Jews known by the pejorative Spanish term Marrano (meaning “little pig”). After the persecution in Spain under the iron hand of the loathsome Inquisition, the Marranos left Spain and Portugal and settled in places like Amsterdam where they were provisionally welcomed for their business skills and where they were eventually able to return openly to Judaism.
This heroic story was once told in many books by Jewish scholars, most importantly Cecil Roth, but in our day there are fewer and fewer studies on the subject. Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi’s excellent monograph From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto (Columbia University Press, 1971, reprinted by University of Washington Press, 1981, currently out of print) looks at Isaac Cardoso, a great Sephardic humanist who brought the Andalusian-Maimonidean tradition to Europe. Jose Faur’s seminal study In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (State University of New York Press, 1992) reviews this same period of Sephardic history with a special emphasis on the ways in which the schism between Maimonideans and anti-Maimonideans took place and how the tradition of Religious Humanism helped to form ideas central to the Renaissance.
Marc Saperstein has done yeoman’s work in the field of late medieval Hebrew sermons in Europe and in Exile in Amsterdam gives us an intimate portrait of Saul Morteira and a generous English selection of his Portuguese sermons that were originally composed in Hebrew.
Morteira is a fascinating figure who is now unknown to most Jews. An Ashkenazi who was heir to a great rabbinical dynasty, he moved from Italy where he was born and left to serve the nascent Spanish-Portuguese community in Amsterdam. His sermons reflect the thinking of a man fully imbued with the old Judeo-Arabic culture, which was transmitted through the agency of Conversos and newly-returned Jews in places like the University of Padua.
The story of the Sephardim in Europe is not well-known these days which is a great pity as the Sephardim were able to preserve their understanding of Jewish Humanism in ways that, as Faur, Yerushalmi, and now Saperstein have all taught, extended the Jewish cultural system into the Western civilization of the Enlightenment.
Saperstein’s book is a rare find that allows us to enter into the rich and rewarding world of a Judaism that speaks to all those who wish to balance tradition with modernity. It was in a figure like Morteira, the man whose signature appeared on the excommunication of Spinoza – who rejected the Jewish religion in favor of a Secular Humanism, in which a brilliant balance between tradition and modernity was struck.
15. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, translated from the Hebrew by R.J. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton University Press, 1973)
In a conceptual universe aeons away from Saul Morteira, the development of the new mystical Kabbalah led in the late 17th century to a messianic movement which heralded the destruction of the old Maimonidean system and the advent of a messianic fervor which eventually served to break apart the Jewish system that had been firmly in place for many centuries.
It is to the everlasting credit of Gershom Scholem and his prodigious scholarly efforts that what was once considered a sordid and disagreeable episode in Jewish history has been restored to public knowledge.
The mission of Sabbatai Sevi, a mystical scholar who proclaimed himself messiah, permeated many if not all precincts of the early modern Jewish world and led to many contradictory developments when it fell apart.
With the vigorous insightfulness of a master novelist, Scholem tells this story in kaleidoscopic detail. Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah is an extraordinary work of Jewish scholarship and lays out for us the ways in which the apocalyptic rapture led to movements as diverse as Hasidism, Zionism, the Jewish Enlightenment and various other heresies.
In contrast to the sober story told by Marc Saperstein about Saul Morteira, Scholem tells a tale of mass frenzy and populist spiritual awakening. Sabbatai was a messianic pretender whose values deeply resonated with the mass of impoverished Jews in Eastern European shtetls as well as in the Ottoman Empire. His book is a classic of Jewish scholarship that provides the reader with a context in which to make sense of the many cataclysms that followed in the aftermath of the failed messianic movement.
16. Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University of Alabama Press, 1973, reprint, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998)
The Ashkenazi tradition found great difficulty accepting Maimonidean Religious Humanism. From the first stirrings of controversy in the 13th century to the present day, Ashkenazi orthodoxy held to a Jewish exclusivism that rejected authentic engagement with the Gentile world.
The development of a German Jewish culture in the early Modern world was led to a great extent by the deeply contested figure of Moses Mendelssohn. Following the Sephardic model established by Maimonides and his peers, Mendelssohn absorbed the new philosophical trends in European culture and sought to continue Judaic tradition on the firm footing of science and philosophical thought. In many ways, Mendelssohn’s intellectual biography can be read as an Ashkenazi acculturation to Sephardic Judaism.
In the late 18th century Ashkenazi culture this was a novel proposition that would eventually lead to tremendous controversy in rabbinic circles.
An emerging Orthodoxy rejected Mendelssohn’s dynamic synthesis; most famously in the fierce opposition to his German translation of the Pentateuch by the foremost Ashkenazi rabbinical authorities and in the ongoing demonization of his name and legacy in Orthodox religious circles.
Conversely, Mendelssohn’s rich legacy was co-opted by the assimilationist school of the Wissenschaft des Judenthums; a scholarly enterprise that was intent on examining Judaism from a critical-historical point of view that famously rejected key elements of Mendelssohn’s synthesis, most pointedly his fidelity to the Halakhic tradition.
Alexander Altmann’s magisterial biography of Mendelssohn is one of the great marvels in contemporary Jewish scholarship. It expertly reconstructs the world of German Judaism in the late 18th century and provides a masterfully detailed biography of Mendelssohn from the many letters and historical documents that are available to the researcher.
Every bit the equal to Gershom Scholem’s massive reconstruction of Sabbateanism, Altmann’s work is far less well known these days. Perhaps Altmann’s scholarship is less alluring than the sexier aspects of Scholem’s Kabbalistic reconstructions, but his presentation of Moses Mendelssohn is critical to our understanding of an important movement in European Jewish culture that ended up being short-circuited by the controversies that ensued between the Orthodox and the Reformers.
Mendelssohn was able to construct a Jewish method that is critical to our future well-being: his fidelity to the rabbinical tradition in no way precluded him from becoming a central figure in the world of European letters. His glittering life brought him into contact with eminent persons in the intellectual landscape of his time. From Lessing to Kant to Herder, Mendelssohn found himself fully acculturated to the most important cultural trends of his time. He was known in Gentile circles as a masterful thinker and as a man of great moral integrity.
With the destruction of German Jewish culture in the wake of both the internal Ashkenazi schisms and, of course, the Nazi persecution of the Jews in the 20th century, the name of Moses Mendelssohn has generally been effaced from the Jewish community and from the larger intellectual world as well. The centrality of Alexander Altmann’s great book on Mendelssohn in our understanding of contemporary Judaism cannot be overestimated; in this massive work we come to understand what Judaism means in modern terms.
The Contemporary Age
17. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951)
18. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philsophy of Judaism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1955)
In his two great philosophical masterpieces, Heschel maps out a profound Jewish vision that has yet to be matched in our time. Like Philo and Maimonides, he brings the Greek terms to bear on Hebrew wisdom and rediscovers the meaning of our ancestral faith.
Each of these two books presents a Jewish wisdom that is based on the classical sources but nourished by the philosophical concerns of the modern age. Heschel’s many years of study led him to think deeply in our post-Holocaust world about what we are as human beings and how the truths of the past apply to us today. His insight and critical spirit translate into a profound spirituality that is at the very apex of who we are as Jews today.
It was in these two books that Heschel mapped out what would be his spiritual program that would manifest itself in his political activism in the 1960s for which he is now best known. It was in these two books that the foundations were laid for his relationship with Martin Luther King Jr. and the renewal of Religious Humanism in our day.
19. Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (Continuum Books, 2002)
20. Jonathan Sacks, The Home We Build Together: Recreating Society (Continuum Books, 2007)
Trained in philosophy at Cambridge, Jonathan Sacks is currently serving as Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and British Commonwealth. His voice is the most important in contemporary Jewish Orthodoxy and his social vision restores to Judaism the values of Religious Humanism that is so tragically missing from many sectors of our community.
In his Dignity of Difference written in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, he counseled tolerance and understanding in a world primed for religious polarization. In terms of Jewish society, Sacks promoted a vision of religious pluralism and liberalism that was a welcome change from the mindless expatiation of Orthodox thinkers who are taking Judaism further and further into a static isolation cell. In his latest book, The Home We Build Together, he lays out a program for a reinstitution of communal values and a roadmap for an improved civic culture in a world that has lost much of its human compassion.
Through his tireless work as a public intellectual and representative of Judaism on the global stage, Rabbi Sacks takes sophisticated and complex Jewish ideas and concepts and breaks them down in ways that are understandable to the average person. In a world of religious fanaticism and hate, he has articulated an inspired Jewish vision that embodies the wisdom of the past in a tone that is sensitive to the contemporary human being.
21. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated from the French by Sean Hand (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)
Perhaps the most influential modern Jewish thinker on the world stage, Emmanuel Levinas is a Talmud scholar as well as one of the most original philosophers of 20th century Europe. Equally versed in the Talmud and Plato, Levinas has published many works on philosophy, but is now best known for his numerous Talmudic lectures, many of which are widely available in English translation.
Given the great erudition of his philosophic knowledge, many will find his Talmud lectures quite intimidating. Fraught with the impenetrable idioms of contemporary French thought (Levinas was a critical part of the development of the thought of Jacques Derrida), the Talmud lectures are not very easy to grasp.
Thankfully, Levinas published a book of his occasional essays on Jewish subjects that, though still intellectually challenging, are much more accessible to the general reader.
In the greatest of these essays, “To Love the Torah More Than God,” Levinas was able to completely transcend modern Jewish thought and return to the very heart of the classical rabbinic tradition. His avowed project was to translate Hebrew into Greek and thus bring contemporary Jews into the world we live in.
Like the great Maimonides, Levinas propounded a form of Religious Humanism that sought to elevate Jewish students and bring them into a dialogue with their Gentile peers.
22. Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions, translated from the French by Rosmarie Waldrop (Wesleyan University Press, 1976-1984)
Jabes, an Egyptian-Jewish poet who left his homeland at the time of the 1956 Suez crisis, developed a form of aphoristic Jewish writing that is truly unclassifiable. His is the only book on my entire list that is not a work of non-fiction.
The seven-volume Book of Questions is written in the form of a Talmudic colloquy with the voices of imaginary rabbis saying things that come out of the ethical traditions of Judaism but articulated in a secular manner along the lines of the contemporary French thinking, such as that of Levinas and Derrida.
It is impossible to describe in prosaic terms the startling depth and originality of Jabes’s achievement. He examines language, rational thought, the great themes of Good and Evil, all in a context that preserves the hallowed form of the horizontal rabbinic dialogue. His work is an elegy for a lost Egypt; for passionate engagement with the Torah and its ideas; engaging the spiritual masters of the past who left us with their questions, only to have us in turn ask our own questions and thus keep alive and animated the wisdom and faith of our tradition.
All this may seem strange given that Edmond Jabes was fully acculturated to Western civilization and did not at all practice the orthodox Jewish rituals. But looking at his work more deeply, after we are able to crack his modern atheistic exterior, we can find a profound Jewish thinker whose ideas and values speak to who we are as a civilized people.
Like his Egyptian-Jewish ancestor Philo, and his Ashkenazi-Jewish contemporary Emmanuel Levinas, Jabes was drawn to the Greek-Jewish relationship and sought ways to transmit new ideas using old voices, and to put the old ideas in the form of a radically new voice. His writing is inimitably Jabesian, but the values he provides for his readers are as old as the hills and mystically emanate from the pages of the old texts that he is constantly interrogating.
Like the rabbis of old, Edmond Jabes seeks to find the meaning in what he calls in French vocables; words that consistently play with us, seeking to test our ability to make sense of them.
23. Aime Palliere, The Unknown Sanctuary: A Pilgrimage from Rome to Israel, translated from the French by Louise Waterman Wise (Bloch Publishers, 1928)
We end our list with an extraordinary spiritual memoir from Aime Palliere who attempted to leave the Catholic Church of his ancestors to become a Jew, and was prevented from doing so by his mentor, perhaps the most important rabbi of the modern period, Elijah Benamozegh.
As a youth training to be a priest, Palliere felt a spiritual longing and found himself visiting Benamozegh’s Synagogue in Leghorn (Livorno), Italy. Undertaking a written correspondence with the great master, Palliere was instructed to follow the Seven Precepts of Noah in order to fulfill the role of a Noahide, a member of the Universal Religion.
Palliere presents to us not only his self-portrait, itself a profound spiritual journey fraught with the mystical, but gives us a rare and precious glimpse of a great Jewish sage and the way he looked at the world.
It is fitting that in our extended discussion of the traditions of Religious Humanism that we conclude with one of its most distinguished representatives. Palliere was a central figure in promoting the legacy of Benamozegh who died in 1900. The great masterwork of Benamozegh, Israel and Humanity (translated from the French by Maxwell Luria, Paulist Press, 1995), was edited by Palliere and his life’s mission was to spread his rabbi’s vision of universalism.
For Palliere, as for Benamozegh, religion and universalism were not to be opposed, but were complementary sides of the same coin. In the view of Benamozegh, humanity was put on earth to shepherd nature and do good. The Jewish revelation was meant to entrust the true universal religion of Noah to a priestly class who would be able to transmit it to the rest of humanity.
Benamozegh’s vision was one where all members of the human race were born of a single ancestor; hence we are all brothers. Fusing the mysticism of the Kabbalah and the rational science of Maimonides, Benamozegh taught us, Jew and Gentile alike, that we cannot rely on only one facet of our intelligence. There could be no science without feeling, no spiritualism without rationality.
In the figure of Elijah Benamozegh as presented in this valuable memoir from Aime Palliere, we see the great genius of the Jewish mind and the compassion and sense of moral justice that it has represented throughout the ages.
Building Your Sephardic Library
Introduction: Perpetuating Sephardic Culture
The rich and vibrant historical culture of the Sephardim is a matter of great pride to the members of our community. One of the primary objectives of the Sephardim over the generations was to make known the great accomplishments of our progenitors and their role in creating and transmitting this great civilization internally in our own communities and to the world at large. It is our belief that knowledge of Sephardic culture would enrich the Jewish world as it would add substantially to the many other global communities.
Ensuring the continuity and perpetuation of Sephardic culture has not been an easy task in our day. The current system of Jewish education has by and large ignored the history of Andalusian, North African and Middle Eastern Jews in favor of the Ashkenazi majority culture. Major figures, events and ideas that have been preserved in the Sephardic tradition are not well known in educated circles and have been abandoned by many Sephardim whose self-knowledge lacks the most rudimentary understanding of its past.
It is thus urgent that we are successful in providing accessible resources to readers in order to enable them to learn about the glorious Sephardic past.
The following article contains some basic information for the general reader to begin the study of Sephardic history and culture.
The Purpose of the List
The purpose of listing the basic bibliography in Sephardic studies is not to provide information on general Jewish history or detailed information on matters having to do with the specifics of religion. There are many well-known books that provide comprehensive information on Jewish culture and history while matters having to do with Sephardic religious and Halakhic traditions are best left to Hebrew sources which can be accessed through Synagogues and rabbinical authorities. The list I will present to you will encompass history, culture, literature, philosophy and politics rather than the specifically religious details of the Sephardic past.
The Foundation
S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, University of California Press, Five Volumes and Index, 1967-1993
The most important resource that must be purchased for any Sephardic library is this multi-volume encyclopedic work. The summa of Sephardic studies, A Mediterranean Society is in effect the most detailed and comprehensive scholarship on any pre-Modern Jewish community that we have. Goitein used the documents of the Cairo Geniza, a storehouse of discarded manuscripts found in the grand Synagogue of Cairo, from which he was able to miraculously reconstruct the entire socio-cultural universe of the Egyptian Jewish community.
The scope of A Mediterranean Society is breathtaking: moving from economics to social mores to family life, Goitein is able to present us with a living, breathing community in remarkably accurate detail.
While it is often remarked that the Dead Sea Scrolls have functioned as the most important manuscript find in contemporary Jewish scholarship, it has been the use made of the Cairo Geniza that has transformed our understanding of the Medieval Jewish world in the age of Islam and its many accomplishments. This was the world in which Maimonides led the community and when an amazing explosion of creativity took place among the Jews of the Mediterranean world.
Goitein looks at how business was conducted, how people lived out their family existence, related to one another and so much more. A Mediterranean Society is a rich treasure trove of information that will be able to illuminate many centuries of Jewish life in the Arab world.
Caveat Emptor: There is a one-volume abridgment of A Mediterranean Society which loses the majesty and scope of the complete edition and is not recommended for those who wish to experience the greatness of the work and its encyclopedic recounting of the Jewish world in the early Middle Ages. Please make sure to purchase the full version of the work which is easily available in an affordable paperback edition.
Two Important Resources
Haim Beinart, Editor, The Sephardi Legacy, The Magnes Press of Hebrew University, Two Volumes, 1992
Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Editor, The Legacy of Muslim Spain, E.J. Brill Publishers, Two Volumes, 1992
Issued to commemorate the Quincentennial of the Expulsion from Spain, these two comprehensive anthologies of essays by top scholars in the field provide the novice reader with a clear and learned review of many cultural and historical aspects of Sephardic civilization before and after the Expulsion.
Beinart’s volume takes care of what is known as Christian Spain with little if any attention paid to the Muslim period. The culture of the Latin Sephardim, as opposed to the Arabic Sephardim whose history was severely curtailed after the Christian Reconquest, is presented in all its variety and complexity. The anthology is particularly strong in presenting the details of the Inquisition and its aftermath. Valuable chapters on the Sephardic experience in Europe and detailed studies of different aspects of Sephardi culture in a wide historical perspective make the books indispensable.
Having few contemporary Jewish resources on Muslim Spain has been a serious problem for students and readers wishing to learn more about the subject. Eliyahu Ashtor wrote the standard history of the period back in the early 1960s and even though his work has become the standard for accessing the information, it lacks a multidisciplinary perspective which can be found in the Jayyusi volumes that truly present the vastly complex civilization that was created in Sepharad/Al-Andalus.
The Jayyusi volumes bring to the reader many diverse scholars who take on different aspects of Muslim Spain. From music and literature to art and architecture there is nary a detail in this culture that is not addressed in these excellent books. The studies provide the reader with the awesome tapestry of life in pre-Catholic Spain and will permit a deeper and more penetrating knowledge of the ways in which Sephardic Jewish life has been connected to Arabic civilization over the course of many centuries.
The Basics: A Baker’s Dozen Books to Start You Off
This basic list of books will attempt to balance the best in contemporary scholarship with the many areas that encompass Sephardic culture and history. I have tried to choose books based on the inherent quality and readability of the scholarship and the writing, but have also paid close attention to try and create a varied selection that would include the many areas of Sephardic studies in order to flesh out a well-rounded presentation of educational resources.
1. Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Spain, Little, Brown and Company, 2002
The brilliantly written book by Hispanic scholar Menocal is the easily the best and most accessible survey of the classical era in Spanish culture which provides a readable and entertaining introduction to the major figures and events in Sephardic history. It is a portal into a magical world of culture and wondrous beauty that befits the history it seeks to describe.
2. Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture, University of Minnesota Press, 1993
An extraordinary achievement which manages to encompasses the entirety of Sephardic history in panoramic fashion while paying very careful attention to the socio-cultural significance of that history. Standing alone among contemporary interpretations of Sephardic civilization, After Jews and Arabs is a work that is written with great scholarly rigor, but which is also a deeply personal reclamation of Sephardic culture perceived within the poetics and literary traditions of the Sephardim. It is a book that startles and enchants its readers with brilliant recreations of Sephardic life presented in the most passionate engagement with our sense of who we are as Sephardim and with a careful eye towards our continuity as a community.
3. Peter Cole, Editor and Translator, The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950-1492, Princeton University Press, 2007
A loving restoration of the classic Hebrew poetry of the Spanish Golden Age and beyond, Peter Cole’s comprehensive book is amazingly the first in English that recounts the entire Sephardic tradition of Hebrew poetry. While the Jewish Publication Society began their series of classic Sephardic poets back in the early 20th century, the literature itself was progressively being forgotten by Western readers. Cole began his restoration of this poetic tradition with individual volumes on Samuel the Nagid and Solomon ibn Gabirol, but his astounding erudition and penetrating knowledge led him to produce a volume that would in effect reproduce poetry from the major – and some minor – figures from the Sephardic school. This is a textbook that will serve students of classical Sephardic literature for many years to come.
4. Colette Sirat, A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 1985
A concise and comprehensive single volume survey of the grand sweep of Jewish thought in the Middle Ages. Sirat is perhaps our best guide to the many trends in Jewish thought and provides extended discussions of Maimonides, Saadiah Gaon and Judah Halevi as well as in-depth analyses of Jewish Neo-Platonism, Aristole’s influence in Jewish thought and the close ties between Arabic Kalam and Jewish religious thinking. A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages is a truly indispensable work that lays out Jewish philosophy in an elegant and lucid manner. It encompasses the earliest stages of the tradition and brings us all the way to 16th century Europe. The book is a rigorous survey which remains accessible to the educated reader and is required reading for those trying to make sense of the vast complexity of this important part of Sephardic Jewish history.
5. Joel Kraemer, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization’s Greatest Minds, Doubleday Books, 2008
The definitive biography of the most important Rabbi in the entirety of Jewish history. Kraemer, an expert on Medieval Arabic Humanism, in addition to the vast corpus of Maimonidean writings, has deployed the vast resources of the Cairo Geniza as well as the writings of Arabic historians and literati to produce what is an astonishingly vigorous and precise portrait of Maimonides. Truly indispensable to our understanding of the Sephardic tradition of Religious Humanism, which he presented in its most brilliant form, Moses Maimonides represents to Judaism its most perfect efflorescence; far from being a frozen icon, Maimonides was able to produce a lasting template of a creative and dynamic Jewish thought and practice that generated many generations of rabbis and literary figures who made of the man a lasting presence in our culture. Kraemer’s book places Maimonides within the Arabic milieu in which he lived and worked showing the deep ties between the Jews of the Arab world and their environment.
6. Ilan Stavans, Editor, The Schocken Book Modern Sephardic Literature, Schocken Books, 2005
Contemporary Sephardic writers are perhaps better known outside the Jewish world than inside it. Authors like Grace Aguilar, Elias Canetti, and Edmond Jabes are world-renowned writers who have achieved great success in literary circles, but when anthologies of Modern Jewish authors are presented they are generally ignored. This comprehensive anthology by Stavans, though somewhat on the conservative side, does a great deal to redress this imbalance. No more must we see Modern Jewish literature simply as Bellow, Roth and a short-list of Ashkenazi-American Jewish writers. The anthology does much to preserve the rich, polyglot nature of Sephardic letters and the ways in which Sephardic writers have distinguished their work by incorporating traditional elements into their prose. Although the Stavans anthology only skims the surface of an immense literature, it is an ideal place to begin to discover the wealth of things that are easily available to the curious student.
7. Jose Faur, In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity, State University of New York Press, 1992
This expertly argued book is a seminal work on the history of Sephardim at the cusp of the Modern era from the dean of all Sephardic scholars. The extraordinary corpus of Jose Faur presents the student of Sephardic history with an archive of material whose richness and scope is without parallel. In the Shadow of History is perhaps his most accessible book. It argues that the culture that was produced by the Jews of Spain was responsible for creating the foundations of the Renaissance and ushered in the Modern era. Having preserved the Greco-Roman traditions over the course of the Islamic centuries in Spain, Jews who held on to the old traditions were able to integrate them into a new age of Spanish literature, the age of Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Gongora, and project into history an acute vision of religious freedom and an emancipatory discourse based on the experience of Inquisition and the Converso consciousness. Faur retraces the controversies in Jewish circles over rationalism and the emergence of a new cadre of intellectuals whose views were formative in the development of European thought in the Renaissance and beyond.
8. Samuel Morell, Studies in the Judicial Methodology of Rabbi David ibn Abi Zimra, University Press of America, 2004
Born in pre-Expulsion Spain, Rabbi David ibn Abi Zimra ministered as a highly influential legal authority in Egypt. This study of the RADBAZ’s legal thought presents a rare and comprehensive analysis of the flexibility and expansiveness of the Sephardic legal tradition at its best. Always cognizant of the letter of the Law, Sephardic sages were amazingly successful throughout the centuries in the way they were able to adapt and apply the Law to new situations. In the post-Maimonidean Jewish world the Sephardic decisor was often faced with the complicated PILPUL of the Ashkenazim and their often harsh manner in dealing with legal cases. Professor Morell’s definitive study of the RADBAZ reviews the great legal mind as he takes on the real world aspects of judicial decision through adaptation to the mores of the time. RADBAZ was deeply concerned with justice and equity and quite frequently adjudicated cases on the basis of social convention and scientific evidence. The Law in the Sephardic tradition was never undermined or argued away; the idea was to apply the Law in a way that was both ethical and logically consistent regardless of precedent. Morell’s study expertly shows us the myriad ways in which RADBAZ blazed a moral pathway for the Law and set his rulings as an important example of Sephardic Religious Humanism.
9. Elijah Benamozegh, Israel and Humanity, Translated from the French by Maxwell Luria, Paulist Press, 1995
It is often remarked by cynics that the Sephardim have not produced religious figures of significance since the Spanish Expulsion. Sadly, such a statement is not only untrue, but it reflects the myriad biases that continue to infect the Jewish community with regard to Sephardic tradition. One of the problems in this view is the way in which it distorts a pluralistic and multivalent nature of Jewish culture, which has been wrongly parochialized and whose focus has been constricted by such limitations. A perfect example of the misperceptions of contemporary Jewish civilization is the magnum opus of one of the most accomplished Sephardic thinkers of the past few centuries, Rabbi Elijah Benamozegh. Born in the port city of Livorno, Italy to a family with roots in Morocco, Benamozegh was a Sephardic homme de lettres whose wide erudition knew few boundaries. The breadth of his knowledge is absolutely extraordinary and I have mooted in the past that the reason for his obscurity in the Jewish world is that he does not present a stereotypical figure of a cloistered and fanatical rabbi. Benamozegh promoted the values of Religious Humanism; a construct that incorporated the strict values of Halakhah and Jewish tradition with the advances of rational thought and science. This stance reflected his adoption of a Maimonidean past that had by his time been overtaken in the Jewish world by other less open and pluralistic ways of seeing. Benamozegh was a religious modernist whose views of universalism and parochialism are as relevant to us now as they were when he fist wrote them back at the end of the 19th century.
10. Arthur Kiron, Golden Ages, Promised Lands: The Victorian Rabbinic Humanism of Sabato Morais, Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1999
The greatest book ever written on American Jewish history is one that has not been issued by a commercial publishing house. In spite of the fact that all histories of Jews in America begin with the famous story of the Jewish immigrants to New York from Recife, Brazil in 1654, the vast preponderance of American Jewish historical study is focused on Ashkenazi Jewish history, leaving Sephardic history almost completely absent. Such is a great shame, for as we see in Arthur Kiron’s magisterial biography of Rabbi Sabato Morais, this history is a critical aspect of Jewish life in the United States. Morais, a contemporary of Elijah Benamozegh, was forced to leave Italy in order to make a living and ended up as the pulpit rabbi in Philadelphia’s Congregation Mikveh Israel, one of the most venerable and oldest of the American Synagogues. Kiron masterfully recounts the history of the period with an especial emphasis on the ideas and values of Morais who was to eventually found the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. The story of Morais is emblematic of the story of Sephardim in America: bringing their rich traditions to the Western shores of the Atlantic Ocean, Sephardim successfully brought their civilization to an inviting world of openness and tolerance, much like the Arab-Islamic world of the classic Sephardic experience. Morais was, like Benamozegh, a promoter of the traditions of Religious Humanism and wrote extensively for both the Jewish and secular press expounding these ideas. Morais was the perfect model of an American Jew who was able to preserve the Jewish past as well as he was able to integrate the values and mores of a new world in flux and transition.
(Note: Golden Ages, Promised Lands may be ordered from UMI Dissertation Services at 800-521-4700. Please specify UMI Number 9930710 when ordering.)
11. Nissim Rejwan, The Jews of Iraq: 3,000 Years of History and Culture, Fons Vitae, 2009
After many years of being out-of-print, Nissim Rejwan’s classic study of the Jews of Iraq is thankfully available once again. It is the best and most comprehensive single-volume work on any Arab Jewish community. Making copious use of the many studies that have detailed the history of this venerable Jewish community, Rejwan has successfully reconstructed not only the parochial history of Iraqi Jewry, but has provided a brilliant précis of Jewish history from the Biblical period through to the Talmudic period and on to the Middle Ages and modernity. The book allows us to see the full arc of the Jewish experience in both its historical and cultural richness. Particularly important are the discussions of the emergence of the rabbinical movement in its Talmudic context, the Arabization of Jewry, and the difficulties created with the emergence of Zionism and the state of Israel. This is the one book that covers all the bases.
12. Stephen Schwartz, Sarajevo Rose: A Balkan Jewish Notebook, Saqi Books, 2005
Of the many books that have been written about Ottoman and Balkan Sephardic history, Schwartz’s is perhaps the most penetrating and enlightening. Comprising a collection of intertwined essays on personalities, events and intellectual histories, Sarajevo Rose cuts to the very heart of the Sephardic experience as few other studies are able. Recounting the rich history of Balkan Sephardic life, Schwartz brings its world to life with vivid retellings of many stories and character portraits that ultimately comprise a comprehensive survey of Ottoman Jewish life. His indelible portrait of the polymath Kalmi Baruh, his homage to the great Sephardic writer Elias Canetti and his many studies of Jewish-Muslim relation in the Balkans provide us with an accurate and much-needed corrective to the lachrymose conceptions of Sephardic history that unfortunately permeate Jewish studies. This critically important work points us to an alternative history that is far closer to our traditional understandings and which creates an informed and sympathetic portrait of a seminal Sephardic community in the Modern period.
13. Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews, with accompanying music CD, University of Chicago Press, 1998
Shelemay’s research on the musical traditions of the Brooklyn Syrian community has become the most important work of cultural analysis on the American Sephardic community that we now possess. Having come to Brooklyn to do a project on ethnomusicology, Shelemay continued her work and eventually produced a book of great value and insight on the Syrian Jews of Brooklyn and their rich culture. Grounding her scholarship in the technical realities of the Syrian Jewish tradition of Pizmonim, the liturgical songs that form the musical repertoire of the Sephardic Synagogue, she extrapolates the community’s cultural and intellectual history in a wider Sephardic context. Making use of the personal reminiscences of community members, the book moves freely between history, culture and memory to produce a richly resonant portrait of a Sephardic community and its noble past. Let Jasmine Rain Down is a fitting testament to the vibrancy of the Sephardic tradition and its cultural creativity.
14. Joann Sfar, The Rabbi’s Cat, Translated from the French by Alexis Siegel and Anjali Singh, Pantheon Books, 2005
Sfar, a graphic artist based in Paris, has produced a hugely entertaining but also insightful and quite serious portrait of a lost Algerian Jewish community through a retelling of family stories. The Rabbi’s Cat is on its surface a breezily entertaining journey which tells the adventures of a nebbishy Algerian rabbi and his daughter and the entanglements they get into. But from the very outset of this very intelligent and insightful graphic novel, Sfar begins to integrate theological discussions, critiques of French Colonialism and Jewish-Muslim relations into the more benign tapestry of what would on the surface appear to be humorous tales of bumbling Jews. Embedded within The Rabbi’s Cat are many critical issues arising from the dispossession of Sephardim in the larger culture and a valiant attempt to re-establish the importance of the Sephardic voice in discussions of Jewish life in the contemporary world. In an interview that I conducted with Sfar at the Center for Jewish History that has been posted to the CJH Website, I attempted to draw out these complex Sephardic themes and succeeding in eliciting from the author a panoply of Arab Jewish memories that showed how the book was a layered work that harbored within it a labyrinthine family history that could stand as representative of the larger world of North African and Arab Jewry in an age of transition.
Conclusion: The Importance of the Sephardic Library
The need to build up a Sephardic library is of the utmost urgency for Sephardim who are in danger of losing the rich civilization of their collective past. But beyond this, the rich culture of the Sephardim is of critical importance to a Jewish world that has increasingly seen itself in extremely narrow terms and which has been presented to the general culture at large in these terms.
Sephardic civilization is a heady amalgamation of many varied world cultures that have been integrated into a parochially Jewish context in ways that speak to the multicultural and pluralistic trends in our own contemporary civilization. Eschewing the monoculturalism of Ashkenazi parochialism which feeds off of an exclusive sense of Jewish identity, Sephardic civilization restores to Jewish self-understanding a profoundly valuable openness to the world and a call to bring Judaism into intimate contact with that world.
Rather than seeing Jewish culture as a sealed room, exploration of the Sephardic library shows just the opposite: Sephardic Judaism is a kaleidoscopic tradition that has been successful at responding to the many challenges that the world presents to Jews and which has raised up personalities of great insight; figures whose stories and ideas have instilled within Jewish civilization a univeralism that has drawn from both religious and humanistic sources to create a culture of great worth and dignity.
Important Book Resources for Sephardic Studies
Over the past couple of years I have been gathering some important bibliographical items that are critical for the study of the Sephardic heritage. The following article will present the many resources that are currently available to the English-speaking reader interested in learning more about the subject. I will follow this presentation with an extensive reading list I prepared in response to a friend who raised the issue of Sephardic education and the problems that we as a community face in making our civilization known to the world.
Golden Age Sephardic Poetry
The most important Sephardic literary-cultural resource published in the past decade has been Peter Cole’s monumental annotated English-language anthology of Sephardic Jewish poetry The Dream of the Poem:
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8349.html
For all of its many virtues, the printed book is missing one thing: the poems in their original Hebrew versions.
I am happy to be able to say that the primary anthology of the Hebrew texts of this seminal poetry of the classical Sephardic tradition – Hayyim Schirmann’s four-volume anthology Ha-Shirah ha-Ibrit bi-Sfarad u-bi-Provens first published in 1956 – is now back in print and available at an extremely reasonable price from the publisher Mossad Bialik:
http://www.bialik-publishing.co.il/product_info.php?products_id=1224&language=en
For those who can read Hebrew, the Schirmann anthology is an essential purchase. It is the most comprehensive collection of medieval Sephardic poetry ever assembled and contains the masterful annotations of the greatest scholar of this literature.
The Cole and Schirmann anthologies can be augmented for the student by two important popular works that present the culture and history of Andalusian Jewry:
Two Popular Books on Andalus-Sepharad
Maria Rosa Menocal’s Ornament of the World has become the standard reference for many readers wishing to have a general understanding of Andalus-Sepharad:
Joel Kraemer’s definitive biography of the great rabbinic sage Moses Maimonides provides a comprehensive review of this central figure in Sephardic history. It is not just the story of one individual, but gives us a panoramic view of the entire religious history of Judaism in the Middle Ages.
The Society of Heshaim
I have just discovered the continuing work of an important Sephardic institution called the Society of Heshaim (Etz Hayyim) which publishes Anglo-Sephardic works. The society continues the traditions of the Spanish Portuguese Synagogue in London’s Bevis Marks and offers prayer-books and community histories:
Of special note is the Society’s 2008 republication of Hakham David Nieto’s 1714 classic Matteh Dan, The Rod of Judgment. Nieto’s work was perhaps the most brilliant defense of the Oral Law and the rabbinic tradition written in the post-Expulsion era.
It is to be remembered that the converted Iberian exiles had little or no contact with the Talmudic tradition. Their only real contact with Judaism in Catholic Spain was the Old Testament. So it was necessary for rabbis in the early Modern period to focus on presenting the Oral tradition to the many Conversos seeking to return to Jewish observance as they moved out of the Iberian Peninsula to places like Amsterdam, Hamburg, Venice, Bordeaux, and other European cities where they were safe to practice their Jewish faith.
The deluxe reprint of Matteh Dan contains the Hebrew and Spanish originals and Louis Loewe’s English translation:
http://www.heshaim.org/other-items-2/
We should note that there has been a recent English translation of the book by an Ashkenazi Orthodox scholar that does not effectively grasp the intellectual grandeur and religious genius of the work, so it is good to have the older translation available again:
Digital Reprints of Sephardic Religious Humanist Classics
Thanks to the excellent work being done to digitize old books, we have been blessed to see many Sephardic classics restored to print.
One of the most important works of Modern Sephardic religious thought is Moses Angel’s The Law of Sinai and its Appointed Times. Published in 1858 in London, this work which is structured by the weekly Torah lections is a classic of Religious Humanism.
I have recently done a couple of SHU posts on another Anglo-Sephardic luminary Grace Aguilar (1816-1847), one of the most important – and prolific – Jewish writers of the 19th century. Her writings on Judaism remain inspirational and reflect the Sephardic tradition of Religious Humanism with her own uniquely proto-feminist leanings:
The Spirit of Judaism (1842)
The Jewish Faith (1845)
Women of Israel (1846)
Grace Aguilar’s Sephardic Fiction
In her tragically-shortened life (she died from a lifelong ailment at the age of 31) Aguilar was a prolific writer of fiction. Most of her literary works were not on specifically Jewish themes, but two of her stories dealt with the matter of Crypto-Jewish identity in a particularly moving way.
Her posthumously-published novel The Vale of Cedars; or, the Martyr is a brilliant revision of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe where a young Converso woman gets caught up in a forbidden romance that might expose her to the depredations of the Inquisition as had happened so many times to the persecuted community that so very carefully hid its Jewish identity:
The Vale of Cedars is one of the few works of imaginative fiction that addresses the profound intricacies of Converso life in a way that makes history come alive for the reader. We grasp the innermost feelings of that community, its fears, and its profound faith in the everlasting truth of Judaism.
Aguilar’s other important piece of Jewish fiction is the 1843 novella The Perez Family; a domestic tale of a Sephardic Jewish family in England and its vicissitudes. It is filled with Aguilar’s characteristic concern for religion and the challenges of Jews adapting to the British way of life.
An excellent anthology of Aguilar’s writings that includes the full text of The Perez Family has been published under the editorship of Michael Galchinsky:
Though her life was tragically cut short, Grace Aguilar left us with an enormous body of writing that articulated a uniquely Sephardic Jewish voice that sought engagement with the Victorian world that she lived in. Hers was a perspective firmly committed to the tenets of Torah and to the illustrious heritage of the Iberian Jewish tradition which she so loved and which was so much a part of her being.
Two Sephardic Giants of the Modern Age: Elijah Benamozegh, Sabato Morais, and Vichian Religious Humanism
Born in Italy, these two Sephardic rabbis embody the illustrious traditions of Rabbinic Humanism. As we have learned from the many studies of my esteemed teacher Rabbi Jose Faur, the importance of the Neopolitan thinker Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) on Sephardic Judaism led to a reinvigoration of the old Maimonidean model in the Enlightenment era:
http://www.josefaurstudies.org/_Vico_Religious_Humanism_and_the_Sephardic_Tradition_by_Jose_Faur.pdf
Vico’s classic work New Science was known to Sephardic Jews when it was first published. A copy of the book was sent in November 1731 to Joseph Attias who, as noted by Faur, shared it with his friends. Vico’s thinking was particularly congenial to Sephardim because, unlike the emerging system of German Idealist philosophy rooted in the thought of Descartes (1596-1650), Spinoza (1632-1677), and especially Voltaire (1694-1778), Vico’s concept of human knowledge was grounded in a positive religious conceptuality.
In contrast to the rigid mathematical scientism prevalent in Enlightenment thought, Vico sought a more dialectical approach based on what he called a “Poetic” reading of history. His book is structured along the lines of this poetic reading that is infused with a hermeneutical dialectics, broken down into categories such as logic, metaphysics, economics, politics, and the various other disciplines of study prevalent in European thought.
We should take note that two of the most important intellectual figures of 20th century Europe, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the classicist Arnaldo Momigliano (both Jewish, the latter of Sephardic origin), wrote important studies of Vico: Berlin’s 1960 book Vico and Herder and Momigliano’s much-quoted 1966 essay “Vico’s Scienza Nuova: Roman ‘Bestioni’ and Roman ‘Eroi’” first published in the journal History and Theory and reprinted in his classic collection Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography. Both Berlin and Momigliano saw the important role of Vico’s thought as a counter to the authoritarian and anti-democratic values in European civilization during that bloody century.
In Vico Jews could find a secularism that did not, as would be the case with Enlightenment thought, eliminate the Bible and religious values. It was a Religious rather than purely Secular form of Humanistic thinking.
Both Elijah Benamozegh (1822-1900) and Sabato Morais (1823-1897) continued the tradition of Rabbinic Humanism passed on in a Sephardic tradition that was informed by a thorough reading in the classical Humanist tradition fused with an abiding commitment to the Talmudic tradition. Another great 19th century Sephardic figure, the itinerant Rabbi Israel Moses Hazzan (1807-1863), born in Izmir and lived in Alexandria, Corfu, and Rome before being called to his Maker in Beirut, also made extensive use of Vico’s Religious Humanism in his work.
Unlike Ashkenazi Judaism which became bogged down in internecine battles between Orthodox and Reform factions in the wake of the Haskalah, Sephardic sages like Benamozegh and Morais provided their communities and students with a stable and creative Jewish model that refused factionalism and divisiveness. Dealing with the harsh constrictions of Secular Humanism, Ashkenazim broke off into combative factions divided by their attitude towards secular knowledge.
Benamozegh’s central work on Jewish thought and Modernity is Israel and Humanity:
Although it is not often cited in academic studies on Modern Jewish Thought, the book is a masterpiece that gives us a profound synthesis of contemporary philosophy and traditional Judaism. Following in the footsteps of the great Maimonides, Benamozegh adapts Enlightenment thought as the previous Jewish philosophers incorporated Greco-Arabic philosophy into their treatises.
Sabato Morais moved from his native Italy to England and ended up in Philadelphia where he transmitted this noble heritage to the congregants of Mikveh Israel, a number of whom became leaders of the American Jewish community. Morais, along with Henry Pereira Mendes (1852-1937) of Manhattan’s Shearith Israel, founded the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York which maintained a Sephardic pedagogical orientation until Morais’ death in 1897.
Thanks to the excellent studies of Arthur Kiron we now have an intimate knowledge of Morais’ work and his intellectual-cultural values. Kiron’s dissertation Golden Ages, Promised Lands is listed in the reading list below. My article on Morais and Sephardic Religious Humanism provides further clarification of the matter:
Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy
Back in 1992 the Jewish world marked the quincentennial of the Spanish Expulsion by focusing attention on the illustrious history of the Sephardim. Many books and public events were presented that sought to educate people on our culture, history, and religious heritage.
Perhaps the best and certainly the most comprehensive work to be published that year was the massive two-volume tome from the Magnes Press of Hebrew University edited by the scholar Haim Beinart called simply The Sephardi Legacy:
http://www.magnespress.co.il/website_en/index.asp?category=217&id=450
http://www.magnespress.co.il/website_en/index.asp?category=231&id=451
The book’s 38 chapters cover an extraordinary swath of history and culture with a special emphasis on the era of the Inquisition and Christian Spain. In addition, the studies analyze the place of Sephardic culture in the European Diaspora and its influence on Modern civilization. The expert scholars delve deeply into the literary, scientific, philosophical, artistic, and religious elements in the Sephardic tradition in a way shows us its great richness and diversity.
The vast and winding arc of Sephardic history is on full display in The Sephardi Legacy and explained in rich detail by the scholars who know it best.
Essential Books on Sephardic History and Culture
I have prepared many reading lists over the years, the following one has been designed to focus more specifically on the Western Sephardic tradition rather than on the Arab Sephardic tradition.
Unlike most of my reading lists, this one contains a number of books that are out-of-print. My aim in putting the list together was to provide a sense of what has been published in English in terms of its importance to an understanding of Western Sephardic history.
The list aims to cover the most important aspects of the Sephardic tradition, including general history, literature, Conversos and the Inquisition, the Sephardic Diaspora in Europe and the Americas, and the Ottoman world. A number of the books focus on specific historical figures whose biographies open a window on the larger experience of the Sephardic communities they lived in. In these stories we can better grasp the central role that Sephardim played in Western civilization.
Even though some of the 30 books might be hard to purchase and somewhat expensive, the list aims to cover most of the important aspects of Sephardic culture as English-language scholarship has made it available to us.
1. E.H. Lindo, The Jews of Spain and Portugal (London, 1848, digital reprint)
2. Jesus Pelaez del Rosal, editor, The Jews in Cordoba (X-XII Centuries), (Ediciones El Almendro, 1985)
3. Mair Jose Benardete, Hispanic Culture and Character of the Sephardic Jews (Hispanic Institute in the United States, 1953, reprint, Sepher-Hermon Press, 1982)
4. Jerilynn Dodds, Maria Rosa Menocal, and Abigail Krasner Balbale, The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (Yale University Press, 2008)
5. Abraham Newman, The Jews in Spain: Their Social, Political, and Cultural Life During the Middle Ages (Jewish Publication Society, 1942, Two Volumes)
6. Carlos Fuentes, The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World (Houghton Mifflin, 1992, reprint, Mariner Books, 1997)
7. Samuel Usque, Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel [1553], translated by Martin Cohen (Jewish Publication Society, 1964)
8. T.A. Perry, editor and translator, The Moral Proverbs of Santob de Carrion [1345]: Jewish Wisdom in Christian Spain (Princeton University Press, 1987)
9. Cecil Roth, A History of the Marranos (Jewish Publication Society, 1932, reprint, Sepher-Hermon Press, 1992)
10. Cecil Roth, A Life of Menasseh Ben Israel: Rabbi, Printer, and Diplomat (Jewish Publication Society, 1934)
11. Cecil Roth, Dona Gracia of the House of Nasi (Jewish Publication Society, 1948)
12. Cecil Roth, The Duke of Naxos of the House of Nasi (Jewish Publication Society, 1948)
13. Alfonso Toro, The Carvajal Family: The Jews and the Inquisition in New Spain in the Sixteenth Century, translated and adapted by Frances Hernandez (Texas Western Press, 2002)
http://twp.utep.edu/carvajal.php
14. Jose Faur, In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (State University of New York Press, 1992)
http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-History-Jews-Conversos-Modernity/dp/0791408027/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357613585&sr=1-6&keywords=jose+faur
15. Stephen Gilman, The Spain of Fernando de Rojas: The Intellectual Landscape of La Celestina (Princeton University Press, 1972)
16. Manuel da Costa Fontes, The Art of Subversion in Inquisitorial Spain: Rojas and Delicado (Purdue University Press, 2005)
17. Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Indiana University Press, 1997)
18. Sanford Shepard, Lost Lexicon: Secret Meanings in the Vocabulary of Spanish Literature During the Inquisition (Ediciones Universal, 1982)
19. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso, A Study in Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (Columbia University Press, 1971, reprint, University of Washington Press, 1981)
20. Marc Saperstein, Exile in Amsterdam: Saul Levi Morteira’s Sermons to a Congregation of “New Jews” (Hebrew Union College Press, 2005)
21. Marc Saperstein, Leadership and Conflict: Tensions in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Culture (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization/Oxford University Press, 2014)
22. Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization/Oxford University Press, 1989)
23. Arthur Kiron, Golden Ages, Promised Lands: The Victorian Rabbinic Humanism of Sabato Morais (Doctoral Dissertation, Columbia University, 1999)
24. Abigail Green, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero (Harvard University Press, 2010)
25. Dianne Ashton, Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America (Wayne State University Press, 1997)
26. David de Sola Pool, Portraits Etched in Stone: Early American Jewish Settlers 1682-1831 (Columbia University Press, 1952)
27. David and Tamar de Sola Pool, An Old Faith in a New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel 1654-1954 (Columbia University Press, 1955)
28. Leon Sciaky, Farewell to Salonica: City at the Crossroads (Current Books, 1946, reprint, Paul Dry Books, 2003)
29. Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews 1430-1950 (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)
30. Stephen Schwartz, Sarajevo Rose: A Balkan Jewish Notebook (Al Saqi Books, 2005)
31. Victor Perera, The Cross and the Pear Tree: A Sephardic Journey (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)
La Celestina and Soledades: Two Important Works of Converso Literature
As a long-time student of Rabbi Jose Faur I have keenly understood the critical importance of Converso literature for the study of Jewish history. Rabbi Faur’s seminal book In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity remains one of the most valuable resources for a comprehensive understanding of the Sephardic Jewish past:
http://www.sunypress.edu/p-1250-in-the-shadow-of-history.aspx
http://www.amazon.com/In-Shadow-History-Conversos-Modernity/dp/0791408019
The book contains extended analyses of some extremely important Spanish-language works that may not be familiar to English-language readers and are not commonly discussed in the context of Jewish history.
Two of the most important of these Converso books have been newly translated in handsome and affordable editions by Penguin Classics:
Fernando de Rojas, Celestina, translated by Peter Bush
http://www.us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780143106098,00.html
Luis de Gongora, The Solitudes, translated by Edith Grossman
For the novice reader these are extremely complex literary works that require expert guidance. There is a good deal of contentiousness in Spanish academic circles regarding the meaning and cultural provenance of the texts – especially the Jewish-Converso context in which they were written. Gallons and gallons of ink have been spilled in the fight over what Rojas and Gongora were doing and what their writings mean. It is no idle matter given the centrality of both works in the canon of Golden Age Spanish literature.
It is therefore of great help to Sephardic Jewish readers and those interested in our heritage to have these new English translations. Of particular importance is the fact that the new edition of La Celestina abandons its usual formatting as a play; the work has now been translated as a prose novel in a manner far more befitting its groundbreaking literary style.
It is quite apt that the cover art of the new edition is a reproduction of an etching by the great Picasso – another angry Iberian rebel like Rojas – from his book “La Celestine.” The etching is just as profanely smutty as the text itself:
http://www.picassomio.com/pablo-picasso/59617.html
http://picasso.parkwestgallery.com/picasso-347-series/la-celestine.html
Fernando de Rojas’ La Celestina is a revolutionary work that is a head-on assault against the many hypocrisies and cruelties of Inquisition-era Spain. It is a book that laid the ground for Cervantes and the rise of the modern novel. It is unbearably sad, profoundly moving, and filled with the bitterness and cynicism that could only have been written by a Converso.
The new edition contains an extremely valuable introduction by the great Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo whose centrality in the drama and debate over the Jewish and Arab role in Spanish civilization makes him an ideal guide to the complexities of Rojas’ classic work.
Another very helpful resource for the study of Converso literature is Sanford Shepard’s study Lost Lexicon: Secret Meanings in the Vocabulary of Spanish Literature During the Inquisition. The book provides alphabetized entries explaining the meaning of lexical terms and concepts used by Spanish writers that refer to Jewish issues.
This important book has been kept in print by its publisher Ediciones Universal in Miami along with the late Professor Shepard’s other important study treating Rabbi Shem Tob Ardutiel called Shem Tov: His World and His Words:
http://www.ediciones.com/pag.cgi?isbn=0-89729-309-6&libro=1
http://www.ediciones.com/pag.cgi?isbn=0-89729-189-1&libro=1
Both titles are highly recommended for their keen insights into Sephardic Jewish culture.
Finally, I would like to present my review essay on the excellent book The Art of Subversion in Inquisitorial Spain on Rojas and Francisco Delicado by our friend Manuel Da Costa Fontes. His essential scholarship is an essential addition to the discussion of Converso literature and Sephardic history.
http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/titles/art-subversion-inquisitorial-spain-rojas-and-delicado
http://www.amazon.com/Manuel-da-Costa-Fontes/e/B001K8PX4Y
My essay covers some of the more important issues when dealing with Converso literature. It is a tricky business given the fact that this literature is one enmeshed in secrecy and irony. I will forward the essay in a subsequent posting.
The study of Converso literature is critical both for an understanding of Western Modernity and for Sephardic Jewish history more specifically. These two new English translations for the general reader are to be welcomed as aids to help in the study of our heritage.
And please keep in mind my recent post on Important Book Resources for Sephardic Studies that provides an extensive listing of writings on the subject of our heritage:
https://groups.google.com/group/Davidshasha/browse_thread/thread/309df96282a5e232
A Broken Frame: Sephardi Occlusion and the Repairing of Jewish Dysfunction
The way in which we name and identify a thing determines the conceptual categories that enable us to resolve problems that we face.
Jewish tradition is filtered through its Biblical and rabbinic antecedents. The historical evolution of Jewish life has taken a number of different turns that must be precisely measured. Quite often, these developments have been ignored.
At present, Jewish life is marked by a serious difficulty in dealing with the outside, non-Jewish world and by an equally difficult internal series of intractable conflicts waged within the Jewish community. These conflicts, internal and external, bespeak a particular vision of Judaism that remains wedded to an insular modality that judges the external as problematic.
In the centuries following the production of the Babylonian Talmud an acculturation took place in the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Jewish world, a world that was linked by a dynamic and creative rabbinical culture with its roots in the old Levant, which led to what scholars have called “Arabization.” With the adoption of the Arabic language by the rabbis and Jewish laypeople of the Mediterranean basin and Near East in the wake of the Islamic conquests, tumultuous changes took place that culminated in the crowning achievements of Moses Maimonides (1138-1204); a figure whose own personal itinerary led him from Spain in the West across North Africa to Egypt.
Maimonides is a figure whose historical influence has been distorted in a desperate attempt to misread the immediate developments in the European Jewish world relating to his teachings and value-system.
Today the supremacy of Maimonides is often taken for granted, whereas his actual teaching has been occluded. Maimonides developed a Judaism that was typified by the Religious Humanism which had been articulated by Middle Eastern thinkers in a polyglot form of Arabic culture that infused the various sacred texts and traditions of the region’s monotheistic religions with Greco-Roman science and rationalism.
Religious Humanism is a critically important category that is rarely articulated in its precise sense and is even less understood as a basis for Jewish self-understanding. The idea provides the integration of the parochial values of religion with the universal aspects of human civilization.
A fairly representative example of what this concept signifies can be found in the following two passages: the first from Maimonides himself and the second from Moses Angel:
It was not the object of the Prophets and our Sages in these utterances to close the gate of investigation entirely, and to prevent the mind from comprehending what is within its reach, as is imagined by simple and idle people, whom it suits better to put forth their ignorance and incapacity as wisdom and perfection, and to regard the distinction and wisdom of others as irreligion and imperfection, thus taking darkness for light and light for darkness. The whole object of the Prophets and the Sages was to declare that a limit is set to human reason where it must halt. (Guide of the Perplexed 1:32)
Then, charity, which in the doctrine of abstract faith, means love for universal mankind, shall cease to be what concrete religion made it, love only for self and self’s imitators. Then, man shall acknowledge that true God-worship consists not in observance of any particular customs, but in the humble, zealous cultivation of those qualities by which the Eternal has made himself known to the world. The members of one creed shall not arrogate to themselves peculiar morality and peculiar salvation, denying both to the members of other creeds; but they shall learn that morality and salvation are the cause and effect of all earnest endeavors to rise to the knowledge of revelation. Men shall cease to attempt the substitution of one set of forms for another set of forms; they shall satisfy themselves with being honest and dignified exponents of their own mode of belief, and shall not seek to coerce what heaven has left unfettered – the rights of conscience. They shall strive to remove all obstacles to the spread of God-worship, by showing how superior the happiness, the intellectuality, the virtue of its professors; but they shall stop there, not even for the sake of securing their object preferring their own faith for that of another. This was the original combination under which Christianity was called into existence; this was the power which enabled it to survive the shock which had destroyed all else, and to this must it return before its mission can be perfectly accomplished. What the teachings of Sinai were to the children of Abraham, the teachings of the other mount were to be to the rest of the world; one was not to supersede the other, but to render it accessible. (The Law of Sinai and its Appointed Times, pp. 288-289)
Religious Humanism is the place where our traditional religious tenets meet with the universal aspects of science and rational culture. The teachings of Maimonides represent for Judaism a significant efflorescence of Religious Humanism and the struggle against Maimonides the most important attempt to suppress it.
The reasons for this are complicated and intertwined with the inner workings of Jewish history. At the outset of any discussion of the matter we have what has become known as “The Maimonidean Controversy,” which, though accepted as axiomatic, is also mired in a murkiness that makes the issue less clear to us today than it was when it first emerged.
What was at the root of this controversy, and what transpired in its wake?
Central to the problem are the clashing Jewish visions of the two different rabbinical traditions that emerge fully in the wake of the various bans and counter-bans that rise up in the aftermath of the publication of the Maimonidean oeuvre.
A century preceding Maimonides’ ministry brought the development of an Ashkenazi rabbinical school which was founded by Rashi (1040-1145) and built up by Rabbi Jacob Tam (c. 1100-1171) and the members of his Tosafist group. A number of basic principles can be noted that were central to the teachings of the school: A fierce sense of Talmudic essentialism emerged that sought to replicate behaviors, concepts and beliefs of the ancient Talmudic society; an interpretive methodology known as pilpul would adapt this Talmudism to the socio-cultural needs of the community; a hermetic system would emerge that closed off rabbinical study from outside influences and mark Talmudic interpretation as an exclusive system that eschewed the modalities of non-Jewish concepts or philosophies.
The emergence and acceptance of the new Maimonidean system in the Sephardic world reverberated in the Ashkenazi communities and led to dramatic responses. A cross-cultural penetration of Ashkenazi thinking into Christian Spain in the 13th century led to fierce battles being waged on the front lines of the new Maimonidean culture. While rabbis in the Rhineland and Northern France were by and large immersed in their own religious world, the Jewish communities of Spain were deeply impacted by the new learning of Maimonides and his school; a school whose illustrious progenitors included figures as august as Se’adya Ga’on (882-942), Bahye ibn Paquda (c. 11th century), Samuel ibn Naghrela (993-1056) and Solomon ibn Gabirol (c. 1021-c. 1057).
Within the new learning was a proclivity to seek wisdom from many different sources. Sephardic learning was not insular as its Ashkenazi counterpart, but took what it needed from any source which could contribute to a better understanding of God’s creation.
We must not, as is currently the case, minimize the impact of the Maimonidean Controversy on subsequent Jewish life. The Maimonidean Controversy led to developments in Jewish law and Jewish thought that we continue to struggle with.
The binary template that is struck in the early Middle Ages sets out two variant forms of rabbinical Judaism, one based on an open-ended form of Religious Humanism, the other which lay the seeds for a fundamentalist Judaism.
This binarism lay dormant in Jewish history for many centuries. With Ashkenazi Talmudism remaining relatively static as it was exclusively tied to ritual matters and legal theory in the form of Talmudic novellae and works of Responsa that often acted as intellectual exercises rather than practical case studies and court rulings, Sephardic literary production remained consistently pluralistic and dynamic. Sephardic writers produced works of literature – religious as well as secular, philosophy, science, ethics, Biblical interpretation, history, Hebrew grammar and many other diverse intellectual studies that spoke to the fundamental centrality of Religious Humanism in the culture.
Religious Humanism sought to link the parochial concerns of the Jewish ritual and liturgical tradition, the element that made Judaism unique among other cultures and faiths, with a concern for what could best be described as the old Greek paidea; that form of Humanistic learning that was characteristic of an educated person in the ancient world.
This form of paidea, in Arabic called adab, became a central part of Jewish learning in the early Medieval period, reaching its high water mark in Maimonides’ seminal achievements. The various bans and attacks on Maimonides had to do with his Religious Humanism. In the most famous – and egregious – case of this we see a rabbinical ban on the first book of the Mishneh Torah – Sefer ha-Madda’ – which incorporates Humanistic concepts and learning into a discussion of ethical and intellectual principles in Jewish thought and practice. The anti-Maimonidean reaction to this Religious Humanism was swift and decisive. It would forever stigmatize the “Humanist” side of “Religious Humanism” and try to beat back what its detractors saw as “alien” influences in Jewish life.
The point that is so important to understand here in the subsequent development of Jewish life in the Modern era was that European Judaism struggled with the problems that such rejectionism placed on its ability to develop and adapt to the ways of the world. So long as European Judaism remained locked into ghettoes, the matter of acculturation was not seen as a decisive issue. But once Europe began to change and provide to Jews the ability to integrate into their societies, deep conflicts arose in the Jewish world.
Some very basic trends began to emerge in the late 18th and early 19th century European Jewish world: Stirrings of a movement for Reform clashed with the old Talmudic schools in Eastern Europe. A seminal figure such as Moses Mendelssohn (1727-1786), himself an observant Jew, was initially seen, as was Azariah de Rossi (c. 1513-1578) in an earlier generation, as a possible danger to the pristine hermetic faith. Mendelssohn provided his own take on Religious Humanism by reading some of the new European learning into the Jewish sources.
The confusion created by Mendelssohn’s teaching led to a renewed effort in rabbinical circles to refuse any connection with the outside culture. In the long run, Mendelssohn became an icon to the reformers and rejected by what would become known as Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy, a movement created in reaction to the establishment of Reform Judaism, soon closed ranks against the attempt by rabbis to incorporate Humanist culture into Judaism.
Such was a repetition of the Maimonidean Controversy which led to new fissures and conflicts in Ashkenazi Jewish culture.
The continuation of Maimonidean thinking among the Sephardic elite in the early Modern age found brilliant rabbinical figures such as Saul Morteira (c. 1596-1660), Menassseh ben Israel (1604-1657), Isaac Abendana (c. 1640-1710), David Nieto (1654-1728), and others articulating a Judaism that was comfortable engaging with the new European learning and was consistent with the old Maimonidean school and its adherence to the pluralistic values of Religious Humanism.
In spite of the massive upheavals in this same early Modern Jewish world wrought by the mystical frenzy of Sabbatianism, leading many in the Sephardic world to embrace its anti-rational mystic tendencies, it is clear that there remained many Sephardic sages who continued to study and promote the old curriculum in places like Amsterdam, London, Venice, Salonica, and Fez.
It was in the early Modern age that a demographic imbalance began to develop between the Sephardi and Ashkenazi worlds. Socio-cultural changes were afoot that weakened the old Sephardic world and empowered the Ashkenazim. This is a deeply complex process with many different aspects that we cannot do adequate justice to in such a confined space.
These changes were ushered in with the emergence of Europe as a major global force and the subsequent eclipse of the Ottoman and Arab worlds in the wake of Colonialism and international power politics that crested in the First World War. The process culminated with the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the occupation of the Levant and North Africa by the European powers. Thus would the Jews of Europe rise in the context of Jewish life the world over.
To take but a single example of this phenomenon, we have the figure of Adolphe Cremieux (1796-1880) in France who reaches out to his “less fortunate” brethren in North Africa and draws up a decree that would provide Algerian Jews with special protections afforded by the French government. This example shows us the complicated ways in which Europe’s Jews now took the lead in world Jewish affairs. And with this change came the emergence of new and often perplexing developments in Judaism and Jewish life.
At the very dawn of the 20th century new developments were taking place in the Jewish world that would have a decisive impact on future events.
A massive wave of immigration brought Eastern European Jews to the United States where they would overwhelm the previous immigrants, many of whom were Sephardim. A gradual transition soon took place in American Jewry from a cosmopolitan Atlantic Judaism stretching from London to Livorno to Gibraltar to Jamaica to Charleston, Newport, Manhattan and Philadelphia, led by seminal figures such as Isaac Leeser (1806-1868), Sabato Morais (1823-1897) and Henry Pereira-Mendes (1852-1937), to a more complex amalgamation of the diffuse and often warring Ashkenazi Jewish groups that brought to America the conflicts that had been waged in the old country.
It should be remembered that a crucial American figure like Isaac Leeser, himself an Ashkenazi, acculturated to the Sephardi model in order to work as a rabbi in this country. Like the Jewish society Rabbi Saul Morteira, an Ashkenazi by birth as well, faced in 17th century Amsterdam, so too did the 19th century Jewish Americans adopt the old Sephardic model.
In America, the European immigrant Reformers and the Orthodox were joined by those who sought to remove themselves from the Jewish fold and start a new life in a new world. Jewish unity was not the watchword of the Eastern European immigrants. Replicating the models of the old world, the immigrants broke off into separate factions that reproduced the acrimony of the Shtetl world and its tense relationship to the Modern age.
Studying the biography of Sabato Morais in this light we can quite clearly see the difficulty in the conferral of names, identities, categories and concepts on American Jewry. Morais was a major presence in American Jewish life in the second half of the 19th century. But today his name is barely known, and when he is discussed attempts are often made to identify him in these denominational terms. Vain efforts have been made by both Orthodox and Conservative writers to identify Morais as one of their own.
And yet Morais himself, as was consistently the case among the Sephardic rabbis, refused the Eastern European nomenclature. Preferring instead to mark Judaism as a single construct that was inclusive of many ideas and values, a true Religious Humanism, Morais and Pereira-Mendes founded their Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City as a repository of traditional Sephardic values that were grounded in the ancient paidea. After Morais’ death, his seminary would sadly fall victim to the denominational maladies of the Ashkenazi world.
As the 20th century dawned, fewer and fewer Sephardic rabbis and leaders could count themselves as part of the American Jewish elite. Indeed, Morais’ own Philadelphia community was populated by many individuals of Ashkenazi origin who supplanted the old Sephardic leadership.
Nevertheless, those Ashkenazi students, peers and colleagues of Morais, people like Marcus Jastrow (1829-1903), Cyrus Adler (1863-1940), Isaac Husik (1876-1939) and many others who would become great Jewish scholars and teachers, continued to set American Jewish scholarship on a resolutely Sephardic course. At the Dropsie College, founded by the Philadelphia Sephardi Moses Aaron Dropsie (1821-1905), we could see this Sephardi-centrism well into the 1950s. In a volume of his collected addresses and essays published in 1953 entitled Landmarks and Goals, Dropsie president Abraham Neuman (1890-1970) concentrated on the Spanish Jewish experience as determinative in Jewish history. Such a philo-Sephardi attitude would lamentably become rarer as the years passed.
Indeed, the very elementary Jewish categories, the way in which we are currently able to process Judaism, are exclusively Ashkenazi.
Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Hasidic and the rest are all products of the schisms inherent to the Ashkenazi Jewish experience and are most definitely alien to the Sephardic tradition.
Going back to the Maimonidean tradition, we can see that the Ashkenazi schismatic groups all focus on disparate elements of Sephardic Religious Humanism that are picked apart and separated in a way that marks each group as distinctive.
What this categorization has done is to balkanize Judaism and, rather than strengthening
Jewish life today, has served to tear it apart.
It is thus critical for us to mark Jewish trends and developments in precise terms so that we can better appreciate the problems that we now face.
The adoption of the term “Orthodoxy” and the attempt to make use of it in a “Modern” context is just one of many hazards that we now face. As we have seen in religious movements all over the world, the trend toward exclusion and fundamentalism is quite pronounced and gaining strength.
The Orthodox trend in Judaism was a reaction to 19th century Jewish Reform and Enlightenment. A prior internal Eastern European battle waged between Orthodox Misnagdim and the Hasidim was dropped in order to better combat the new ideas and groups. Today, a resurgent Hasidic messianism that looked like it might once again separate Orthodox and Hasidic groups is being suppressed in an Israeli context where elements of the Religious Orthodox community seem to have made common cause with Lubavitch messianists in order to support an extremist form of Zionist identification.
For a long time Sephardic Judaism remained outside the frame of this internecine Ashkenazi battle. It continued well into the 20th century to articulate its own traditional Religious Humanism in spite of the pressures being inflicted by demography and socio-cultural exclusion. From the headmaster of the Jews’ Free School in London Moses Angel (1819-1898), a brilliant educator and author of the Religious Humanist classic The Law of Sinai and its Appointed Times (1858) from which we quoted earlier, to the Italians Sabato Morais and Elijah Benamozegh (1822-1900), to the last Hakham Bashi of the Ottoman Empire Haim Nahum Effendi (1872-1960), to the Alexandrian Chief Rabbi Bekhor Eliyyahu Hazzan (c. 1845-1908), to Palestinian Chief Rabbi Ben-Zion Uzziel (1880-1953) and on to more contemporary figures like Hayyim David Halevi (1924-1998), Yitzhak Dayyan (1878-1964), Matloub Abadi (1889-1970), and the contemporary academic Jose Faur, we find the leading lights of the most recent epoch of Sephardic Rabbinical Humanism, now almost completely lost to us.
Given the occlusion of the Sephardim and their Religious Humanism within the majority Ashkenazi culture, these names are now more or less unknown – not just to Ashkenazi Jews, but to Sephardim themselves. A critical part of the Sephardi acculturation to the new Jewish world has been a process of de-Sephardification and the adoption of the new insular models and frames of reference.
In my own Brooklyn Sephardic community we can clearly see – after some 50 years of profound cultural erosion – the complete absence of the old ways and the adoption of the new ways.
We now have Modern Orthodox Ashkenazi rabbis in the community who have sadly expressed a profound antipathy to the Sephardic tradition, while at the same time we have seen an explosion of Lithuanian-style Yeshivas that have paradoxically claimed the mantle of the old Sephardi traditions.
It is equally clear in Israel, given the emergence of the SHAS party and a full-fledged Haredization of important sectors of the community there, that the post-Sabbatian rejection of Religious Humanism in the name of a more pronounced mystical bend has done a great deal of damage to the organic values of Sephardic Religious Humanism whose roots, as we have seen, extend back many centuries.
Given that the Sephardic option has been made unavailable even in the Sephardic communities, the Ashkenazi schisms that affect the wider Jewish world have continued apace. Attempts to integrate non-Jewish learning into an Orthodox context have been met with hostility and outright rejection by an ever-expanding Ultra-Orthodox world with massive global tentacles.
Pronouncements by less extreme Orthodox rabbis are met with derision by what has become known as “Da’as Torah” that stems from a robust and all-powerful rabbinical leadership connecting Borough Park, Monsey, Bnei Brak, Gateshead and various other places around the world. It now seems clear that this rabbinic power base has consumed Orthodoxy.
But in the Sephardic terms that I have examined in this essay, it is the very nomenclature that is the problem here. Any attempt at moderating Orthodoxy is profoundly antithetical to the original construct and vision of the movement.
Orthodoxy itself, as its Greek roots indicate, is primed to express a single, unwavering truth that is to be determined by its rabbinical leadership. All previous attempts at having Orthodox leadership take into account the non-Jewish world have been met by rejection and failure.
There is no reason to think that as Orthodoxy continues to garner more power and influence in the Jewish world – that part of the Jewish world that continues to use the Talmudic law as its foundation – that it will compromise its rigid stance and its almost-complete rejection of the outside world. Orthodoxy builds its rejection into the very linguistic foundation of the nomenclature. As its name indicates, what we are dealing with is a form of Jewish monolingualism that eerily reminds us of an exclusionary Hellenism that did not tolerate aliens.
To cite a relevant example of the inherent complexities of this problem, we can point to the intricacies of the thinking of the acknowledged leader of Modern Orthodoxy, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993), and the continued difficulty he had with the matter of defining the movement in pluralistic terms.
In his seminal 1965 essay “Confrontation,” Rabbi Soloveitchik made it quite clear that the outside world – here represented by Christianity – is off-limits in terms of religious discussion and dialogue. Such a stance is consistent with Orthodox belief that the outside world has nothing to offer us in terms of Jewish self-understanding and in asserting ourselves as a community in the world.
Indeed, since the death of Rabbi Soloveitchik there has been an ongoing tug-of-war between moderate Orthodox forces and the more extreme elements to claim his legacy as their own. His very biography has been combed for definitive proof of his ideological predilections and leanings. But in the end, it is all of little matter as the struggle exemplifies the larger battle for the soul of Orthodoxy; a battle which will inevitably be won by the extremists. I say inevitably because it is in Ultra-Orthodoxy that we have the most perfect manifestation of Orthodox thinking and its proclivity for exclusion and intolerance. Again, exclusion and intolerance is built into its very nomenclature.
So it is now more than worthwhile for those who continue to do battle with Ultra-Orthodox forces, as well as the schisms of the reformers and assimilationists, to take seriously the nomenclature of Sephardic Religious Humanism and the manner in which it has been passed over in contemporary Jewish life.
Eschewing the many problems inherent in the Ashkenazi construction of Judaism as different denominations, it is time that we paid respect to the Sephardi tradition of pluralism, tolerance and inclusion. The existence of different denominations is not necessarily a mark of strength and good health, but can just as equally indicate a profoundly troubling dysfunctionalism.
Attempts to appropriate the Sephardi model without naming it will not be an effective tool in transforming Judaism and in addressing the current situation we face. Names have meaning and behind those names are some very complex and difficult histories that we must face if we are to move forward.
In truth, the Maimonidean Controversy continues to be fought and the anathemas against foreign ideas and learning remain a central part of the tension in contemporary Jewish life. Exclusionary visions of Jewish identity have now extended to the state of Israel itself where the rejection of the model of Levantine Religious Humanism, what I have called “The Levantine Option,” has made of Israel a Middle Eastern ghetto which has turned the old Shtetl mentality into a national matter.
A siege mentality now pervades many parts of the Jewish world. In religious, socio-cultural and political terms Jews continue to suffer from an inability to make peace internally and with the outside world. Where you stand on these issues depend on which Jewish group you are affiliated to.
The old model of Sephardic Religious Humanism brings together a seriously committed yet moderate form of Halakhic observance with a liberal attitude towards an outside world which is definitely not deemed treyf and which will not lead to the rejection of Talmudic standards.
Maimonides stood firm in his belief that Judaism must not be an insular culture and for this was anathematized by those rabbis who stand as the model for today’s Ultra-Orthodox. He counseled Jews to live in the world as equal and proud members of the human family. It was this Jewish pride that resonated in the Sephardic world throughout the centuries and which has now been lost to the Jewish community.
Such a broken frame needs both to be repaired and rearticulated.
Repaired means that we need to identify the forces that rejected such Religious Humanism and have suppressed it as a force within Judaism. We cannot bring the Jewish body to proper health unless we can correctly identify the illness from which it suffers. Attempts to sidestep this part of the process will inevitably lead us to failure because of the continued confusion over the conceptual framework and the proper understanding of the categories in which we are functioning.
But the identification of the problem is only one half of the process.
We must restore the vision of Sephardic Religious Humanism and with it the standing of the Sephardim in the larger Jewish world. The grave historical injustices that have been inflicted on the Jews of the Mediterranean and the Middle East in recent times are deeply complex, yet brutally obvious to all who calmly investigate the matter. The Ashkenazi Jewish ethnocentrism that is a critical part of the current problematic must be identified and expunged from our communities. Such an exclusionary racism is not limited to Ashkenazi Jews per se, as many Jews of Sephardic origin have themselves taken on such a viewpoint which has generated a self-loathing that is just as dangerous a problem as that of Ashkenazi prejudice.
Once we look to restore the model of Sephardic Religious Humanism to the Jewish community, we will see the formation of exciting new possibilities for the promulgation of a healthy and robust Jewish identity. Rather than breaking Jews off into separate groups, the Sephardic model of Religious Humanism would enable Jews of all ethnic origins to unite under the rubric of an inclusive and tolerant culture that seeks entente and rapprochement with the world at large and the primacy of Jewish shalom bayit as its ultimate aim.
The Idiot Sephardim: A Confrontation between a Sephardic Student and a Yeshiva University Professor
I received this quite disturbing letter through an intermediary who thought I could provide a more effective response than he would be able to. It was written by a young man in the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community who currently attends Yeshiva University. The letter is reproduced in bold characters with my comments following:
Earlier this semester in a course at YU entitled "twentieth century hebrew literature" the professor felt the need to tell the class that the "sephardim made no contributions to modern hebrew literature because they were all poor and uneducated" (the period in question is the twentieth century up until 1967)
I see here four claims:
1 all sephardim were uneducated
2 all sephardim were poor
3 sephardim made no contribution to modern hebrew lit
4 because they were poor and uneducated
What would you answer to an idiot like this guy?
Some Resources to Learn More about Modern Sephardic Hebrew Literature
Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
Ammiel Alcalay, editor, Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (City Lights, 1996)
Ilan Stavans, editor, The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature (Schocken, 2005)
Gil Hochberg, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton University Press, 2007)
Yitzhak Shami, Hebron Stories (Labyrinthos, 2000)
A.B. Yehoshua, Mr. Mani (Doubleday, 1992)
Ronit Matalon, The One Facing Us (Henry Holt, 1998)
Sami Michael, Refuge (Jewish Publication Society, 1988)
Yehuda Burla, In Darkness Striving (Institute for Hebrew Translation, 1968)
Deborah Starr and Sasson Somekh, editors, Mongrels or Marvels: The Levantine Writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (Stanford University Press, 2011)