Authors: George K. Zucker
ISBN-13: 9780786420216, ISBN-10: 0786420219
Format: Paperback
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers
Date Published: December 2004
Edition: New Edition
George K. Zucker is Professor Emeritus of Spanish at the University of Northern Iowa, having retired in 2001. He lives in Tampa, Florida.
The Sephardim, a fast-disappearing group of Jews whose ancestors were exiled from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century, have fought to retain their identity while necessarily assimilating to the surrounding society. This culture was changed by settlement and residence in non-Spanish areas for over four centuries, a Diaspora in the late nineteenth century, and the Nazi Holocaust. Sephardic settlements in Latin America, the United States, Israel, and elsewhere were the result. Because Judaism is as much a culture as a religion, any move toward assimilation into a non-Jewish culture has historically been seen as a threat to Jewish identity: this is an ongoing crisis in Sephardic life.
These essays, representing some of the most innovative work being done in Sephardic studies, are divided into sections exploring history, sociology, anthropology, language, literature and the performing arts. Topics include the possibility that the Sephardim are Judaized Arabs, Berbers and Iberians; the role of Spanish exiles in the Ottoman Empire; Sephardic remnants in Greece; Sephardic philosophy; the literature of New Christians (the community that arose out of forcibly converted Jews) whose works reveal Jewish roots; the Judeo-Spanish press in Salonika; and the influences of Sephardism on contemporary Argentine literature. An introduction to Sephardism begins the work and a conclusion discusses the Sephardic Education Center, which hopes to assure the culture's future.
Preface | 1 | |
1 | Sephardic scholarship : a personal journey | 11 |
2 | Are the Sephardim Jews or Judaized Arabs, Berbers, and Iberians? | 29 |
3 | Iberian exiles in the sixteenth-century Ottoman empire | 43 |
4 | A surreptitious tolerance : Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Southern Balearic Islands | 55 |
5 | Assimilation and identity in Spain, Portugal, and their colonies | 65 |
6 | Sephardic remnants in Ioannina | 75 |
7 | The power of speech among the Sephardim | 81 |
8 | What language did the Jews speak in pre-expulsion Spain? | 99 |
9 | Don Isaac Abravanel on exile and redemption | 113 |
10 | Judaic motifs and religious inclinations in Romance al divin martir, Juda Creyente by Antonio Enriquez Gomez (1600-1663) | 125 |
11 | Sebastian de Horozco (1510-1580), the ambivalent anti-Semitic converso | 141 |
12 | The Judeo-Spanish press in Salonika : from glory to destruction | 151 |
13 | The allure of Sepharad | 157 |
14 | Is Sephardic dance too sexy? | 167 |
15 | Sephardic vocal music and the tape recorder : new life or the end of an oral tradition? | 179 |
16 | The mediaization of Judeo-Spanish song | 189 |
17 | The Sephardic educational center : crisis of identity and assimilation in modern American Judaism | 207 |