Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora

Preface

Preface This book is a collection of essays dealing with Sephardi Jewish family life in the early modern period. It includes studies dealing with Sephardi communities formed after the expulsion from Spain in 1492, when Spanish Jewry was forced to disperse in numerous directions. In that catastrophic year, many Spanish Jews made the painful decision to go into exile instead of abandoning Judaism and traveled tortuous and dangerous routes by land and sea. Many of them found temporary refuge in places such as the kingdoms of Navarre in northern Spain, Portugal to the west, the region of Provence in southern France, and various cities in Italy and northern Africa. Most of the exiles eventually made it to Mediterranean countries recently conquered by the emerging and expanding Ottoman Empire. Because of the eastern route that these exiles followed, historians call the communities under Ottoman rule “Eastern Sephardi” communities . From most of these temporary places of refuge, the Spanish exiles were soon forced to leave again shortly after their arrival. In 1497, those who went to the nearby kingdom of Portugal were forcibly baptized by royal decree, together with the indigenous Portuguese Jews, and became “New Christians.” While many Jews chose to leave Spain in 1492, a large number converted to Christianity in order to remain in their country of birth. This group joined the ranks of other so-called Spanish New Christians who were, in fact, descendants of those who had originally converted to Christianity in 1391, when violence forced many to accept Christianity. But neither those who converted and remained in Spain, nor those who went to Portugal and were forcibly baptized, integrated into the larger society that, for centuries, continued to label them and their descendents New Christians, “conversos,” “marranos,” or tornadizos (turncoats), as opposed to Old Christians: Spanish or Portuguese Christians who supposedly had no Jewish (or Muslim) blood. The expulsion from Spain not only dispersed Iberian Jewry as a collectivity, it also had a tremendous impact on individual households as frequently members of the same family went in different directions. As historian Haim Beinart has demonstrated, between the date of expulsion, 1492, and 1499, a number of xii Preface Spanish Jews who went to Portugal and Morocco felt compelled to return to Spain and convert to Christianity. Most of the returnees from Portugal were among those who had left property behind and had something they wished to recover. In many cases they were sons and daughters whose parents had died in Portugal, or women who became widowed in exile and sought to recover their parents’ or husbands’ property, even their dowries, and return to their places of origin in Spain. Before the expulsion they had belonged to a cross-section of Jewish society whose livelihood depended on agriculture and landowning in an expansive geographical area in Castile. As they had run out of financial resources in Portugal, they saw no other option but to return to Spain.1 Migration of conversos in large numbers to the Ottoman Empire was gradual and took several decades.2 It started in the 1480s, when small numbers of converso families from the regions of Valencia and Aragon moved to places such as Valona in Albania, the Holy Land (under the Mamluks), or Salonica (Thessaloniki ), where they reverted to the Judaism they or their parents had abandoned in 1391 or thereafter.3 In 1492, right after the expulsion, some Spanish exiles arrived in the port city of Salonica, but the majority of them found temporary shelter elsewhere and only gradually made it to Ottoman-ruled lands. At first they settled in port cities of the southern Balkans and western Anatolia, such as Salonica, the empire’s capital Constantinople (Istanbul), and Adrianople (Edirne). In the two main centers, Constantinople and Salonica, Spanish exiles organized their communities in two different ways, and these two models were followed by other Sephardi communities. In Salonica the exiles found basically no other Jews, as the Ottomans had transferred the indigenous Jewish population, mostly Romaniots and some Ashkenazim and Italians, to the capital and to other centers; those Iberians soon formed the majority of the Jewish population. They faced tremendous challenges reconstructing Jewish communal and family lives in small groups, without any organized Jewish leadership or others to guide them in their new environment, but soon the Sephardim imposed Castilian usages and customs, and the Salonica model of communal organization was followed by other Balkan communities. In Constantinople, the situation developed differently, as the Iberians found an indigenous...