The Origins of Sefardi Jewry
🌅 Today we kick off a new series focused on the achievements of Jews in Islamicate Iberia with an exploration of the storied community's ancient origins and its growth in the medieval period.
You’re reading Stories from Jewish History, a weekly newsletter exploring Jewish thinkers, events, and artifacts, from the famous to the obscure. Last time, we wrapped up a series on the Geonic period in which we examined this comparatively little-known but immensely formative period. Paid subscribers, look for a new eBook of the Geonim series later this week.
I had originally planned to do a Great Rishonim, Series Two this fall, but after plotting it out, I decided it was too scattered. Not enough storylines! So I’m going to cover a whole new group of Rishonim, but within the stories of their regional communities. First up: the Jewish community of medieval Sefarad.
The origins of Sefardi Jewry actually predate the Geonic period, stretching back to antiquity, but the community really comes into its own around the year 1000. Today, we’ll look into the foundations of the community and some of its characteristic features; next time, we’ll go all in on the grammarians. You wouldn’t think grammar would be a subject for intense social controversy, but hey, welcome to medieval Sefarad.
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Let’s start by talking about what we talk about when we talk about Sefarad. In its adjectival form, Sefaradi often serves as a broad counterpoint to Ashkenazi, together, taken to describe the major branches and cultural spheres of world Jewry. In their more restricted meanings, these terms describe Jews from the two regions we today call Spain and Germany, respectively, as well as their descendants.
The reality is, as usual, messier. For one, neither Spain nor Germany, in the ways we use those geographical designators, quite existed in premodernity. In their broader meanings, the terms “Sefardi” and “Ashkenazi” collapse diverse groups of Jews and leave out others entirely, such as the ancient Jewish community of Yemen. And then there is the complex reality of, for example, Ottoman Turkey, where exiled Iberian Jews joined local Romaniote communities, differentiating themselves by place of origin, sometimes even city of origin. Can such a diversity of Jewish cultures be meaningfully called “Sefardi”? Add to this the reclamation and widespread use of the term Edot ha-Mizrach and Mizrachi in contemporary Israel and Sefardi becomes more specific, and contestable, again.
So: I’m going to be using the terms “Sefarad” and “Spain” to describe the Iberian peninsula. Here, too, a note of caution is required: Iberia is a distinct geographical entity—a peninsula connected to Europe by a narrow neck covered with tall mountains. This geographical discreteness, along with the rise of the modern state of Spain, can trick us into thinking of Spain as a politically and culturally unified region, which it never was and is not even today. (At minimum, there are two modern states in the Iberian peninsula: Spain and Portugal.) Coming out of antiquity, Spain was intimately connected to the Roman Empire, of which it was a province. This province was called Hispania, from which we get modern Castilian España and, when not called Sefarad, Espamia in Hebrew. In its Islamicate period, Spain was similarly well-connected to northern Africa and the Islamic east. And after the expansion of the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, parts of “Spain” were connected politically and culturally with France.
In other words, it’s important to remember that when we talk about Spain, we’re talking about a fluid and diverse region to which we give this name as a heuristic for the purposes of enabling us to study it and better understand its Jewish communities. The myths and cultural memories of Spain’s varied communities would loom unusually large over its history, affecting and co-creating its realities. We’ll try to understand some of these a bit better below.
Myths of Origin and their Cultural Meanings
Ovadia 1:20, in the midst of a prophetic vision, speaks of “the exile of Jerusalem that is in Sefarad” (גלות ירושלים אשר בספרד). It is in this verse, in Targum Yonatan, that Spain is first rendered as Espamia. Probably referring originally to the city of Sardis in Asia Minor (the part of modern Turkey that lies in Asia), our Spain may have received colonists from Sardis, making the link an actual one, as some scholars have suggested. By the early middle ages, “Sefarad” was the common appellation among Jews for what we today call Spain. The pasuk (verse) from Ovadia served as a prooftext attesting to the nobility and antiquity of the Sefardi Jewish community, a central component of its self-understanding.
Centuries later, on the cusp of modernity when questions of lineage became supercharged in Spanish society, Sefardi Jews claimed to unearth, in the old Jewish cemetery of Morvedre (Murviedro, now Sagunt[o]), the tombstone of Adoniram, the treasurer of Melech Shlomo (King Solomon). Despite this dubious latter claim, Sefardi Jewry’s collective sense of its own antiquity is borne out by the probably small, but not insignificant, presence of Jews in late antique Iberia, possibly even earlier. Archaeological remains, chiefly grave markers in Latin and Hebrew, attest to Jewish presence in Roman Hispania. While the Jewish population of medieval Spain had diverse origins, not all from this ancient community, the reality of the long-established history of Jews in Sefarad had a profound affect on the community and was one (of many) factors that made the eventual expulsion of Jews from all the Iberian kingdoms in 1492-97 so traumatic.
Jews in Visigothic Spain
In the fifth century, when Roman authority crumbled across the outer reaches of the empire, Iberia, like the other provinces including Rome itself, was subject to Germanic invasions. The various Germanic tribes sought to ally themselves with Rome, not to destroy it; driven out of their homelands by the advancement of central Asian peoples into eastern Europe, these “barbarians,” as seen from the Roman perspective, demanded rights of settlement in exchange for their service and loyalty. However, encountering resistance, the tribes often turned to violence; hence our term “vandal,” the actual name of one of the Germanic peoples (who also reached, and tore through, Spain). The Visigoths (visi = western, so, the western Goths, as opposed to the Ostrogoths, the eastern Goths) were not the first of the Germanic peoples to reach Spain, and they initially focused their attention on their kingdom in what is today France. Eventually, pushed out of France and rebuffed in their attempts to reach Roman Africa, the Visigoths settled to rule out of Toledo. This sense of a united Christian monarchy in Spain, though largely fictive, would loom large in Latin Christendom.
Visigothic rule, however, was tenuous at best and anarchic at worst. The Visigoths were never more than a small percentage of the Spanish population, meaning that they were a tiny nobility attempting to exert control over a local population to which they had little relation. In addition to this, like many of the Germanic peoples, the Visigoths were Arians, a branch of Christianity that the Catholic church considered heretical following the Council of Nicaea in 325. There was already a flourishing Catholic ecclesiastical network in Spain with the advent of Visigothic rule, which did not look with favor upon the new Arian ruling classes. Finally, the Visigoths themselves failed to institute an orderly process of succession, which meant intense internecine struggles, both among brothers and among different noble families. Transitions of power, under the best of circumstances, were fraught with danger in premodernity, and especially for minority populations. Under less than ideal circumstances, they could be brutal.
In the early fourth century, before the Visigoths had consolidated their power, the Catholic church council of Elvira, a town near Granada, passed stringent anti-Jewish legislation that sought to prevent intermarriages and Jewish conversion, especially of slaves. There is no better way to know that something was happening in a society than a law declaring, you shall not do this one thing, so this tells us that at least some Jews and Christians had close social ties in late antique Spain. Such strictures were roundly adopted under the Visigoths as well.
In 587 (or perhaps 589), the Visigothic king Reccared I converted from Arianism to Catholic Christianity. (Catholic, by the way, is an aspirational term here: the word simply means “universal,” which is what the Nicene Church, meaning the Roman church as delineated at the Council of Nicaea, wished to be. It would later, for a period until the schism of 1054, achieve something near to this.) What is clear is that after Reccared’s conversion, some Visigothic kings began vigorous anti-Jewish campaigns, especially those focused on forcibly converting Jews. What is less clear is to what degree these were politically expedient moves as opposed to theologically motivated ones. The back-and-forth nature of Visigothic legislation regarding Jews shows that there was no unified policy.
The intensity of persecution of Jews under some of the Visigothic monarchs gave rise to the idea, echoed in later Christian historiography and accepted by earlier generations of modern historians, that Jews were eager collaborators with the invading Muslim forces. While there is no doubt that Jewish life in Islamicate Spain was more stable, more protected, and less pernicious (until the persecutions of the eleventh century), widespread collaboration is not corroborated by contemporaneous sources.
The Muslim Conquests of Iberia
In 711, Muslim forces crossed the narrow straits between northern Africa, what is today Morocco, and the southern tip of Spain, under the command of one Tariq ibn Ziyad. Ibn Ziyad was the manumitted slave (probably) of the governor of Ifriqiya (modern-day Tunisia), an important province of the Islamic empire, and a favorite of the Umayyad caliph. The rocky outcropping where Muslim forces met the European continent is known to this day by the name of “Tariq’s mountain”—jabal Tariq, or Gibraltar.
The Muslim forces quickly overtook the crumbling Visigothic kingdoms. By 717 they had pushed over the Pyrenees into southern France, managing to reach Toulouse. They would eventually be defeated there by the Merovingian Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne; retreating to Iberia, they ruled the vast majority of the peninsula. C. 750, with the fall of the Umayyad caliphate in favor of the Abbasids, al-Andalus, as Islamicate Spain was to be known to its inhabitants, became the last bastion of the Umayyad dynasty. It was not until the 800s that Spain became fully Islamized religiously and culturally, and it is then that we begin to see the growth of the famed Jewish community of Sefarad. This community had Judeo-Arabic as its common language and enjoyed protected dhimmi status, like all Jews and Christians in the Islamicate world. As it grew, Sefardi Jewry developed its own institutions of learning, especially at Córdoba and Lucena, a mercantile class, and distinctive local traditions of learning, culture, and liturgy.
Readings & Resources
For a good, if slightly dated, overview of medieval Sefarad, see Jane S. Gerber’s The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience, with uses the heuristic of Spain to cover the entire gamut of Jewish life on the peninsula.
For a general history, see Joseph F. O’Callaghan’s A History of Medieval Spain, which is similarly arranged under the rubric of “Spain.”
For a newer and excellent history of Islamicate Spain, with some discussion of the period before the conquests, see Brian A, Catlos’ Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain.
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I absolutely loved this one! Thanks for all the work you put into these.