The Sephardic Jew as Mediterranean: A View from Kinship and Gender1

The scholarly characterisation of the Sephardic world as typically ‘Mediterranean’ aims to elaborate the representation of Sephardicness as a Jewish ‘Gemeinschaft’. The article deciphers the ideological foundations of this theoretical construction by analyzing how the Sephardic world is represented as being sealed in its kinship structures and gender roles. This essentialising representation, the heritage of 19th-century Wissenschaft scholarship, constitutes the Jewish version of European ‘Orientalism’. It is analysed in such discursive contexts as social scientific literature (history, sociology, ethnography), political, public and popular culture.