This dissertation is a study of initiatives to recover the Jewish past and of the emergence of Sephardic Studies in Spain from 1845 to 1935. It explores the ways the Jewish past became central to efforts to construct and claim a Spanish patria, through its appropriation and integration into the nation's official national historical narrative, or historia patria. The construction of this history was highly contentious, as historians and politicians brought Spain's Jewish past to bear in debates over political reform, in discussions of religious and national identity, and in elaborating diverse political and cultural movements. Moreover, it demonstrates how the recovery of the Jewish past connected--via a Spanish variant of the so-called "Jewish question"--to nationalist political and cultural movements such as Neo-Catholicism, Orientalism, Regenerationism, Hispanism, and Fascism. In all of these contexts, attempts to reclaim Spain's Jewish past--however impassioned, and however committed--remained fractured and ambivalent, making such efforts to "recover" Spain's Jews as partial as they were compromised.

This work is a comprehensive study of the Sephardic Romancero and the historical, political and cultural elements that have contributed to the maintenance of the romance tradition in Sephardic life. The investigation begins with an overview of the past studies of the Sephardic Romancero and is followed by a survey of the history of the Sephardic Jews, both in Spain and in the Spanish Diaspora. An historical approach to the literary and linguistic aspects of the Sephardic Romancero follows and this approach is then applied to a musical study. The concluding chapter discusses the uses and functions of the romancero in the Sephardic world, particularly among the Sephardic women and the social processes that have contributed to the maintenance of the romance tradition in Sephardic culture.

Zugl.: Heidelberg, Univ., Diss., 2002

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1996. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [381]-407).

Diese Doktorarbeit befasst sich mit Fragen der Sprache und Identität von drei Generationen sephardischer Juden in Sarajevo. Aufgrund der Komplexität sephardischen Geschichte in Sarajevo untersuche ich Bosnien-Herzegowina/Jugoslawien, Israel und Spanien als mögliche Identitätsoptionen für die Sephardim in Sarajevo nach der Shoah. In einem weiteren Kontext ist die Arbeit auch ein Beitrag zu Minderheiten in Europa und zum facettenreichen Zusammenspiel von Sprache und ethnischer und religiöser Identifikation. Typisch für die jüdische Gemeinschaft im heutigen Sarajevo ist, dass nur ein Gesprächspartner seine jüdische Identität auf der traditionellen halachischen Definition aufbaut, einer Definition, die von der matrilinealen Abstammung abhängt. Ebenso ist die Feier der jüdischen Feiertage meinen Informanten für die Aufrechterhaltung der Identität wichtiger als das Sprechen einer jüdischen Sprache. Gleichzeitig vertreten die Individuen auch alternative Formen des Bosnischseins, die mehrere Ethnien und religiöse Zuschreibungen umfassen. Zu den einzigartigen Merkmalen der Sephardim in Sarajevo zählen der Status der Sephardim und der anderen Minderheiten in Bosnien und Herzegowina, die sie (1) durch die diskriminierende bosnische Verfassung zugeteilt bekommen haben; (2) das Fehlen eines Gesetzes in Bosnien über die Rückgabe von Eigentum; (3) die besondere Situation, in der drei ethnische Hauptgruppen und nicht nur eine einzige ethnisch homogene ‚Mehrheit‘ das Land beherrschen; (4) das Fehlen einer gut entwickelten jüdischen kulturellen Infrastruktur. Trotz alledem findet eine Annäherung der Mitglieder der Jüdischen Gemeinde von Sarajevo an ihre Religion und Tradition statt. Dieses Phänomen ist zum Teil dem jungen religiösen Aktivisten und chazan (Kantor) der Gemeinde, Igor Kožemjakin, zuzuschreiben, der jüngere Mitglieder zu den Gottesdiensten angezogen hat. / This study analyzes issues of language and Jewish identification pertaining to the Sephardim in Sarajevo. Complexity of the Sarajevo Sephardi history means that I explore Bosnia-Herzegovina/Yugoslavia, Israel and Spain as possible identity-creating factors for the Sephardim in Sarajevo today. My findings show that the elderly Sephardic generation insist on calling their language Serbo-Croatian, whereas the younger generations do not really know what language they speak – and laugh about the linguistic situation in Sarajevo, or rely on made-up categories such as ‘Sarajevan.’ None of the interviewees emphasize the maintenance of Judeo-Spanish as a crucial condition for the continuation of Sephardic culture in Sarajevo. Similarly, the celebration of Jewish holidays is more important for the maintenance of identity across the generations than speaking a Jewish language. At the same time, the individuals also assert alternative forms of being Bosnian, ones that encompass multiple ethnicities and religious ascriptions. All the youngest interviewees however fear that the Sarajevo Sephardic identity will disappear in a near future. Unique characteristics of Sarajevo Sephardim include the status of the Sephardim and minorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina given (1) the discriminatory Bosnian Constitution; (2) the absence of a law in Bosnia on the return of property; (3) the special situation wherein three major ethnic groups, and not just a single, ethnically homogeneous ‘majority,’ dominate the country; (4) the lack of a well-developed Jewish cultural infrastructure. Despite all of this, a rapprochement between the Sarajevo Jewish Community members and their religion and tradition is taking place. This phenomenon is partly attributable to the Community’s young religious activist and chazan, Igor Kožemjakin, who has attracted younger members to the religious services.

Thessaloniki, a city with an Ottoman, Byzantine, and Sephardic past, is located in the Balkan area of Macedonia, in northern Greece. Its history is the story of people who have come from someplace else. For several hundred years, the majority population of the city was comprised of Spanish speaking Sephardic Jews who contributed to all aspects of the development of the city. This significant presence is no longer visible unless one specifically knows where to look for its traces. It is not a history that has been silenced or erased, but rather obliterated. In this dissertation, I present the documented presence and transformations of the Jewish population in Thessaloniki from the earliest contributions to present day. This work on absence uses visual anthropology to explore the present day urban environment through an ethnographic account of the city of Thessaloniki. . This is a work about what happens when intentionally omitted histories remain absent from the public sphere. What remains physically present but unrepresented proves equally important in creating and reinforcing memory. Our relationship to our environment also may be compromised by what is absent. This project examines absence through the circumstances by which the past is represented in the present, and looks at how the past is experienced in ways that may be used to invoke, challenge, or re-direct the way a community is remembered. / by Nancy Carol Stein. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

The Sephardic ballad collection contains ballads of varying themes, many of which have been forgotten in Spain, where they were originally sung by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. A popular theme within this genre is that of women committing adultery and transgressions which in many of the ballads is punishable by death. A brief history of the Sephardic Jews and their literary and oral tradition is included. An emphasis is placed on women's role in ballad tradition and the importance of transculturation and mimesis within the oral tradition, both significant to the survival of a tradition that has been continued for over five centuries, encompassing various regions around the world. The analysis focuses on two ballads in particular ; the "Celestine Romance", which shares a similar plot to La Celestina, written by Fernando de Rojas, and the ballad of "The Adulteress", a popular ballad within several traditions. / by Inbal Mazar. / Abstract in English. / Signature page unsigned. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2008. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2008. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This dissertation reconstructs Ashkenazi and Sephardi German Jews’ intensive pursuit of civil and religious rights before Germany’s Imperial Supreme Court (Reichskammergericht, the Imperial Chamber Court) in the context of the wide-ranging religious and legal reforms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through my systematic analysis of 75,000 court records and my examinations of manuscripts and early printed materials from more than thirty archives across three continents, I study hundreds of previously untapped Supreme Court cases alongside religious and legal sources in German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin. I take an integrative approach to this wealth of sources to argue that by using the Supreme Court in numbers that far exceeded their proportion of the population, including in matters that pertained to Jewish law, this litigious minority generated grounds for inter-religious exchanges with the court’s Christian lawyers and judges. These lawyers endeavored to understand and incorporate Jewish law into imperial procedure, not merely due to their commitment to conflict resolution, but also due to their interest in advancing the universal applicability of Roman law as a sophisticated tool to conjoin the different limbs of the empire into a cohesive state. These efforts led the Supreme Court, and therefore the state, to protect rabbinic law and secure the continuation of a Jewish presence in Germany, thus moving in an opposite direction from key religious reformers and local authorities. This dissertation reveals that the study of Jews’ surprising strategies of interconnecting law and religion in defense of themselves and their religious laws promoted Jews’ civil rights in radical ways, and attained a de facto status of imperial citizenship for Ashkenazi and Sephardi-Portuguese Jews. Unearthing knowledge from the archives, this dissertation redraws the porous boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish legal cultures and calls for a reconsideration of early modes of Jewish citizenship. Showing how Jewish women and men, including Iberian refugees, employed litigation as an anti-nomadic tool against pending expulsions, this dissertation also challenges prevalent conventions on weak Jewish responses to persecution, forced migration, and the agency that ethnic and religious minorities can wield in state-building processes.

This project focuses on the autofictional family novels, crafted from the mid-1970s onwards through the early 2000s in French and Serbian by the women writers of Jewish Sephardi origin, born in the French-ruled Maghreb (Annie Cohen, Annie Fitoussi, Nine Moati, Gisèle Halimi) and ex-Yugoslavia (Frida Filipović and Gordana Kuić), respectively. It is situated at the many intersections of Slavic, Jewish, Gender, and Memory Studies. Through the lens of feminist and decolonizing interpretive strategies, I analyze and connect these texts as a translingual and largely unknown archive of Sephardi women’s contemporary writing. Applying the methodological took-kit of Comparative Literature, I unsettle and frustrate a narrowly conceptualized—monolingual and mono-ethnic—vision of literary production. This emerging archive carves out a space in which the uniqueness and difference—ethno-cultural and gender, alike—of Sephardi women’s lived experiences throughout the 20th century becomes foregrounded in the full complexity of their poetics against the politics of erasure, silencing, invisibilization, and oblivion.  In this connective and comparative thesis, I re-discover the corpus as a transmediterranean feminist project, which destabilizes the notion of literary canon and articulates its anti-ethnocentric instantiations. Additionally, I tease out Sephardi identity as a tenuous and performative phenomenon, produced in and through the act of writing by the generation of Sephardi daughters, as they grapple with ambiguous and provocative maternal legacies. Language or, more precisely, languages themselves—Serbian and French, traversed, interspersed with, if not interrupted by Judeo-Spanish/Djudezmo, Spanish, and Judeo-Arabic—serve as the crucial poetic means of this identity performance. Finally, the corpus under my scrutiny performs what Marianne Hirsch deems postmemorial work, in that it harbors and preserves the memories of the foremothers in the narrative flow of these autofictional matrifocal family novels, which are, in turn, to be remembered by the reader.

Cette thèse explore la caractérisation et le rôle du Juif dans l'un des textes antisémites les plus controversés du XVIIe siècle en Espagne : Centinela contra judíos (Sentinelle contre les Juifs), composée par le franciscain Fray Francisco de Torrejoncillo. Il a été largement lu à son époque et a été imprimé treize fois dans la péninsule ibérique, avec neuf éditions en espagnol et quatre en portugais entre 1674 et 1748. Cependant, la recherche sur la Sentinelle à ce jour a été très déficiente, car il n'y a pas d’édition du texte en espagnol, ni études critiques pertinentes du point de vue culturel et littéraire. Seul l'historien François Soyer a produit une analyse détaillée de la Sentinelle, qui contient également une traduction annotée du texte anglais. Cependant, sa décision d'écrire pour un public anglophone est un obstacle non négligeable pour le lecteur hispanophone, tout comme son approche éminemment historique laisse place à d'autres types de perspectives analytiques complémentaires. Grâce à la première transcription annotée de Centinela contra judíos en espagnol, notre travail offre aux lecteurs hispanophones une édition académique accessible, qui distingue pour la première fois clairement les textes des éditions madrilènes de 1674 (Julián de Paredes) et 1676 (Ioseph Fernández de Buendía), qui contiennent des différences notables non signalées auparavant par les critiques. Nous proposons également une analyse littéraire et culturelle de la Sentinelle, utilisant l'appareil de la tératologie afin d'identifier et de reconnaître son Juif comme un monstre plutôt qu'un être humain. Ce passage d'homme à bête a eu de graves conséquences pour les victimes de la campagne de répression religieuse menée par le Saint-Office, mais il a également touché les catholiques qui se sont vus dans le rôle de héros, contraints d'effacer toute trace de la culture hébraïque de son pays natal. Nous considérons la possibilité que l'expérience juive dans la péninsule ibérique soit, à un niveau plus fondamental, une histoire de monstres, et que la caractérisation du Juif dans la Sentinelle soit révélatrice d'une telle histoire. Dans le premier chapitre, nous présentons Torrejoncillo et son livre dans son contexte historique, ainsi que l'influence de l'antisémitisme en Espagne avant la publication de la Sentinelle et la structure de l'ouvrage lui-même. Le chapitre 2 explore les éléments centraux de la tératologie et de la monstruosité, que Torrejoncillo utilisera pour fabriquer son juif monstrueux. Basé sur des textes théoriques de Cohen, Kristeva et Befu, l'altérité, l'abjection, l'hybridité et l'évasion sont quelques-uns des concepts d'ancrage, chacun ayant un rôle unique et récurrent dans la construction des monstres de l'âge classique au 21e siècle. Enfin, au chapitre 3, nous appliquons ce qui a été élaboré sur le monstre et ses fondements culturels et théoriques à la figure juive de la Sentinelle. / This thesis explores the characterization and role of the Jew in one of the most polemical antisemitic texts from seventeenth-century Spain: the Centinela contra judíos, by the Franciscan friar Francisco de Torrejoncillo. This book was widely printed and read in its time, not only in the original Spanish but in Portuguese translation as well, with thirteen individual printings between 1674 and 1748. Nevertheless, scholarship on the Centinela has been severely lacking to date, with no modern academic version in Spanish of the text to speak of, and no literary criticism done on the book at all. Those who wish to read the Centinela itself will find only raw copies of the centuries-old originals, scanned in and uploaded to the National Library of Spain’s website, with none of the annotations, citations, and explanations necessary to understand it. Furthermore, just one researcher, François Soyer, has produced any detailed scholarly analysis of the Centinela at all, which includes a translation of the 1676 version into English with commentary and footnotes. However, the entirely historical focus of his work, combined with his choice to write for an anglophone readership, presents an obstacle for the Spanish-speaking reader, and indeed for bilingual readers more interested in approaching the Centinela from a literary perspective. By means of the first annotated transcription of the Centinela in modern standard Spanish, we now provide a scholarly text accessible to Spanish speakers who either cannot read Soyer’s English translation, or would prefer to read and analyze Fray Francisco’s book in the language that it was originally written in. We also provide literary criticism and analysis of the same, using a teratological approach based on the writings of Kristeva, Cohen, and Befu, that identifies the Jew in the Centinela as a monster instead of a human being. This change from person to beast carried grave consequences for both the victims of religious and ethnic oppression during the Inquisition and those who sought to remove all vestiges of Hebrew culture from the Spanish homeland. We consider the possibility that the Jewish experience in Spain is, at its heart, a history of and about monsters, and that the characterization of the Jew in Fray Francisco’s book is indicative of this history. The first chapter of three in our analysis presents the Centinela in its historical context, touching on Torrejoncillo’s contemporaries, the influence of antisemitism in Spain prior to the book’s publication, and the structure of the work itself. Chapter 2 explores historical and contemporary fundamentals of monster theory, the building blocks with which Torrejoncillo will build his monstrous Jew. Otherness, abjection, hybridity, and escapism are central concepts in this chapter, among several others, each having a unique yet recurring role in the construction of monsters from antiquity to the present time. Finally, in chapter 3, we apply what we now understand about the monster and its theoretical and cultural underpinnings to the Jewish figure in the Centinela.