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

Wacks 1 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 Wacks 2 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, Wacks 3 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 Wacks 4 balearics, Sardinia, Sicily, Naples and southern Italy, parts of the Maghrib, Ifriqiyya, and Greece, had outposts in ports across

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