Sephardic Studies

The following list was curated by Randall C. Belinfante of the American Sephardi Federation. The mission of the American Sephardi Federation is to promote and preserve the spiritual, historical, cultural and social traditions of all Sephardic communities as an integral part of Jewish heritage. Read more about ASF here.

Voices in Exile: Study in Sephardic Intellectual History Marc D. Angel KTAV Publishing with Sephardic House, 1991. Rabbi Angel explores the teachings of the Sephardi sages and thinkers who flourished around the Mediterranean and in in the New World in the centuries after the Expulsion.

The Jewish Nation of the Caribbean: The Spanish-Portuguese Jewish settlements in the Caribbean and the Guianas Mordechai Arbell Gefen Publishing House, 2002. An ideal resource and captivating read for those traveling to the region or people with an interest in Jewish history, this is an exceptional book that brings the Jewish communities of the Caribbean to life, with intensity, and with a heartbeat so strong as to secure their proper and rightful place in recorded Jewish history.

Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History Aviva Ben-Ur New York University Press, 2009. A significant number of Sephardic Jews, tracing their remote origins to Spain and Portugal, immigrated to the United States from Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans from 1880 through the 1920s, joined by a smaller number of Mizrahi Jews arriving from Arab lands. Most Sephardim settled in New York, establishing the leading Judeo-Spanish community outside the Ottoman Empire. Drawing on primary sources such as the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) press, archival documents, and oral histories, Sephardic Jews in America offers an academic treatment of their history in the United States, from 1654 to the present, focusing on the age of mass immigration.

A Treasury of Sephardic Laws and Customs: The Ritual Practices of Syrian, Moroccan, Judeo-Spanish and Spanish and Portuguese Jews of North America Herbert C. Dobrinsky Yeshiva University Press, 2001.

Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews David M. Gitlitz Jewish Publication Society, 1996. Despite the increased attention given to Hispano-Jewish topics, and the "conversos" or Crypto-Jews in particular, this is the first thorough compilation of their customs and practices. Gitlitz has culled from Inquisition documents and other sources to paint a portrait of the richness and diversity of CryptoJewish practices in Spain, Portugal, and the New World.

The Sephardim: Their Glorious Tradition from the Babylonian Exile to the Present Day Lucien Gubbay and Abraham Levy Carnell, 1992.

Death of a Language: The History of Judeo-Spanish Tracy K. Harris University of Delaware Press, 1994.

Sephardic American Voices: Two Hundred Years of a Literary Legacy Diane Matza, ed. Brandeis University Press, 1997. This collection of stories, poems, and plays by American Jews of Sephardic descent gives voice to a culture previously unheard in a literary canon with a predominantly Eastern European and Ashkenazic accent. Representing only five percent of US Jewish immigrants, Sephardim have necessarily existed on the margins of Jewish and American life. Yet these Jews of Spanish, Greek, and Middle Eastern origins have, as Diane Matza demonstrates, maintained their ethnic identity despite persecution, expulsion, and prolonged cultural insularity.

The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature Ilan Stavans, ed. and intro. Schocken Books, 2005. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 gave rise to a series of rich, diverse diasporas that were interconnected through a common vision and joie de vivre. The exodus took these Sephardim to other European countries; to North Africa, Asia Minor, and South America; and, eventually, to the American colonies. In each community new literary and artistic forms grew out of the melding of their Judeo-Spanish legacy with the cultures of their host countries, and that process has continued to the present day. This multilingual tradition brought with it both opportunities and challenges that will resonate within any contemporary culture: the status of minorities within the larger society; the tension between a civil, democratic tradition and the anti-Semitism ready to undermine it; and the opposing forces of religion and secularism. This anthology contains fiction, memoirs, essays, and poetry from twenty-eight writers who span more than 150 years.

Crown of Aleppo: The Mystery of the Oldest Hebrew Bible Codex Hayim Tawil and Bernard Schneider Jewish Publication Society, 2010. In Crown of Aleppo, Hayim Tawil and Bernard Schneider tell the incredible story of the survival, against all odds, of the Aleppo Codexone of the most authoritative and accurate traditional Masoretic texts of the Bible. Completed circa 939 in Tiberias, the Crown was created by exacting Tiberian scribes who copied the entire Bible into book form, adding annotations, vowel and cantillation marks, and precise commentary. Praised by Torah scholars for centuries after its writing, the Crown passed through history until the 15th century when it was housed in the Great Synagogue of Aleppo, Syria. When the synagogue was burned in the 1947 pogrom, the codex was thought to be destroyed, lost forever.That is where its great mystery begins. Miraculously, a significant portion of the Crown of Aleppo survived the fire and was smuggled from the synagogue ruins to an unknown location presumably within the Aleppan Jewish community. Ten years later, the surviving pages of the codex were secretly brought to Israel and finally moved to their current location in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.