Book: SEPHARDI FAMILY LIFE IN THE EARLY MODERN DIASPORA by Julia R. Lieberman

Groundbreaking essays on Sephardic Jewish families in the Ottoman Empire and Western Sephardic communities

This collection of essays examines an important and under-studied topic in early modern Jewish social history—the family life of Sephardi Jewish families in the Ottoman Empire. At the height of its power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire spanned three continents, controlling much of southeastern Europe, western Asia, and North Africa. Thousands of Jewish families that had been expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century created communities in these far-flung locations—communities that were very different from those of Ashkenazi Jews in the same period.

The authors of these essays use the lens of domestic life to illuminate the diversity of the post-Inquisition Sephardi Jewish experience, enabling readers to enter into little-known and little-studied Jewish historical episodes.

Endorsements:
“Professor Lieberman has edited six thoroughly referenced and stimulating articles on Sephardi life, both in the Ottoman Empire and in the Western Sephardi communities which were founded by refugees from the Inquisition. Most of the articles deal with a range of new situations arising from women’s lives, sometimes because of rabbinical disagreements between the newcomers from Spain and the existing Jewish communities in the Ottoman world, at others because of particular issues created by divorce and separation, while yet others emerged from women’s new position in modern, commercial societies.”

—Michael Alpert, Professor Emeritus of the Modern and Contemporary History of Spain, University of Westminster.

JULIA R. LIEBERMAN is associate professor of Spanish and International Studies, St. Louis University.

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: What is a Family?
• Reconstructing Sephardi Family Life in the Ottoman Empire: The Exiles of 1492
• Communal Pride and Feminine Virtue: “Suspecting Sivlonot” in the Jewish Communities of the Ottoman Empire in the Early Sixteenth Century – Hannah Davidson
• Mothers and Children as Seen by Sixteenth-Century Rabbis in the Ottoman Empire – Ruth Lamdan
• Western Sephardi Households: Women, Children, and Life-Cycle Events
• Religious Space, Gender, and Power in the Sephardi Diaspora: The Return to Judaism of New Christian Men and Women in Livorno and Pisa – Cristina Galasso
• Childhood and Family among the Western Sephardim in the Seventeenth Century – Julia R. Lieberman
• Sephardi Women in Holland’s Golden Age – Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld
• Judeoconverso Families in the Diaspora: Cultural Commuting between Christianity and Judaism
• Researching the Childhood of “New Jews” of the Western Sephardi Diaspora in Light of Recent Historiography – David Graizbord
• Glossary
• List of Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index

Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora
Julia R. Lieberman, ed.; Tirsah Levie Bernfeld, contrib.; Hannah Davidson, contrib.; Cristina Galasso, contrib.; David Graizbord, contrib.

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Formats:
Hardcover 
Paperback

HBI Series on Jewish Women
Brandeis University Press
2010 • 304 pp. 5 maps. 6 x 9″
Jewish Studies / Women’s Studies
Publisher: Brandeis (December 14, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1584659165
ISBN-13: 978-1584659167