Cities of Splendour in the Shaping of Sephardi History [Hardcover]

The history of Sephardi Jewry is examined here through a wide-ranging study of its cultural achievements, offering an unrivalled overview of centuries of Sephardi creativity in such cities as Amsterdam, Istanbul, Safed, Salonica, and Venice. Contemporary travellers' accounts, sermons, and correspondence all contribute to creating a vivid picture of dynamism and cultural flourishing.Sephardi identity has meant different things at different times, but has always entailed a connection with Spain, from which the Jews were expelled in 1492. While Sephardi Jews have lived in numerous cities and towns throughout history, certain cities had a greater impact in the shaping of their culture. This book focuses on those that may be considered most important, from Cordoba in the tenth century to Toledo, Venice, Safed, Istanbul, Salonica, and Amsterdam at the dawn of the seventeenth century. Each served as a venue in which a particular dimension of Sephardi Jewry either took shape or was expressed in especially intense form. Significantly, these cities were mostly heterogeneous in their population and culture - half of them under Christian rule and half under Muslim rule - and this too shaped the Sephardi world-view and attitude. While Sephardim cultivated a distinctive identity, they felt at home in the cultures of their adopted lands. Drawing upon a variety of both primary and secondary sources, Jane Gerber demonstrates that Sephardi history and culture have always been multifaceted. Her interdisciplinary approach captures the many contexts in which the life of the Jews from Iberia unfolded, without either romanticizing the past or diluting its reality. Highly readable and enlightening... Gerber paints an illuminating picture of a vivid Jewish sub-culture always in contact with the non-Jewish, Christian and Muslim, surroundings... Cities of Splendour will be of great value for many scholars and students of Sephardic and Jewish history.
Carsten Schapkow, Sephardic Horizons