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Mediterranean Networks: Literature of the Sephardic Mediterranean David Wacks Professor of Spanish University of Oregon

NEH Summer Institute for College Instructors Thresholds of Change: Modernity and Transformation in the Mediterranean 1400-1700

Email: [email protected] Twitter: @davidwacks Web: davidwacks.uoregon.edu

Mediterranean Studies At this point in the Institute you all have a pretty good idea of what Mediterranean studies is all about, but today I’d like to zoom in on one particular corner of the field at the intersection of literary studies and Iberian/Sephardic studies. I am going to speak about Sephardic literature as a Mediterranean cultural phenomenon, and in particular as a network of cultural production. I am coming at the question of the Mediterranean from Hispanic Studies, and to a lesser extent, as I will explain, from Jewish studies, but primarily as a scholar of language and literature, and in particular as a scholar employed in a department of Romance Languages. In these remarks, I’d like to touch on the question of Mediterranean Literature as a category of scholarly inquiry, then focus on the history of Jews in the Iberian Peninsula and in diaspora from it during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with particular attention to language and literary practice. Finally, we’ll have a look at a few examples of works of literature written, translated and printed by Sephardic Jews throughout the Mediterranean and think about how this literary activity is the product of a social network. Mediterranean studies has been dominated by Classicists and historians of the medieval and early modern periods. Ancient archaeology and anthropology were quicker to respond to Horden and Purcell’s challenge than literary scholarship, a field mostly organized into departments of national languages whose practitioners are trained to focus on a single language and national tradition (Akbari 4–5; Horden and Purcell). Literary scholars have come late to the party, and so Mediterranean Literature

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is only now emerging as a category, thanks to the efforts of Sharon Kinoshita, Karla Mallette, Suzanne Akbari, and others. Nearly all of these scholars work in departments of national literatures, but build on the work of Horden and Purcell and others in order to privilege the Mediterranean context of the traditions they study and their connections to authors, works, and practices normally studied in connection to other, national literatures. This approach is a natural fit for someone who works, for example, on medieval classical languages (such as Hebrew and Classical Arabic) that were used throughout the region. Part of the difficulty in mobilizing literary scholars to adopt a Mediterranean approach is overcoming not only the institutional cultures of departments of national languages and literatures, but also the sheer linguistic complexity of the region. Again, the legacy of national philology pushes anything that does not support a national linguistic narrative to the margins. The Mediterranean, a space of connectivity and contact across languages, religions, and ethnic cultures, produced literary and linguistic practices, such as aljamiado (Iberian Romance written in Arabic or Hebrew script) that are “puzzling curiosities to modern eyes but were in fact unexceptional in the multilingual, multi-confessional landscape of the medieval Mediterranean” (Kinoshita, “Mediterranean Literature” 315). The resulting kaleidoscope of medieval Mediterranean literary and linguistic practice, though fascinating and ripe with literary critical possibility, is daunting: who can learn all those languages? María Rosa Menocal, writing about the Iberian question, tells us that translations are “vital” in studying Mediterranean literature (Menocal). Her suggestion goes very much against the grain of national philologies’ role as guardian of linguistic boundaries: think of the work that goes into enforcing the distinction between ‘language’ and ‘dialect.’ However, in many cases the ideologies that guide national philologies do not bear close scrutiny. Take for example, Sharon Kinoshita’s observation that epic poems such as the Poem of the Cid or the Song of Roland, canonized in modernity as foundational national works, have a manuscript record that is very poor in comparison with that of works of wisdom literature in translation from Eastern traditions such as Kalila and Dimna or Sendebar. She writes: “versions of wisdom literature like the Seven Sages survive in the dozens, while the Poem of the Cid or the Song of Roland come down to us in a single exemplar” (Kinoshita, “Negotiating” 35–36). Kinoshita’s comments go right to the center of the problem. The Mediterranean studies approach, as you well know by now, reframes the study of history and culture with an approach defined not by national histories and literatures, but rather by geography, and regional cultural practices and historical processes. It focuses not on ‘roots,’ as have national literatures and histories, but on routes, itineraries, crossings, exchanges, and the types of cultural production and interaction that Mediterranean trade, travel, and migration make possible. Brian Catlos has remarked that Mediterranean studies focuses on the “commonality of culture…despite the region’s ethno-culturally fractured nature” (Catlos 5). Thinking about the interconnectedness of Mediterranean geography and cultural practice allows us to understand local histories and cultural practices as part of broader networks that span languages, religions, ethnic identities, and cultural practices. Under the influence of the nationalist ideologies of the nineteenth-century scholars who shaped the academic fields in which we work, we tend to perceive (and teach) these histories and cultures in large part as national traditions,

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or at best as part of a “Western” (meaning Latin Christian or western European) civilization. However, the people whose lives and works we study understood their world in ways that do not resemble or coincide with the categories of inquiry developed by modern academic study. According to Catlos, deprivileging these categories allows “developments that seem anomalous, exceptional, or inexplicable when viewed through the narrow lens of one religio-cultural tradition, [to] suddenly make sense when viewed from the perspective of a broader interconnected and interdependent Mediterranean” (Catlos 14). What, then, does Mediterranean studies have to offer to literary criticism? As critics such as Suzanne Akbari, Sharon Kinoshita (“Medieval Mediterranean Literature”; “Mediterranean Literature”; “Negotiating”), Karla Mallette (Sicily; “Boustrophedon”; “Lingua Franca”), Michelle Hamilton and Núria Silleras-Fernández (Hamilton and Silleras-Fernández) have written, reading the literature of the Mediterranean region as Mediterranean Literature can be a corrective to the parochialism of national philologies. I have written elsewhere in favor of a multilingual and multiconfessional approach to Medieval Iberian literature, arguing that it might help to get us closer to how medieval Iberians experienced the literary practice of their own time and place, rather than persist in some of the habits we have learned from national philology that make this less likely (Wacks, Framing Iberia 11). Sharon Kinoshita expands this argument for the corpus of Mediterranean literature as a whole. According to her, this approach “expands the limits of our textual world and provides us with a repertoire of different questions that bespeak the connectivity…of the medieval Mediterranean, getting us (I would like to think) closer to the mentalities of the cultures and agents that produced the texts we read” (Kinoshita, “Negotiating” 46). This approach, as we will see, is very productive for studying Sephardic literary practice, or any other diasporic literature. Diasporic cultures are a bad fit for a national languages approach: their production is not limited to a single territory, not tied to a single court, and intersect with a number of other classical and vernacular languages. For example: though Sephardic Spanish is linguistically a Romance language, and perfectly intelligible to most Spanish speakers, it is written in Hebrew letters, contains numerous loanwords from Hebrew, Arabic, and Turkish. Works in Sephardic Spanish contain constant references to Jewish law, history, and rabbinic culture with which scholars of Hispanic Studies are not typically familiar. The same could be said for Aljamiado literature, the vernacular literature of Spanish-speaking Muslims in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These languages existed outside of official Spanish culture and so Modern Hispanism tends to ignore them or at best minimize their importance.

Iberian literatures Before I get into the question of Sephardic Jews and the Mediterranean context of Sephardic literature, I’d like to speak for a moment to the question of Iberian culture in general in the Mediterranean context. The cultures of the Iberian Peninsula are very much both in and of the Iberian. That is, they are physically and culturally located in the Mediterranean region, and draw on materials and traditions shared throughout the region. Antiquity connected Iberia with metropoles in Phoenicia, Rome, Byzantium, and Africa. Medieval Iberian monarchs ruled over territories across the Mediterranean: the

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Balearics, Sardinia, Sicily, Naples and southern Italy, parts of the Maghrib, Ifriqiyya, and Greece, had outposts in ports across the Islamic Mediterranean, and claimed (successfully, or not) authority over North Africa and the then-ephemeral Kingdom of Jerusalem. Members of their court and aristocracy sojourned or settled permanently in many of these places. Trade, especially the ports of Barcelona, Palma, Valencia, and Málaga, but historically Almería and Cartagena as well, connected Iberian populations and markets with all points of the Mediterranean. There is a lot about medieval Iberian culture that fits with this approach: the coexistence of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, of Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Ibero- Romance vernaculars, of the routes of material culture, human migration, and ideas for which the Iberian ports were important sites, and for the various migrations and imperialisms (Phoenician, Celtic, Roman, Jewish, Carthaginian, Visigothic, Islamic, Andalusi, Sephardic, Castilian) that shaped medieval Iberian society and that Iberian kingdoms sought to shape (Africa, Eastern Mediterranean). For this reason, Suzanne Akbari has called Iberia “a Mediterranean in microcosm, a polity and a history unimaginable without the broader backdrop of Mediterranean history” (Akbari 10). Recent work by scholars across a number of disciplines responds to this approach to Iberia in the Mediterranean context. Many such studies focus on the Crown of Aragon, whose historical footprint in the Mediterranean is vast and better documented in the Archives of the Crown of Aragon in Barcelona than those of Granada, Castile, or the other medieval kingdoms of the Peninsula. Literary scholars have only recently begun to take up the challenge of theorizing a Mediterranean literature of Iberia. A number of those brought together in the pioneering 2015 volume edited by Michelle M. Hamilton and Núria Silleras-Fernández, In and of the Mediterranean: Medieval and Early Modern Studies are explicit in addressing Iberian literature as both in and of the Mediterranean region; others work independently on topics such as the representation of Byzantium by medieval Iberian travelers (Bravo García), the Holy Land in the work of Catalan troubadours (Paterson), and descriptions of eastern cities by Iberian travelers (Rodilla León). By and large, as Suzanne Akbari points out, scholars of Iberian literature “have not responded coherently, however, to the fundamental provocation of Mediterranean Studies to work beyond the category of the modern nation, to see local microhistories and the macrohistory of the sea in indissoluble and essential continuity” (Akbari 10). Scholars of Sephardic and other diasporic cultures, however, are at a distinct advantage here. Because diasporic cultures are distributed among territories that now represent various different nation states, groups such as Jews and Armenians are a natural subject for critical approaches that challenge national paradigms. But Sephardic Jews were not always in a diaspora of their own, and because I am primarily a medievalist, before we speak of the Sephardic diaspora in early modernity I’d like to give a bit of background on the cultural history of the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, and then move on to their expulsion and dispersal throughout the Mediterranean. The earliest evidence of Jewish settlement on the Iberian Peninsula dates to the Early Roman period, but tradition holds that Jews arrived there after the Babylonian captivity some five centuries prior. The Hebrew word Sefarad traditionally refers to the Iberia Peninsula, but more likely originally referred to an area in Asia Minor, and only later came to be associated with the Peninsula. Sources on Roman-era Iberian Jewry

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are sparse but we know they were involved in Mediterranean trade and left behind ossiaries, a few inscriptions, and other evidence of organized life. The Visigothic period following Roman rule was a darker time for Iberian Jewry, and the legend that Iberian Jews welcomed Muslim invaders in the early eighth century was probably only slightly exaggerated. Jewish fortunes under Islam in the Peninsula improved considerably, thanks in part to the Islamic doctrine of dhimma or protected minority status granted to Christians and Jews in Islamic society. This allowed them to organize their own affairs and live relatively free of persecution, though ultimately they were considered second- class citizens by the Muslim ruling class. Nonetheless, and keeping in mind that the vast majority of Jews, and everyone else for that matter, were quite poor, individual Jews managed to occupy very high positions at court. Under the Caliph Abd al-Rahman I in the tenth century, for example, the Jewish courtier Hasdai ibn Shaprut served as court physician and diplomat. In the following century, Shmuel Hanagid Naghrela served King Habbus of Granada as wazir and general of the Granadan army. In the transition to Christian rule Jewish courtiers made themselves useful as interpreters, tax farmers, court physicians, and the like. Even after the tide began to turn against Iberian Jews in the fourteenth century, certain Jews remained very influential at court. All the while, Jewish merchants and rabbis participated in complex and wide-ranging networks in the Mediterranean and beyond, as documents from the Cairo Geniza continue to demonstrate. Jewish fortunes on the Peninsula went, on the balance, gradually downhill between 1150 and 1350, culminating in the infamous pogroms that swept the Peninsula in the summer of 1391. This widespread popular violence triggered a wave of mass conversions to Catholicism and created a class of conversos or New Christians who were technically Christian, but whose spiritual beliefs and practices varied wildly and produced some very innovative hybrid forms. Those Jews who chose to leave Spain rather than to convert were soon joined by Portuguese Jews, expelled five years later in 1497, and settled in communities in North Africa, Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, Italy, and beyond. The Ottoman Sultan Bayazid II is said (legendarily) to have remarked (and I paraphrase), “how foolish these Catholic Monarchs, who impoverish themselves by sending away their Jews, and send them to me, making me rich in the process!” (Aboab 304–05). In some cases they joined other Sepharadim who had left in the previous century on the heels of the pogroms of 1391. In others, they joined communities of North African, Romaniote (Greek-speaking, formerly Byzantine), and other Jews, often overwhelming and assimilating the established communities by their numbers and cultural prestige. Contemporary sources bear out this characterization of the Sepharadim as the socially and culturally dominant group within Ottoman Jewry, imposing their liturgy, rabbinic jurisprudence, cuisine, language, and social customs on the wider community. Writing in 1509, Rabbi Moses Aroquis of Salonica bears witness to this phenomenon:

It is well known that the Sepharadim and their scholars in this empire, together with the other communities that have joined them, make up the majority, may the lord be praised. To them alone the land was given, and they are its glory and its splendor and its magnificence, enlightening the land and its inhabitants. Who deserves to order them about? All these

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places too should be considered as ours, and it is fitting that the small number of early inhabitants of the empire observe all our religious customs… (Hacker 111)

Neither was it lost on outside observers such as Nicholas de Nicolay (1517–1583), a French traveler and diplomat who marveled at the extent of the Sephardic economic domination of the Ottoman scene:

[The Jews] have amongst them workmen of all artes and handicraftes moste excellent, and specially of the Maranes [Marranos] of late banished and driven out of Spaine and Portugale, who to the great detriment and damage of the Christianitie, have taught the Turkes divers inventions, craftes and engines of warre, as to make artillerie, harquebuses, gunne powder, shot, and other munitions: they have also there set up printing, not before seen in those countries, by the which in faire characters they put in light divers bookes in divers languages, as Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and the Hebrew tongue, beeing too them naturall, but are not permitted to print the Turkie or Arabic tongue. (Nicolay 93a; Levy 26)

This new diaspora of Sepharadim throughout the Mediterranean and beyond created new social, commercial, and intellectual phenomena. Socially, the Sepharadim, who were on the whole more educated, had more experience working at court, and were better connected in the region, came to displace Jewish elites of the communities where they settled. Intellectually, they brought a very high level of rabbinic and secular learning, including knowledge of the literatures and histories of the courts of the West and perhaps most importantly for our discussion, established printing presses in Italy and the Ottoman empire that diffused works of rabbinic and other literature, thus transforming the Jewish intellectual scene of the Mediterranean. The diaspora of Sephardic rabbis injected new life into communities but also caused controversies surrounding ritual, liturgy, and rabbinic jurisprudence (Ray). But, as we will see, for a literary scholar the diaspora was a bonanza, and gave rise to new forms of literature, new uses of Hebrew and Jewish vernaculars, and the broad transmission and diffusion of works across religious, linguistic, and regional lines. The question of language is very much at the center of our discussion of literature. In their new homes in Tetouan, Izmir, Salonica, and elsewhere, Sepharadim continued to speak their language. What exactly we should call this language has been a bone of contention between specialists, though the Sepharadim themselves seem less troubled by this question, content to refer to it variously as judezmo, ladino, haketia, muestro español, or spanyolit (Bunis 402; Díaz Mas 74–75). By any name –why not call it Sephardic Spanish, or the variety of Spanish spoken in the Sephardic world– their language was primarily medieval Castilian, which came to dominate and assimilate the other Ibero-Romance dialects spoken by the exiles, who came from all areas of the Peninsula (Attig 836). Memories of this early linguistic diversity persist in Sephardic folklore, in a rhyme collected in the twentieth century describing the unintelligible (to Castilian speakers) dialect of the Galician exiles: “somos gallegos, no nos entemdemos [sic]” (‘We’re Galicians, we don’t even understand each other!’) (Nehama 27). To this

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base of medieval Castilian, the Sepharadim added bits of Hebrew drawn from ritual and communal life, Arabisms, Turkish loan words, Italian and French influences (Díaz Mas 89–90). A well-documented corpus of Sephardic folklore and written literature demonstrates that Sephardic Spanish, written in Hebrew letters until the twentieth century, was a very productive language for centuries until its decline in the twentieth century. While Hebrew continued to be the prestige literary language in most Sephardic communities into modernity (as it had been in Spain), Sephardic authors began to experiment with Spanish as a literary language as early as the fifteenth century, when they translated parts of the liturgy and, in one case, the Takkanot of Valladolid, the Jewish community charter, into Spanish for the benefit of community members who did not read Hebrew (Moreno Koch). A late fifteenth-century aljamiado (Spanish written in Hebrew letters) manuscript, from Spain or Italy, Parma 2666, is a compilation of learned texts including courtly Spanish cancionero poetry, Aristotelian philosophy, and other genres typical of the Spanish court (Hamilton). This manuscript demonstrates the extent to which some Jews had begun to use Spanish as a language of learning within the Jewish community. This was far from the norm in most Ottoman Sephardic press, in which Hebrew titles dominated, despite the viability of Sephardic Spanish as a vernacular. One area of religious life in which the Sepharadim did use written Spanish was in their responsa, or legal decisions. Annette Benaim has edited a sizable corpus of such responsa written in Sephardic Spanish, and explains Spanish enjoyed sufficient prestige in the Ottoman Jewish communities to be used in contexts normally reserved for Rabbinic Hebrew (Benaim 18). A recent discovery from the Cairo Genizah demonstrates that this use of the vernacular had already begun on the Peninsula in the fifteenth century (Arad and Glick). The prestige Spanish enjoyed in the Sephardic world made possible its development as a literary language as well. While scholars tend to locate the origins of Sephardic Spanish literature in the eighteenth century with the publication of the Biblical commentary Meam Loez by Rabbi Isaac Huli, Olga Borovaya has recently shown that there is a significant corpus of Spanish-language publications by Sephardic authors working in the Ottoman Empire beginning in the sixteenth century. These include works of geography, such as Moses Almosnino’s Grandezas de Constantinopla, (later also published in Spain in Roman characters for an ostensibly Christian audience), Almosnino’s compilation of Aristotelian philosophy, Regimiento de la vida (Salonika, 1564) (Almosnino, Regimiento de la vida Tratado de los suenyos), the anonymous religious polemic Fuente clara (Salonica ca. 1595) (Romeu Ferré) and Mesa de el alma (Salonica, 1568, printed in Venice 1602) (Karo), an abridged translation of Rabbi Joseph Karo’s Hebrew Talmudic digest, the Shulkhan Arukh (Venice, 1565) (Borovaya, “Ladino” 45; Borovaya, Beginnings). Fuente clara and other works were published to cater to recently arrived conversos as yet ignorant of Hebrew. These and other travelers coming from Spain brought Spanish books that circulated in the Sephardic community and thus created linguistic and literary connections to the Peninsular linguistic communities (Borovaya, Epistles). S.D. Goitein and others established long ago that Iberian Jews formed part of a complex social, religious, and commercial Mediterranean network. The documents he

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and others have studied from the Cairo Geniza, that is the book graveyard of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo, reveal this world, and his findings are brought together in his multivolume work, A Mediterranean Jewish Society (Goitein). Scholars continue to explore this world and continue to unearth very interesting material relevant to Iberian Jews and their relations with their counterparts throughout the Mediterranean. Sources on the experience of the Sephardic communities limit themselves primarily to the case of Jewish books published in Hebrew, but indicate the high level of interconnectedness that the international Jewish press made possible (Ruderman 102). What we do know is that Sephardic writers working both in Italy and in the Ottoman Empire made translations of popular Spanish works such Fernando de Rojas’ Celestina, Rodríguez de Montalvo’s Amadís, and Franciso López de Gómara’s Historia de las Indias into Hebrew. It is possible that they made these translations for the benefit of non-Sephardic Jews who read Hebrew (and not Spanish), but that they themselves were regular readers of the original Spanish titles coming out of Amsterdam, Venice, or Spain itself, rabbinic objections notwithstanding (Wacks, “Translation”). One testimony is the complaint of Rabbi Menahem di Lunzano, who, during an extended stay in Jerusalem, chastizes the Sephardic Jews there for reading Amadís de Gaula (Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, 1507) and Palmerín de Oliva (Francisco Vázquez, 1511) (blockbuster chivalric novels in Spain) on the Sabbath instead of books of Jewish learning (Wacks, Double Diaspora 197–98). Thousands of Iberian Jews and conversos poured into the Ottoman Empire, beginning in the fourteenth century and steadily increasing throughout the sixteenth. In many cases the Sepharadim overwhelmed local communities and assimilated them culturally. In this way Sephardic Spanish gained numbers of new speakers who had no historical connection with Spain, mimicking the colonial expansion of Spanish in the Americas within the Ottoman Jewish context. Because Hebrew was so well established as a language of Jewish learning, the overwhelming number of books printed for Jews in the Ottoman Empire were written in Hebrew. There was, however, a steady trickle of titles in Sephardic Spanish, followed by a stream of religious literature in the nineteenth century, and a torrent of both religious and secular works in the twentieth century (Díaz Mas 132–150; Borovaya, Beginnings; Borovaya, Modern). These works written and published by Sephardic Jews did not form a closed system in any way, but were part of a series of interlocking literary systems in the region, as our examples will bear out. They were in dialogue with conversos, some of whom were bicultural and lived as Jews in Italy or the Ottoman Empire and as Christians in Spain. They were also in dialogue with established local Jewish communities, such as those in Italy and the Greek- speaking Romaniote Jews in the Ottoman Empire, as well as Arab Jews in North Africa and the very cosmopolitan Jewish populations of cities like Alexandria and Cairo. As a consequence, the works they wrote, translated, printed, and red cannot be understood without taking into account the broader Mediterranean context of literary practice. The literary production of the Sepharadim in early modernity ranged from religious texts to philosophy, poetry, histories, and popular novels. The lion’s share was published in Hebrew, but there were also titles in Spanish, Judeo-Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French. Presses in Italy published titles in Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, and very occasionally in Judeo-Spanish. Venice in particular was an important center for the Jewish print culture, and titles published there made their way throughout the Sephardic

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world. Constantinople and Salonica also became important centers, and there too Hebrew titles predominated, though there were some important exceptions in Judeo- Spanish, as we will see in our examples today as well as in our reading for tomorrow, Moses Almosnino’s Extremos y grandezas de Constantinopla. In the time remaining, I’d like to look at a set of five texts as a sample Sephardic literary network, though one that is admittedly heavily weighted toward Sephardic reception of popular Spanish literature. The first example is a thirteenth-century Hebrew work by the writer Judah al- Harizi, who was perhaps better known as the also-ran translator into Hebrew of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. Around 1200, he wrote a series of rhymed prose tales, or maqamat, in imitation of the more famous Arabic maqamat written in the previous century by al-Hariri. His book, Tahkemoni, was then brought into print in Constantinople in 1578 (Al-Harizi). The next two examples are popular novels written by Christian Spanish authors in Castilian and later translated into Hebrew. Fernando de Rojas published his novel-in- dialogue, Celestina in 1499. It was translated into Italian in 1506 and in the following year Joseph Tsarfati translated it into Hebrew, though it never saw print (Wacks, “Translation”). If the Celestina was a good example of a medieval best seller, Amadís de Gaula, published in 1507, was a straight up blockbuster. It defined the Spanish novel of chivalry and inspired countless sequels, imitations, and translations. The frenzied market for chivalric literature it created was brutally parodied by Cervantes in Don Quijote, which is full of allusions to Amadís. Like Celestina, it was translated into several languages. In 1554, Isaac Algaba published his Hebrew translation in Constantinople, which was effectively the first novel in Hebrew, though this is a bone of contention among scholars of Hebrew who would prefer to credit the Ashenazi writers of the Haskalah, or Hebrew enlightenment, with this accomplishment (Dan 188; Wacks, Double Diaspora 252 n 66). This reinforces Sharon Kinoshita’s point about how a more capacious view of literary culture, one that weights translations and original works in minor languages, produces quite different results. This is of course the age of discovery, and folks were eager to hear accounts of the Spanish and Portuguese conquests. Francisco López de Gómara wrote his account of Cortés’ conquests, titled, Historia de las Indias and published it in Spain in 1552 (López de Gómara). It was banned in Spain from 1556 forward, but in Italy, the prolific writer Yosef Hakohen, who also authored histories of Christian and Ottoman kings and of the Jewish people, capitalized on the resulting publicity, publishing his Hebrew translation in 1557 (Hakohen). In a similar vein, Rabbi Moses Almosnino of Salonica wrote a longer chronicle of Ottoman sultans, completing a a Hebrew-letter Ladino manuscript in 1567. Around 1630, Jacobo Cansino, a Jewish translator working for the Spanish crown in occupied Oran, transliterated an excerpt of the chronicle into a Latin- character edition, publishing it in Madrid in 1638 with the title Extremos y grandezas de Constantinopla, (Almosnino, Extremos) which we will read more in depth in tomorrow’s workshop. We’ll also mention one very important work of Rabbinic jurisprudence by a Sephardic author who was left Spain as a very young child, traveling through Salonica before settling in the city of Safed in what was then Northern Ottoman Palestine. Yosef

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Caro settled in Safed and was active in the well-known group of mystics and scholars that produced Isaac Luria, whose work transformed Jewish mystical practice and brought into the mainstream. Caro was also a very authoritative Talmudic scholar and wrote the still-authoritative index to the Talmud, the Shulkhan Arukh, or ‘set table,’ completing it in 1554. Three years later, it was published in Hebrew in Venice. Two years after that, in 1556 (and again in 1602), an abridged version in Judeo-Spanish, titled Shulkhan Hapanim (‘The table set with shew-breads’) was published, also in Venice (Karo).

Works Cited

Aboab, Imanuel. Nomología, o, discursos legales. Edited by Moisés Orfali Levi, Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2007. Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. “Introduction: The Persistence of Philology.” A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, edited by Suzanne Conklin Akbari, University of Toronto Press, 2013, pp. 3–24. Al-Harizi, Judah. Tahkemoni. Ovadia Sabach, 1578, http://www.hebrewbooks.org/11922. Almosnino, Moses. Extremos y grandezas de Constantinopla. Edited by Jacob Cansino, Francisco Martínez, 1638. ---. Regimiento de la vida Tratado de los suenyos: (Salonika, 1564). Edited by John Zemke, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004. Arad, Dotan, and Shumel Glick. “Texto Halájico Pre-Exílico En Aljamía Hebraico- Castellana de La Guenizá de El Cairo Por R. Jacob Campantón.” Sefarad: Revista de Estudios Hebraicos, Sefardíes y de Oriente Próximo, vol. 73, no. 2, 2013, pp. 409–21. Attig, Remy. “Did the Sephardic Jews Speak Ladino?” Bulletin of Spanish Studies, vol. 89, no. 6, 2012, pp. 831–38, doi:10.1080/14753820.2012.712320. Benaim, Annette. Sixteenth-Century Judeo-Spanish Testimonies: An Edition of Eighty- Four Testimonies from the Sephardic Responsa in the Ottoman Empire. Brill, 2012. Borovaya, Olga. “How Old Is Ladino Literature?” Sepharad as Imagined Community: Language, History, and Religion from the Early Modern Period to the 21st Century, edited by Mahir Şaul and José Ignacio Hualde, Peter Lang, 2017, pp. 43–52. ---. Modern Ladino Culture Press, Belles Lettres, and Theater in the Late Ottoman Empire. Indiana University Press, 2011. ---. Moses Almosnino’s Epistles: A Sixteenth-Century Genre of Sephardi Vernacular Literature. Vol. 6, no. 2, 2014, pp. 251–69, doi:10.1080/17546559.2013.857424. ---. The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and His Readers. Indiana University Press, 2017. Bravo García, Antonio. “La imagen de Bizancio en los viajeros medievales españoles. Notas para un nuevo comentario a sus relatos (I).” Bizancio y la Península Ibérica: De la antigüedad tardía a la edad moderna, edited by Inmaculada Pérez Martín and Pedro Bádenas de la Peña, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2004, pp. 381–436.

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Bunis, David. “The Language of the Sephardim: A Historical Overview.” Moreshet Sepharad: The Sephardic Legacy, edited by Haim Beinart, vol. 2, The Magnes Press, 1992, pp. 399–422. Catlos, Brian A. “Why the Mediterranean?” Can We Talk Mediterranean?: Conversations on an Emerging Field in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, edited by Brian A. Catlos and Sharon Kinoshita, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 1–18. Dan, Joseph. “The First Hebrew Novel: Jacob Algabe’s Amadis of Gaul [Hebrew].” Moznayim, vol. 45, 1977, pp. 181–88. Díaz Mas, Paloma. The Sephardim: The Jews from Spain. University of Chicago Press, 2007. Goitein, S. D., editor. A Mediterranean Society; The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. University of California Press, 1967. Hacker, Joseph. “The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth Century.” The Sephardi Legacy, vol. 2, Magnes Press, 1992, pp. 108–33. Hakohen, Joseph. Sefer Ha-Indiʼah Ha-Ḥadashah Ṿe-Sefer Fernando Ḳorṭeś, 1553 : Nusaḥ ʻIvri Shel Toldot Peru u-Meḳsiḳo Bi-Yede Yosef Ha-Kohen, 1568 : Ketav- Yad Shel Sifriyat Kiaḥ, Paris. Edited by Moshe Lazar, Labyrinthos, 2002. Hamilton, Michelle M. Beyond Faith: Belief, Morality and Memory in a Fifteenth-Century Judeo-Iberian Manuscript. Brill, 2014. Hamilton, Michelle M., and Núria Silleras-Fernández. “Introduction.” In and Of the Mediterranean: Medieval and Early Modern Iberian Studies, edited by Michelle M. Hamilton and Núria Silleras-Fernández, Vanderbilt University Press, 2015, pp. ix–xxvii. Horden, Peregrine, and Nicholas Purcell. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Blackwell, 2000. Karo, Yosef. Meza de El Alma. Translated by Yosef ben David Franco, Gershom Soncino, 1602, http://www.hebrewbooks.org/11642. Kinoshita, Sharon. “Medieval Mediterranean Literature.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 124, no. 2, 2009, pp. 600–08. ---. “Mediterranean Literature.” A Companion to Mediterranean History, edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp. 314–29, doi:10.1002/9781118519356.ch20. ---. “Negotiating the Corrrupting Sea: Literature in and of the Medieval Mediterranean.” Can We Talk Mediterranean?: Conversations on an Emerging Field in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, edited by Brian A. Catlos and Sharon Kinoshita, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 33–48. Levy, Avigdor. “Introduction.” The Jews of the Ottoman Empire, Darwin Press, 1994, pp. 1–150. López de Gómara, Francisco. Historia general de las Indias : “Hispania vitrix”, cuya segunda parte corresponde a la conquista de Méjico. Edited by Pilar Guibelalde, Editorial Iberia, 1954. Mallette, Karla. “Boustrophedon: Towards a Literary Theory of the Mediterranean.” A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History,

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edited by Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette, University of Toronto Press, 2013, pp. 254–66. ---. “Lingua Franca.” A Companion to Mediterranean History, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp. 330–44. ---. The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Menocal, Maria Rosa. The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History a Forgotten Heritage. 2nd ed., University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Moreno Koch, Yolanda, editor. De Iure Hispano-Hebraico. Las Taqqanot de Valladolid de 1432. Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca; Universidad de Granada, 1987. Nehama, Joseph. Histoire des Israélites de Salonique. Librairie Molho, 1935. Nicolay, Nicholas. The Navigations, Peregrinatians and Voyages, Made into Turkie by Nicholas Nicolay. Translated by T. Washington, s.n., 1585. Paterson, Linda. “James the Conqueror, the Holy Land and the Troubadours.” Cultura Neolatina: Rivista Di Filologia Romanza, vol. 71, no. 3–4, 2011, pp. 211–86. Ray, Jonathan. After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry. New York University Press, 2013. Rodilla León, María José. “Laudibus Urbium: Ciudades Orientales En Los Libros de Viajes.” Medievalia: Revista Del Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), vol. 34, 2002, pp. 3–8. Romeu Ferré, Pilar, editor. Fuente clara, (Salónica, 1595): un converso sefardí a la defensa del judaísmo y a la búsqueda de su propia fe. Tirocinio, 2007. Ruderman, David. Cultural Intermediaries: Jewish Intellectuals in Early Modern Italy. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Wacks, David A. Double Diaspora in Sephardic Literature: Jewish Cultural Production before and after 1492. Indiana University Press, 2015. ---. Framing Iberia: Maqamat and Frametale Narratives in Medieval Spain. Brill, 2007. ---. “Translation in Diaspora: Sephardic Spanish-Hebrew Translations in the Sixteenth Century.” A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, edited by César Domínguez et al., vol. 2, Benjamins, 2016, pp. 351–63.

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Judah al-Harizi, Tahkemoni

*Tahkemoni (ca. 1200) (Manuscript) Tahkemoni (1578)

Celestina

Celestina (1506) (Italian) Celestina (1499) *Celestina (1507) (Hebrew) (Castilian)

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Amadís de Gaula

Amadís de Gaula (1507) (Castilian) Amadís de Gaula (1554) (Hebrew)

Historia de las Indias

Historia de las Indias Historia de las Indias (1557) (1552) (Castilian) (Hebrew)

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Extremos y grandezas de Constantinopla

Extremos y Grandezas (1638 (Castilian)

Crónica de los reyes Otomanos (1567) (Ladino) *Extremos y Grandezas (1630) (Castilian Manuscript)

Shulkhan Arukh

Shulkhan Arukh (1557) (Hebrew)

Shulkhan Hapanim or Meza de el alma (1557) (Ladino)

*Shulkhan Arukh (ca. 1554) (Hebrew mansucript)

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Chronological Order

*Tahkemoni (ca. 1200) Celestina (1506) Celestina (1499) Amadís de Gaula (1554) Celestina (1507) Amadís de Gaula (1507) Shulkhan Arukh (1554) Tahkemoni (1578) Historia de las Indias (1552) Historia de las Indias (1556) Extremos y grandezas (1638) Historia de las Indias (1557) Crónica de reyes otomanos (1567) Shulkhan Arukh (1565)

* Extremos y grandezas (ca. 1630)

● Castilian ● Italian *Shulkhan Arukh (1550) ● Ladino ● Hebrew * = manuscript

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