The Western Sephardic Diaspora: Ancestral Birthplaces and Displacement, Diaspora Formation and Multiple Homelands

This introductory chapter provides a background of Jacob Sasportas. Around 1610, Sasportas was born in Oran, a garrison town at the edge of the Iberian Empire on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa in present day Algeria. The scion of a rabbinic family, Sasportas served the Jews of Oran and nearby Tlemcen as a rabbinic judge for several decades. In his early forties, he was exiled from North Africa for reasons that remain unknown, and fled to Amsterdam. For almost half a century, Sasportas lived among the Portuguese Jews of the Sephardic Diaspora. In 1665, he emerged as one of the few opponents to the provocative persona of Sabbetai Zevi, the self-proclaimed Messiah who became the center of a mass movement. From his temporary home in Hamburg, he conducted a vigorous campaign first to challenge and later to undermine the messianic claims of Sabbetai Zevi and Nathan of Gaza, keeping a meticulous record of Sabbatianism as it was occurring. This book asks why Sasportas would oppose a messianic movement and what the substance of this opposition is. In other words, it explores the truth-value of doubt within the rabbinic tradition as it was expressed by one man living in the midst of a maelstrom.

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Chaos and Community: 1492 and the Formation of the Sephardic Diaspora – Jonathan Ray

Religious Diaspora in Early Modern Europe ◽

10.4324/9781315654317-19 ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 169-182

Keyword(s):

Sephardic Diaspora

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Monique R. Balbuena, Homeless Tongues: Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. xi + 239 pp.

10.1093/oso/9780190912628.003.0020 ◽

2018 ◽

Keyword(s):

Jewish Studies ◽

Stanford University ◽

Jewish Literature ◽

Depth Analysis ◽

Primary Means ◽

Sephardic Diaspora

This chapter reviews the book Homeless Tongues: Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora (2016), by Monique R. Balbuena. Homeless Tongues is the first in-depth analysis of contemporary Sephardic poetry, focusing on three relatively unknown authors: Sadia Lévy, Margalit Matitiahu, and Juan Gelman. According to Balbuena, Sephardic writers have often been marginalized even within the field of Jewish studies. Seeking to “observe the contours” of the multiplicity of Jewish literature, she presents Lévy, Matitiahu, and Gelman as examples par excellence of cultural, literary, and linguistic multiplicity. She argues that translation and the trope of linguistic dialogue between languages is the primary means by which the three Sephardic poets interact with majority languages and cultures.

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