BiblioVault - Books about Sephardim

After Jews And Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture
Ammiel Alcalay
University of Minnesota Press, 1992
Library of Congress DS113.A398 1993 | Dewey Decimal 305.8924

"Painstakingly, brick by brick, he has reconstructed a shared literary and historical tradition that has linked Arab and Oriental Jewish thought for the better part of a millennium." --Victor Perera

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Drawing to an Inside Straight: The Legacy of an Absent Father
Jodi Varon
University of Missouri Press, 2006
Library of Congress F785.J5V37 2006 | Dewey Decimal 978.883004924

Life can sometimes hinge on the turn of a card—not only the gambler’s life but also the lives of those close to him. For Jodi Varon, one fateful turn changed her father’s life—propelling her into a search far from home that will lead readers to a new contemplation of family ties and lost cultural legacies.

Benjamin Varon never rode a horse and preferred his beef hanging in a cooler, but he still thought of himself as a cattleman—that is, until he disappeared after losing his meat-supply business in a high-stakes poker game. In recalling how a hardscrabble New Yorker sought his fortune in Colorado’s cattle country, Varon also relates a daughter’s quest to understand and forgive.

Drawing to an Inside Straight is a bittersweet story of growing up in Denver during the 1960s. As Varon recalls life at home with parents Benjamin and Irene—Jews of decidedly different backgrounds, he a Ladino-speaking Sephardi from New York, she a Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi from Denver’s close-knit Jewish community—she tells of a childhood nourished by pireshkes and cronson, hamantashen and challah. These stories and other culinary delights are contrasted with her father’s childhood of stolen fruit and his longing for the aromas of the Mediterranean spice markets of his ancestors.

Against the backdrop of America in the Vietnam era, and amid tales of Joseph McCarthy’s tyranny, Burma-Shave divination, domestic nerve-gas stockpiling, suburban wife-swapping, murder, and suicide, Varon offers an intriguing look at Sephardic history and culture. Behind her own story looms that of Benjamin, who transformed himself from an immigrant’s son sneaking into Yankee Stadium, to a tough GI, to a quixotic dreamer willing to stake his hard-won business in a game of chance.

Rather than cast off his European past, Benjamin embraced it, insisted upon it, tried to celebrate what was different. All the while, he was dogged by his favorite Ladino adage—“We left on a horse. We came back on a donkey”—which served to remind him of the caprices of fortune that would follow him to that fateful poker game. Varon’s story of her own journey to Spain, in search of her father’s lost heritage and his adoration of the Sephardim’s Golden Age, helps seal her understanding as it heals wounds left open too long.

Varon’s account is an insightful view of what it means to be American without losing one’s past to the proverbial melting pot, with its insider’s look at Sephardic culture and depictions of Denver’s ethnic communities that challenge stereotypes of the Anglo-American West. Drawing to an Inside Straight is a book that will make an immediate connection with readers—even those whose fathers weren’t compulsive gamblers—who struggle with mixed emotions about childhood or are in search of their own roots.

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Extraterritorial Dreams: European Citizenship, Sephardi Jews, and the Ottoman Twentieth Century
Sarah Abrevaya Stein
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Library of Congress DS135.T8S75 2016 | Dewey Decimal 940.3089924056

We tend to think of citizenship as something that is either offered or denied by a state. Modern history teaches otherwise. Reimagining citizenship as a legal spectrum along which individuals can travel, Extraterritorial Dreams explores the history of Ottoman Jews who sought, acquired, were denied or stripped of citizenship in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—as the Ottoman Empire retracted and new states were born—in order to ask larger questions about the nature of citizenship itself.

Sarah Abrevaya Stein traces the experiences of Mediterranean Jewish women, men, and families who lived through a tumultuous series of wars, border changes, genocides, and mass migrations, all in the shadow of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the ascendance of the modern passport regime. Moving across vast stretches of Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas, she tells the intimate stories of people struggling to find a legal place in a world ever more divided by political boundaries and competing nationalist sentiments. From a poor youth who reached France as a stowaway only to be hunted by the Parisian police as a spy to a wealthy Baghdadi-born man in Shanghai who willed his fortune to his Eurasian Buddhist wife, Stein tells stories that illuminate the intertwined nature of minority histories and global politics through the turbulence of the modern era.

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Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance among Syrian Jews
Kay Kaufman Shelemay
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Library of Congress ML3776.S53 1998 | Dewey Decimal 782.421629240569

When Jews left Aleppo, Syria, in the early twentieth century and established communities abroad, they carried with them a repertory of songs (pizmonim) with sacred Hebrew texts set to melodies borrowed from the popular Middle Eastern Arab musical tradition. Let Jasmine Rain Down tells the story of the pizmonim as they have continued to be composed, performed, and transformed through the present day; it is thus an innovative ethnography of an important Judeo-Arabic musical tradition and a probing contribution to studies of the link between collective memory and popular culture.

Shelemay views the intersection of music, individual remembrances, and collective memory through the pizmonim. Reconstructing a century of pizmon history in America based on research in New York, Mexico, and Israel, she explains how verbal and musical memories are embedded in individual songs and how these songs perform both what has been remembered and what otherwise would have been forgotten. In confronting issues of identity and meaning in a postmodern world, Shelemay moves ethnomusicology into the domain of memory studies.

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Memory, Oblivion, and Jewish Culture in Latin America
Edited by Marjorie Agosín
University of Texas Press, 2005
Library of Congress F1419.J4M46 2005 | Dewey Decimal 980.004924

Latin America has been a refuge for Jews fleeing persecution from 1492, when Sepharad Jews were expelled from Spain, until well into the twentieth century, when European Jews sought sanctuary there from the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. Vibrant Jewish communities have deep roots in countries such as Argentina, Mexico, Guatemala, and Chile—though members of these communities have at times experienced the pain of being “the other,” ostracized by Christian society and even tortured by military governments. While commonalities of religion and culture link these communities across time and national boundaries, the Jewish experience in Latin America is irreducible to a single perspective. Only a multitude of voices can express it. This anthology gathers fifteen essays by historians, creative writers, artists, literary scholars, anthropologists, and social scientists who collectively tell the story of Jewish life in Latin America. Some of the pieces are personal tales of exile and survival; some explore Jewish humor and its role in amalgamating histories of past and present; and others look at serious episodes of political persecution and military dictatorship. As a whole, these challenging essays ask what Jewish identity is in Latin America and how it changes throughout history. They leave us to ponder the tantalizing question: Does being Jewish in the Americas speak to a transitory history or a more permanent one?

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The Miriam Tradition: Teaching Embodied Torah
Cia Sautter
University of Illinois Press, 2010
Library of Congress BM729.D35S28 2010 | Dewey Decimal 296.46

The Miriam Tradition works from the premise that religious values form in and through movement, with ritual and dance developing patterns for enacting those values. Cia Sautter considers the case of Sephardic Jewish women who, following in the tradition of Miriam the prophet, performed dance and music for Jewish celebrations and special occasions. She uses rabbinic and feminist understandings of the Torah to argue that these women, called tanyaderas, "taught" Jewish values by leading appropriate behavior for major life events.

Sautter considers the religious values that are in music and dance performed by tanyaderas and examines them in conjunction with written and visual records and evidence from dance and music traditions. Explaining the symbolic gestures and motions encoded in dances, Sautter shows how rituals display deeply held values that are best expressed through the body. The book argues that the activities of women in other religions might also be examined for their embodiment and display of important values, bringing forgotten groups of women back into the historical record as important community leaders

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Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women: Sweetening the Spirits, Healing the Sick
Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt
University of Illinois Press, 2002
Library of Congress GR98.L48 2002 | Dewey Decimal 398.353089924

Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women preserves the precious remnants of a rich culture on the verge of extinction while affirming women's pivotal role in the health of their communities. Centered around extensive interviews with elders of the Sephardic communities of the former Ottoman Empire, this volume illuminates a fascinating complex of preventive and curative rituals conducted by women at home--rituals that ensured the physical and spiritual well-being of the community and functioned as a vital counterpart to the public rites conducted by men in the synagogues.

Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt take us into the homes and families of Sephardim in Turkey, Israel, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States to unravel the ancient practices of domestic healing: the network of blessings and curses tailored to every occasion of daily life; the beliefs and customs surrounding mal ojo (evil eye), espanto (fright), and echizo (witchcraft); and cures involving everything from herbs, oil, and sugar to the powerful mumia (mummy) made from dried bones of corpses.

For the Sephardim, curing an illness required discovering its spiritual cause, which might be unintentional thought or speech, accident, or magical incantation. The healing rituals of domesticated medicine provided a way of making sense of illness and a way of shaping behavior to fit the narrow constraints of a tightly structured community. Tapping a rich and irreplaceable vein of oral testimony, Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women offers fascinating insight into a culture where profound spirituality permeated every aspect of daily life.

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Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora
Edited by Julia R. Lieberman
Brandeis University Press, 2010
Library of Congress DS135.T8S426 2011 | Dewey Decimal 305.89240560903

This collection of essays examines an important and under-studied topic in early modern Jewish social history”—the family life of Sephardi Jewish families in the Ottoman Empire as well as in communities in Western Europe. At the height of its power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire spanned three continents, controlling much of southeastern Europe, western Asia, and North Africa. Thousands of Jewish families that had been expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century created communities in these far-flung locations. Later emigrants from Iberia, who converted to Christianity at the time of the expulsion or before, created communities in Western European cities such as Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Livorno. Sephardi communities were very different from those of Ashkenazi Jews in the same period. The authors of these essays use the lens of domestic life to illuminate the diversity of the post-Inquisition Sephardi Jewish experience, enabling readers to enter into little-known and little-studied Jewish historical episodes. Contributors include: Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, Hannah Davidson, Cristina Galasso, David Graizbord, Ruth Lamdan, and Julia Lieberman

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The Sephardic Jews of Bordeaux: Assimilation and Emancipation in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France
Frances Malino
University of Alabama Press, 1978
Library of Congress DS135.F85B65 | Dewey Decimal 323.1192404471

Sephardim of Bordeaux—the first in Europe to be recognized as a Jewish community

This book focuses on a small community of French Jews, the first in Europe to encounter the requirements of an emerging nation-state and to be recognized by that state as full and equal citizens. The Sephardim of Bordeaux were typical of neither the majority of the Jews of France nor those of Western Europe. They had entered France as Catholics; only after more than a century of public adherence to Catholicism was their community officially recognized as Jewish. Nevertheless, their assimilation and conformity to the standards of French society as well as their commitment to a Judaism fashioned as much by contemporary political and economic concerns as by tradition reveal a legacy bequeathed to French Jewry and an important model for the development of the modern Jew.

Describing the tensions that existed between the Sephardic community of Bordeaux and the Ashkenazic Jews of France, the author also depicts their role in the relation of the Jews with Napoleon and the forming of the Grand Sanhedrin.

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Sephardim in the Americas: Studies in Culture and History
Martin A. Cohen
University of Alabama Press, 1993
Library of Congress E29.J5S46 1993 | Dewey Decimal 970.004924046

Multidisciplinary essays examinig the historical and cultural history of the Sephardic experience in the Americas, from pre-expulsion Spain to the modern era, as recounted by some of the most outstanding interpreters of the field.

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The Sephardim in the Holocaust: A Forgotten People
Isaac Jack Lévy with Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt
University of Alabama Press, 2020
Library of Congress D804.3.L515 2020 | Dewey Decimal 940.5318

Documents the first-hand experiences in the Holocaust of the Sephardim from Greece, the Balkans, North Africa, Libya, Cos, and Rhodes

The Sephardim suffered devastation during the Holocaust, but this facet of history is poorly documented. What literature exists on the Sephardim in the Holocaust focuses on specific countries, such as Yugoslavia and Greece, or on specific cities, such as Salonika, and many of these works are not available in English.

The Sephardim in the Holocaust: A Forgotten People embraces the Sephardim of all the countries shattered by the Holocaust and pays tribute to the memory of the more than 160,000 Sephardim who perished. Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt draw on a wealth of archival sources, family history (Isaac and his family were expelled from Rhodes in 1938), and more than 150 interviews conducted with survivors during research trips to Belgium, Canada, France, Greece, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, the former Yugoslavia, and the United States. Lévy follows the Sephardim from Athens, Corfu, Cos, Macedonia, Rhodes, Salonika, and the former Yugoslavia to Auschwitz.

The authors chronicle the interminable cruelty of the camps, from the initial selections to the grisly work of the Sonderkommandos inside the crematoria, detailing the distinctive challenges the Sephardim faced, with their differences in language, physical appearance, and pronunciation of Hebrew, all of which set them apart from the Ashkenazim. They document courageous Sephardic revolts, especially those by Greek Jews, which involved intricate planning, sequestering of gunpowder, and complex coordination and communication between Ashkenazi and Sephardic inmates—all done in the strictest of secrecy. And they follow a number of Sephardic survivors who took refuge in Albania with the benevolent assistance of Muslims and Christians who opened their doors to give sanctuary, and traces the fate of the approximately 430,000 Jews from Morocco, Algiers, Tunisia, and Libya from 1939 through the end of the war.

The author’s intention is to include the Sephardim in the shared tragedy with the Ashkenazim and others. The result is a much needed, accessible, and viscerally moving account of the Sephardim’s unique experience of the Holocaust.

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Sephardim: The Jews from Spain
Paloma Díaz-Mas
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Library of Congress DS134.D52413 1992 | Dewey Decimal 909.04924

Here, in a single volume, is the first comprehensive history in English of the Sephardim—descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Paloma Díaz-Mas recounts the journey and customs of this fascinating group as they moved across the globe. They settled initially in Mediterranean Europe, the Low Countries, North Africa, and the Turkish Empire, but in the nineteenth century, a second diaspora brought the Sephardim to the United States, South America, Israel, and Western Europe. She traces the origins and survival of their unique language and explores the literature they produced. Their relationship to Spain is also uncovered, as well as their everyday lives. Sephardim is an authoritative and completely accessible investigation of the history and legacy of this amazing people.

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The Seventh Heaven: Travels Through Jewish Latin America
Ilan Stavans
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020
Library of Congress F1419.J4S78 2019 | Dewey Decimal 980.004924

Jewish Book Council Natan Notable Book 2020

Internationally renowned essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans spent five years traveling from across a dozen countries in Latin America, in search of what defines the Jewish communities in the region, whose roots date back to Christopher Columbus’s arrival. In the tradition of V.S. Naipaul’s explorations of India, the Caribbean, and the Arab World, he came back with an extraordinarily vivid travelogue. Stavans talks to families of the desaparecidos in Buenos Aires, to “Indian Jews,” and to people affiliated with neo-Nazi groups in Patagonia. He also visits Spain to understand the long-term effects of the Inquisition, the American Southwest habitat of “secret Jews,” and Israel, where immigrants from Latin America have reshaped the Jewish state. Along the way, he looks for the proverbial “seventh heaven,” which, according to the Talmud, out of proximity with the divine, the meaning of life in general, and Jewish life in particular, becomes clearer. The Seventh Heaven is a masterful work in Stavans’s ongoing quest to find a convergence between the personal and the historical.

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