Foundations of Sephardic Spirituality: The Inner Life of Jews of the Ottoman Empire (review)

Rabbi Marc Angel is not only a recognized scholar of religious studies at the Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City, but also the descendant of a Sephardic Jewish family that migrated to the United States in the early twentieth century. As such, he can offer multiple perspectives on the ideas he writes about. In Foundations of Sephardic Spirituality: The Inner Life of Jews of the Ottoman Empire, he uses his own and his family's experiences, works by historians and literary scholars, and an array of elite and popular Jewish literature, religious tracts, poems, and folk stories to present a historical synthesis of Sephardic civilization within the Ottoman Empire. He argues that to fully understand Sephardic civilization, one must examine not only how outside observers have depicted Sephardim, but also how they have viewed themselves. Angel surmises that although Sephardic Jews routinely suffered from economic and political persecution as a minority in the Ottoman state, they created a flourishing Judeo-Spanish civilization that included shared common values, featured a true sense of community, and existed for over five centuries until the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1923.

Angel traces the origins of Sephardic civilization in the Ottoman Empire to 1492, but contends that even before Spain officially expelled its Jews, their treatment by Christian rulers, "fanatical clerics," and the general population had become increasingly insufferable anyway (21). Thousands of Jews therefore moved elsewhere in western Europe or, more often, to the "relatively benevolent" Ottoman Empire (23). In the latter case, Jews could at least worship with relative freedom under the Ottoman millet system, which consisted of autonomous religious communities specifically designed to protect religious minorities and avoid civil strife. In spite of some "internal differences" between them, non-Sephardic Jews were gradually absorbed into the ways of life of the Sephardim due to the "heritage of intellectual achievement in Spain," a "feeling of cultural superiority," and the sheer larger numbers of Sephardic Jews (26, 28).

Angel further argues that a major turning point of Sephardic civilization occurred in the seventeenth century as the Ottoman Empire faced growing internal and external crises. Military defeats, the erosion of central authority, and economic instability all produced "a period of stagnation and decline" that led to a marked deterioration in the empire's treatment of its religious minorities (60). Jews no longer wielded the same economic prestige or political influence as they had previously. Many Sephardic communities increasingly looked to divine intervention to "redeem them from their suffering" (63). At this point, Angel recounts the famous story of the Sabbatai Sevi. He shows how the apostasy of the false Messiah profoundly impacted Sephardic spirituality because Post-Sabbatean spiritual life became characterized by "an authoritative midrastic/ kabbalistic view of Judaism," which emphasized passivity, humility, and repentance as the proper mechanisms for dealing with the problems and challenges that Jews encountered in their secular lives (89). The midrastic/kabbalistic teachings preached an acceptance of the superstitious, authoritarian ideas of rabbis and other Jewish teachers that Sabbatai Sevi had so popularized, and continued to disparage intellectualism, reason, and education. The author argues that this type of Sephardic spirituality largely explains Jews' lackluster outward response to their declining economic and political status in the later Ottoman Empire.

According to Angel, the other major turning point of Sephardic civilization, which ultimately led to its collapse, occurred with the onset of modernity, or westernization, in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. The influx of economic, military, administrative, and civic ideas and reforms from Western Europe produced an ideological struggle amongst the Ottoman Sephardim between "reformists" and "traditionalists." Both groups claimed to know how to lead the Sephardic communities during this period of momentous changes. Angel argues that, on the one hand, the reformists, who favored westernization, "hoped to stimulate the emergence of an educated and enlightened Turkish Jewry, freed of its old folkways and superstitions" (165). However, by promoting the French language and...