Séfarades

The word "Sephardi" derives from Sefarad, a biblical toponym (Obadiah 1:20) that Jewish tradition very early identified with the Iberian Peninsula. It refers first to the Jews of Spain and Portugal, and then, by extension, to the immense diaspora born of the expulsions of 1492 and 1497. This community — or edah — is distinguished by a language, Judeo-Spanish or Ladino, by a liturgical rite of its own, by a vivid memory of the "lost land," and by a remarkable capacity for adaptation, from Salonika to Amsterdam, from Safed to the Maghreb. More than a mere geographical origin, Sephardism constitutes a civilization: heir to the Andalusian golden age, shaped by exile, recomposed in the Ottoman Empire and the mercantile West. This monograph traces its major stages, from the splendors of al-Andalus to contemporary questions of identity.

Under the Muslim rule of the Iberian Peninsula, from the tenth to the twelfth century, the Jews of Spain experienced an intellectual flourishing unprecedented since Antiquity. In Cordoba, capital of the Umayyad Caliphate, Hasdaï ibn Shaprout (tenth century), physician and diplomat, made his city a center of Talmudic study and forged ties with the Khazar kingdom. This symbiosis between Arab culture and Jewish learning — the convivencia, a term to be handled with caution since the condition of the dhimmi remained subordinate — allowed the blossoming of a "Hebrew renaissance." Samuel ibn Naghrela, known as Samuel ha-Nagid (993–c. 1056), embodied this greatness: vizier and military commander of the kingdom of Granada, Talmudist and poet, he was one of the few Jews to wield real political power. Hebrew poetry then reached its heights with Salomon ibn Gabirol (c. 1020–c. 1057), Neoplatonic poet and philosopher whose Fons Vitae (The Source of Life) circulated in the Christian West, and Juda Halevi (c. 1075–1141), author of the Kuzari and of poignant "songs of Zion." The summit was Moïse ben Maïmon, Maïmonide or the Rambam (1138–1204), born in Cordoba. Fleeing Almohad persecution, he settled at last in Fustat, in Egypt. His Mishneh Torah and his Guide for the Perplexed remain monuments of Jewish thought. The Almohad incursion, in the mid-twelfth century, however, sounded the death knell of this golden age.

As the Christian Reconquista advanced, the Jews of Castile and Aragon first experienced a period of relative prosperity, serving as financiers, physicians, and administrators. But economic decline, anti-Jewish preaching, and social tensions led to catastrophe: in the summer of 1391, a wave of pogroms beginning in Seville set ablaze more than seventy towns across Castile and Aragon. Thousands of Jews were massacred; thousands of others converted to Christianity to save their lives. These conversions, often forced, gave rise to a new social category: the conversos or "new Christians," sometimes designated by the pejorative term marranos. Many continued to practice Judaism in secret; they were called crypto-Jews. The Disputation of Tortosa (1413-1414) and the conversion campaigns further intensified this phenomenon. Suspicion toward the religious sincerity of the conversos gave rise to an obsession with "purity of blood" (limpieza de sangre) and led to the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478, authorized by Pope Sixtus IV and entrusted to inquisitors such as Tomás de Torquemada. It was precisely to remove the new Christians from the influence of the Jews who remained faithful that the Catholic Monarchs decided upon expulsion.

On March 31, 1492, shortly after the fall of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom of the peninsula, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon signed the edict of expulsion at the Alhambra. Unconverted Jews were to leave the Crowns of Castile and Aragon before July 31, under penalty of death. The number of exiles, long overestimated, is today assessed by historians at several tens of thousands; many others preferred a final conversion. The great financier Isaac Abravanel, who pleaded in vain with the sovereigns, himself took the road to exile. Many of the expelled took refuge in neighboring Portugal. But the respite was brief: in 1497, King Manuel I, eager to marry a Spanish infanta, ordered the massive forced conversion of the kingdom's Jews rather than their expulsion, retaining the population while tearing it from its faith. Portugal was thus peopled by a vast class of new Christians, many of whom, over generations, secretly perpetuated Jewish traditions. The Iberian expulsion was a founding trauma. It dispersed the most brilliant Jewish community of the medieval West and created a diaspora conscious of itself, bound together by language, the memory of Sefarad, and messianic hope.

The dispersion led the Sephardim toward manifold horizons. The Ottoman Empire, whose sultan Bayézid II is said to have welcomed the exiles with favor, became the principal hearth of the diaspora. Salonika, in particular, was dubbed the "mother of Israel" and sheltered the largest Sephardic community in the world, where Judeo-Spanish remained the dominant language until the twentieth century. Constantinople, Smyrna, and the towns of the Balkans were covered with synagogues organized according to their Iberian cities of origin. Another branch, descended from the Portuguese conversos, openly reconstituted Judaism in the Christian West: these were the Portuguese "nations." In Amsterdam a famous community of merchants flourished — the "Jerusalem of the North" — which produced Baruch Spinoza, excommunicated in 1656. Analogous communities established themselves in Hamburg, in Venice, in Livorno (where the Livornina guaranteed protection and freedom of trade as early as 1591–1593), in Bordeaux and Bayonne, in London after 1656, and then in the Americas. In the Maghreb, the exiles — the megorashim — mingled with the native Jews, the toshavim, not without tensions, in Fez, Tétouan, Salé, or Algiers, importing there their customs, their takkanot, and their prestige. Everywhere, these communities preserved a distinct Sephardic liturgical rite and a keen sense of their Iberian lineage.

Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, preserved the Spanish of the fifteenth century and enriched it with Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish, Greek, Arabic, and Italian borrowings. It became the vehicle of a rich oral and written culture: the romancero, those ballads inherited from medieval Spain, the coplas, the proverbs (refranes), and a religious literature whose monument is the Meam Loez, a vast biblical commentary undertaken in the eighteenth century. It was at Safed, in Galilee, that Sephardic spirituality reached its apogee in the sixteenth century. Joseph Caro (1488-1575), born in Portugal, composed there the Shulhan Arukh, a code of law that established itself as the normative reference for all of Judaism. Alongside him, Isaac Luria (1534-1572), the "Ari," elaborated within a few years a kabbalistic system of unparalleled power—tsimtsum (divine contraction), the breaking of the vessels, tikkun (repair of the world)—which, disseminated by his disciple Hayyim Vital, became the dominant mystical theology of premodern Judaism. This effervescence also prepared the greatest spiritual crisis of the diaspora. Shabbetai Tzevi (1626-1676), a native of Smyrna, was proclaimed Messiah; relayed by the prophet Nathan of Gaza, his movement set the Jewish communities ablaze around the year 1666. Ordered to choose by the sultan, Shabbetai Tzevi converted to Islam, plunging his faithful into dismay and forming the sect of the Dönmeh.

In the modern era, the Sephardic world experienced a slow decline followed by a profound transformation. From 1860 onward, the Alliance israélite universelle, founded in Paris, deployed a network of schools from the eastern Mediterranean to the Maghreb, spreading the French language and an ideal of emancipation that Westernized the elites while eroding Judeo-Spanish. The twentieth century was tragic: the Shoah annihilated the great communities of the Balkans — Salonika lost the overwhelming majority of its own in 1943 — while decolonization and the creation of the State of Israel emptied the Sephardic lands of the Maghreb and the Levant within a few decades. Today, Sephardic identity survives in memory, liturgy, cuisine, and a revived musical heritage, in Israel, in France, in the Americas. Ladino, classified as an endangered language, is the object of safeguarding efforts. Far from being a mere relic, Sephardism remains a living component of contemporary Judaism, bearing a memory that five centuries of exile have not erased.