After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry

Conclusion

>> 157 Conclusion The Expulsion of 1492 was the culmination of a long series of large-scale expulsions that drove the Jews out of Latin Christendom. After decades of continued expulsion and migration, the majority of Iberian Jews ultimately came to settle in Muslim lands, where they continued their legacy of economic and cultural achievement. From this perspective, it is perhaps natural to view their transition from the medieval to the early modern period, and from Iberia to the broader Mediterranean world, through a juxtaposition of Christian and Muslim attitudes toward the Jews. In turn, such questions of interfaith dynamics on the eve of modernity inevitably bring to mind debates about contemporary relations among these communities. Does the exclusion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal and their subsequent welcome in the Ottoman Empire make a broader statement about the treatment of minorities in Christian and Muslim societies? Can we draw conclusions about the relative failures of the nation-state to integrate minority groups as compared to heterodox and multi-ethnic empires? Should we see the Jews as a naturally “Oriental” or Middle Eastern people, and if so, does the transference of the 158 > 159 Diaspora was fraught with difficulties. That these Jews did not come together easily or naturally to form communities, and that these migrants and their would-be leaders continued to view each other with suspicion and contempt even after their communities took root, are features of Jewish society that should not be overlooked. Negotiations of power and authority within the emerging Sephardic Diaspora —between rabbis and communal officials, and between those groups and the Jews they sought to govern—represent central themes of Jewish history that link the medieval and modern periods. So too was the persistence of religious and cultural borrowing among Jews of different regional backgrounds , as well as between Jews and their Christian and Muslim neighbors, a characteristic of medieval Jewish society that continued to shape the contours of the Sephardic Diaspora in its formative century. The transregional society that arose out of these repeated encounters was characterized by a host of apparent contradictions. It was a society whose members exhibited a resilient dedication to Judaism, but not always to the normative Judaism of their rabbis. They routinely turned to one another for political, economic, and social support, but maintained a strong tendency toward personal independence. They created a new language and forged a new ethnic identity, but read these cultural markers as part of shared cultural heritage that contributed to a nostalgic image of the past. Amid this internal factionalism and dissent, a cultural identity began to take hold throughout the Sephardic Diaspora. This process of cultural and communal rapprochement, which took place over the course of several generations , was aided by a number of factors, including intermarriage among distinct Jewries; the general process of cultural consolidation of immigrants in a new land; and the self-confidence of the Spanish Jews, which allowed them to successfully assert their cultural dominance over other Jewish groups. This ethnic amalgamation was soon followed by the emergence of clear regional subsets within the Sephardic Diaspora, as the cultural character of Maghrebi, Ottoman, Italian (primarily Livornese), and northern European (primarily Dutch) Sephardim was increasingly influenced by each group’s distinct regional situation.2 But the sense of belonging to a translocal Sephardic society was never fully lost. Writing on religion as a mode of social organization, historian Bruce Masters notes: “Religion was at least the primary basis of identity, beyond family, clan or gender, for members of most of the Ottoman period. If for no other reason than that was their core identity mandated by state, law, and tradition.”3 This astute observation offers an important evaluation of the role played by religion in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean. 160 > 161 rapidly shifting fortunes of nations and individuals in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean caused those who moved throughout the region to constantly reconsider the nature and value of their religious counterparts. Nor was Muslim treatment of Jews solely determined by the longstanding legislation concerning dhimmi. Rather, that code was alternately upheld or ignored as it suited individual Muslim rulers. In order to gauge the image of the Jew in the Muslim world at this time, it is perhaps best to emphasize the contextual nature of the Muslim-Jewish relationship. In the sixteenth century, Muslim attitudes toward the Jews were as contingent upon the relative power and social status of particular individuals as were those of their Christian...