Sephardic Trajectories brings together scholars of Ottoman history and Jewish studies to discuss how family heirlooms, papers, and memorabilia help us conceptualize the complex process of migration from the Ottoman Empire to the United States. To consider the shared significance of family archives in both the United States and in Ottoman lands, the volume takes as starting point the formation of the Sephardic Studies Digital Collection at the University of Washington, a community-led archive and the world's first major digital repository of archival documents and recordings related to the Sephardic Jews of the Mediterranean world. Contributors reflect on the role of private collections and material objects in studying the Sephardi past, presenting case studies of Sephardic music and literature alongside discussions of the role of new media, digitization projects, investigative podcasts, and family memorabilia in preserving Ottoman Sephardic culture.

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.

Named one of the best books of 2019 by The Economist and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. A National Jewish Book Award finalist. "A superb and touching book about the frailty of ties that hold together places and people." --The New York Times Book Review An award-winning historian shares the true story of a frayed and diasporic Sephardic Jewish family preserved in thousands of letters For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew the borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members soon moved across boundaries and hemispheres, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the clan, eradicating whole branches of the family tree. In Family Papers, the prizewinning Sephardic historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein uses the family’s correspondence to tell the story of their journey across the arc of a century and the breadth of the globe. They wrote to share grief and to reveal secrets, to propose marriage and to plan for divorce, to maintain connection. They wrote because they were family. And years after they frayed, Stein discovers, what remains solid is the fragile tissue that once held them together: neither blood nor belief, but papers. With meticulous research and care, Stein uses the Levys' letters to tell not only their history, but the history of Sephardic Jews in the twentieth century.

In the last few years, the fields of Sephardic and Mizrahi Studies have grown significantly, thanks to new publications which take into consideration unexplored aspects of the history, literature and identity of modern Middle Eastern and North African Jews. However, few of these studies abandoned the Diaspora/Israel dichotomy and analysed the Jews who moved to Israel and those that settled elsewhere as part of a new, diverse and interconnected diaspora. Contemporary Sephardic and Mizrahi Literature argues that the literary texts produced by Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who migrated from the Middle East and North Africa in the 1950s and afterwards, should be considered as part of a transnational arena, in which forms of Jewish diasporism and postcolonial displacement interweave. Through an original perspective that focuses on novelists, poets, professional and amateur writers – from the Israeli poets Erez Biton and Shva Salhoov to Francophone authors such as Chochana Boukhobza, Ami Bouganim and Serge Moati – the book explains that these Sephardic and Mizrahi authors are part of a global literary diaspora at the crossroads of past Arab legacies, new national identities and persistent feelings of Jewishness. Some of the chapters emphasise how the Sephardic and Mizrahi past and present identities are narrated, how generational and ethno-national issues are taken into account and which linguistic and stylistic strategies the authors adopted. Other chapters focus more explicitly on how the relations between national societies and different Jewish migrant communities are narrated, both in today’s Israel and in the diaspora. The book helps to bridge the gap between Hebrew and postcolonial literature, and opens up new perspectives on Sephardic and Mizrahi literature. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of Jewish and Postcolonial Studies and Comparative Literature

This volume contributes to the growing field of Early Modern Jewish Atlantic History, while stimulating new discussions at the interface between Jewish Studies and Postcolonial Studies. It is a collection of substantive, sophisticated and variegated essays, combining case studies with theoretical reflections, organized into three sections: race and blood, metropoles and colonies, and history and memory. Twelve chapters treat converso slave traders, race and early Afro-Portuguese relations in West Africa, Sephardim and people of color in nineteenth-century Curaçao, Portuguese converso/Sephardic imperialist behavior, Caspar Barlaeus’ attitude toward Jews in the Sephardic Atlantic, Jewish-Creole historiography in eighteenth-century Suriname, Savannah’s eighteenth-century Sephardic community in an Altantic setting, Freemasonry and Sephardim in the British Empire, the figure of Columbus in popular literature about the Caribbean, key works of Caribbean postcolonial literature on Sephardim, the holocaust, slavery and race, Canadian Jewish identity in the reception history of Esther Brandeau/Jacques La Fargue and Moroccan-Jewish memories of a sixteenth-century Portuguese military defeat.

This volume explores the global transformations of contemporary Jewishness, which give renewed meaning to identity, tradition, and politics in our post secular world.

The volume offers an overview of the diverse Jewish experiences in Southeastern Europe from the 19th to the 21st centuries, and the various forms and strategies of their representation in literature, the arts, historiography and philosophy. Southeastern Europe is characterized by a high degree of ethnical, religious and cultural diversity. Jews, whether Sephardim, Ashkenazim or Romaniots – settling there in different periods – experienced divergent life worlds which engendered rich cultural production. Though recent scholarly and popular interest in this heterogeneous region has grown impressively, Jewish cultural production is still an under-researched area. The volume offers an overview of the diverse Jewish experiences in Southeastern Europe from the 19th to the 21st centuries, and the various forms and strategies of their representation in literature, the arts, historiography and philosophy, thus creating a dialogue between Jewish studies, Balkan studies, and current literary and cultural theories.