Institut für Religionswissenschaft Diplomarbeit Titel der Diplomarbeit Imagining Sephardic Diaspora Verfasser Martin Stechauner angestrebter akademischer Grad Magister (Mag.) Wien, April 2013 Studienkennzahl lt. Studienblatt: A 057 011 Studienrichtung lt. Studienblatt: Individuelles Diplomstudium Religionswissenschaft UniStG Betreuer: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Wolfram Reiss 1 2 Contents 1. Introduction......................................................................................................................................5 1.1. Research Approach & Research Question...........................................................................5 1.2. Theoretical Approach...........................................................................................................6 1.3. Methodology......................................................................................................................10 1.4. Structure.............................................................................................................................15 2. Imagining Diaspora Communities..................................................................................................17 2.1. Benedict Anderson's Conception of Imagined Communities............................................18 2.2. Imagining Cultural Identity................................................................................................21 2.3. Theorizing Diaspora...........................................................................................................23 2.3.1. Imaginative Geographies.......................................................................................23 2.3.2. Diasporas & Homelands........................................................................................25 2.4. Cultural Identity and Diaspora...........................................................................................27 2.5. Final Hypotheses................................................................................................................32 3. Imagining Sephardic Diaspora.......................................................................................................35 3.1. Imagining National Identity of Jews in Antiquity..............................................................35 3.2. Sephardic Jewry within the Ethnic Diversity of Judaism..................................................44 3.3. The Role of Language within Sephardic Culture...............................................................49 3.3.1. How to call the Language of the Sephardic Jews?................................................53 3.3.2. Judeo-Spanish: A Language or a Dialect?.............................................................59 3.3.3. What was the Language of Jews in Pre-Expulsion Spain?....................................61 3.4. Sepharad & Sephardic Diaspora – One, Two, Three or Four Diasporas?..........................65 4. Imagining Sephardic History..........................................................................................................71 4.1. Origins, Myths and First Persecutions...............................................................................71 4.2. The Golden Age.................................................................................................................75 4.3. Jews in Christian Spain......................................................................................................80 4.4. Imagining Sephardic Diasporas.........................................................................................87 4.4.1. The Glory of Spain................................................................................................90 4.4.2. The Trauma of Expulsion......................................................................................95 4.5. Imagining Sephardic Nationhood......................................................................................97 5. Imagining the Sephardic Community of Vienna..........................................................................102 5.1. Baron Diego d'Aguilar – A Legendary Figure between Myth and Reality......................102 5.2. A Legendary Hero............................................................................................................108 5.3. Authorship and Social Environment................................................................................112 6. Conclusion....................................................................................................................................122 7. Sources.........................................................................................................................................128 8. Appendix.......................................................................................................................................138 Acknowledgement............................................................................................................................143 Abstract.............................................................................................................................................145 Zusammenfassung (Abstract in German).........................................................................................146 Statement of Confirmation...............................................................................................................149 3 4 1. Introduction 1.1. Research Approach & Research Question Within the last few decades more and more attention has been drawn to the studies of Sephardic communities, especially in the fields of Jewish and Romance Studies. The growing interest in the history and language of Sephardic Jews has not solely been limited to the traditional and well- known cultural centres of Sephardic Jewry (e.g. in the former Ottoman Empire 1 or in the Netherlands 2); in the recent past also smaller, however, no less significant and thriving Sephardic communities, such as the (historic) Sephardic community of Vienna have taken the centre stage of several studies 3, exhibitions 4 and symposia 5. The aim of the present thesis is, however, to highlight another aspect of Sephardic Jewry, that goes a bit beyond the study of Sephardic history and language, namely the different notions of Sephardic diaspora and identity. Animated by these objectives I will try to find answers to the following question: Which mechanisms are responsible for the emergence of Sephardic identity and to what extend does the experience of diaspora play a significant role in the identity finding process of Sephardic Jews? Of course, in order to find an answer to this question, my analysis will heavily rely on the linguistic and historiographical studies about Sephardic Jewry that have been carried out so far. However, in order to gain deeper insights into the diasporic and cultural identity of Sephardic Jews, I have chosen a discourse-analytic approach. Since the so-called “'linguistic' turn” in the 1960s and the following “'discursive' turn” in the early 1980s, discourse analysis has become a popular methodological choice within most disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, in order to study “how our language use and [other] modes of representation fundamentally affect and shape our understandings of reality and our constructions of meaningful worlds” 6. Also in the fields of the Studies of Religion discourse-analytical approaches have more and more frequently been applied over the recent years 7, simply because such approaches not only provide new perspectives on 1 cf. e.g. Benbassa, Rodrigue 2000 2 cf. e.g. Bodian 1997 3 cf. e.g. Eugen 2001 4 cf. the exhibition “ Die Türken in Wien ” organised by the Jewish Museum of Vienna (2010) and the Jewish Museum Hohenems (2011) about the Turkish-Israelite Community of Vienna (cf. , http://www.jmw.at/de/die-t-rken-wien 25.3.2013; http://www.jm-hohenems.at/index2.php?id=3030&lang=0, 25.3.2013) 5 cf. the conference “ Sefarad an der Donau ” organised by Michael Studemund Halévy at the Austrian Academy of Science (26.06.2011 – 29.06.2011) (cf. http://www.oeaw.ac.at/vk/detail.do?id=92 , 25.12.2013) 6 Moberg 2013, p. 4 7 cf. Wijsen 2013, pp. 1-3 5 religion and religious phenomena as such but also because they offer new ways of (re-)evaluating and (re-)interpreting the research material (i.e. primary and secondary sources) at our disposal. In this regard, discourse analysis also turns out to be a very useful tool for gaining deeper insights into certain aspects of religion and religious communities, such as issues dealing with religious and cultural identity. 1.2. Theoretical Approach So far, a variety of different discourse-analytic approaches have emerged which usually “share the same meta-theoretical underpinning, namely that of social constructionism”. Social- constructionist perspectives are usually associated with “post-structuralism” and “postmodernism/postmodern critique” and have so far been adopted by many different disciplines (e.g. philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology etc.) 8. Marcus Moberg names four key assumptions which are commonly shared by most social constructionists: (1) “the view that conventional knowledge is based upon [an] objective unbiased observation of the world” has to be challenged; (2) “all modes of understanding are viewed as being intimately tied to a particular historical, social, and cultural context” which also implies that there are multiple possible constructions of the world; (3) “all forms of