The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience - Hardcover

Jane S. Gerber

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0029115736 ISBN 13: 9780029115732

Publisher: Free Press, 1992

Synopsis

A narrative history of the Sephardic Jews discusses the first Jewish settlements of Roman times, Sephardic relations with Christian and Muslim societies, Spain's Golden Age, and the expulsion of the Jews.

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Reviews

Before the brutal expulsion of 300,000 Jews from Spain in 1492, Sephardic Jews thrived on the Iberian peninsula for more than a millennium, as Gerber relates in this stirring and riveting saga, a remarkable story of creative adaptation, minority achievement and survival. During the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry, Sephardim excelled in medicine, science, philosophy, music and literature. Columbus, evasive about his origins, kept close company with Jews, and several Jewish converts sailed with him. Gerber, director of the City University of New York's Graduate Center's Institute for Sephardic Studies, charts the haunted lives of "New Christians," secret Jews who were persecuted by the Inquisition, from Mexico to Peru, and surveys Sephardic communities that flourished openly from Romania, Syria and Turkey to the U.S. and Barbados. She examines the tensions between impoverished Ashkenazim (Jews of middle and northern Europe) and aristocratic Sephardim throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Betrayals and horrors of WW II and the Holocaust reinforced Sephardic Jews' resolve to leave the Muslim world, and Gerber incisively looks at today's Sephardic communities in Israel, France, the U.S. and Spain.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In 1492, the Jews were expelled from Spain, ending a centuries-long relationship with their Islamic and then Christian masters. During a part of this time, a veritable medieval golden age of poets and philosophers had flourished. Judah Halevi and Moses Maimonides are just two of the age's legendary figures whose works are still avidly read today. However, as Gerber reminds us, the Spanish or Sephardic Jewish experience did not end in 1492. Sephardic colonies sprouted all along the Mediterranean and in the sea-faring countries of Europe. Jews looked toward the New World too. Gerber tells their continuing story in a lively, readable, yet learned manner. This book is recommended for most libraries. Larger libraries should also consider the 1992 reissues of two classic works from the Jewish Publication Society: Yitzhak Baer's A History of the Jews in Christian Spain and Eliyahu Ashtor's The Jews of Moslem Spain .
- Paul Kaplan, Dakota Cty. Lib., Eagan, Minn.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0029115736
• ISBN 13: 9780029115732
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 390