The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience

Jane S. Gerber is a historian of Sephardic Jewry, and this Free Press book is her general scholarly history of Jewish life in Spain and of the Sephardic diaspora that followed the 1492 expulsion. Its strength is broad synthesis grounded in genuine historical research, tracing Sephardic communal, religious and intellectual life from the medieval convivencia period through expulsion and resettlement across the Mediterranean and beyond. Its limit is exactly that breadth, as a general history spanning many centuries and regions it cannot give the same depth to any one period or community that a focused monograph would, so a claim needing detailed treatment of one specific Sephardic community or century is better served by a narrower specialist source alongside this general history.