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  • Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry: From the Golden Age of Spain to Modern Times
  • Ranen Omer-Sherman
Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry: From the Golden Age of Spain to Modern Times, edited by Zion Zohar. New York: New York University Press, 2005. 343 pp. $65.00 (c); $22.00 (p). ISBN 0-814797059 (c); 0-814797067 (p).

At the outset, it should be noted that it is highly useful to have a comparative treatment of crucial cultural and historical developments of the Sephardic and Mizrahi communities in a relatively compact volume of essays. This admirable collection should serve the needs of readers searching for introductory material as well as those more established in the field. Editor Zion Zohar's sensible methodological structure includes three sections: "Sephardic Jewry in the Middle Ages"; "From Expulsion to the Modern Era"; and a heading designated "Special Topics" that includes crucial but neglected areas such as the relation between Sephardim and Blacks in the early modern era, the experience of the Sephardim in the Shoah, and current sociopolitical patterns in Israel. Zohar's lucid introductory essay provides a helpful overview of how the relative tolerance of Islamic culture paved the way for Sephardic rabbis to creatively engage with external philosophic and aesthetic developments—in marked contrast to the exclusive study of the Bible and the Talmud of Ashkenazi Jewry's inward [End Page 185] turn in its own exilic form of Judaism (which Zohar and others rightly ascribe to centuries of existence under oppressive conditions imposed by the Church). Though there were exceptions, on the whole the Muslim conquerors of the Iberian peninsula awarded Jews lofty positions in civic, diplomatic, and even military spheres.

More enduring, in terms of Jewish life in our own time, were the unique literary and philosophic exchanges and borrowings of the period. These are explored by Norman A. Stillman in a remarkable essay examining why Judeo-Arabic proved such a strong stimulus for the Jewish literary imagination. In his like-minded discussion, David Bunis shows how the Sephardic spirit continued to be open to its environment, even during the wrenching upheaval caused by the Christian Reconquista, citing the evidence left us by proverbs, ballads, and folk legends, in which Jewish life absorbed the vitality of Castilian and other Romance languages. And Jonathan P. Decter offers a fine introduction to the startling aesthetic revolution in Hebrew literary culture that transpired as a result of metrical and imagistic innovations brought about by the contact between Jewish and Arab poets.

A significant highlight is surely Moshe Idel's terrifically engaging account of the Kabbalah ("Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah in Spain") and how this tradition evolved under the disparate pressures and influences of Christianity and Islam. In marked contrast to Gershom Scholem's mid-twentieth century declaration that sixteenth-century Lurianic Kabbalah was primarily a response to the crisis and trauma of expulsion, Idel asserts (as he has elsewhere) that the Sephardi Kabbalists were more dedicated toward restoring a sense of intellectual and spiritual life in their new environments. Idel's work on the medieval flowering of Jewish mysticism is nicely complemented by Morris Faierstein's analysis of its new life in Safed, where kabbalistic rituals, especially relating to the Sabbath, were first put into practice. Faierstein offers a lively account of how many of the most "universal" Jewish customs of contemporary Judaism were actually created by the kabbalist rabbis.

Many of the essays do tend to ignore the crucial dynamic of gender, an absence for which Paméla Dorn Sezgin partially compensates in her spirited examination of "Jewish Women in the Ottoman Empire." Sezgin presents a vivid sense of the literacy, folk religious practices, and commercial and work activities of the anonymous Jewish women who were the "primary transmitters of the Judeo-Spanish language and culture" during nearly 450 years of Ottoman rule. As the author herself notes, much of the diverse and cosmopolitan nature of this period remains tantalizingly hidden from us, waiting patiently for future generations of scholars, "in many unexplored documents." [End Page 186]

Perhaps the most controversial and theoretically rich entry is Jonathan Schorsch's richly interdisciplinary analysis in "Early Modern Sephardim and Blacks: Contact and Conflict," which is...

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