Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa

7. Dating the Demise of the Western Sephardi Jewish Diaspora in the Mediterranean

7 • Dating the Demise of the Western Sephardi Jewish Diaspora in the Mediterranean Yaron Tsur Discussing Jewish communities in the Maghrib as a whole has certain advantages when the region is viewed as having historical connections that distinguish it from other parts of the Mediterranean and beyond. However, as with elsewhere in the Jewish world, the specificity of a given region can be better understood by examining the extensive supracommunity networks in which it was located. This chapter will discuss in brief the history of such networks in the Muslim Mediterranean on the brink of modern times. My interest focuses on a network whose boundaries reached far beyond the region of Islam and had important centers in Western Europe and on the Ameri­ can continent—the so-­ called Western Sephardi diaspora. But I will refer also to a sec­ ond network whose boundaries were confined to the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and the Middle East. The comparison between these two networks constitutes the chief contribution of the chapter. Jonathan Israel, one of the more important historians of Europe in the early modern era, devoted much of his research to the Western Sephardi diaspora. Several years ago, he published Diasporas within a Diaspora, a collection of his essays on the topic.1 One of his conclusions is that the diaspora weakened and disintegrated around the middle of the eighteenth century.2 I would like to examine his conclusion and dating with respect to the Mediterranean arena. However, before turning to the end of the diaspora, it is worth examining its beginnings and development . The Western Sephardi diaspora originated with both the Jews who were expelled from Spain and part of the families of converts, or “New Christians,” who remained in the Iberian Peninsula and lived after 1492 in Spain and Portugal or in their colonies in the New World of America. Family and social connections across the religious divide derived from special circumstances: in Portugal, Jew93 94 Yaron Tsur ish refugees were forced to convert to Christianity in 1497, but some of the New Christians continued to practice Judaism covertly as crypto-­ Jews, and in some cases their descendants fled the Inquisition and returned to normative Judaism in Jewish communities abroad. The 1492 expellees founded some communities in North Africa but they mainly went to communities in the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, and the Levant, from where they later sent out an offshoot to Italy. In Italy the “Levantines” (Sephardim who came from the East) met up with the “Ponentines ,” Sephardim and former Portuguese crypto-­ Jews who had immigrated directly from the West to cities such as Venice and Livorno. Other branches developed from the communities of “New Christians” in Portugal, in­ clud­ ing those of Antwerp and the Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the New World. In the sixteenth century, the main lines of the Western Sephardi network ran between Salonika in the Balkans and Venice in Italy, between Lisbon in the Iberian Peninsula and Antwerp in the Lowlands, and between Antwerp and Venice. The network also spread out from Lisbon and Antwerp across the Atlantic to Brazil and Peru in South America. These centers sufficed to connect the two continents of Europe and America. But Jonathan Israel’s primary argument is that the Western Sephardi diaspora was unique in connecting all the continents by both primary channels and sec­ ondary lines from the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent to North Africa, the Sahara, India, and even Indonesia and China, linking Asia and Africa as well as Europe and America. He contends that though other non-­ Jewish commercial diasporas existed in this period (Armenian , Greek, Huguenots), those diasporas merely spanned parts of the worldwide wings—part of the cultures and part of the religions. Only the long-­ term Sephardi network joined up all the continents across both religious and cultural divides.3 The title of Israel’s book, Diasporas within a Diaspora, may seem misleading at first glance if “diaspora” is taken to mean all Jewish communities as a whole. Actually , Israel means only the Spanish-­ Portuguese diaspora centered in the West, and the term “diasporas” relates to its sec­ ondary branches. The assump­ tion behind the designation is that the Western Sephardi network consisted of sec­ ond­ ary networks that were integrally related to it socially, culturally, and commercially , in contrast to other Jewish networks of the time. Israel thus differentiates between the overall religious diaspora and the commercial networks made up of Jewish co-­ religionists...