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Large-scale expulsions of the Jews in the Middle Ages and the early modern period may be seen as a continuum shaped by exile, migration and new settlement. 1 In this paper I do not discuss the much-debated issues related to the " why " and the " how " of expulsion and exile. Rather, I examine the various ways contemporary actors and modern historians have perceived and conceptualized the exile that followed the 1492 expulsion from Spain. Salonika's Sephardic community was largely formed by Jews and conver-sos, expelled from Spain and Portugal, who had arrived at the Ottoman city through consecutive waves of migration in the late 15th and during the 16th centuries. 2 In what follows I revisit both the Jewish chronicles of expulsion and the historiography of the Jews of Salonika. I attempt to decipher the ways in which the concept of exile interweaves with the refugees' and historians' understanding of exile. In the first part of the paper I clarify the medieval concepts related to migration and exile and discuss the assumptions that underpin the master narratives of modern historiography. In the second part, I focus on the 16th-century Jewish accounts of the expulsion and comment on some loci of the " foundational histories " of the Jews of Salonika.
Jewish History
Fashioning the “Mother of Israel”: The Ottoman Jewish Historical Narrative and the Image of Jewish Salonica2014 •
Using sources in Judeo-Spanish, French, German, and Hebrew, this article explores the complex processes through which Ottoman Jewish intellectuals fashioned their own vision of Ottoman Jewish history, positioned Salonica at the center of that narrative, and in the process popularized an image of the city as the “mother of Israel.” Ottoman Jewish history writers internalized Enlightenment discourses about “regeneration,” “civilization,” and “modernity” that also shaped the nineteenth-century historiography of Greek Christian, Ottoman Muslim, French Jewish, and German Jewish intellectuals. This article focuses on how Ottoman Jewish intellectuals translated French Jewish and German Jewish historical narratives about Ottoman Jewry into Judeo-Spanish, adapted and rewrote them, and ultimately overturned them. Discovering that German Jewish historians portrayed Ottoman Jews as being in decline while French Jewish writers adopted a more sympathetic perspective, Ottoman Jewish intellectuals recast their own former narrative of tragedy as an exceptional story of Jewish redemption and romance in the Ottoman realm. In reclaiming Ottoman Jewish history they sought to strengthen their position within the Ottoman Empire and to elevate their status in the eyes of world Jewry. The Salonican Jewish intellectuals who participated in this effort presented an image of their city and its storied Jewish past as an idealized symbol of the broader Ottoman Jewish experience and founded a Salonican Jewish historiography that still shapes our understanding of the city’s history today.
Journal of Early Modern History
"Sephardic Migration and Cultural Transfer: The Ottoman and Spanish Expansion through a Cinquecento Jewish Lens," Journal of Early Modern History 21 (2017): 516-422017 •
This study explores the reading and writing practices of Joseph Ha-Kohen, a sixteenth-century Jewish chronicler from Genoa, against the background of his Italian and Spanish sources: in what ways and why did he adapt, change or subvert their narratives? It focuses on two of Ha-Kohen's major works: his Franco-Turkish Chronicle, and his Hebrew adaptation of López de Gómara's account of the Spanish conquests in the Americas. Based on these writings, the essay asks how the author’s Sephardic identity and migration experience inform his ideas about the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. Notably, the Jewish chronicler applauds the Ottomans’ conversion of churches into mosques, while he condemns the forced Christianization of the Amerindians. At the same time, Ha-Kohen shares cultural attitudes with Gómara and voices qualified support for a Spanish civilizing mission. These ambiguities in Ha-Kohen’s writings—oscillating between praise and repudiation of imperial ideology—prove to be emblematic of post-expulsion Sephardic Jewry.
As characteristic of Jewish languages in general, Judezmo (Ladino/Judeo-Spanish), the traditional language of the Sephardim of the former Ottoman Empire, was perceived by its speakers and their neighbors as the Jewish language.
ÉTUDES BALKANIQUES
BEYOND THE "VALLEY OF TEARS": REASSESSING THE NARRATIVE OF DECLINE IN SALONICAN JEWISH HISTORIOGRAPHY2018 •
Scholars have relied upon diverse methodologies and sources to produce a new corpus of studies about Salonica’s Jews that explores the impact of the end of the Ottoman Empire and the consolidation of the Greek nation-state. Much of the newer scholarship, however, reinforces the perception that Salonica’s Jews experienced a period of “decline” after the city’s incorporation into the Greek state (1912 – 1913) that culminated in their deportation to Auschwitz (1943). This study investigates why such a lachrymose and teleological interpretation of Salonican Jewish history persists today. By reference to new sources and a different interpretive lens, this article also challenges conventional wisdom concerning key turning points in the narrative of the city’s Jews: a major fire (1917), a compulsory Sunday closing law (1924), and the first major act of anti-Jewish violence (1931). The article thus offers a new approach to assessing the encounters between the multiplicities of Jews in Salonica and the Greek state.
Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture
David Sclar, “History for Religious Purposes: The Writing, Publication, and Renewal of Tsemah David,” Zutot: Perspectives on Jewish Culture 12:1 (April 2015): 16–30.2015 •
This paper examines the pervasive religiosity of Tzemah David and of its subsequent reprinting. David Gans’s work of history was published at least ten times between the end of the sixteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century, indicating its popularity and continued relevance among Eastern European Jews. The book took on varied and unexpected meaning, as printers amended the text to renew it for successive generations. Although some historians have argued that early modern Jews did not have an imminent interest in historical events, the sustained demand for Tzemah David suggests that Ashkenazic Jewry valued history as it related, in the least, to Jewish religious identity. That is, piety involved more than memory, and historiography, broadly speaking, has not only been utilized in the realm of the secular. As I will show, Tzemah David provided laymen entry into personal religiosity otherwise reserved for scholars of rabbinic texts.
Mediterranean Historical Review
Rabbis on refugees: theological responses to the treatment of converso migrants in sixteenth- century Candia2019 •
This case study considers rabbinic texts that address the migration of converso refugees to Venetian Crete in the mid-sixteenth century. New papal policies and the onset of the Roman Inquisition on mainland Italy prompted a refugee crisis in Candia that led to tensions between the migrants and local Candiote Jews. Coming primarily from Sephardic origins, these migrants were in search of refuge as well as the opportunity to reclaim their Jewish identities after forced conversion; here we con- sider three letters contained in Takkanot Kandiyah from rabbinic authorities on how to diffuse the situation and approach the converso issue within a halakhic framework.
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Languages in Jewish Communities Past and Present
Judezmo_in Hary and Benor Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present2018 •
Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary e-Journal
Reflections on Jewish Women in Eulogies and Sermons of Ottoman Sages in the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries2018 •
Medieval Encounters
The Mass Conversion of 1495 in South Italy and its Precedents: a Comparative Approach2019 •
HISPANIA JUDAICA BULLETIN, Editors: Ram Ben-Shalom and Raquel Ibáñez-Sperber, Volume 12
The Balkans as a Passage between the West and the East: An Itinerary of the Portuguese Conversos to and from the Ottoman Empire (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries)Amsterdam: s.n.
Links in a Chain: Early Modern Yiddish Historiography in the Northern Netherlands (1743-1812)2012 •
Conversion and its Intellectual Consequences
Nebuchadnezzar's Jewish Legions: Sephardic Legends' Journey from Biblical Polemic to Humanist HistoryBA Thesys, Zagreb: University of Zagreb, 1999
Sephardic Diaspora in the Mediterranean in the 16th CenturyComitatus 36 (2005). 114-141.
Negotiating Renaissance Harmony: The First Spanish Translation of Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’AmoreAvotaynu, The Internation Review of Jewish Genealogy, 31, 1 (Spring 2019), pp. 7-12
Surnames of "Portuguese" Jews as a Tool for Analyzing Basic Aspects of Their History2019 •
Insights from the Sephardic Tradition:
A SEPHARDIC COMPONENT TO ZIONISM IN ISRAEL EDUCATION2019 •
Judeo-Spanish throughout the Sephardic Diaspora
Hary and Benor Languages in Jewish Communities.pdf2018 •