Sephardic Jews

Jews lived in Iberia from Roman times, but Sepharad flowered under Muslim al-Andalus, where Arabic learning and courtly patronage produced a golden age: Hasdai ibn Shaprut serving the Cordoban caliphs, Samuel ha-Nagid commanding armies for Granada, the poetry of Judah Halevi and Solomon ibn Gabirol, and the towering figure of Maimonides, born in Cordoba in 1138, whose legal code and Guide of the Perplexed shaped all later Judaism. The documents of the Cairo Geniza, studied exhaustively by S. D. Goitein, show this Mediterranean Jewish world as one connected society of merchants, scholars and families from Spain to Egypt and beyond.

Christian reconquest changed the terms slowly, then catastrophically. The massacres of 1391 drove thousands into baptism, creating the conversos whose secret loyalties the Spanish Inquisition was founded to hunt. In March 1492, fresh from conquering Granada, Ferdinand and Isabella signed the Alhambra Decree expelling every professing Jew from Spain; Portugal followed in 1497 with forced conversion rather than exile.

The exiles rebuilt in the lands that would take them. The Ottoman sultans welcomed them into Istanbul, Izmir and above all Salonica, which became a majority Jewish city for four centuries. Others settled Morocco and North Africa, Italy, and eventually Amsterdam, whose Portuguese former conversos returned openly to Judaism and founded the first Jewish communities of the New World.

The exiles of 1492 carried medieval Spanish with them, and in Ottoman lands it grew into Ladino, Judeo-Spanish, written in Hebrew letters and sung in a ballad tradition that preserved medieval Iberian romances for five centuries. Alongside it lived Judeo-Arabic, the older vernacular of the Sephardic and Eastern communities of North Africa and the Middle East. The Sephardic liturgical rite, minhag Sefarad, kept its own melodies, poetry and order of prayer, and Sephardic legal practice was codified by Joseph Karo, child of the expulsion, whose Shulchan Aruch, written in Safed, became the standard code of Jewish law everywhere, read in Ashkenaz through the glosses of Moses Isserles.

Sepharad also gave Judaism its central mystical text. The Zohar appeared in late thirteenth century Castile, and Gershom Scholem's scholarship traced the Kabbalah's origins through Provence and Gerona into that Castilian flowering. After the expulsion, the mystics of Safed, most of them of Sephardic descent, made Kabbalah a world inheritance.

The twentieth century broke the old centers: the Holocaust destroyed Salonica almost entirely, and the departure of Jews from the Arab world after 1948 moved the communities of Morocco, Iraq and Egypt largely to Israel and France. Sephardic Judaism today has its own chief rabbinate in Israel, living musical and liturgical traditions, and a Ladino heritage kept alive by scholars and singers, while Spain and Portugal have offered nationality to the expulsion's descendants.