Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora

This collection of essays examines an important and under-studied topic in early modern Jewish social history--the family life of Sephardi Jewish families in the Ottoman Empire. At the height of its power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire spanned three continents, controlling much of southeastern Europe, western Asia, and North Africa, as well as territory in Western Europe, including the cities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Livorno, and part of southern France. Thousands of Jewish families that had been expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century created communities in these far-flung locations--communities that were very different from those of Ashkenazi Jews in the same period. The authors of these essays use the lens of domestic life to illuminate the diversity of the post-Inquisition Sephardi Jewish experience, enabling readers to enter into little-known and little-studied Jewish historical episodes.

JULIA R. LIEBERMAN is associate professor of Spanish and International Studies, St. Louis University.