Farewell Espana: The World of the Sephardim Remembered - Howard M. Sacher
This history for the general reader provides informative
overviews of Sephardic communal and intellectual history, with many colorful
stories and asides of Sephardic scholars, traders, artisans, community leaders,
and religious figures.
From about 711 to 1492 in the different kingdoms of Spain, Jews, Muslims, Roman
Catholics lived together in comparative peace, though it must be said that the
Christians were ever pushing south into Moorish territory. The Spanish,
or Sephardic, Jews made up a large, prosperous, dynamic, learned community that
even had its own language Ladino, a mixture of Old Spanish and Hebrew.
But by the 14th century living together gave way to shocking pogroms, such as
the massacre in 1391, in which 30,000 Jewish people were killed. Then, the
Inquisition began in the late 15th century. Sacher’s descriptions of the
unfolding of this gory phenomenon are illuminating and blood-curdling. In
1492 the Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella and
they spread throughout the Mediterranean littoral and the Ottoman Empire, as
well as to Holland, England, the Western Hemisphere.
Sacher’s account of Balkan Sephardic communities during the Holocaust is
especially enlightening albeit heart-wrenching. Sometimes he makes broad
generalizations about large groups of people (mystical Balkan soul,
etc.) but this is the only quibble I have with this compelling chronicle.
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