Welcome
Spanish and Portuguese Jewry is a noble tradition that emerged in the early modern period, when Iberian conversos began to shed their Catholicism in mostly Protestant countries. Drawing on Hispanic social constructs and memory, they rebuilt an exciting new Jewish civilization in Western Europe and the New World, inviting their brethren to join them in the fanfare of rejudaizing. As their business interests spread through an increasingly global economy, they founded new communities around the Atlantic, adopting the solemn pageantry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries along the way. The result was a cosmopolitan and highly cultured international civilization, which continues to survive today in spite of its many tragic reverses over the past four centuries.
This website is devoted to making the historiography of these "Western Sephardim" and their world more accessible to English speakers. From both within the community and without, there is an appetite for knowledge about Spanish and Portuguese Jews, and it could be fed with an organized, public presentation of source material. Since the number of active Western Sephardic synagogues is small, books are the easiest point of entry for many, and this site will steadily create reviews of some of the principal treatises in the field. Like all pet projects of the gainfully employed, its progress will be slow, but we hope that in the long run it will be built up to the useful resource that we believe it has the potential to be!
This website is devoted to making the historiography of these "Western Sephardim" and their world more accessible to English speakers. From both within the community and without, there is an appetite for knowledge about Spanish and Portuguese Jews, and it could be fed with an organized, public presentation of source material. Since the number of active Western Sephardic synagogues is small, books are the easiest point of entry for many, and this site will steadily create reviews of some of the principal treatises in the field. Like all pet projects of the gainfully employed, its progress will be slow, but we hope that in the long run it will be built up to the useful resource that we believe it has the potential to be!
Schola Spagnola – Venice, 1580
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The Esnoga – Amsterdam, 1675
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Bevis Marks – London, 1701
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