Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardi Legacy sets out to summarize the monumental legacy of a Jewish community that resided within the historical boundaries of Spain for some fifteen hundred years. Many chapters evaluate the contribution of Sephardi Jewry to the renaissance of Hebrew Language and science. These as well as many issues in Jewish communal life, have been analyzed and evaluated both in the context of Spain prior to the Expulsion and in the various settings where the exiles settled and formed new social patterns. The thirty-eight chapters which make up the work provide guidelines which the student or interested reader may utilize to gain a deeper understanding of the essence of Sephardi Jewry in the basis of its glorious past and heritage.

Sephardic and Ashkenazic Judaism have long been studied separately. Yet, scholars are becoming ever more aware of the need to merge them into a single field of Jewish Studies. This volume opens new perspectives and bridges traditional gaps. The authors are not simply contributing to their respective fields of Sephardic or Ashkenazic Studies. Rather, they all include both Sephardic and Ashkenazic perspectives as they reflect on different aspects of encounters and reconsider traditional narratives. Subjects range from medieval and early modern Sephardic and Ashkenazic constructions of identities, influences, and entanglements in the fields of religious art, halakhah, kabbalah, messianism, and charity to modern Ashkenazic Sephardism and Sephardic admiration for Ashkenazic culture. For reasons of coherency, the contributions all focus on European contexts between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries.

This volume contains fifteen articles on the communal, social, and intellectual life of medieval Jewry in Islamic lands. The book is divided into three parts. Part I, 'Communities and Their Leaders' is devoted to the old Babylonian center in the East and the Andalusian community in the West. Part II, 'Self-Perceptions and Attitudes Towards Others' investigates the ways in which medieval Jews living under Islam viewed their gentile neighbours and expressed their own identity. Part III, 'Religious Philosophy, Mysticism, and Spirituality in Islam and Judaism' explores the impact of Islamic thought on the Jewish intellectual tradition. The collection depicts a civilization at once unified and diverse, revealing both consistent patterns of leadership and scholarship as well as distinctively local identities and collective memories.

The Reader's Guide to Judaism is a survey of English-language translations of the most important primary texts in the Jewish tradition. The field is assessed in some 470 essays discussing individuals (Martin Buber, Gluckel of Hameln), literature (Genesis, Ladino Literature), thought and beliefs (Holiness, Bioethics), practice (Dietary Laws, Passover), history (Venice, Baghdadi Jews of India), and arts and material culture (Synagogue Architecture, Costume). The emphasis is on Judaism, rather than on Jewish studies more broadly.

The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 gave rise to a series of rich, diverse diasporas that were interconnected through a common vision and joie de vivre. The exodus took these Sephardim to other European countries; to North Africa, Asia Minor, and South America; and, eventually, to the American colonies. In each community new literary and artistic forms grew out of the melding of their Judeo-Spanish legacy with the cultures of their host countries, and that process has continued to the present day. This multilingual tradition brought with it both opportunities and challenges that will resonate within any contemporary culture: the status of minorities within the larger society; the tension between a civil, democratic tradition and the anti-Semitism ready to undermine it; and the opposing forces of religion and secularism. Ilan Stavans has been described by The Washington Post as “Latin America’s liveliest and boldest critic and most innovative cultural enthusiast.” And the Forward calls him “a maverick intellectual whose canonical work has already produced a whole array of marvels that are redefining Jewishness.” This new anthology contains fiction, memoirs, essays, and poetry from twenty-eight writers who span more than 150 years. Included are Emma Lazarus’s legendary poem “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty; the hypnotizing prose of Greece-born, Switzerland-based Albert Cohen; Nobel—Prize winner Elias Canetti’s ruminations on Europe before World War II; Albert Memmi’s identity quest as an Arab Jew in France; Primo Levi’s testimony on the Holocaust; and A. B. Yehoshua’s epic stories set in Israel today. When read together, these explorations offer an astonishingly incisive collective portrait of the “other Jews,” Sephardim who long for la España perdida, their lost ancestral home, even as they create a vibrant, multifaceted literary tradition in exile.