Sephardic Scholarly Worlds: Toward a Novel Geography of Modern Jewish History

This article presents synthetically the scholarly contributions of four generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Sephardic intellectuals, pioneers of the field of Sephardic Studies, who were born in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans and Levant. These individuals participated in a world of Judeo-Spanish letters that stretched from Jerusalem to Vienna, Livorno to Cairo, Adrianople to Ruschuk, and Sofia to Sarajevo, but whose center of gravity lay somewhere between the Ottoman port cities of Salonica, Izmir, and Istanbul, cities with the largest and longest-running Ladino printing presses and the three largest Judeo-Spanish communities of the period. In the mid-nineteenth century, this unorganized collection of scholars began pursuing the study of Sephardic communities as they read the works of the German and East European Haskalah, translated Hebrew as well as western literatures and contributed to the flowering of the Ladino press. As the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire contracted, and as they witnessed a series of wars and disasters—most dramatically the near destruction of various Balkan Jewish communities during the Second World War—they began producing serious scholarship on the history and traditions of their own communities, compelled as much by their commitment to scientific studies as by their sense that the world of Judeo-Spanish culture they knew so intimately was poised to disappear. As the authors reconstruct this history, they argue that modern Sephardic intellectual history existed not in the form of a few isolated or marginalized thinkers, but in dynamic engagement with a wide landscape of Jewish and non-Jewish thought.