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125 6 : in Praise oF ladino A review essay, published in Conservative Judaism 27:2 (Winter 1973), 56–66. This essay is a review of an anthology of Ladino and Spanish-Jewish literature that was published in 1972. Its editor was the prolific scholar of Ladino literature Moshe Lazar, who taught at the Hebrew University, founded the School of Visual and Performing Arts at Tel Aviv University, and later taught at the University of Southern California. Yerushalmi was a natural choice to review the anthology. His first book about the experience of crypto-Jews in the seventeenth century, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, had been published in 1971. Now well established at Harvard University, Yerushalmi was one of the few American scholars at the time who had both the historical expertise and the linguistic facility to assess a work of this nature. Prior to the publication of this anthology, no accessible introduction to Ladino literature had been available to an English-speaking audience. Yerushalmi recognized that the book at hand was a pioneering project and hoped it would find a wide audience. Nonetheless, he voiced serious reservations about the book. He criticized the “gross imbalance” of Lazar’s selections. Half of the book was dedicated to the unabridged reproduction of a poem and a play whose historical and literary importance did not merit, he believed, such prominence in an anthology. He lamented that there was no mention in the book of Ladino periodicals or of Judeo-Christian polemics in Ladino and that Jewish writing in Portuguese was almost entirely ignored. Furthermore, Lazar’s decision to include only “secular” and not “religious” literature was flawed both because it was arbitrary and because the distinction between these two categories was so vague as to be misleading. However, most of Yerushalmi’s criticism was reserved for Lazar’s historical introduction. The fact that the book was written for a popular audience, he insisted , did not excuse its inaccuracies. For example, Jews were not expelled from Portugal, as Lazar claimed, but forcibly converted en masse in 1497; the Spanish Inquisition began not in 1391, which was, however, a year in which a new wave of violent assaults against Spanish Jews broke out, but in 1478; and it was not possible , on the whole, to practice openly as a Jew in Latin America or in Antwerp, which were both within the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. Yerushalmi’s most strident critique of Lazar was aimed at his characterization of those Sephardim who migrated from the Iberian Peninsula to the Ottoman Empire as lower class and pious and those Sephardim who settled in the “Christian West” as aristocrats more fully assimilated into Gentile culture. Yerushalmi freely 126 | early paTTerns granted that Jewish communities in Western Europe were different from those in the Ottoman Empire. Given what Yerushalmi called the “different array of cultural baggage” of the Jews in each place, this was to be expected. But he insisted that the socioeconomic situation of the Spanish Jews was not the main determinant of their choice of home or level of piety; indeed, Yerushalmi balked at Lazar’s anachronistic use of the term “Orthodox.” Rather, Jews in the East and the West “all have the same traditional frame of reference.” Ultimately, Yerushalmi argued, “the question of where to go was not ideological, but above all, practical.” In the background of this review was a foreshadowing of themes that were developed later in Yerushalmi’s scholarly writings. In this piece, he briefly compared the Jews of Inquisition-era Spain to those of Nazi Germany. He would later deepen this comparison in an article comparing early modern Spanish protoracialism and modern racial antisemitism (see chapter 9). Even more significantly, Yerushalmi began and ended this reviewof a book about Ladino-speaking Jews by pointing to the characteristics they shared with Yiddish-speaking Jews (of which he was one). Yerushalmi had in mind the familiar Jewish experience of exile—another of his scholarly preoccupations—in which “organic cultures” were removed from their “natural soil” to “alien environments.” Indeed, as Yerushalmi’s later work would demonstrate, the experience of exile continued into the modern period, during which the Jew was no longer exiled only from a physical locale but also from the very soil of Jewish memory itself. In 1917 Franz Rosenzweig, then in the German army, spent a furlough in Üsküb, Yugoslavia, and came into contact with Sephardic Jews for the first time in his life. His report of this experience...

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