L'histoire des juifs expulsés d'Espagne et qui ont rejoint la Pologne

The fall of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the peninsula, opened the way for the religious unification sought by the Crown. The conquest completed a long Christian reconquest, and a few months later the expulsion decree struck the oldest and most deeply rooted Jewish community in Western Europe [Baer, 1966]. The exiles dispersed along the trade routes and political hospitalities of the time. Communities of notable size resettled in Amsterdam, in Poland, and in the Ottoman lands of the East such as Sarajevo, Istanbul, and Salonique [Eurasia Review].

This dispersion was not uniform. Many remained at first in Portugal, where the forced conversion of 1497 gave rise to the enduring figure of the converso or New Christian, some of whom, having remained secretly faithful to Judaism, later sought a refuge where they could openly return to the faith of their fathers [Yerushalmi, 1998]. The United Provinces and certain Italian cities offered such a framework. Poland-Lithuania, as we shall see, played a more marginal but real role in this reconquest of a lost identity.

For the clarity of our argument, it is important to distinguish the Séfarades of Iberian stock from the Portuguese and Italian Marranos who resumed their journey in the sixteenth century. The figures who reached Poland often belong to this second wave, passing through Italy or the Levant before reaching the Vistula [Gerber, 1992].

The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania constituted, at the end of the Middle Ages and at the dawn of the Early Modern period, one of the largest Jewish refuges in Europe. A long tradition of royal privileges, dating back to the charters granted to Ashkenazi Jews, had made this vast space a pole of immigration and structured communal life. It was within this framework of relative tolerance — a juridical rather than ideological tolerance — that a few Sephardic Jews found their place [Biale, 2005].

Their situation differed, however, from that of the Ashkenazi majority. According to scholarship devoted to the Sephardic presence in Poland, although Sephardic Jews created no established community until the end of the sixteenth century, their presence deserves particular attention, as it differed, from a sociological and juridical standpoint, from that of the Ashkenazi communities of Poland [Prace Historyczne]. These newcomers arrived equipped with a distinct cultural capital: command of Romance languages, Mediterranean commercial networks, and university medical training acquired notably in Padua.

The royal court itself opened its doors to these talents. The physician of Judeo-German origin trained in Italy, Salomon Ashkenazi, illustrates the permeability of these worlds: following the expulsion of the Jews from Udine in 1556, Ashkenazi travelled to Kraków, in Poland, to serve as chief physician to King Sigismond II Auguste [Wikipedia]. Though his ancestry was not Iberian, his trajectory traces the Italian path that genuine Sephardic Jews also took toward the Polish capital.

The most distinctly Sephardic community in Poland was born of an urban and economic project. The city of Zamość, a fortress-town built in the 1580s according to the canons of Italian Renaissance architecture, was conceived by Chancellor Jan Zamoyski. Zamoyski invited Sephardic Jews to settle there, and a large number of Sephardim from Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey arrived around 1588 [Hamilton Jewish News]. The magnate intended to draw upon the commercial networks and Levantine expertise of these merchants in the luxury trade.

The legal instrument of this welcome was the concession of 1588. The Zamość concession of 1588 was conceived in this spirit, in which the feudal magnate Jan Zamoyski provided, with a generous hand, exclusively for Sephardic Jews [JewishGen]. This privilege proves to be, the same source adds, the oldest concession of its kind obtained by Sephardic Jews upon the establishment of a new town [JewishGen]. The document did not merely authorize settlement: it also regulated economic activity. Sephardic Jews were permitted to practice trades, with the exception of hat-making, pot-making, and shoemaking; nor were they permitted to serve as butchers [JewishGen], these trades already being protected by guilds jealous of their interests.

Municipal documents specify the geographical origins of these settlers. The Jews who settled in Zamość came from Spain, Turkey, and Italy; they traded primarily in precious goods [Virtual Shtetl]. Particular mention is made of the diamond trade and commerce in oriental merchandise, an activity consistent with the commercial vocation envisioned by the city's founder. Thus Zamość became, on the scale of Poland, the sole place where a distinct Sephardic identity found expression in a legal status of its own.

Beyond Zamość, the Sephardic presence in Poland took the form above all of families of physicians and scholars settled in the major cities. Cracow and its neighboring Jewish city of Kazimierz, as well as Poznań, welcomed several of these lineages of Iberian origin passing through Italy. Genealogical directories record the settlement in Kazimierz, in the years following 1600, of Sephardic practitioners such as Salomon Calahora, who came from Italy, and a certain Isaak Hispanus whose very name betrays his Hispanic origin [Khazaria/Sephardim in Galitzia].

These families put down roots and continued across several generations. The Calahora lineage, bearing a surname derived from the Spanish city of Calahorra, produced rabbis and preachers active in Poznań in the seventeenth century. Likewise, the de Lima family, of Portuguese descent, numbered physicians established in Poznań over at least four generations, until the mid-seventeenth century [Khazaria/Sephardim in Central and Northern Poland]. These trajectories confirm that the Sephardic contribution to Poland, though modest in numerical terms, distinguished itself through its intellectual quality and professional specialization.

Onomastics offers a precious indicator here, as it has done for the diasporas of North Africa where family names preserve the trace of origins and migrations [Toledano, 1999]. Surnames such as Calahora, Hispanus, or de Lima function as living archives of the Iberian exile, carried as far as the Polish lands. It is likely that other bearers of such names, less well documented, shared these itineraries without leaving written traces.

The Sephardic specificity of Zamość barely survived beyond two generations. Few in number and without deep roots, these exiles were progressively absorbed by the surrounding Ashkenazic majority. According to the study devoted to the community of Zamość, the Sephardic community of Zamość disappeared in the 1620s under the combined influence of "mixed" marriages with Ashkenazim, their gradual settlement within the city, wars, and finally migrations [Prace Historyczne]. The same causes contributed further isolation and an impoverishment of cultural exchanges with other Sephardic centers.

The balance of economic power had moreover been reversed. Ashkenazic Jews rapidly gained the upper hand over Sephardic Jews, causing the latter to lose their former economic standing [Virtual Shtetl]. A late attempt at restoration did nonetheless occur: even though, in 1684, Sephardic Jews received permission to establish their own independent Jewish community, some among them had already merged with the Ashkenazim [Virtual Shtetl].

It is here that Memory and History enter into dialogue and sometimes qualify one another. Where classical historiography concludes with an early extinction, certain more recent readings suggest a longer persistence. According to one contemporary interpretation, the Sephardic community of Zamość did not die out shortly after its founding — as many historians have claimed — but continued to exist until the eighteenth century [Times of Israel]. This minority hypothesis illustrates the still open character of research into the fate of these absorbed lineages.

What remains, in Jewish memory, of these Séfarades of the North? Their most tangible trace resides in the material heritage of Zamość, whose Renaissance synagogue, built in the early seventeenth century, endures as a stone witness to that encounter between Italian urbanism, the ambition of a Polish magnate, and the spirit of a community that came from Sefarad. The city itself, nicknamed "the Padua of the North," carries in its layout the memory of the Mediterranean exchanges that shaped it.

On the level of lineages, memory is transmitted through names. Descendants absorbed into Polish Ashkenazic life sometimes preserved, through their patronym, the memory of a distant Iberian origin — a trace comparable to that which other branches of the diaspora maintained from Toledo to Salonique [Benbassa & Rodrigue, 2002]. This form of memory, diffuse and fragmentary, belongs less to the archive than to family memory and genealogical consciousness.

The history of the Jews expelled from Spain who made their way to Poland thus belongs fully to the long memory of a diaspora that spread across three continents [Méchoulan, 1992]. It is a reminder that the exile of 1492 knew no simple borders, and that the map of the Séfarade dispersion must include, alongside Istanbul, Fès, and Amsterdam, the streets of Zamość, Cracovie, and Poznań.

The history of the Jews of Sefarad who joined Poland is that of a diaspora within a diaspora: a trickle of exiles, scholars and merchants, grafted onto the vast body of Polish Judaism. Far from the masses welcomed by the Ottoman Empire, these northern Sephardim formed only a brief and singular community, of which Zamość was the sole institutional embodiment through the concession of 1588 [JewishGen]. Their fate — the progressive assimilation into the Ashkenazi majority over the course of the seventeenth century — bears witness to the difficulty of maintaining a distinct minority identity within a demographically dominant environment [Prace Historyczne].

This northern chapter of the Sephardic adventure, modest in numbers yet rich in the quality of its actors, deserves its place in the great narrative of the exile of 1492. It illustrates, once again, the plasticity of Jewish identities and the capacity of the culture of Sefarad to leave a lasting imprint, even in the form of a family name, a stone synagogue, or a lineage of physicians, reaching to the eastern frontiers of Europe [Biale, 2005]. Research remains open regarding the precise extent and longevity of this presence, caught between the archive that points to a rapid disappearance and the hypotheses of a more enduring survival.