Sephardic Studies

Sephardic Jews and Jews from Arab lands are the majority Jewish demographic in Israel today.  While some came to Israel with different motivations, the majority of Sephardim were motivated to make 'aliyah through traditional understandings. By adding their important contributions as a component to pedagogy, educators can enhance the diversity of voices in their instruction on the polyphonic texture of Israeli history and society.

Benedetto Ligorio Connecting Cultures. Cross-cultural Trade Networks of Ragusan Sephardim in the 16th and 17th Centuries

Unire le culture. Le reti di commercio interculturale dei sefarditi di Ragusa nel XVI e nel XVII secolo.

Łączenie kultur. Międzykulturowe sieci handlowe Sefardyjczyków z Raguzy w XVI i XVII wieku strona

Following the institution of the Tanzimat in 1839, the Ottoman Mashriq
evolved into a contact zone where different understandings, interpretations, and discourses emerged regarding these reforms. The European powers saw themselves as defenders of the non-Muslim Ottoman communities, and understood the reforms as part of a transformation from a despotic Islamic polity to a progressive European-Christian one. On the other hand, the discourse advanced by the Sublime Porte framed the reforms as an integral part of the attempt to safeguard the unification of the empire as a political unit. These varying discourses reflected the various understandings within the local communities of their own status and roles within the developing political framework. In this article, I examine this contact zone of Tanzimat discourses through discussion of the writings of one of the well-known sages of the Baghdadi Jewish community, R. Yosef Hayyim (1834-1909). I focus on
the various ways in which he depicted the contested discourses of modernity, while also relating to other Baghdadi Jewish perspectives on this issue. I argue that while Hayyim rejected the European emancipatory model—identifying it as a false approach to Jewish redemption—he did adopt, though hesitantly, the Ottoman model of the Tanzimat, which he identified as an initial stage for redemption.

This is the expanded and updated second edition of the famous Guide to Jewish Bulgaria first published in 2011 and now a collector's item.

A Guide to Jewish Bulgaria was designed as a "journey through both time and territory." It contains introductory chapters on early Jewish history in the Balkans, life in the Ottoman Empire (1393-1878), Jewish going-ons in independent Bulgaria (1878-1944), Jewish decline under Communism (1944-1989), and Jewish life post-1989. A special section deals with the famous rescue of the Bulgarian Jews from the Holocaust "paid off" by Jews in Aegean Thrace, Vardar Macedonia and Pirot who were deported to Nazi-occupied Poland.

Richly illustrated with superb photography, this book focuses on what remains of the Jewish presence in Bulgaria now: synagogues, old cemeteries, remnants of Jewish neighbourhoods in Sofia, Plovdiv, Vidin, Ruse, Varna, Burgas, Yambol, Samokov, Dupnitsa, Kyustendil, Gotse Delchev and elsewhere.

This new edition contains a chapter about Jewish heritage in Bulgaria's neighbouring states: Turkey, Greece, North Macedonia, Serbia and Romania.

A must for anyone interested in Jewish heritage in Eastern Europe in general and Bulgaria in particular.

Inspired by the discovery of a letter written by a Spanish woman under the pseudonym of Marcelina de Quinto to Isaac Molho, editor of the Tesoro de los judíos sefardíes (Treasure of the Sephardic Jews), this article focuses on the persistence of memory of Jewish ancestry within a prominent family of Spanish intellectuals in the 20th century-the Jardiels-and its reenactment in two different generational contexts. While the literary oeuvre of Enrique Jardiel Poncela, one of the most important comic writers of twentieth-century Spain and a staunch supporter of Franco, is tainted by a resolute antisemitic bent, his daughter Evangelina, a psychologist and author of fictional books and journalistic essays, converted to Judaism and strongly identified with the struggles of the State of Israel. Through the analysis of the biographical and intellectual trajectories of these two individuals, the article casts light upon the stereotypes, contradictions and ambivalent attitudes of Spanish intellectuals regarding Jews and Judaism.

Drawing on two distinct bodies of Sephardi food writing-Anglophone cookbooks and the long-running recipe column in the Judeo-Spanish periodical Aki Yerushalayim-this paper explores the role of cuisine as a primary affiliative structure in contemporary Sephardi culture. I argue that these two divergent literary traditions, in their general ignorance of one another, constitute a framework for an archive of Sephardi cooking. In spite of these texts' common conception of cooking as a female practice of memory and identification as well as their shared interest in the intersection of the culinary and the linguistic, they are at odds with one another as to whether Sephardi culture exists only in the past, or may also be found in the present. Side-by-side consideration of both corpuses requires an understanding of Sephardi culture attentive to persistent continuities in spite of major historical ruptures.