Spain and the Jews: The Sephardi Experience 1492 and After (review)

Book Reviews 151 in the genocide of 1915. However, what is one to do with the fact that the Young Turks who were responsible for the events of 1915 were not responsible for those of 1909? Indeed, when the Young Turks came to power in 1908 they were supported by Armenian revolutionary parties, and it was said that Turks and Armenians embraced in the streets. How then did the propensity to violence cumulate and make genocide more likely by 1915? There must have been intervening events that radically redefined the Turkish and Armenian situations. But such events and their effects are not given their due in this work. Similarly Why Genocide? follows a standard interpretation that views the rise of antisemitic movements in Imperial Germany as precursors to the Nazis. In that sense the events of 1933-1945 could be seen as the end process of a cumulative or value added process. But here again there are some problems. The fact is that by 1912 the antisemitic parties ofImperial Germany were a failure, and no one could at this point have predicted that a genocide of the European Jews would be initiated a few years later in Germany. Thus there are problems with an approach that sees genocide as an outcome of contin'uous processes in history that cumulate and culminate in massive violence. This study would have been stronger had it been more critical ofits own (and Smelser's) assumptions, and if it had considered the contrary view that genocide is the product of discontinuous and not necessarily cumulative factors. Robert Melson Depanment of Political Science Purdue University Spain and the Jews: The Sephardi Experience 1492 and After, edited by Elie Kedourie. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992. 248 pp. $40.00. The editor of this volume was Professor of Politics in the University of London for twenty-five years until his retirement in 1990. Unfortunately he died just as it appeared, but, being a valuable contribution, it serves as an appropriate memorial to him. It is one of the plethora of books appearing in this quincentenary of the discovery ofAmerica and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and one of the better ones. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain is one of the most famous acts of its kind in history, although as we are only too well aware in our own day, such dreadful uprootings of innocent, law-abiding citizens still go on 152 SHOFAR Summer 1993 Vol. il, No.4 apace. The unspeakable Idi Amin Dada of Uganda expelled in 1972 some 40,000 Asiatics from his realm, and currently Yugoslavia has created the dreadful euphemism "ethnic cleansing" to cover the horror of this activity. The organization of the book is simple and logical, consisting of a perceptive introduction by Kedourie, dealing mainly with the struggles of various individuals to come to terms with the new environment created by the expulsion, followed by nine chapters written by different scholars who are experts in their fields and who studiously avoid the kind of hype that an anniversary of this type is apt to provoke. These nine chapters fall into three roughly equal sections. The first section deals with the events leading up to the expulsion, and the expulsion itself. The second deals with the impact of the expulsion on the Jewish community, and what occurred inside and outside the Iberian peninsula. The third consists of chapters devoted to three areas of Sephardic settlement, namely the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands, and England. Many areas are omitted in this survey, but this was inevitable in order to keep the book within reasonable compass. Thus, the important communities of exiles from Spain and Portugal in North Africa and the New World hardly get mentioned. But the fact is that the study of the history of the Jews of North Africa is only beginning, and in that of South America much remains to be done. John lynch's chapter on "Spain after the Expulsion" shows well how difficult it is to make an adequate assessment of all these tumultuous events, and in general one is struck by how much we do not know. For example, Henry Kamen in his chapter...